Embers Rekindled

While the recent death by suicide of a farmer has rendered the mood sombre at Shambhu border, the protests have picked momentum at the call of the unions

- Apeksha Priyadarshini

IT’S a dimly lit room. The walls are colourless, lined with studio portraits of family members. One can hear the cold winds in the stillness of the household. Manjeet Kaur, 71, rocks back and forth, recounting her son's last physical memory in a loop. She cries and smiles at the same time. “When I return for Lohri, we will all celebrate together,” Resham Singh, 53, had promised her, before leaving for Shambhu border, where farmers have been protesting for the past one year. The celebration never took place. Instead, the news of her son’s death reached her a week later.

Singh left home from his village in Pahu Wind—in Tarn Taran district of Punjab—on January 3. He broke his promise to his mother and family on January 9, when he consumed ‘Sulphas’—a cheap pesticide commonly used by farmers—at the border and took his life. He was unable to bear the distress he saw his fellow farmers going through. “Jhappi paa ke gaya tha mujhe, bola ki main aa reya hun,” Kaur recalls, as she wails inconsolably.

“Hansta khelta gaya tha woh, koi problem, koi tension nahin,” remembers Sucha Singh, a member of the Kisan Mazdoor Sangharsh Committee, who was with Resham Singh on the day of his suicide. While narrating the incident sitting in the compound of Resham Singh’s house—not very far from the India-Pakistan border—Singh says: “Around 9.15 am, when I went for langar duty, he committed the act. After consuming the poisonous substance, he called to inform me. When I asked him why he did it, he said: ‘I’m fed up with this government’.”

Sucha Singh takes out from his pocket the suicide note that Resham Singh wrote. He still carries it with him. In a trembling voice, he reads out the deceased farmer’s last words: “It’s been so long since we have been sitting on the roads—our children, our mothers, our elders have all been stationed here. Dallewal