Field Notes: Araku Valley

The hills in Araku are a million shades of green. There are shelves of rice paddy ponds and groves of straight, tall trees shading lush coffee plantations. Bulbous jackfruit, each the size of two basketballs, hang off branches and rot on the side of the road when they fall. Fields of methi and spinach and millet thrive, even though the monsoon rains have only sprinkled the valley. Out here streams rush down the slopes and across the roads and through the tiny villages of mud houses and red tiled roofs.

It's too beautiful to close my eyes, too alive to daydream. I forget about the ribs of the jeep seat jamming into my hip, or the numbing vibration of long motorcycle rides. I forget about the work I came to do.

But V. Rao, a community leader and researcher who has opened his home to us for the week, says he no longer sees this Araku, a tribal area in Andhra Pradesh that was once a hotbed for the Maoist movement. "I just see the poverty. I see how bad things are," he says without emotion, steering his bike expertly through the eroded roads.

I don't know much about Rao. I don't speak Telugu, and he doesn't know Hindi or English. Vivek, my reporting partner, translates for us, and there isn't much time. But I see that he dresses with care, speaks with authority, and in the evening, dances tipsily to dimsa music while he brainstorms ideas to move his community forward. His home -- three bedrooms in Araku town -- doubles as an orphanage for the twenty abandoned girls that he has taken in as his own along with his own children and their families.

That day, we're returning from a daylong meeting with about fifty village leaders and youth -- a meeting where Rao has spent hours making sure attendees know their rights at a time when their land is threatened by the mining industry, illegal timber markets, climate change.

Those struggles, while very real, are not the most immediate in these striking communities. In villages like Chintalveedi, the families tell us they're just trying not to get sick by drinking the well water that is covered by a sheet of algae. They wonder why their babies keep getting viral fevers, or why their feet swell with disease while the doctors remain far away. And they wait for the government to turn the skeletal bamboo huts where their children study every day into actual buildings that resemble a school.

But there are also signs of incredible health and harmony -- a vestige of age-old wisdom that dissolves as you get closer to industrialization. Here the farmers have sinewy arms and strong, white teeth. They eat local grain and rice with lentils and green vegetables straight from the earth. Men and women share tasks like cooking and taking care of children, and the threatening leer of creepy men is nonexistent. And while the next generation seek an education to grapple with the economy they can no longer avoid, many said they would prefer to stay close to this lush, green haven.

I think back to the cities, bursting at the seams with new villagers choosing the urban life, just like my great grandparents did years ago. I think of scarcity -- power cuts and dry taps and fights over space and walls and borders. And how far removed the rice on our plates are from these paddy fields. Amid the traffic and concrete jungles that I have deemed my comfort zones, there are diseases of a different nature in every home.

In Araku I don't know what's right or wrong and I'm too tired and uninformed to figure it out. When a weathered grandfather in one village asks if I've come to find out what medicines to send to them, I feel helpless and misdirected. So I wake up every day for the journey instead -- the hours in the backseat, staring at the valleys and hills with renewed awe. And I think of this line from the Bollywood movie Highway when the heroine says: "Where I came from, I don't want to go back. But wherever we're going, I don't want to reach."

The road has yet to let me down.