HAVERI: After a promising start in the first week of June, long-awaited monsoon has taken a shocking break, throwing Haveri district into another spell of dry weather - and pushing it back into the decades-old practice of exhuming the bodies of those who had had skin diseases in a bid to revive rain.
If rain fails, people in this primarily agrarian district pray in many ways - marriage of animals or dolls, and going around the town begging naked - to restart the rainy season. Nearly 2 lakh of 3.3 lakh hectares of cultivated land here depend on monsoon.
Villagers believe monsoon will hit a roadblock if bodies of those with vitiligo are buried. In the past two weeks after the rainy season ran into a rough patch, villagers have exhumed no less than 10 bodies of people with vitiligo and cremated them ritualistically in presence of immediate family members, hoping rain will resume with new vigour.
Though ghastly and unpleasant to dig up a grave, distraught family members have acquiesced to such strange requests and participated in rituals for the greater good and appeasing rain gods.