Faith’s Prisoner

 

Kalu had—we need to use the past tense for he is no more—almost full faith in hard work as a daily wage earner; but he had a still superior faith in getting fully drunk on the major portion of his meagre earnings. And that made him a loser at both ends.

His employers—the farmers, the people adding some more walls to their houses and all those who needed labour in any form—knew that his faith in hard work made him helpless to do at least two workers’ job in a day. As per the inapplicable law of humanity, he should have got double pay for his single day’s work. But the world is ruled by the ‘quantitative’ aspect, not the ‘qualitative’. So right from the beginning, it was a gain for the employer.

As per the applicable law, the hardworking labourer had no right over the unseen and irretrievable half of his well-deserved wage. So year after year, they kept on paying him only half the amount due to them in reality. So what if almost the entire village was indebted to him, the simple creditor but never tormented them on this account, for Kalu was no sahukar exploiting the needy through the exorbitant rates of interest.

For each piece of work he did, a kind of little bonus undid any feeling of exploitation. The people knew his superior faith in cheap, local variety of liquor. Thus after each assignment of work lasting many days and even weeks, he got a bottle worth his half day’s wage. And that squared up things pretty nicely for both the parties. With a bottle of cheap liquor as a gift, Kalu would forget and forgive anything under the sun. The grossest of wrongs committed against him would stand undone just with that magic of alcohol. 

Out of his highly subsidised wage rates borne by his faith in hard work, he had to take big, bitter swigs, sips and draughts of local desi liquor to still more affirm his faith in the Goddess of oblivion, hallucination and cessation of work, during which period the poor chap was spared of the bone-breaking physical drudgery.

Thanks to the inherent charity involved in the system of wages, many people just rushed to hire him. There was almost a mad scampering around the harvesting seasons when the profit-driven farmers just bayed for his blood. Now at least some stakes were raised for him, for the competition-subdued farmers tried to out-do each other by ensnaring him by offering the liquor of superior varieties as a bonus.

If we subtract the cost of his daily sips of ease going away from his own pockets, in the hard monetary sense, we can surmise that the poor fellow broke his back virtually for nothing. We can say that both his faiths supported each other in equal measure.

****

Their community of Lodhi Rajputs had migrated to this part of the countryside Haryana about four-five generations ago, in 1830s to be precise, when the Britishers dug the Western Yamuna canal to supply water to Delhi. His forefathers were hired to dig the canal. They completed the task and settled in the area. The earliest settlers engaged chiefly in taking fruit gardens (mainly berries, guavas, blackberries and mangoes) on lease and do their drudgery on them to carve out a living. The horse was their main pet animal and consequently the tonga was a favourite mode of personal and professional carriage.

Later, the things changed as everything is meant for change, either for good, bad, both or on exceptional occasions, even neutral. So the swift currents of time left a mark on their form of occupation and life styles. However, one thing didn’t change and it was poverty and doing drudgery daily to survive as landless people.

Kalu’s grandfather had died decades ago, leaving his ever-humorous wife in charge of four sons and four daughters and the upcoming trail of grandsons and granddaughters to carry along in her cart of widowhood. She was just in her late thirties. The onerous duties of a single landless parent with an ever-increasing family hardly quelled her comic attitude towards life. She simply laughed away most of the routine challenges of life faced by a poor, socially low-placed family. Her funny anecdotes, crude humour, jibing puns, serious folklore stories and unsparing laughing bone made her arduous journey easy for herself as well as others. The family matriarch just laughed away the hard husbandless, multi-childrened days selling watermelons, sugar beet, berries, guava and mulberries, all made still sweeter by her accompanying humour and the tongue’s nice work. Even the drowning of one of her sons in the canal, taking its life-giving and life-taking course along the village fields, could not cower down her cherishing of life for too long and she was firmly back on her feet.

Her days were as toiling and tiresome as could be expected of any widow with many children, creating morsels out of misery, but her fun and pun-loving nature greased the creaky wheels of her widow-cart; and the matriarchal family just trotted ahead with she and her brood playing their assigned parts. It just stopped to get them married off now and then. So the daughters got alighted from the cart driven by the grey-haired carter but the load remained almost the same, for their place was easily taken by the daughter-in-laws. However, even though both the daughters and the daughters-in-law bore almost the same weight, it but made much difference to the speed and direction of the cart. The journey was made further complex as the grandchildren very quickly took almost all the empty spaces without giving her any respite.

Very smartly Kalu too had been provided a ticket to ride in the cart by the invisible forces of destiny present at the time of his parents having sex. He found the silvery-haired, black, wrinkling matriarch still going strong. But by this time her strength and resolution was depleting as he stepped ahead in his childhood, nestled in a joint family housed in a small brick house that quite commonly had a room on the upper storey. This along with its semi-plastered front wall—leaving the back and side walls unplastered as an indication of how far they still had to move up the social ladder—evinced the tell-tale signs of their joint hard work. The roofs were still not layered with brickwork and the floor too was of mud and dung paste. The small house was thus crammed like a hen-coop where the messrs mother-in-law Vs daughters-in-law were inevitably involved in a game of hen-pecking.

Fortunately, the children aren’t much bothered about such grown-up’s bickering, so Kalu had a full throttled childhood filled with pond and river swims, joyrides on the family horse, riding tonga at a hurtling pace, scaling the highest branches in the family-leased fruit garden, sweet-sour sensations of stealing from under the keen eyes of the family matriarch and still ahead the great excitement and experimentation with sexuality in the form of masturbation and feigning sex acts like the elders with the children of both sexes—how could he help being a witness to the very same, given the still blowing passions of his parents, uncles and aunties within the narrow confines of their tiny house.

The new elements of controversy were added as the grandchildren turned grand-boys grand-girls. The cord of her control was broken and the matriarch diligently held out the baton to the three new families, but not before getting the eldest son’s eldest two sons (that included Kalu in addition to his elder brother) getting married. It was almost a child marriage and still four-five years before they turned the real householders, enjoying the fullest throngs of sexuality just at the threshold of early youth.

In the meantime, Kalu still had to grow both mentally and physically; drop out of the school after class 5 (a clear generosity from the primary school, given so few attendances, no homework and almost no educational learning). The schooling was a mere fun-drag for five years, almost a ritual. He simply declared one fine day that he won’t go to school anymore, come what may. This decision and its bland declaration fetched him a few parentally abiding thwacks from the fresh patriarch on the body of his erroneous son. However, it was expected—later or sooner. So Kalu was adopted as a new labouring hand to the family’s pool of resources.

Their grandmother remained with the youngest son. And from there, she still tried to support all her progenies; though now she had to put up sometimes drama, the other times show subtle shades of diplomacy and now and then feign neutrality and favouritism to support her status of being with one and not the other two. Still the old mother in her had enough calibre to manage all this. She would continue to do the job till she will die suddenly of liver cancer a couple of years into the grandchildren’s real matrimony.

****

Long before he purchased his first whole pack of beedies as a fresh school dropout in his new thatched house, he had already been experimenting with smoking in the secret on the left-out stubs and one or two complete ones stolen from the elders’ collection of these leaf-bound little cigarettes of tobacco.

As he grew up, so did the strains of vagrancy; but one thing also grew and that was his belief in hard work. His dusky limbs grew stronger and his height opened up to an average level. He now smoked in the open like a grown-up right there in the presence of his parents. A first-rated drunkard initiated him into the art and craft of opium and alcohol meanwhile. The habits grew as did his passion for hard work. Now there were no more fruit gardens—save some exceptions here and there and even these had been truncated to a very small size—so they started taking cultivable land on yearly lease to muster up the price to be paid to the owner and surviving morsels for themselves. Off and on, whenever he found time from their own cultivation, he worked as a wage labourer.

His strength grew and so did his reputation as a first rate worker who wasn’t just interested in seeing the sun progressing from dawn to dusk, but found pleasure in watching its differently angled rays at various points of the day reflecting in his sweat’s puddle. Happily profited by getting two day’s work accomplished in a single day at the rate of a single day’s wage, they praised him for the copious amounts of alcohol he would swig down after his backbreaking working hours. Initially his family tried to check down the riveting flow of this fuming river of intoxication, but their piecemeal efforts were easily checkmated.

Thus became his identity in the village: The hardest worker and the hardest drinker.

He formed drinking groups in the other low caste neighbourhoods, which further dented the already skewed economy of his hard work. These were but his heydays, as he got all the compensation through his illicit relations with two or three badly treated women, the sufferers of domestic violence and crimpled-by-poverty housewives in the underprivileged, landless locality. The freshly adolescent snake of his passion hissed in their groins, many-many precious minutes and sometimes even a complete hour when he was high on opium. To checkmate his rampant passion, the father brought his wife—a mere wispy girl—to make him enjoy the conjugal bliss. She, just a tiny streamlet of sorrow, surrendered herself like an obliging, uncomplaining girl-bride to his stream of passion and orgies.

Irrespective of what went in his personal life, the prospective employers still found him the very same Kalu, the forever good worker. After all, the social position of a man is determined by two factors: a) either what he actually gives to others freely or at highly subsidised rates; b) or raises his material status to the extent that although others might not get a penny from him all along his life yet a prospect does exist, however far the hope might galore.

Kalu belonged to the first category. So they liked him without investing too much on their part to sustain the emotion. What he did with his meagre earnings was nobody’s business. Their only motive was to get his help in their business at a highly subsidised rate; which he did like before, so there was hardly the question of his fall of status as a very-very hardworking, honest labourer.

Can a person be good by remaining good to others and being bad to himself? His addiction ensured that he could never be good to himself even if he tried his best, utilising the golden quality of any human character—hardworking nature and a soul that always got attracted to work like iron to the magnet. Many times, he worked assuming work to be his only reward. However, this type of philosophy very easily ensures a highly troubled domestic life. As he was bad to himself only, how could he avoid being bad to his better half? The poor wife-cum-girl or girl-cum-wife suffered all the fire of his frustration.

Now he took days out of work and drank right from dawn to dusk and then again deep into the night. But people still kept on liking him; for he seemed to be making amends for the lost days on the working days by toiling even harder than earlier. Nonetheless, the economy of it was futile, for he got the average working pay even though he worked thrice as much, driven by an unavoidable fury of work that only alcohol made him to forget.

Within no time he was the father of two sons: a suitable threshold for starting a separate family unit.

‘From now onwards manage your own affairs and bake your bread on a separate hearth,’ his father tried to yoke him into responsibilities.

His wife cooked on a separate hearth but they remained in the same thatched shelter run by his parents. In addition to Kalu’s hyperactive role on the poor stage of the famished household, his elder married brother (now a father of three himself) and two younger unmarried brothers kept it a happening place. During all this turbulence, the family had some moments of respite to get the only daughter married off in which the family matriarch, though she stayed with her youngest son, played her maternal as well as monetary part much to the chagrin of the daughter-in-law she was staying with, who accused:

‘You fatten your old flesh on our crumbs and shower your affection on these neighbours!’

****

Now we enter the deciding phase of Kalu’s life. He was in his mid twenties now.  

If we trace the story from his wife’s angle, it will portray another independent story of sufferings and privations. But let us consider it just a tributary stream of sorrows that emptied its surrendering worth into the major stream of the husband’s bigger woes. The fact that her husband was the hardest working labourer in the village, in addition to the another fact that he was the hardest drinker as well, made her life miserable beyond measures. All in all, the poor lady suffered in poverty, deprivation and the barrage of her husband’s acts of verbal and physical abuse. To the rest of the village, he was the very same Kalu who worked double for a single wage and responded nicely, respectfully to their working calls.

Is our goodness or badness decided by the number of people who think we are either good or bad? The poor lady almost worked like her husband but was still a bigger loser; because the husband took away her wages from the employers even before she could hold out her weak hand to gather the fruits of her labour.

Some conscience-driven folks even tried to follow the principle of equal opportunities of work and wage but were faced with the much dreaded threat from the numero uno taskmaster that if they again tried to separate his account from his wife’s then he will never work for them. Now, who wants to incur losses these days just on mere principles. Although they could easily get a replacement yet that would be at the best at a rate of one wage and single day’s work—a huge scale down from Kalu’s prospects of at least double work for a single wage. So the better sense prevailed and they too became party to his exploitation of his wife.

They took on annual lease a few acres of land to plant marigolds. The crop was very good. Marigolds—yellow, orange and scarlet—swayed as the symbol of their efforts, for both of them were almost equally hardworking by nature. The prices were really good in the flower market in Delhi about 50 kilometres away. The big bales of flowers meant big bucks as well. However, it also meant bigger prospects of money for drinking—not only for himself but even for his fellow drunkards from the village, who now swarmed around him like flies around a lump of jaggery.

Many times, when he had lost his senses, he woke to find the money missing from his pockets. After all, it is so easy to rob a fully drunk man. So the whole season passed with almost no spare money and the rent for the land lease was yet to be settled. However hopeless the situation turned, in addition to a more and more whimpering wife who continuously pointed out the impending disaster, it but won’t create much worrying lines on his face. Those who have faith in hard work, they worry less about failure to the same extent. And Kalu was really a tough nut to crack. He knew that he had strength to earn the money through toil and blood and pay the debt. So he laughed off his wife’s desperation and started working with even greater zeal; of course, he continued drinking with equal zeal as well. Lease debt plus the exorbitant interest mounted and at last he started to feel the pressure.

The sky high prices of tomatoes in the vegetable market attracted him monetarily—perhaps for the first time—with the prospects of a short-cut to earn some quick money by reversing the earlier ratio of double work for a single wage. Each and everybody in the farming community was talking of tomatoes for these were fetching hefty prices. A crate of tomatoes appeared like a tiny bar of gold.

Taking a shortcut from his usual means of hard work to way lay the debt, he purchased a raw, handsome, buxom crop of tomatoes at a hefty price. The new scales of profit had already been set up in the village. In the previous season, a seven acre plot of tomatoes had fetched 60,000 rupees to a farmer. Entailing his dreams, many more farmers from the village had planted tomatoes this year.

Simply deriving his equation from the previous year (and also from this year’s early signs of a hefty price because the early-sown varieties were making farmers delirious with joy), he purchased an acre of young standing crop for 25,000 rupees. Easy money shone through the fat, greenish tomatoes of hybrid variety standing in the hired land—for he was just required to pluck these as soon as these ripened: A tremendously easy task in comparison to his earlier drudgery.

Only the first visit to the market with his crateful of ripe tomatoes was sufficient to turn him glum. Instead of a wad of notes, he returned with famished pockets. The prices had crashed due to the glut in the market and he had drunk away the pittance he got in return of his bumper crop after payments for plucking, picking and transporting. Perhaps the providence was unforgiving regarding his earlier equation of work. For double the work, he had always earned almost half in return; and the equation won’t just change like that.

Market kills! The onion that once toppled the government in Delhi; it on another time gets thrown away at 50 paisa/kilogram. The farmer is always held by his throat by the market fluctuations. In its fluctuation of prices, it almost butchers farmers, especially the landless ones who rent land or purchase standing crops at fairly high prices because then the market looks good. Then the weather plays cat and mouse. Earlier it was only the weather given its divine unpredictability that tormented and tortured them; and now came the market with still greater inexplicability, fluctuation, unexpected shocks, surprises and jolts. So between the paws of two mighty cats, the little mouse rolled, getting mortally bloodied.

Kalu also rolled bloodied between his hired standing crop and the market. The owner planter had put up a very grand show of hard work that had been amply supported by an equally grand show of weather conditions. So the crop was amazingly good. However, equally grand show in every nook corner had uniformly showered bumper productivity in the surrounding countryside. Tomatoes were as big, ripe and succulent as their hopes. Even the hardworking Kalu found it difficult to keep up with the picking labour rate on account of exceptionally large amounts of ripening daily.

The market crashed with surplus. Too much of luck to too many farmers isn’t digestible to the market. Prices ate dust. On successive days, his earlier equation of more work for a lesser wage hit newer and newer lows. The poor fellow, for the first time, had drunk away the last portion of his meagre earnings. And when the tomatoes said good-bye to their span of fructification, he was left with only 5,000 rupees at the end of the season. Fluctuations in prices had meant he had been electrocuted.

Quite surprisingly, this time he didn’t drink it away. In the simmering hot days of June, he took one more short-cut to offset the negative consequences of his earlier short-cut. These 5,000 rupees he spent on purchasing watermelons, sold the produce in the wholesale market as well as well as hawked day in and day out by the roadside. However, the law of diminishing returns was catching up with him furiously. Gone were the happy days of double work on a single wage.

This investment of 5,000 rupees fetched him only 1,500 rupees. It had been quite a time since he had been unfaithful to his two faiths—hard work as a labourer and the fantastic guzzler of alcohol. Before returning to the first, he decided to pacify the latter, for he had 1,500 bucks with him. Understandable, when one gets this much out of an investment of 25,000 rupees, the further loss of these 1,500 rupees doesn’t make any difference—unless one is a financial wizard.

So he drank these off quite regally. But this time, even his hallucinated world won’t give him total respite. These big figures still tormented him. In the first half of the first decade of the new century, to a landless wage earner in the famished countryside, it was a huge sum after all.

Including the interest, he the landless labourer owed 40,000 rupees to two landowners. While lost in the sea of liquor, he tried to muster up his belief in the other faith—hard work. Sadly, keeping both his faiths (working doubly for a single wage and worshipping the goddess of intoxication with a major portion of the former) in addition to the upkeeping of the family (we shouldn’t forget he had two sons by now: one aged four and the other just two), he calculated that he will require at least two lifetimes to settle his debts.

Hopelessly drawing out the last notes from his pockets and staring at them he lay in his room fully drunk. During this time, he made amends for his brutalities done to his wife. He spoke nicely to her; even purchased her a new salwar-kameez and two sets of T-shirts and shorts for the boys. With the last hundred rupees he went to the nearest tehsil town and returned with three pills that would affirm his faith in eternal sleep and obliviousness forever. These were deadly poisonous sulphas pills that the farmers put in their grain stores to kill the last of the last insects.

Lying in his room on a semi-depilated cot he had already swallowed the two pills when his wife caught him, tried to prevent the third from ending into the destination of death. But she was weak work-broken creature and he was still stronger than her. Caught in the death’s throngs, he gave his first and last parental sermon to his sons standing nearby, scared out of their wits, the younger one howling because the other one was also doing the same.

‘Keep your mother always happy!’ he managed to say as his mouth started to get effulgent with poisonous foams eating his innards.

By the time they took him to the hospital at the district city his soul had more or less escaped from the cage tormented by his two faiths. The doctor knew that he should declare him brought dead, but realising his Hippocratic oath he still tried for at least a couple of hours.

‘It is the costliest life-giving treatment I’m giving him!’ his eyes seemed to say.

However, it was a foregone conclusion that the poor fellow will not survive. The doctor as well as the patient’s relatives were doing their futile duties only. There is but a limit to which one can perform one’s duty. So they had to finally stop this game of duty.

By this time, the cost of treatment had further gone against the tragedy-struck family. At the final call, the doctor’s hands struck to 20,000 rupees on the price clock. He was smartly adamant; declared that he won’t allow them to take away the body unless they settled the dues. Kalu’s father thus again borrowed money, settled the doctor’s fees and settled a part of the dead man’s debts as well.

The circle of debt would continue, possibly till Kalu’s own father’s death and more unfortunately even to the coming generations.