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mamta

mamta
yadav , chattisgarh

Mamta Yadav (33), wearing a sea-green kameez and a white underskirt, sits on a stool, holding a white porcelain mug with a sea-green rim. She wears a nose-stud and her hair is combed back with red sindoor in the centre parting. There is a closed, brown wooden door behind her with a decorative red and white thoran strung across the header.
A smiling Mamta wearing her green kameez and underskirt sits cross-legged on the plain cement floor. With her right hand she has gathered a handful of rice from a large rimless aluminium plate in front of her and is pouring the grain back into the plate. Behind her there is a plastic stool on top of which there is a steel draining-rack filled with washed steel vessels. Large aluminium dabbas are placed on a low wooden table to the right of the stool.
Mamta, wearing a blackish blue nighty printed with small pink and white diamond shaped motifs, stands in front of a gas stove, stirring a yellow curry in a steel vessel with a ladle in her right hand. The vessel is placed on the blue flame of the left burner. The unlit right burner has a pressure cooker on top of it. There are several red-and-gold glass bangles on both her wrists.
Mamta wearing her blackish-blue printed nighty sits on the cement floor outside the back door. There are several steel plates and other vessels in a draining rack before her, and a few vessels on the floor. The sea-green wall behind her is chipped and peeling.
Mamta and her mother Lal Kusum Yadav (50) sit side by side on two light-brown plastic chairs. Both of them are smiling broadly. Mamta wears a nighty printed in a floral design of brown, mustard, red and white. She wears a gold mangalsutra on a black bead chain. Her hands rest on her lap. Lal Kusum wears a flaming orange sari and white blouse. She wears red, orange, and white bangles on both wrists. To the right there is a black iron footwear-rack in which there are several pairs of slippers. A reddish-brown curtain is drawn across a door behind Lal Kusum. There are orange, light brown, and blue clothes hanging on a clothesline overhead.
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“It is difficult for me to come downstairs from my room. But my husband is very supportive of me and my natal family”

It is not uncommon for disabled persons in rural and remote areas to be deprived of their disability benefits by unscrupulous middlemen. Some petty neta (political leader) with a name resembling that of a villain in a B-grade Bollywood movie would approach a disabled person with promises of getting them a UDID (disability card) and would either charge a commission or, if the worst came to the worst, funnel the disability pension into their own account.
 
We suspect that something of this sort happened with Mamta Yadav (33) from Khamtarai in Chhattisgarh’s Raipur district. She has both intellectual and locomotive disabilities. Our interviewer was wondering why her mother Lal Kusum Yadav (50) was so reluctant to speak to her until she realised that Lal Kusum had assumed that she was a flunky of the local leader who had got Mamta’s UDID made! Why wasn’t she receiving the disability pension although she got the certificate in February 2021? She wanted to know.
 
It was Dharmendra Yadav (38), Mamta’s husband, who answered many of our questions. Dharmendra, a delivery executive for HPS Logistics, has a 12-hour working day and returns home only by 10 or 11 at night; Sunday is his only day off. A soft-spoken man, he told us that he didn’t meet Mamta before their wedding and didn’t know she had (as her UDID mentions) 75 per cent intellectual disability or (what her UDID doesn’t mention) locomotor issues. In 2006 he was working in Delhi when his father arranged the match. Apparently Mamta’s father Vijay Prasad Yadav told his father, “In our region we don’t have the custom of the boy seeing the girl before marriage.” He added, “Mamta has some problems but she can cook.”
 
Dharmendra says that fate brought him and Mamta together. “It was kismet,” he told us. “God has a plan for us. He is the one who gives us everything we have.” The couple have three children: Bhavna (13), Ladu Gopal (6) and Aryan (5). Dharmendra bathes the kids, drops them to school and helps in a few domestic chores but it is Lal Kusum who shoulders the heaviest burden. She does all the cooking and cleaning, feeds the kids and helps Mamta with what she is unable to do (she has trouble climbing steps and combing her hair).
 
Lal Kusum reminisced about Mamta’s birth (“she didn’t cry until many hours after my delivery”) and her early childhood when doctors, who knew she was intellectually disabled, advised the parents: “Feed and take care of her. It’s no use spending money to try to cure her, she is not going to change. At least she doesn’t have any physical disability.” It was Dharmendra who got the UDID ball rolling. About the man who had procured the certificate, Kusum said, “I asked him why we weren’t getting any benefits and he gave some excuse like Mamta does not have a ‘suchit-vala naam’ (proper name?) or something.”
 
Dharmendra said all his sisters were happily married. He has been living with his in-laws all along; Vijay Prasad’s father, who worked in the Railways, had bought a plot in Raipur on which this house was built. Vijay and Kusum moved here when Mamta was six. Anay, who got a job in the Railways a few months ago, lives with them. The eldest, Om Prakash, lives separately and works in the private sector.
 
Mamta occasionally flies into a temper when she experiences “some internal disturbance” but speaks lovingly to the kids although she doesn’t know how to take care of them, said Lal Kusum. She ended our chat by appealing to us to help sort out the UDID issue.


Photos:

Vicky Roy

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