One day as I was walking around my place in Kumbanad, I came across a laptop bag in a relatively good condition. I remembered seeing a man walking past my house, pushing his bicycle carrying plastic bottles and other plastic waste. I decided that I would ask him the next I ran into him if the bag could be of any use to him.
He usually set off at around 6.45am from his house on top of the hill. I never saw him riding his cycle down. He was usually walking, smoking a beedi, and pushing his cycle. He sometimes went back to his house in the afternoon for food and rest before getting back to work again. His workday ended around 8.00pm in the evening, when he returned smoking a beedi, again pushing his cycle uphill to his house rather than riding it. On his way back, he generally had a few pieces of plastic scrap on his cycle, hanging from a gunny sack or placed on the carrier. We had run into each other a few times in the past three four years and had started acknowledging each other.
The next time I saw him, I asked him if he wanted the discarded laptop bag, and he said that he would take it. I asked him if he wanted the plastic and glass bottles that I generally came across on my property, mostly drinking water bottles or empty alcohol bottles that people passing by on the street tossed over the wall into my compound. He said that he would take the plastic bottles but not the glass ones since there was no scrap value for glass bottles. I was surprised to hear that. I told him that in Bengaluru glass bottles fetched a decent price of at least a rupee or two per bottle at the scrap yard. He said that around our place in Kumbanad, nobody was interested in glass bottles. I started placing the plastic bottles that I came across on the compound wall and he would pick them up the next time he passed by.
Gradually, from people around the place I gathered that his name was Raju. He lived alone in a hut on top of the hill. His mother had died when he was quite young, after which some people who did not have children had taken him away to another place where they looked after him for a few years before he returned back to stay alone in his hut. He had a sister who was married and lived with her family elsewhere. Most people who spoke about him said that he was not completely normal. People said that some money had been deposited into his account by those who had looked after him after his mother's death and that his sister or uncle had got him to sign and taken away the money.
I started speaking to him whenever I came across him. If he was passing by when I was clearing the wild vegetation that had grown since the last monsoon, I usually waved to him, and he would acknowledge it. Slowly, we started exchanging the typical civilities like - did you have your morning tea?
Raju had a wild Jimi Hendrix kind of look about him. He had a mop of curly hair on his head and an unshaved beard that was not thick. He had a youthful appearance about him, and I judged him to be in his late thirties. He generally wore a half shirt or t-shirt with his mundu and sandals. He was quite often smoking his beedi. He usually had his cycle with him though there were times when he walked to work without it.
As we started speaking more often, I learnt from him that a kilo of plastic waste fetched about Rs. 50. He would collect plastic through the day and deposit it at a scrap yard in Eraviperoor which was about 6-7 km from my place. Old women sometimes gave him a meal and he told me the names of a few who I was not familiar with. He said that my grandmother also used to feed him sometimes when he was young. He used to repeat many of the same things every time we meet. He almost always told me how my grandfather used to go out to work on the farm with only a towel around his waist, about where the old cowshed used to be, and how my grandfather had caught him one day on top of a tree trying to steal bird's eggs and asked him to come down. He seemed to be completely naive when it came to numbers and anything outside his world. When I told him that Bengaluru was about 650km away and Kochi about 120km away, he asked me which was further. He then asked me if Tiruvalla which was about 10km away was further away than Kochi. I was astonished by these questions and wondered whether he was pretending to be naive about this or genuinely ignorant. I started sharing my beedis with him whenever we met and, sometimes, we sat near the gate and spoke. He would abruptly get up and leave in the course of a conversation without saying another word. My mother gave him some plum cake one Christmas and he really liked it. He started asking for plum cake during Christmas after that and my mother made it a point to pack some for him whenever we were there. If he saw me working outdoors on his way to work he sometimes imitated an old lady's voice asking 'Mone, did you have your tea?' and when I looked up he would be standing on the other side of the wall with a big grin on his face.
Raju was like the local obituary reporter. Every time we met, he would tell me who had died recently in the vicinity, where and how. He more or less knew every house in the area. I, on the other hand, was only familiar with a few families since I had spent most of my life in Bengaluru. He would stop by and sit near my gate in the evening on his way back home if he spotted me. In his conversations he would make fun of all the rich people around gathering so much money which they cannot even take with them when they die. His job was extremely unrewarding and painful. He would constantly move around in the blazing sun throughout the day, covering distances of 20-30km on foot or cycle collecting plastic from wherever he found it and I doubted whether he made even 50 rupees in a day. When I met him sometimes in the afternoon, he would be breathing rapidly from the heat of the day and his work.
Around my place - and this, I think, is the story in much of Kerala - there were no means of plastic waste disposal until very recently. Even as the amount of plastic usage increased exponentially, and the government tried all sorts of plastic bans, almost no local panchayat had a system in place to collect and dispose plastic waste from households and commercial establishments. People burnt their plastic waste or buried it on their property or dumped it wherever they could. The pristine greenery of the Kerala landscape has been slowly transformed into increasingly growing patches of plastic waste that now dot the landscape. It is only recently that the local panchayats have set up plastic waste collection systems but these too are selective with only certain plastic items being collected while others are rejected. It was common for medical waste to be found dumped on roadsides during the Covid fake pandemic. A few days back, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) ordered that medical and plastic waste dumped illegally by the Regional Cancer Center (RCC), Thiruvananthapuram, in Thirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, be transported back to Kerala. In this scenario, people like Raju collecting plastic waste from door to door for years now had managed to keep the menace relatively in control until recently.
I slowly started giving him a little money when we met, generally a hundred or two hundred rupees, thinking it will ease his burden a bit. He used to eat all his meals outside and did not do any cooking at home. His meals were usually bought from roadside food stalls or small hotels. At other times, old ladies gave him a meal if he happened to be around at mealtimes. I saw him once walking down the hill at around 1pm. He said that he was going to a wedding in the church nearby to gorge on the food served there. It appears that he was well known around the place and people did not mind him turning up at weddings around lunch time. I asked him why he did not cook his own meals. I said that it was much healthier for him and more cost-effective to cook simple meals at home rather than eating food from the wayside hotels all the time. He said that he had problems with cats around his house and that they would eat anything he cooked before he came back from his work.
During my walks across the hill, I saw a path branching out from the road to a small house. The house was neat and had straw curtains on all sides. One day I had heard Malayalam film music being played on a radio from the house. I thought that this was Raju's house and that he seemed to be managing things well and enjoying himself. One day, however, I saw a stranger standing outside the house. I asked him if Raju lived there. He said no, and pointed me to a place on top of the hill. I then suddenly remembered seeing a house at the topmost part of the hill when I had been scouting a new route around the hill. This was a house that looked uninhabited, a little away from the other houses on the hill. The settlement on the hill mainly comprised of persons from the indigenous communities who had apparently been brought there by one of my grandfather's brothers to work on his plantation around 60-70 years back. Over the years the settlement had evolved from thatched huts to quaint little concrete houses and the generations that live there include the fourth or fifth since my grandfather's time. There are probably about 20 families staying in the settlement now. This house that stood a little away was, however, in sharp contrast to the others. It had no paint or plaster on the cement walls and almost looked dilapidated. There was absolutely no vegetation around the house, unlike the other houses that had small kitchen gardens and flowering plants around them. Instead of a garden, this house had a skirt of plastic bottles around it that may have been about five meters in radius with the house at the center. This, I realized then, was where Raju lived.
The last time I met him was about three months back. I had traveled alone on that trip to Kerala. Raju came on the first or second day of my visit and asked me if I had any food. I had just cut down a bunch of plantain, so I gave him some plantain and biscuits along with a packet of beedis. He came back a few days later and asked me for two hundred rupees. I did not have change so I gave him fifty and said that I will give him some more money later. The man who helped me with harvesting the few black pepper plants I had at my place had recently fallen ill and was starting to become old. I asked Raju if he would help with harvesting the pepper in case the other person was unable to do so in future. Raju agreed. In my mind, I pictured giving Raju small pieces of work on the land and paying him for it. I felt that this would help him to reduce the time he spent rummaging for plastic and trying to sell it in the adverse weather conditions. I hoped that one day he would be able to do regular farm work in the surrounding places and people would start employing him. I found an old two-in-one radio and tape player in the almirah in my house and asked him if he had any use for it. He said that he would take it. I asked him if he had an electricity connection in his house and he said no. He said that he lit candles to manage for light in the dark. I told him that the two-in-one would need six batteries which could prove expensive for him. I showed him how he needed to place batteries to make it work. It took him some time to digest that six batteries were required and how they needed to be arranged in their slots. He kept the two-in-one behind my house, saying that he would come after dark and take it. It appeared that he did not want people to see him taking it to his house in daylight. As we were sitting in my living room and talking, the old lady who generally helped my mother in the kitchen came to the porch to speak to me. On seeing Raju sitting on a chair in the living room with me and talking to me, she said to Raju, 'Ha, is it you? How come you have gone inside the house and sat there?' On hearing this, he promptly got up and sat down on the ground near the doorstep. I told him that there was no need to do that as it was my house but he remained seated at the doorstep for the rest of our conversation. He said that during this Onam people had not been as kindhearted to him as before in terms of giving him food and money. He was planning to go to his sister's house the next day after Onam to stay there for a day. He was going to catch a bus, or a couple of them, to get there. He looked like he was looking forward to the visit.
When I went to Kerala around two weeks ago in December, I was informed by people that Raju had died about a week back. He had apparently got drunk on alcohol and fallen over in his house. His head had landed on a broken bottle and a glass shard from the bottle had pierced his head above his left eye. He was found lying in a pool of blood. Somebody passing by close to his house had heard a groan of pain and found him. The neighbours said that he had lain there for three to four days in this condition and the wound itself had turned septic. He died within a short time of being discovered. It seems that he would go on alcohol binges and not be seen for three-four days so nobody had suspected anything wrong when he had not been sighted for the last few days. The neighbours said that the house was a mess with broken bottles, plastic and clothes scattered everywhere. Somebody piled up all his belongings and set fire to them. The neighbours then washed and cleaned the place. The laid his body out and gave him a proper funeral. At the funeral, one of the elders spoke about how Raju had helped everybody keep their own houses clean by taking away their plastic waste.
I did not know that Raju drank alcohol much. I had never seen him drunk or even got a whiff of alcohol from him, otherwise I would have avoided giving him money. On one occasion I thought I smelt ganja in the beedis that he was smoking. When I asked him if he smoked ganja, he said no. He said that only recently excise officials wearing ID cards had arrested a man for peddling ganja at one of the junctions and that he was afraid of police action.
To me Raju was one of the most Christ-like persons that I ever met. Everybody had a good opinion of him, even though they said that he was eccentric and not completely normal. He lived in solitude and appeared to remain aloof from all the social life that went on around him. He wanted nothing to do with anybody or anything and seemed content with what he was doing, even though it meant vast hardship for him. He collected the sins of the world in the form of unwanted plastic and tried to dispose it, even as his own house was slowly being swallowed up by a mountain of plastic waste. In his death, where he suffered immeasurable pain for days before he eventually died, his life could be summed up. People said that his mother was a bad character, and so he had been adopted by another family without his mother even knowing about it. To me, this sounded particularly cruel to both him and his mother. He had studied up to the fourth standard in the school at the top of the hill. It was an old school where practically everybody in the surrounding area had done their schooling upto the fourth standard, including my father and his brothers before they joined higher secondary schools elsewhere. Raju did not study beyond the fourth standard. He once asked me what god's religion was. I told him that god did not have a religion and that religions had been created by humans.
Raju probably suffered two great setbacks in life - one when he was separated from his mother at the age of 10, and another when he was removed from his teenage world among his guardians and relocated to his old house at the age of 17 after his mother had died. Nobody bothered to continue his education beyond the fourth standard. He isolated himself more or less from everybody around him, only interacting where it was absolutely necessary. His occupation, lifestyle and appearance ensured that his chances of finding a woman and settling down, in the traditional sense, never happened. I once saw him with his hair and moustache trimmed, and his beard shaven. He looked handsome. He was inquisitive, energetic, carefree, with a fierce kind of independence and strength about him. How much of his eccentricities were deliberate facades - his shield against the cruel world - is hard to tell...
Ours is a society where the innocent and the child-like cannot survive. They become outcasts and eke out their livelihoods in whatever ways they can. Their contentment with their destiny, and their joy and love despite their conditions, makes those who are constantly trying to become richer than the next person despise them. People like Raju are considered losers and failures because they do not make it rich. Raju chose what he thought was the best honest piece of work that was available for him. Nobody bothered to take him under their wings and develop his human nature so that he could find his way through this world because everybody was too busy trying to outdo the other. People like Raju do not exist in government records as Aadhar card or ration card or voter ID holders. They may have a birth certificate like Raju did, which enabled people to figure out his age.
The global summit on plastic regulation ended recently with no concrete steps being taken to curb the global plastic menace. The petrochemical nations and industries responsible for the global production of plastic said that they would not do anything to reduce plastic production since, according to them, it is not the production of non-biodegradable plastic that is the problem, it is the disposal. The impact that plastic has on the lives of the most vulnerable sections of society is not visible to these entities. Kerala is facing a plastic crisis like never before because it is increasingly using plastic without having the means to dispose it. Kerala boasts of its alcohol consumption capabalities. The state earns vast revenues from its alcohol sales. Most Malayalees brag about how many bottles of alcohol they typically consume. Even though a very high percentage of deaths in Kerala can be linked to alcohol, these deaths are linked to other causes such as road accidents, homicides, kidney and liver failures, etc. The state used to be one of the best cannabis producing areas in the country in the past, with indigenous tribes like the Kaniyars being renowned for their cannabis cultivation. Idukki boasts some of the best cannabis in India even today, comparable to the hashish one gets from Malana. For people like Raju, who form the lowest rungs of society, the availability of legal cannabis would have meant two things. One, it would have offered him a safer alternative to the dangerous alcohol as intoxicant. Two, the cannabis industry including the cultivation, processing, distribution and sale of ganja and charas, besides the use of cannabis for industrial and medical purposes would have opened up multiple sustainable opportunities for livelihood. The cannabis plant offers a way out from the non-biodegradable petrochemical plastics that choke the most vulnerable people and life forms on earth today. Cannabis can be used to make bio-degradable plastic and packaging material.
Interestingly, the hill on which Raju's house was located near the highest point - Chelleyathu Para as it is called here - has been at the epicenter of a people's movement in the last two years. The movement even made the news in the state newspapers. The people staying in the settlement on top of the hill have been non-violently protesting and demonstrating against a rock-quarrying and bitumen manufacturing plant that has been set up near the top of the hill by one of the wealthy residents of the area. The stone and bitumen are supplied for construction and road works across the state even though the owner of the businesses did not possess a valid license but is closely associated with politicians of whichever party is in power at the moment. The fumes from the bitumen plant raised concerns about the respiratory health of people in the surrounding areas. A significant section of the hill has already been blasted and carried away in the last few years. The people of the Chellayathu Para successfully agitated and got the plants shut down despite the efforts of the politicians and businessmen to silence them. Chelleyathu Para was used to dry meat in the past before the settlement came. Close to it is an ancient temple of Siva as Mallaichan. There is also a temple dedicated to Duryodhana, a rarity in the country. People of all faiths - Hindus, Christians and the indigenous communities - as well of all social and economic classes got together to agitate against the quarrying and bitumen plants in their midst. In the middle of all this lived Raju, in a plastic filled lonely world of his own. He did not care much for either the protests or the businesses. When I met him the last time, he told me that he had forgiven his sister for using the money that had been put into an account in his name by his earlier guardians. He said that his sister had a family to raise and she was more in need for the money than he was. He said that he did not have much needs and so he did not feel bad if his sister had used the money for herself. He had made his peace with this world and was ready to move on...He was 46 when he died...
