Diving for the dead

On October 31 of this year, the day after Diwali, 58-year old Mahinder Singh went missing. The retired bus driver lived in Mansa, Punjab, with his family. He had told them he was going to visit Patiala, but had disappeared somewhere along the way. When they were unable to locate him, Mahinder’s family knew what had most likely happened: Mahinder had probably committed suicide. The next day, Mahinder’s son and nephew, accompanied by other family members, made their way to the Bhakra Main Line (BML) canal leading out of Patiala and towards Khanauri, in the nearby Sangrur district. They scanned its length carefully. “We thought maybe he took off his shoes before jumping in and if we found them, we would know for sure,” said Dilpreet Singh, Mahinder’s nephew said.

The search yielded nothing. Two days later, Mahinder was still untraceable. The Singh family came to Khanauri, which is about 95 kilometres from Mansa. They made their way to the Sahara Charitable Trust guest house, where families like Mahinder’s come and stay free of cost as they wait for their dear and disappeared to surface. Like everyone else who comes to Khanauri to recover their dead, the Singhs also enlisted the service of the gotakhor, Ashu Malik.  

The Wall of ‘Missing’ Posters at Khanauri Head

A lifeline for the dead

“I’ve been going into canals since I was eight years old. That’s when I learnt how to swim,” said Malik. For those who come to Khanauri in the hope of finding their missing family members, Malik is the one on whom they pin hopes. If he doesn’t fish out their relative’s dead body from the canal, there’s still hope that their worst fears were baseless. He isn’t the only gotakhor in Khanauri, but he certainly is the most trusted.

The first time Malik, 36, jumped into a canal to save someone, he was 12 years old. “She was washing clothes by the canal and fell in,” he remembered. “Nobody else made a move, so not fearing for my own life, I jumped in.” The incident occurred in Panipat, Haryana, where Malik, the son of a farm labourer, was born. “I remember that day a reporter from Amar Ujala was there,” he said. “He clicked a photo of me and put it in the paper. ‘Gotakhor Ne Bachayi Ek Ki Jaan (diver saves a life)’ was the headline.”

But it wasn’t just getting his face in the newspaper that made Malik pick the business of gotakhori. For his intervention, Malik was rewarded with Rs 50, which he said was worth five months of rent at the time. “We had to struggle a lot because we were poor. I had three elder sisters and was the only son,” Malik told Newslaundry. His family disapproved of this dangerous way to earn a living and told him as much, but Malik decided to become a professional gotakhor.

Today, 24 years later, Malik says he has helped recover more than 40,000 bodies from Punjab’s myriad canals. It’s not just a morbid job, but also a dangerous one because Malik and his fellow divers (he has a team now) don’t wear any equipment or have any safety backup. They wait for the corpse to pass by, strip down to their underwear and simply dive in.

By Malik’s estimate, roughly a third of the bodies pulled out of the canals are victims of murders and accidents. About 70 per cent of the rest are suicide victims, he says. As Punjab’s woes have intensified over the years – due to drugs, unemployment and an agrarian crisis – so have the number of suicides. As callous as it may sound, the demand for gotakhors in Punjab has risen correspondingly. Malik moved from Panipat to first Fatehgarh Sahib, then to Patiala and two years ago, he finally came to Khanauri, a hotspot for recovering bodies.

The wait

Over lunch, provided by the local gurdwara, Mahinder’s nephew speculated upon why his uncle may have killed himself. “He worked as a bus driver all his life,” Dilpreet said. “Of late, due to his age, the family thought that it wasn’t safe for him to drive anymore, so he quit his job. But he just couldn’t sit at home. He started drinking, and got more and more depressed.” A few months ago, Mahinder had tried to commit suicide by jumping into a canal near Mansa, but an onlooker had rescued him.

According to results from the National Mental Health Survey, 13.4 per cent of Punjab’s population suffers from mental disorders, the third highest among Indian states. Further, it is estimated that only one in 10 mental health patients receive treatment in India. Perhaps, if Mahinder had received help, his family wouldn’t have been holding a vigil at the Khanauri head, opposite the guest house.

Malik, after decades of studying the current of the canal and the speed at which it tugs dead bodies to the sluice gates, knew that the Singh family had one more day’s wait ahead of them. He predicted it would take approximately 72 hours for Mahinder’s body to show up at Khanauri and told the family as much.

“We keep on monitoring our ‘routes’,” said Malik. “We have 5-6 motorcycles and our people are constantly checking the canal.” Maintaining his team is tough. Malik’s monthly earnings vary between Rs 8,000-10,000, after expenses. There is no fixed fee for recovering a body. “When I find someone’s body, I feel good. Even if the other person doesn’t pay me, at least he’ll give me a blessing. I feel peaceful that I’ve done a good deed,” he said. The expenses – food, fuel etc. – sometimes exceed the remuneration, which largely depends on the family’s’ capacity to pay. The disorganised nature of the work has also given rise to what Malik calls “nakli gotakhor (fake divers)” who charge exorbitant rates for retrieving bodies and exploit grieving families.

“The stats show that everyday 12 people are dying in Punjab,” said Malik. “We have so many bodies which are unclaimed, they get eaten by dogs.” Malik feels gotakhors get a raw deal from the state administration. “We don’t have a ration card, no voter card, no facilities from the government,” he lamented. Harassment by the police is also common for gotakhors. “Every new SHO (Station House Officer) takes our case, accuses us of being thieves, of duping people. We have to explain ourselves every time,” he said angrily. “Why, after doing so much work, doesn’t anybody help us?”

Malik feels the state government should permanently employ two gotakhors in Khanauri and pay them a fixed salary. “We have families of our own,” he said. “We have little children. If we get a salary, then there won’t be pressure on those who can’t pay us. After all, we are poor and we have to earn a living.”

Ashu Malik [left] and Kapil Ahmed with the former’s newspaper clippings and bravery certificates

The gotakhor has two hefty folders – one filled with newspaper clippings of his exploits, the other with certificates of bravery he has received from the government over the years. When asked what all this meant to him, Malik replied. “These are all worthless. I’m waiting for some big shot government representative to come and I’ll burn all these in front of him. Maybe I’ll do it if [Prime Minister] Modi comes here.”

Closure

Despite there being little chance of Mahinder’s body turning up early, his son and nephew – accompanied by two uncles – spent the night of November 2 waiting by the canal, under the floodlights which illuminate it at night. “We are tired but what if the body passed by while we were sleeping?” a visibly-exhausted Dilpreet told Newslaundry. Frayed by anxiety, uncertainty and exhaustion, the Singh family was now desperate to find Mahinder, even if it was as a bloated corpse.  

Around 6 am on November 4, a little after the 72-hour window expired, Malik received a call from the Singh family. They’d spotted a body go by. Instead of going further down the BML, it had been drawn into a smaller canal that branched off from the Khanauri head. Malik managed to intercept the body.

The body that Malik dragged to the banks looked like a weather-beaten mannequin. Pale after more than three days in the water; only slightly bloated; his beard perfectly in place; his face expressionless – Mahinder Singh’s body bore few traces of the torment the man must have endured both when he was alive and in his death.   

Malik recovering Mahinder Singh’s dead body from the canal.

This was closure for the Singh family: stiff, still and lifeless.

While the wait had ended for the Singhs, for Malik, it began now. It wouldn’t be long, though. Both his experience and the statistics suggested that somewhere else in Punjab, another Mahinder would have disappeared, another family would have been wrenched out of their everyday patterns and plunged into miserable anxiety; and they would, soon enough, make their way to Khanauri. Once here, they would come to the guest house, turn to Ashu Malik for help, eat lunch at the local gurudwara, stare at the canal and wait. Because for Malik and Khanauri, this is the life cycle.