RAMANATHAPURAM: Exactly ten years have passed since a fire at a mental home in the small Tamil Nadu town of Erawadi claimed the lives of 28 mentally ill patients. Erawadi lies close to the famous temple town of Ramanathapuram, and is home to the Quthbus Sultan Syed Ibrahim Shaheed Valiyullah Dargah, a destination for those who seek the saint’s intervention to cure the mentally ill.
Sunita lies on her stomach, her head buried in the sand, her body curled up. Both her arms are stretched out above her, tied with long pieces of cloth to a rock. Every morning, her aged mother Mahalakshmi buys two cups of tea, unties her, and coaxes her to drink it.
Sunita takes one sip, refusing any more, and drops down on the sand again. The 25 year-old mental patient and her mother, have been living on the Dargah premises for over two years, waiting for a divine cure. They have no place to go. Mahalakshmi sold everything she had, to take her daughter on a long round of various hospitals, including the Institute of Mental Health (IMH), Chennai. “They would give her medicines that made her sleep all day, and her body would bloat. She would be all right for a few months, and then it would start again: the screaming, breaking everything in the house, running away. The Ramanathapuram General Hospital refused to admit her. We then came here and she is calmer now. But even here, she ran away and fell into a well. If I had come here years ago, she could have been all right by now,” Mahalakshmi says.
On August 7, 2001, the Supreme Court suo motu issued a notice to the Tamil Nadu government to submit a report on the fire; it also asked the Central and state governments to submit a report on the state of mental healthcare. 22 intervention applications followed. The court passed an interim order in 2002, but adjourned the matter pending the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
The convention came into force in May 2008. However, since then, the case has not progressed.
The mentally ill and their relatives populate the sprawling premises of the dargah in Erawadi, famed for its curative powers. People of all faiths from across south India throng in thousands to its gates, hoping for a miracle to cure their loved ones. The belief: they must stay there until the saint appears to the patients in a dream asking them to leave. At that point, they are cured and can get on with their lives. This could take anywhere between a few days and several years. Many have sold their homes, their land and any other possessions they have, to come here. Most subsist by finding daily wage labour, while some others are sent money by their families back home. The dargah feeds everyone on its premises once a day. For many of the abandoned, it is probably their only meal of the day.
It is difficult to control the ill. Anitha does not know how she can manage, without chaining up one of her sons. Three months ago, she came to the dargah with her two sons, both mentally ill. While one, a former heavy tank driver in Chennai, wanders about the premises, the other is chained to a pillar.
“I feed them every day, take them to the bathroom and go with them to the river for them to have a bath. But there is no saying when they will turn violent.
Once, I had to hide in the ladies prayer hall for three days from my son, who threatened to kill me,” she says.
Anitha took her son to IMH, Chennai, which sent him back in a few months. She then tried many doctors, mortgaging her home for funds, before coming here. “Extremely violent mentally- ill patients have to be restrained.
We do it pharmacologically.
But those inside the dargah do not believe in drugs, and tie up people they cannot control,” says Dr J Periyar Lenin, psychiatrist, District Mental Health Programme, Ramanathapuram.
A few feet away from Sunita, a nameless man in a loin cloth is chained to an large, old tricycle.
His matted hair covers most of his face, and he doesn’t respond when spoken to. He was abandoned here years ago. He gets fed occasionally, but doesn’t eat much. In a nearby shed, three men are chained to pillars, one of whom is abandoned.
In 2007, V Shahul Riyas, president of the Haqdar Youth Progress Federation filed a writ petition at the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court against the Dargah Haqdar Management Committee and others, asking for a special home or rehabilitation centre to be set up to house the mentally ill in the dargah. In 2008, the Dargah Committee agreed to allot two acres of land for the purpose.
The court directed the district administration to extend cooperation.
The home, however, is yet to materialise. Syed Ibrahim, Dargah committee member, informs that they had submitted an application to the government for a No Objection Certificate (NOC), but that this had not yet come. “Three years ago we estimated the cost of construction to be Rs 20 lakh. Now it has nearly doubled. We need aid from the government—either a grant or a loan—to help us build it,” he adds. Ramanathapuram Collectorate officials denies the dargah approached them for an NOC. “We would have no problem in giving them the NOC, as, after all, it is their private land.
Aid, however, may not be possible,” collector Arun Roy says.
There are only two psychiatrists in Ramanathapuram, and an average of 4,000 patients.
A decade after the fire, not much has changed for the mentally ill and their relatives. A young man contemplates emptiness, tied to a tree. His mother, a labourer who believes the wicked spirit in her son is slowly being pulled out by the powers of the dargah, says. “My husband and other children don’t believe this place can cure him, but the spirit is so deeply embedded in him, it will take time. I’m not leaving here till he is cured.” Meanwhile, an inferno burns unabated within the fevered imaginations of those who languish for a miracle and a cure.