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The Rediff Special/Syed Firdaus Ashraf & Jewella C Miranda

The Twilight Zone

Syed Firdaus Ashraf and Photographer Jewella C Miranda travelled to the Indo-Pak frontier in the Rann of Kutch recently. This is what they discovered:

You don't know who Atal Bihari Vajpayee is?"

Frankly, I couldn't keep the surprise out of my voice -- I thought he was pulling my leg.

"No," came the answer, pat and dead serious. "Okay, then you must have heard of L K Advani at least?"

"No, haven't heard of him."

Around this point in time, I thought maybe Gulani Jan Mohammad was the nearest thing to Rip Van Winkle I was ever going to see in this lifetime.

A day later, I realised there were hundreds of Gulanis, of unknowing, uncaring R W Winkles, living on the Indian border.

It is almost like a twilight zone. A land that exists in, and for, itself, and where nothing that happens outside its very limited horizon is over any consequence.

I am in Nana Bitara, one of the last of the villages along the 600 km stretch of the border in Gujarat that separates India and Pakistan along the Rann of Kutch.

The Rann, celebrated in legend, is 7,000 square miles of... what, exactly? Neither fish nor fowl, neither land nor sea, totally dry and during one part of the year, covered by salty water during the monsoon season, it is a bit of everything.

It is also very dangerous -- quicksand traps are all over, indistinguishable from the rest of the surface, at least until you get caught in one, and then your recognition comes too late to do you any good, anyway.

"This place is fit only for junglis," says Mohammad, himself a native. "It is not physically possible for ordinary human beings to live here, nature is very cruel."

At that, you wonder why anyone would want to. The only occupations worth noting are selling milk to the Bhuj district, and selling gum extracted from the forest.

"We have requested successive state governments to help, but all we have had in return are false promises, made and immediately forgotten," says Ramzan Omar, sarpanch of Nana Bitara.

They are all alike, the villages dotting the border: Nana Bitara, Udma, Sarada, Bhagadia, Chachla, Burkul, Nana Luna. Little hamlets with people, and nothing else of import: no school, no doctor, no nothing.

Just people, and their misery -- a misery that numbs them, makes them completely, frighteningly indifferent to the rest of the country.

A B Vajpayee who? Exactly!

"Our first priority is to get a veterinary doctor," says Omar. I find that surprising, since they don't have any doctor to treat human ailments, either. "Our livelihood depends on these few buffaloes and cows," the sarpanch explains.

Every single family includes, at the least, one bovine member. Every morning, a tempo does the rounds, collecting milk from each house, ferrying it to Bhuj. The average family earns Rs 1,000 a month.

Sufficient for a meal a day, they say. And with no shops worth the name, there is nothing else to buy anyway.

If ever marbles made it to the Olympics, the region would produce gold medalists galore -- every single child there appears to be an adept, unerring of eye, unfailing of aim. With no schools to go to and no work to do, they have all the time in the world to develop this expertise.

The women of the region are good cooks, even better with a needle. Practise apparently does make perfect -- and besides cooking and needlework, what do they have to occupy their time with anyway?

There are two television sets in Nana Bitara, and the same is the case with other villages. Strangely in a land devoid of other sources of entertainment, the viewership is not particularly large.

The reason, I find, is religious. Devout Muslims, the inhabitants there believe that their religious tenets do not permit them to watch the idiot box.

L K Advani who? Exactly!

"The other reason for our ignorance is that majority of our people do not understand any of the languages in which television programmes are made," explains Omar.

The languages spoken in the region are Sindhi, Kutchi, Baluchi. The people are predominantly Muslim -- 95 per cent, at a conservative estimate, and this is true of the 41 villages in the region.

"Our forefathers came to India from Baluchistan 300 years ago," explains Abu Bakkar Sajjan, the 55-year-old sarpanch of Burkul village. "We have settled here and been here ever since, so we still speak the Baluchi language."

'We stay, because we have no options'

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