Troubled Waters
The Caravan|February 2017

Families look for their lost loved ones at a barrage in Punjab / Communities.

Fiona Weber-Steinhaus
Troubled Waters

On 8 November, a rice-farming family from Naiwala village, in Punjab’s Sangrur district, drove five kilometres to Khanauri, a town near the Haryana border. For the past two days, they had been looking for one of their relatives: 95-year-old Kundan Singh.

Kundan’s nephew Manu told me that over the previous three months, his uncle, who struggled with diabetes and depression, had begun to talk about ending his life. On 6 November, Kundan drank his afternoon tea and hitched a ride on a motorbike to the Bhakra main line canal. He drowned himself there, leaving a slipper and his jacket at the water’s edge. A note in the jacket pocket read: No one is responsible for my death but me.

“I don’t understand it,” another of Kundan’s nephews, Dilraj, said. “He was a religious man. He wasn’t even financially dependent on his family.” In 1947, Kundan moved to Singapore to work as a bank manager. He returned to India in 2001 “because he didn’t want to die alone, in a coffin, in a foreign land,” Dilraj said. “And now, this.”

In Khanauri, which has a population of almost 11,000, a barrage stems the waters of the Bhakra main line canal—a 164-kilometre channel that supplies water to Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. Many corpses wash up at the barrage, leading locals to call it “the place of dead bodies.” A hut at the barrage is plastered with missing-person notices of people from all over Punjab. According to Kulwender Singh, a policeman who accounts for the bodies, around 30 turn up each month. On 25 days out of 30, he said, there will be a family waiting near the hut, hoping to find a relative’s body.

This story is from the February 2017 edition of The Caravan.

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This story is from the February 2017 edition of The Caravan.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.