It was a cool winter’s day in February 2023 when a middle-aged daily wage labourer called Sreedharan told his sister-in-law that he was leaving the home that the two families shared here in Kerala’s lush highlands to buy a bar of soap to wash clothes.

Sreedharan, 49, never returned.

“We never saw him after that,” said his wife Vasantha, 30, a soft-spoken woman dressed in a nightie, her voice trembling as she spoke.

At the family home in Velaramkunnu colony, a collection of more than 15 hilltop homes about 5 km from a town called Vellamunda, a Wayanad gram panchayat, Vasatha explained how they found out a day later from someone in town that he had travelled two hours by bus 54 km to the southeast to Kodagu in the neighbouring state of Karnataka.

Sreedharan, an illiterate father of six, who earned between Rs 15,000 and Rs 20,000 per month labouring in arecanut fields and coffee plantations, had not told the family where he was headed.

They learnt from two men who left with him that he intended to return for a temple festival in March 2023.

Daily wage labour in these parts of Kerala pays about Rs 1,000 per day, which is about double of Kodagu.

But work is hard to find in Kerala, and so thousands of Adivasis seek work in Karnataka, as Sreedharan apparently did in Kodagu, where more than a third of India’s coffee is grown, as it has for 170 years since British colonialists first found the red soil and cool weather perfect.

Today, Sreedharan’s youngest son, eight-year-old Preejesh, often asks his mother about his father’s sudden disappearance.

“He asks, ‘Why am I not seeing our father?’” said Vasantha.

In Prosperous Kerala, A Poor Tribe.

On 18 April 2023, after reporting to the Vellamunda police station that Sreedharan was missing, the family was told that he had died two months earlier.




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