Karimnagar town patterns itself after Hyderabad: You have stand-alone Louis Phillipe stores, ‘Chaineese’ fast food centres, Bawarchi biryani franchises and needless honking in the streets. I stopped an auto and asked to be taken to the bus station for the journey to Warangal. It was 10 am and the driver Ravi said it would take less than five minutes.
Speeding down a near-empty main street, I wondered if it was past rush hour but Ravi said this is what things have come to since three new districts -- Sircilla, Jagtial and Peddapalli – were carved out of Karimnagar.
Ravi didn’t sound like he liked it. “You used to be stuck in traffic jams until 12 noon on a working day. After Karimnagar was divided, people have moved and our business has fallen by 40 per cent. The decision may be good for the new districts, but it has been a blow to Karimnagar. He has a wife and child to support.
He didn’t expect much from the new year. “What can you say? You saw how unpredictable 2016 was. Who expected the ‘Delhi’ government to ban big notes? Who thought the new districts would affect Karimnagar. Anything can happen,” he said.
I mulled over the irony of Karimnagar, the epicentre of the Telangana agitation, suffering the wages of division as I got onto the express bus to Warangal. It was a short hop of 80 km but the sun was warmer than it had been in Adilabad. The road was part of NH 163 connecting to the Vajpayee Golden Quad and Warangal was quickly reached, another town mimicking Hyderabad with a flash mob distracting the bus driver from the green signal and the hoardings inviting youngsters to a DJ party.
Before catching the train to Khammam, I thought I would dart into a book store to get a book worm’s perspective. I found a store in the station and bought three magazines and a novel – a bit ambitious for a two-hour-journey. The man in the store didn’t seem happy either. I asked G Ravi how sales have been and he said, “Not much. People buy newspapers and magazines. We get a 10 per cent commission. If there is a sale of Rs 1,000, I get Rs 100. That’s hardly anything.”
Alarmingly, he added that he was thinking of quitting and taking up work as a security guard.
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Warangal too has suffered from being sundered into several districts. Once the Uttar Pradesh of Telangana, it has been cut down to size. “People don’t come to Warangal too often now. They go to the new district HQs. The rush has come down. And the note ban has brought business down by 50 per cent,” said Ravi.
“I will shift to something else now,” he told me. He looked bleak but he cheered up when I invited him to join me in a selfie. “People should learn about our misery,” he said as I thanked him and left.
As I walked onto the platform, the announcement was being made for the Hyderabad-Howrah 18646 Up East Coast Express. I asked the ticket collector where my seat would be. He asked to see my ticket and wrote ‘50’ on the back. “Please take seat 51 in this compartment,” he said. I got on and opened a magazine to read when I realised he had come for me. He asked me to pay Rs 50 and I gave him the money. Now what was that, 5o, 51 and all that? I gazed out the window to unplucked cotton fields until another man, clad in a white shirt and trousers, asked me if my seat was reserved. I showed him the ticket. “Is pe Khammam jaate aap? (You want to go to Khammam on this ticket),” he said and then examined the ticket. He returned it and walked away.
I asked the man seated beside me what had just happened. He looked at my ticket and explained, “You won’t find place in the general compartment. But with this ticket you can travel in the AC compartment also. Depends on how much the collector wants to charge,” he told me. Wait a minute, who gets the money? “It goes into his pocket, obviously. It is common here,” the man said.
In Khammam, I was to wait for a contact to pick me up and so sat down with three greasy, chote samose when a 60-year-old daily wage worker came and sat by my side. She was ordering her husband to sleep on the cleaner side of the platform.
“We came for his checkup,” Mareed Kausalya said, indicating to her husband. He was diagnosed with ‘fever’. “There are hospitals in my village, but they don’t treat us well,” she said.
The ticket to her village costs Rs 10. With no rains in the district this year, her employers haven’t paid her. “We pluck cotton and red chillies and earn Rs 100 a day. We didn’t get much work this year. And they haven’t paid us saying banks are not giving enough cash,” she said. She didn’t know about the note ban.
I asked her if she had a bank account. “Why would I have a bank account?” she replied.