Little Surendra Majhi doesn’t quite know what home is. Nobody, it seems, wants to give him shelter for very long.

He was only a year old when seven members of his family, including his mother, died in the infamous mango kernel starvation deaths in southern Orissa Nov 13, 2001. Since then he has been shunted back and forth from his home to orphanages.

Surendra lost his mother, brothers and sisters when – as the residents of the poverty-stricken Sapalguda village in Gajapati district are wont to do – they resorted to consuming gruel prepared from rotten mango kernels for lack of anything better and were poisoned to death.

Only he and his father Taragasa Majhi survived.

But Taragasa, a daily wage earner, soon found himself facing another problem. He could not look after Surendra.

“I had no choice,” Taragasa, 55, told IANS. “When I would go to work, my son, who was only a year old then, would be alone. I had to look for his rehabilitation.”

Sapalguda, a tiny tribal village surrounded by forests and hills and housing about 25 families of the Kandh tribe, has few resources of its own.

“Most leaders representing this region never visit us because they never consider us a vote bank,” said a villager. “Only disease and death visit this village.”

People often fall prey to diseases there. There are no tarred roads, nor any modern means of communication. One has to trek at least five kilometres to reach the village.

Taragasa therefore pleaded with people and local administration officials for help. Finally, a district government official assured assistance. He took the child to an orphanage in Aliganda, a neighbouring village.

The orphanage kept the boy for a year. But soon, it told Taragasa to take his son away, saying the orphanage was not getting any assistance from the government.

He did as he was told. And Surendra came home again. But not for long.

“I didn’t know what to do with the boy. If I went to work he would be alone. If I didn’t go, we would both die of hunger,” Taragasa said.

He said: “I have no choice but to live on hope. I have no land to cultivate, nor any source of livelihood. I go to the forest and bring firewood. I sell it in the local market and survive on that.”

So he approached the district collector, “who ordered the local administration to rehabilitate my son at another orphanage”, he said.

Little Surendra was taken away from his father’s home again Jan 27 this year and is now at Srijagannath Niketan, an orphanage in neighbouring Rajasitapur.

“He will take some time to get used to the new environment,” an orphanage official said.

District collector B.B. Mohanty told IANS: “He is living comfortably. This orphanage gets assistance from the Red Cross and they will take care of the boy.”

Surendra and Taragasa meanwhile have little else but hope to hold on to. Said the boy’s father: “I may not last long but my son will. I have faith in the new orphanage where he has been moved.”

In southern Orissa’s Gajapati and Raigada districts, over two-dozen people died after eating rotten mango kernel that same year.