A Mutinous Fart in the Fields

The early winter is pouting like a dusky beauty in this last week of November, to appease, to assuage, to help, to strengthen and to make everybody’s smile more charming. Through its mist-laden cool nights and sun-tanned days, it is trying its best to invigorate the flora and fauna that usually gets lynched by the weather extremes in North India.

Rambeer is feeling the balmy solace of this November sun. His eyes are closed and he looks more pensive than a rough farmer like him should. To be linguistically correct he should have been called ‘Ramveer’, i.e., brave like Sri Ram, but in the farming community the finer edges get broken to leave a blunt-faced reality. So for the convenience of the cattle- and women-abusing tongues, he is called ‘Rambeer’. He has many nagging thoughts plaguing his simple mind not used to calculations outside the sums and deductions related to agricultural inputs and outputs.  

Like many other farmers he has also been done in. He is feeling fucked. The other day he had got his virgin buffalo force-mated with a seasoned male buffalo. There were all signs that the young animal was ready for mating to be pregnant for the first time. It was braying all night and had gone romping around flirtatiously, broke its rope, and when they caught it, it was a ghost buffalo with mud all over its body, shrubbery dangling from its horns. Typical signs of a mating call, they say. He was not the one to go missing on a chance to get fresh milk in the family so had immediately hired the services of a muscular, lecherous male buffalo belonging to an equally lecherous farmer. Initiations are seldom smooth. There was quite a scene as they facilitated the act. The unsparing male buffalo landed with its forepaws on the denying young little filly. The lusty monster’s nostrils full of guffawing, frothy, salivating, sneezy liquid. Fearsome sight, but then the street urchins clap at the scene as well like they are witnessing street circus. The poor animal underneath lost its footing and fell under the masculine black weight.

He now cursed, spat and muttered that he has been painfully banged like his young buffalo. He recalled the eventful scene yesterday and said aloud he himself has been treated in the very same manner by the bulkier buffaloes, the bigger forces: the weather, hence the God automatically; and then its representative on earth, the market, hence to the poor farmers like him, the Government again automatically.

Gentleman, farmers suffer at two very distinct levels. Either it’s the impersonal hand of God that simply holds them by ears and smilingly makes them see the mysterious spectacle of undoing all their hard work. If the God is busy doing some more important undoings somewhere else, thus sparing the tillers for some time, the Government does it from His side. Low prices hit the farmers even worse, because here they complete the crop cycle with certain dreams but return almost empty-handed from the market. So caught between these two supernatural forces, the poor farmer gets just one weather-saved and market-saved crop in four seasons. And that surplus keeps him on the path of survival.

This time paddy has been fucked by the Government-cum-market force. Rambeer’s face had glittered like he had struck gold under the hoofs of his male buffalo, 12 years ago, when he sold Basmati rice at INR 2600/100 Kg. Mind it that was more than a decade ago. Can you believe the same stuff fetched a paltry INR 1400 this season? Almost half! That too a dozen years down the line. Meanwhile the costs of farming inputs had skyrocketed. It indeed defies logic. Some educated farmer might very well crib aloud, ‘Capitalism how can you leave a certain section in lurch like this?’

Rambeer as a landless farmer had taken a portion of some other big farmer’s land on rent for paddy farming. The sum they agreed upon was just on the basis of the expected price of at least, in the worst case scenario, INR 2000/100 Kg. Robbed of all his profits by the fluctuating market forces and stockists’ manipulative mantra, he returned from the market with just the money that would go into settling the rental amount. It meant he had simply worked for free. The landholding farmers have pretty thick skin that makes them immune to any sentimentality born of a crying landless farmer. So there was no option of sharing the loss. An agreement is after all an agreement and if you do not keep your word, people won’t give you land on rent anymore in the coming seasons. So keeping the word was most important. And why would a better placed farmer get a hole in his pocket by such acts of philanthropy like waiving off a bit of debt in lieu of unpredictable market-born losses? So Rambeer had just simply handed over whatever he had got from the grain merchant to the bulky better-placed farmer. Anyway, if the market forces and the shining economy of India, for their survival, presume such acts of kindness from a bit-better-placed farmer, then to the hell with such a system. Those who have hundreds of millions in Swiss accounts are better for such philanthropy. The Swami who was recently talking of getting that money back had been cowed down by the lady with glassy eyes and Italian steely resolve.

Rambeer’s reverie is broken by the arrival of another farmer who tills the neighbouring patch of land. Nursing the market insult, he hatefully stars at the stunted growth of his winter tomatoes. An ex-serviceman, in late forties, this farmer has been working with all his army ethics on his small landholding. 'This country is up for bloodbath, I tell you!' he frets and fumes like an aimless light machinegun. Rambeer even gets scared. Gosh! Guys there is real fire in the eyes and practical intent in the farmer-ex-soldier’s words. 'The fuckers have stashed all the money in Swiss accounts. That’s our money man. While they cheat us through low agricultural product prices and very high cost of livelihood. The behen****s... ', sorry guys an angry farmer cannot do without gali-sali, 'have fucked farmers at all fronts.' 'Unemployment...these graduate farmers of the 21st century India are not dumb like their forefathers. Believe me man the day will come when they will just barge into Parliament and just kill the lawmakers there!' Dear-o-dear what a stormy spectacle it becomes. He is literally shaking as if we just now have the first leader of the peasant uprising in this agrarian belt. He seems to recall his still bigger losses in life, ‘I have never been lucky, hard work does not pay as they say in the books. Even in army behen****s fucked my chances of a promotion forcing me to retire just at the age of 40 and that is when you need the financial back-up for your family, your kids are growing up, you need more money.’ The dispiriting spectacle of his stunted poor tomato plants takes him back to his in-service miseries. He is wearing a faded, coarse-clothed army shirt that helps him in farming like denims did with the cowboys.

It is the very same shirt that gave him a chance to become a part of what the common man presumed to be ‘the liberation movement in independent India’. His ex-army shirt gave him an opportunity to contribute his common part to the common men’s movement led by the common man and his team of self-proclaimed common men and women?! Yes of course it did! It saved his life just a day before he and Rambeer had planned to add to the weakening voice of Anna from his Ramlila maidan platform as his fast entered the second week in the terribly hot and humid Delhi in August. It happened a day before they had planned to see the great Anna who had literally hijacked all forms of media in the country. The farming ex-soldier was cutting Jowar, the long-stalked fodder crop, moving his sickle with expertise. The fodder crop had overgrown grass on the ground. His sickle must have touched the reptile. With its venomously instantaneous hitting prowess, the cobra struck at the hand wielding the instrument. Sometimes you are unlucky to fall even on the smoothest of ground, without hitting any obstacle, without walking carelessly, even while watching your feet. At other times, you might be lucky not to trip even once while the terrain around might not spare even a single smooth step. It was one such stroke of luck, the good luck that we need and aspire for so much. The cobra hit precisely the way it should when provoked like this. The farmer reacted with the usual not-so-agile reaction of the hand whose beholder is just cutting fodder lost in so many mundane things. But he was lucky, an odd chance, an exception. His army background saved him, or more particularly his army shirt did, or more specifically his habit of wearing his clothes always with full sleeves, or still more specifically the big cuff button that you have on army dresses saved him, or still more particularly his caring wife was the beholder of luck in that only yesterday she had retagged the about to get off button with her needle work. It was a little chain of good causes that fetched him that bit of life-saving luck. The cobra’s snout hit the big button, as providential as a bullet meant to hit the soldier right in the middle of the heart, hits rather the coin, five rupee coin in the pocket to get ricocheted. The black hooded reptile’s fang got entangled in the button hole. The official army wares have big buttons, if you can recall. Both the human and the deadly reptile panicked out of their wits. The farmer ex-soldier but deserves more credit in that he did not faint. With death hanging down his cuff button, he used some odd still-working chamber in his brain to throw away the reptile with the help of his sickle. The cobra was as longer than his height. When he had stood, holding his hand at it maximum possible distance from his face, their eyes meeting for the flash of a second, the reptile’s head still higher by a few inches, he had stolen a look at its tail still touching the ground, and then he had just given the best shot of his life in blowing away the enemy with his sickle. That was the closest he had faced death.      

The Anna movement had caught Delhi in the whirl-wind of many such disgruntled hardworkers! Both Rambeer and the just saved ex-soldier-cum-farmer had added to the disgruntled clamour in the Ramlila maidan under the presumption that they are playing their tiny parts in the new revolution. A new liberating moment in the country’s political history. But all this would just end up as a damp squib, the movement just acting like a safety valve to let out the over-boiling mass angst. There would be just another political spin out: Kejriwal and his socially active band of non-descript workers who would also get a ride in the political bandwagon and the great Anna will again go fasting innocuously at his village in Maharashtra. The mountain turning out to be a molehill, the future seemed really for some political jerks and pulls by Kejriwal and group who defected to have a share in the ruling pie.

However, on this sunny November afternoon, in the year 2011 to be precise, right here in the fields, the real but always ignored stage of losses and sufferings, there is a mini-storm, a tiny-revolt in the butter-jug. The soldier still appears to carry that revolutionary spirit that he mustered up in yelling ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ towing the aged social worker’s clarion call to set people against the mighty and the corrupt in the country. Two ranting, aggrieved farmers now at least believe that they have a right to grumble and nurse their injuries through verbal outpours.