Shaken Roots and Broken Fruits

 

The overloaded tempo pickup, piled high with the provisions of a poor household stuffed in huge sacks made by stitching empty fertiliser bags, had to make an effort to move on another of its chugging journey. After all, domesticity carries weight, however limiting the situation and resources of the tenants.

So the small carrier vehicle, barely visible under the piles of clothing, bedding rolls, plastic cans, cheap kitchen utensils, plastic drums, a refrigerator, a bicycle, fuel wood, dung cakes, paddy chaff and much more, made the decisive move.

In the driver’s cabin, two small boys, one four and the other just over five, sat between the driver and their sister who sat by the window. The excitement of the journey making it almost another fun-game for the little boys. They were too small to feel the pain of getting transplanted again, like little saplings of paddy can be grafted at other place.

The girl was 14 or something. At this age she could feel the pain of this tearing: shifting from a home set up with so much of attention, focus and labour. She wore her school dress, white salwar kameez, maroon jersey and dupatta folded to form a V across the front. It was her last day in the school and in the village. With much effort and teary eyes she had said bye to her classmates and the teaching staff.         

It was 19^th of January and a close call to being able to complete the academic year. She thus missed her final exams in the village school just by a month or so. Before boarding the pickup, she was heard discussing the matter regarding the school leaving certificate. Just weeks to go for the year-end annual exams, it indeed was a close miss. Her serious expression bore the vestiges of this pain. Within the limited circumstances of their household, she had been a diligent student, taking her homework very seriously.

‘Bye, bye, bye....’

The children from the neighbourhood raised a see-off chorus among the plume of smoke let out by the vehicle as it made an extra effort to start the journey.

Most probably they won’t be meeting again in life. And the fact that till a day before they had played so wholeheartedly, totally absorbed in childhood oblivious to the bigger causes and worries, as if life was just endless fun with the same friends at the same place, brought tears in the girl’s eyes. She tightly held the huge bag of books held in her lap.

So in the days to come, the excited voices and shouts of the playing children won’t involve the ones who just left. The two little boys were tireless, voracious elements of childhood fun and frolicking. Still beyond the shackles of schooling, they just drew out every ounce of untamed energy to loiter around, picking out any opportunity to turn it into a game.

The house which saw the provisions taken out again acquired its melancholic look like it bore before they had moved into it.

Another carrier tempo arrived at the small square in the village neighbourhood. With a tangible feeling of sadness, the women from the locality gathered to see the family off.

Charpoys were laid over the carrier railings, a buffalo and two calves, one very small just born a month back and the other from the previous delivery, were straggled up onto the back under the charpoys, some more bundles were piled on the charpoys forming a platform over the carrier’s railings. Now was the time of departure for whatever was left behind by the first vehicle.

The women embraced the pretty girl. Since females were involved in this see off, a few eyes had their share of moisture. Even a rented house takes roots. And when someone, especially forced by situations, gets going, suddenly cutting the routine life in a friendly neighbourhood, you feel the pain of it.

The girl was medium built and had big eyes which seemed to take a parting, nostalgic pan-shot to take it to the new place. A woollen dupatta tied around her face, a nose-pin exotically adoring her shapely nose, she looked suitable for a matronly parting kiss on her forehead and a blessing on her head.  

The mother, worn out by the excess load of multiple children and labour in the fields, appeared more agile than her situation may have allowed. She took leave of the ladies, holding the hands of the ones with whom she had become really close, the friendship cosily hatched during the free hours that offered the opportunity for the typical female gossip. She climbed into the cabin followed by the girl in light green salwar kameez. The girl had a pair of badminton rackets in her hand, which she held against the windscreen as her younger brother, younger to her by a year or two, climbed into the seat and shut the window.

The vehicle moved. The father would follow on his bike, pillion ridden by a boy relative who had come to help them in this hurried shifting. The family patriarch, forty or something in age, wore a black piece of cloth tied around his head. He had a full, dense salt and pepper beard. There was pinkish glow on his cheeks doused with freckles of worries and recent suffering. He walked with certain calculation in steps, as if feeling chained to some restrictions, as if a careless step would give him pain somewhere, especially the posterior.          

The vehicle moved. So did the bike. The square got empty as the children dispersed to play and the women got into their household chores with a touch of sadness.

All through the process of loading their provisions, in unmaking what he, his wife and the elder son and daughter had made with tireless work, the family patriarch bore a sombre expression. One could even trace some faintest sign of a mysterious smile on his face. It but wasn’t a smile. It was the print of acceptance, of surrender, of unquestioning acceptance of the piece put by destiny in your bowl as you toil to survive. This state has its own unique regality, and may be mistaken as a smile.

The bike was gone, turning around a corner in the street. The house was padlocked. A rundown house having enough space for a poor family and their buffalo to knit them into a sheltered unity to fight for better days, or at least a life at the same level, if not worse.

The owner of the house, who stayed in a big, newly built house at the village periphery, padlocked the main wooden door which opened into the barn, followed by an inner yard, two rooms at the back and one upstairs. It will see a lonely night today and they will lie down among their packed provisions at their new destination tonight.

****

He was here in this village of Haryana for almost a decade. Just like water naturally trickles down from the higher to the lower surface, so do the people driven by the hard situation of poverty. They move from the areas of limitations to the ones having better resources. The family belonged to western UP. The region’s agro economy was a few rungs below Haryana across the border; the boundary formed by a recalcitrant and famished Yamuna. With its more intense agriculture, the region west to the river was the natural point of movement for those feeling it hot to survive in the east.

He was a tough worker, so was his wife who matched him in cutting down lines after lines of harvesting furrows. They shifted from their predominantly Muslim village in western UP to this predominantly Hindu Jat village in eastern Haryana. They arrived with three daughters and a son and straightway got into the never-ending offers of agriculture labour in the wheat and paddy fields.

If you keep your head down, don’t speak more than required, don’t make your presence felt more than the barest minimum required and that too only at the places where you are supposed to be, and work almost double than expected in lieu of the daily wages paid to you, then survival flows like time flows through inanimate objects.

The migrant couple just worked and worked. The best known fact, apart from their stand-out religion, was that they cut unbelievable acreage of golden ripe wheat under the scorching sun in April, May and June. Respect is difficult to come by for a migrant agricultural labourer, but even the sturdy local work brutes had to fetch out a few words of appreciation in this regard.

The eldest girl was married. At the cost of litres of sweat under the sweltering sun, the family’s fortune showed better prospects. A tireless worker can ask the almighty for as much luck as would be sufficient to get him continuous work. Of this there was aplenty in the village.

Even the snail-paced society of a village has its faint rumblings and churning events. There is always someone or the other moving to the city. Someone having a class three or four government job and a little holding of land, both of which combining to take his prospects to buy a house in the nearest town, leaving the village house either under the care of relatives or renting it just at nominal rates to someone like our migrant from the neighbouring state, doing it not for money primarily but basically to have somebody to look after the property, for it’s believed that an unoccupied house sees its decay in just a few years. There is always some nostalgia because old roots go with some fight against the foot soldiers of time. His time had been spent among three or four such houses in the village.

Poverty has its own caste, class and religion. So in the usual routine of life, it was as subdued and unassuming a family as any other in the non-Jat communities in the village. The Jats carry humungous attitude. One has to be careful not to puncture it. There is a tacit social understanding. Allow and help the Jats in keeping the crown of their ego on their head and there won’t be any problem.

It thus went well. They got mixed at the rung of any other non-Jat household in the village. He never missed to join people whenever a Hindu pyre was lit in the cremation ground. The children added their share of energy to the limitless tomfoolery the village children engage in. The wife had a little circle among the peasant women. She had an agile tongue and could rapidly recall harmless anecdotes to please the local women. The girls mixed with the girls of their age.

All seemed to go well. Or was it?

****

Cow protection became one of the driving forces of the state policy with a nationalist party coming to power. Well, nothing wrong with that. In the changing agronomy, cows have been replaced by more economical buffalos, leaving poor cows to stray around, eating garbage, dying of hunger on the roads. But then an issue, in its political version, remains just a populist rhetoric serving partisan purposes instead of helping resolve the problem. The cause of gau mata was enthusiastically taken up by the vagrant youths caught in the chasm of ‘the will to do something in life’ and ‘the capability or guidance to get something really done on the ground’. The gap is easily picked up by the misguiding hands that brainstorm the young flagellant self to get into some funny show of bravado, patriotism and nationalism.

A boy from the village took the clarion call of cow protection too seriously. He got funds to operate a small veterinary hospital to treat stray cows. The hospital, run from a depilated one time ice-making unit, whose owner had decamped after defaulting on his loan, leaving it abandoned and in the clutches of insolvency and auction laws, became the den of entertainment for a group of youngsters who needed an adda for drinking and co-related forms of fun in the category.

That is the problem with extremist politics. The decent people stay away. The excitement of crossing the line seduces those who have the groundwork of illegalities, a position wherein they very conveniently interpret their escapades as valour, guts, bravery, patriotism and nationalism. The most important thing is that they are ready to hate, and even kill.

A cow is one of the most evolved quadrupeds, definitely deserving all the love, affection and care that the Homo-sapiens can manage. Its mere presence purifies the surroundings at the level of energy field. No wonder we worship it. But how many of the political careerist Hindus know about the real worth of gau mata beyond the grand plans of communal polarization? The vision of a cow-full Hindu Bharat Rashtra is one matter. It can be interpreted as a form of deshbhakti as well. But I have seen cows and pigs sharing the same garbage at dumpsites. Rhetoric and sloganeering gets votes in cow’s name but hardly makes any positive change in the life of millions of stray cows. They suffer as they have been doing for decades.

Now when the buffalos had taken the place of the cows in the agrarian economy, the issue of cow at the debating stage was the shiny occupation in demand. Anything related to cow gave you good image and if managed properly, and with a stroke of luck, one could even catapult oneself from the fringe to the centre-stage of political power.

The young nationalist in the village was all absorbed on the surface turbulence regarding the issue of cows and saving India from the evil-minded minority. As for the service to his private self, the proclivities such as over-drinking, visiting brothels, including paid sex services to a docile, feminine homosexual official in corporate in Delhi, was something that could be put into a separate compartment, closed, beyond the pricks of conscience. For as long as he could hate Muslims from the core of his heart, and thus assured of his patriotism, no other deed of his could put him in the dock questioning his errant ways.

There was hardly any communal fodder to reap in this part of Haryana. But he was not the one to miss the little chances available to bring his patriotic theories into practice. His Facebook page was always waiting for some first hand, real life contribution to the cause of nation building.

Just outside the village, by the road, there was a mound on a patch of Waqf property. The plot of land still reminding that the village had Muslim families in the past who left for Pakistan in 1947. The rest of the Waqf land had been taken on 99-year-lease by some influential farmers, leaving this mound and the small chunk of land around it, as an abbreviation, as an assurance to the secular fabric of India.

A Muslim friar had set up a blue-tiled peer shrine, reinforcing the fading facts that Muslims once stayed in the village. They had houses, they had land, but the partition-time storm changed geographies and demographies. 

A hunting lion preying upon a grasshopper, for fun, for amusement, but more importantly to satiate the inner hunger, to keep the faculty of hunting alive, also a reminder that things can be grabbed by might.

To save the Hindu honour, the gau rakshak thrashed the fragile shrine keeper who had started to have some notes and coins in his purse. The dalits, starting with the bhangis, had started to pray at the peer shrine, perhaps hoping for more kindness by a Muslim fakir who didn’t believe in caste. To the overzealous foot-soldiers of Hindutva, of course there was danger to Hinduism here with a Muslim shrine cropping up on the mound. He swung into action. Getting some slaps and a wrestler style throw-down, the old and frail Muslim ran away. The honour of the land was saved. He installed Hindu Gods in the freshly tiled tiny shrine room. All this was gloriously displayed on his Facebook page. And congratulatory messages poured in hundreds.   

On the social media there was always something to sharpen his Islam-phobia. His little crusade, shared with pictures and live footage, got long trails of likes and comments on the FB page. Life seemed to acquire a purpose. He even thought of moving onto becoming an MLA in future. However, it was far way down the line and a lot many things to be done meantime.

He was on the lookout. As much as he believed in the cause of quenching his carnal desires, he believed in the cause of the nation also.

****

Apart from the side that wants us to excel and get highlighted as someone exemplary, using the clichés and prevailing prejudices, there is, alongside, a part which pulls with its raw force, driven by the basic instincts.

The cow vigilante eyed the young beautiful Muslim girl who went to the fields with her mother for wage work in the fields. Her big eyes, oval face and nose-pin mixed the two parts, the passion to get recognised as a famous rightist from the area and the carnal force of unsheathed passion. In fact it became the one and the same thing. Taking a chance at the modesty of a Muslim girl, apart from obeying the call of blinding passion, could well as be taken as a chivalrous deed on communal grounds.

He pursued her, first subtly, expecting her to get the point and surrender to his youthful handsomeness, and later, in the face of her being completely unaffected and nonchalant to the cooings of his desire, pretty directly. It went to the extent of grazing his shoulder against her as the girl evaded and just moved on as if nothing had happened. The girl, advised by her mother, just saw through his overtures. It was safe for them that nothing of any sort surfaced that would put them in the spotlight.

On his part, even some reaction to the side of denial would still have kept the dog on pursuit even though on a leash. But this complete impassivity, as if he didn’t exist, as if she won’t think of him more than a roadside stone, made him feel insulted, sent his soul sizzling with jealousy and hate.

Spurned, he was waiting for an opportunity to strike. India is but decently secular. Unlike Pakistan, here one cannot take outright liberty with the minority, however overpowering the blizzard of desire and communal motives. There have to be reasons, and appropriate ones by the way, otherwise there were enough farmers to question such behaviour amounting to mistreating somebody, whoever it was.

Helpless in failing to pursue the direction of his desire, and believing himself justified in his communal rant against the minority, he was heeding time to strike.

****

The local culture was driven by the agricultural push and pull. More than being condemned for your religion, you stood a better chance to be appreciated for your hard work. So, miyanji, as he was called by the villagers, spreading his identity to an almost nameless, see-through transparency, of being just like that, simply, earned loads of praise for his unrelenting stamina to work in the fields and thus raise his brood of children with his sweat. More the harvesting lanes vanished, the more furrows he vanquished with his sickle, the bigger fodder bundles he carried, the villagers, if nothing more, gave him unqualified words of praise.

The family just worked tirelessly, so tirelessly that even the most pun-prone villagers didn’t take a jibe at their having many children.

That’s how you develop roots at a new place. You aren’t supposed to create ripples in the fluid picture. You must add to the local values exactly in the manner they exist. And for God sake please, please don’t experiment. Just increase the proportions of the existing values. Do things exactly the way they want it. You have to dissolve the outstanding edges on your persona and merge in equal proportions in all directions and all individuals. You shouldn’t be someone’s special friend; you can’t simply afford to be anybody’s enemy, it needs no repetition.

So the agrarian society didn’t feel any disturbance even in the wake of the social media’s communal propaganda and the world-over prevailing Islamophobia.

In the marriage-time community feasts, his brood of children would go uninvited, and people just took it as normal as somebody who been cordially invited.

Miyanji would be seen among the mourners as the Hindu pyres were lit in the cremation ground. They were here to share all pain and happiness that occurred to the villagers.

How simple this world would become if the train of life could run smoothly after picking up with pain and much efforts.

One thing is guaranteed that after becoming the target of somebody’s hate, you already become a victim even before the real consequences born of the hate-driven actions start. It’s simple cause and effect, like someone throwing stones into a pond. There will be shaking of the waters.

We sometimes, voluntarily or involuntarily, with an imperceptible force driving us, barely giving us a chance to do the real calculation, end up changing the lanes where the mundane life was comfortably chugging ahead. Do we do it to shake off the monotony which becomes boring? Do we do it with the spirit to get into something adventurous? Or is it just unavoidable push and pull of the destiny? It’s not even that the old track was too unbearable. Still we just end up changing it willy-nilly. It stays a mystery why we suddenly change the track and almost topple the cart. Maybe to take the short-cut, to make it a bit more convenient, and hardly realise before overstepping many lines defining our small but safe world. It may even involve crossing the legal lines. Not that we are monsters and biggest of sinners. The transgressions are humane, much as they get us temporary, facilitated gratification, these land us in trouble also.

And nobody falls off the line in complete awareness.

For the last few months, miyanji was making more than usual trips to his native place in western UP. Unusual in the sense that a daily wage earner, having set up his home and hearth at a distance from his native place, should have hardly any reasons to waste wage days, time and money in being off the scene, unless under exceptional circumstances.

The trips became almost weekly in nature. Better clad, bathed, off work and far happier in look, miyanji somehow stood off. The anonymity which hid him in the grit and grind of agro-work now got dispelled. The result was his visibility.

‘He is up to something!’ many eyebrows got raised.

Now here is a common known fact about his native place. It’s ill-famed for illegal country-made weapons. With Haryana almost upstaging UP and Bihar in terms of directionless youth biting the illegal bullet, the illicit pistols found a ready market to the west of Yamuna.

Even to the simplest of a farming brain, it was a case of two plus two making four.

The gau rakshak got the opportunity to hit the nail on its patriotic head. Boiling with his nascent nationalism, he ran to inform the police.

With greater enthusiasm miyanji was picked up by the police, tortured and made to eat the bitter side-fruits of the tasty pie he had come to like for the last few months. Some country-made pistols were recovered from the vagrant youths in the surrounding villages. The wires were connected to the supplier. It was substantiated.

Majority of such cases don’t reach the courts. It gets settled well before that. The police are even more enthusiastic in getting it settled ‘outside’ as it’s more lucrative to them. So all the facilitation done, a limping miyanji, carrying the marks of vengeance by the cat-o-nail on his bum, purchased his deliverance from the clutches of law at the first stage, and walked for some weeks morosely. Meanwhile the gau rakshak, his onslaught having been justified, launched his communal fusillade.

He had an argument to slap in the face of anyone who asked him to tone down and leave the limping miyanji in peace.

‘Vaah, vaah so much for your kindness! Do you take a guarantee on his behalf? Now illegal pistols, tomorrow he may shelter some terrorist. Bolo, bolo, will you be answerable then?’

So not many had the zeal to put up a roadblock to his patriotic fervour in contributing to the cause of Hindu rashtra.

‘I will leave no stone unturned till he leaves this place,’ he declared with point-blank finality.

Father of a young girl who had to go with her parents to the fields to help them, and given the odd hours, times, location, everything convinced miyanji that it would be a struggle now.

So off he went, packing their stuff in rucksacks and bundles, to a place which he considered safer for small illegalities that a local person, surrounded by his own people, can engage in without getting burdened with the fear of consequences.

There is a lesson though—a decade of diligence can be undone by some moments of mischief. It takes just a moment to fall and get undone.