His mother doesn't remember anything now. She can't recognise him in the photograph. But sometimes she asks them to take her to him
She worked on farms and construction sites and even when her son became the district magistrate of Gopalganj, she continued to live simply. Now G Yankamma remembers nothing but occasionally calls out for the son she lost 13 years ago

For over an hour G Yankamma, 72, held the framed photo in both her hands and struggled to recognise the person staring back at her. After turning it around several times she ventured a guess. ‘‘Murthy?’’ she asks, voice quivering.
The photograph is of her youngest son G Krishnaiah, the collector and district magistrate of Gopalganj in Bihar. He had been dragged out of his car and shot on December 5, 1994, near Khabra near Muzaffarpur.
You can’t say if it is the shock of losing her favourite son when he was only 35 or the brutal manner in which he was murdered or a memory disorder or simply age that has reduced Yankamma to this. Yankamma does not register anything these days but even today, whenever she looks at any man the age of her son when he was killed, it sets her off talking.
She can go on like this for an hour, muttering incoherently, asking questions that no one can understand. Or answer.
But in 1993, a year before Krishnaiah’s death, she was an alert, sprightly woman who knew her mind and didn’t hesitate to speak it.
For instance, she never lost an opportunity to scold her son affectionately if she saw more than one official car outside his bungalow.
She was a simple woman, who despite having worked for years as a farm hand and sometimes as a construction worker, refused to enjoy the luxuries of a district magistrate’s house.
Today, her speech is incoherent and she has become a recluse, grieving all by herself in a corner of the two-room house in Hyderabad.
‘‘She doesn’t remember anything now. She cannot recognise Krishnaiah in his photograph or recollect his name. But sometimes she does ask me to take her to him,’’ says Uma.
‘‘He is away in some distant land she says, and insists on being taken there on the rare occasion that she remembers him. Then she forgets all about him,’’ says Uma.
But Uma remembers the times they all spent ogether in Bihar.
‘‘She stayed with us when we were in Gopalganj. We had a small field there at the collector’s bungalow where we had grown some vegetables. She insisted on working there. She would work there in the field for several hours and in the evening, when Krishnaiah returned home from work, she would walk up to him take Rs 50 from him as wages,’’ remembers Uma.
‘‘And she would scold him for keeping cars and servants at home. ‘If the vehicles belong to someone, go and return them,’ she would tell him.’’
Krishnaiah’s father died in 1991. Belonging to the poorest section of the Dalit community in Undavelli village in Bailapuram and working as labourers, their finances improved only after their elder son joined as a junior assistant in the Commercial Tax Department and partly financed his younger brother’s education.
Yankamma was already 50 when Krishnaiah became an Indian Administrative Service officer in 1985. Though she refused to be pampered and live comfortably in official bungalows, things changed forever for Yankamma on December 5, 1994, when she lost her son to the fury of a mob.
She now lives in the two-room flat at the Officers Transit Hostel in the heart of Hyderabad where she shares her meals with her daughter-in-law and two granddaughters.
It’s a regular family scene except that her son who worked hard to make this possible is no longer around to be a part of it.