WRITING ON THE WALL

The village is yet to get over the shock of this loss.

It can’t be a case of suicide, they were all too lion-hearted to take such a step, is the general refrain. More than the tall, wiry Mam Chand who had a narrow escape during the Amarnath yatra last month, the villagers remember his wife Nirmala Devi as a woman with a sunny smile.
The friendly matron who spoke fluent Haryanvi and a smattering of Punjabi ran her own hole-in-the-wall kiryana shop in the village with considerable elan. She knew both the art of counting and small talk. Angoori Devi, her toothless mother-in-law, blinks away tears as she tells you how her daughter-in-law was a matriculate ‘’more educated than even my son.’’
Though small, Nirmala’s shop flourished, with the villagers preferring to do their shopping at the Taayi’s who would not only greet them respectfully but would also not mind giving them goods on credit for as long as six months. “She adapted her business to the farming cycle and did well,’’ says Angrez.
So did her two sons, who would often lend her a helping hand. Villagers remember Pradeep as the more business-minded of the two. Though both the brothers had a similar birth defect on one of their feet that kept them away from the playground, Amit tried his hand at cricket when he turned 15, becoming part of the local team. On the field he made an impression more for his spirit than the game. “He was very cheerful and never got into a fight with anyone,’’ recalls Sahib Singh, the young village sarpanch, who was a year junior to Pradeep in the local Government Senior High School and then at DAV College in Kurukshetra.
Studies did not interest Pradeep, or Shilla as the villagers call him, and soon after Class XI, he began to work as a commission agent. “It’s not an easy job, you take money from people on loan and then give it out at a higher interest,’’ explains Janak Raj Singla, one of his uncles.
Sahib Singh says though Pradeep may not have had much seed money, he could garner enough from the NRI cash-rich region where farmers are loath to keep their money in banks. Soon, the brothers became household names in neighbouring villages such as Talli Farm, home to a large number of NRIs from the Lobana community.
A couple of years ago, Pradeep did run into trouble with Brahm Prakash, a Jat who said he had been short-changed, but the panchayat sorted out the trouble amicably. Today Brahm Prakash is the first on the list of debtors the brothers left on the wall. “Our villagers trust the mahajans blindly, they are our any-time bankers,’’ says Sahib Singh.

The mass deaths have reopened the fissures between arhtiyas and farmers with a section of traders saying they would not lend money to farmers any longer. Calling Mam Chand a martyr to the cause of the traders, Suresh Jindal, senior vice-president of the Haryana Beopar Mandal, fumed that the government’s loan waiver policy was encouraging farmers not to repay the traders.
But his diatribe finds little resonance on the ground. As Janak Raj Singla, Mam Chand’s relative and a commission agent, puts it: “We have a symbiotic relationship with the farmer. We have to work together.’’
Interestingly, most villagers are at pains to underline how the brothers were unlike the traditional moneylenders. “Pradeep was not tight-fisted, he was happy to spend on friends,’’ says the sarpanch, recalling the young man’s chicken-and-whisky parties.
These sundowners often worried Mam Chand, a teetotaler himself. Om Prakash, his brother, recalls how he would fret about Amit getting sozzled at the sheller. “But that was once in a blue moon, and he had never made any such complaints of late,’’ he is quick to clear the air.
Both the brothers were well-known pranksters as well. Surinder Singh, Pradeep’s junior, remembers how Amit would throw water from the rooftop on him. “I used to tell him ‘Grow up, now you run a rice sheller’.’’
Villagers say the brothers were also good friends, sharing both a fag and a joke with equal ease. So were their wives Babli and Seema.
Shobha Sharma, a neighbour, is all praise for Babli who got married to Pradeep shortly after he divorced his first wife. “She was very beautiful, like a fairy. It is because of her that Nancy, 7, and Vanshika, 4, stood first in their classes,’’ she says. Seema, who was eight-month-pregnant with a baby boy, and had a daughter, Yashika, 3, had a fetish for cleanliness. “Their house used to sparkle. They did all the work themselves, right from mopping the floors to doing the dishes and clothes,’’ says Angoori Devi.
Neighbours recall Mam Chand rushing out of the house on that fateful Sunday morning of March 16 to get medicines for Seema.
At 10 am, the family got a call from their daughter Shalini. Rajesh Kumar says: “As always my brother-in-law Amit asked me to disconnect saying he would call back. They seemed to be in good humour. My wife had spent four days with them in February when they had come to pick her up and she too did not find anything amiss.’’
The traders at the grain market too had no idea that something was wrong. Surender Taneja, a commission agent whose shop is next to theirs, can’t believe they could have taken their own lives. “You can’t expect so many people to enter into a suicide pact. Besides, how could they drive their little daughters into the canal? Even if they were neck-deep in debt, we would have bailed them out. This tragedy is a blot on our mandi.’’
Friends and relatives have now pinned their hopes on the Central Bureau of Investigation probe to clear the fog surrounding the tragedy.
As the sun goes down on the lush green fields, Gurdeep Kaur of Talli Farm sighs as she remembers how the brothers returned her Rs 1 lakh on Friday, two days before they disappeared. ‘‘They always did their dealings together. They used to say this was to ensure that even if one of them met with an accident, the other would be able to complete the deal.’’
In death, they could not keep this promise.

Mam Chand Singla and his family scribbled the names of people who owed them money