There is a small window facing the street in Dutee Chand's room. The sunlight peeping through it is not enough to light up the two-bedroom house shared by a family of eight. Opposite the window, on the wall of the house across the street is a crude painting of a rice plant.
That window was Dutee’s outlet to the world for two years while she went through the humiliating experience of being subjected to a hyperandrogenism test, seen by many as a test of gender. Pursued by media and fighting the maelstrom of identity raging within her, she remained indoors, gazing at that reed of grass from that window.
It was a test of resilience as the girl -- yes, girl -- from the village of Gopalpur, about 90 km from Bhubaneswar, took the case to the Court of Arbitration for Sports, and won its verdict. Now, the taunts have turned into paeans: Dutee Chand, the 'golden girl', who has qualified for Rio Olympics in the 100 m and 4x100 m relay, the girl who became a girl again.
On a rainy afternoon, sitting by Dutee's window, her elder sister Saraswati recollected the hardships the sprinter and the family endured after the Incident.
“I remember her coming home after the incident. She was brought home by two coaches. There was only silence in our house for two months. It was like a mourning. We hardly cooked. Dutee would stand here at this window. Sometimes, she would go to that corner and silently weep. Occasionally, she would explode with anger. Sometimes, she became delirious. Much of that time, she became distant, sitting still like a doll. We were afraid if she was going to harm herself,” says the sister.
Dutee’s success on the track had got her a job, and the family looked up to her. “We had been struggling financially until Dutee got a job. It was a big relief. Our parents were weavers. Between them, my father and mother made about Rs 3000 per month.”
Dutee took to athletics after her elder sister. Saraswati’s purpose in running was to get herself a job, any job. She would practice on the banks of the river Brahmani near their house. “One day, while running on the sand, I spotted Duttee behind me. I had never seen her doing that. She told me she had been doing it secretly for a long time. She had been running on my footprints. How had I missed that! And then I thought 'now this girl will also run, get a government job and help the family',” Saraswati recalled.
Government jobs were something to run for. The Chand family home was a thatched hut. The sisters’ parents, Chakradhar and Akhuji, wove in the ‘verandah’ of the hut on an ancient handloom. It barely paid for the food.
Saraswati's husky voice cracks as she relives those days. “Till I got a job, we had never had royal food.”
She means non-vegetarian dishes.
“Survival was our biggest challenge. Good food was a luxury. We lived on tomato curry. Tomatoes were cheap. On days when we couldn't afford even that, we dipped our rotis in black tea.”
It wasn’t only poverty. There was its sibling, social humiliation, to endure. “There is a grocery shop in the market nearby, where our father bought food on credit,” says Saraswati, her eyes now glinting in remembered anger. “When the payment got due, the shopkeeper would make him wait. Those who paid in cash got served first. That was the rule. There were days my father used to go to get rice for our supper at 8 pm and be back at 11.”
The sisters can’t get themselves to forgive the shopkeeper to this day.
It was Saraswati who made the breakthrough. She ran for the state, and it got her a job in the Odisha Police in 2005. Dutee, running in her sister’s footsteps, made it through several years later, and it turned the tide for the family.
The girls’ jobs changed things but slowly. The food got better, if not right royal. The hut became a house and the parents were forbidden to go that shop ever again. The ancient loom is still in the verandah, treated more as an heirloom on which Chakradhar insists on weaving a scarf or two as homage to his ancestral profession.
Freed of bread-winning responsibilities, Chakradhar and Akhuji turned to prayer. Whenever the girls ran, Akhuji lit a lamp for her idols of Maa Tarini, Lakshmi and Hanuman, Dutee’s favour god.
And then the hyperandrogenism controversy broke upon Dutee. The mother was inconsolable. “I was broken when I heard of it,” Akhuji says. “How could it happen? She was born a girl, competed as a girl and won medals as one. And then one morning, someone says she's not a girl. How can that happen?”
The family turned to its fait to keep Dutee’s spirits up, telling her countless times about the travails that even Lord Rama had to endure.
In their formative years, when the sisters ran on the banks of the Brahmani in shorts, it caused an uproar in the village. “Why are you allowing the girls to run in skimpy clothes,” villages would stop Chakradhar in the streets to ask. He used silence as defiance. “They were against the girls running and I defied them. Now Dutee has proved that my defiance was valid,” he says now, beaming.
The village too has learnt to accept the girls, and even takes pride in them now. The Chands’ neighbor, Bipin Bihari Guin, now thinks the sisters’ fame can bring drinking water to the village. “The village is facing a lot of issues like scarcity of drinking water and power cuts. We feel Dutee's achievements will draw the attention of authorities to these issues.”
Now the village is united in praying for Duteee’s return to laurels, perhaps even an Olympic medal. For Dutee's younger sisters, there is also the promise of chocolates from abroad, which sister always remembers to bring after a competition overseas.
“We have an Olympian who didn't have the fortune to taste chicken curry in her childhood,” chuckles Utkal Guin, Dutee’s classmate and neighbour.
Out on the street, not far from Dutee’s once sad window, stands a violet Nano, wrapped in body cover. It’s the car someone gifted to Dutee chand after she won in the school nationals some years ago. It’s little used, bar for taking Dutee’s younger siblings out on a spin around the village. It waits, a symbol of a small fortune and a sea change.