After dropping out of school at 14, unable to travel to the Zilla Parishad High School just a kilometre away everyday, Ramavath Suvarna remained at home.
Completing her fifth standard, it’s been eight years now since Suvarna left her bed or her home in Khudabakshpalli here. Reason? Like her brother, who died last year, she too is fluorosis afflicted. Her legs and hands are more twisted now than when she was a child, according to her mother Paringi, who takes care of all her needs.
Cot to canvas
Though confined to the cot, supported by a gunny of old clothes on the left to balance her body, Suvarna keeps doing what she loves: drawing and sketching. Now 22, she cannot move her limbs, and the maximum her right wrist and fingers can move is less than five centimetres. “I wanted to draw women, fish and gods,” Suvarna shows the many paper cuttings of her drawings stuck on the wall, including her first one, of a woman clad in an embroidered and studded saree. “Schoolchildren who fancy her small pencil and crayon work buy from her for ₹2 each,” says Paringi. Suvarna also recollects another student from Nalanda University, Bihar, here on an assignment, had picked a pencil art of Lord Ganesha by her.
Portraits of the big
But her recent work — portraits of Telangana Rashtra Samithi president and Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao , his son K. T. Rama Rao and daughter K. Kavitha — are all set to give her a big boost.
“An NRI uncle brought this watercolours set and brush, and asked me to paint the pictures, of KCR, KTR and Kavitha ,” Suvarna says, showing her first larger canvas, sheet larger that A4 size paintings. Deft they may not, be but driven by grit, her fingers completed each painting in three days — breakfast to dinner time.
Recognition is coming in. Jalagam Sudheer, an MLA hopeful of Kodad constituency said the paintings were posted online, and one of them — a girl dressed in tribal attire — was put up in a 72-hour auction on Facebook. The man who outbid everyone to collect the painting for ₹10,000 was one Sakru Naik, a native of Suryapet currently working in the US. That’s big money for one who ekes out a living with an Aasra pension of ₹1,500 per month and her mother’s petty earnings as domestic help.
But, for Suvarna the artist, more than money, is her desire to hand over his portrait to KCR herself when he is in Nalgonda for the election campaign. And, tell him directly the problems of the many fluorosis-affected people. A straight stroke that.
