Grandfather's Googlies and Bouncers

 

Grandfather was named Pohker. Later they added 'Master' to it because he turned out to be a teacher, an unorthodox phenomenon among the work-brute peasantry, almost equal to a snake turning white among a den of black Cobras. The inspiration for the name being the Hindu month of his birth as per the lunar calendar. He was born on a date roughly falling in January, in the lunar month of Poh. The event must have taken place in the winters of either 1904 or 1905, he was never sure about it. Those were the times when they grew up watching and marveling at the rudimentary flying objects, the ancestors of modern planes. They called them something that would roughly come to be translated as cheel gadis or kite carts.

I would consider myself very lucky in one regard. I always thank God that Grandfather never played cricket in his life. There is a rigorous acceptability for hard words in peasant families. The peasants carry a heady attitude that prowls like the ramrod straight arm of the marching soldier. The addicted frenzy for rough words takes even the children in its grip. Habits are merely transferred across generations, after all. So the children in peasant families have tart tongues. Breaking the restraining ropes of etiquettes, they speak back upon their elders. With a strict guardian’s rigor, the elders have still tartier fists and kicks to sum up the equation. At least that was how it was while we were growing up. And still worse during the preceding generations.

This incident happened while I was a college-going rebel. Grandfather was considerably old at that time, in his late eighties in fact. He had a sharecropper for onions. Grandfather stocked his part of the produce in the barn, waiting for better market price. But the rains arrived before the better market conditions. The barn roof leaked. Now rottening onions will allow you to give any diabolical interpretation to the domain of bad smells. The stinking onions will eat your nerves. His preservationist plans gone haywire, he was required to sort out the rotten onions from the sound ones to protect himself from a total loss. So Grandfather needed an assistant to sort out the sellable onions from the stanching heap. I was forced into the assignment.

Rotten onions carry a swashbuckling charisma. The bad odor comes leaping and lunging to eat into your nerves and suck at the last traces of gentlemanly streak in you, if any. Grandfather, his olfactory senses dulled by the advanced years, got into the job with almost a curatorial instinct. But to me the pungent encroachment into my nostrils was darkly evocative. I kept grumbling my dissent as my hands ran through the gore of decaying onions.

I was sitting at a distance of say twelve feet from him in a corner of the barn. With a calculated familiarity with old-age born wisdom and patience, Grandfather kept his cool despite the whirlwind and spark of my igniting words of dissent. Probably he thought that even a single good, intact onion would be a nice bargain by keeping cool despite my waspish comments. He looked refreshingly restrained in this avatar.

Grandfather possessed strong-looking, lean legs and still steelier nerves. But very few good onions on one side and a big heap of rotten ones on the other, growing bigger with each passing minute, forced him to change gears in his demeanor. His hopes nosedived and temper rose. We were mired to our elbows by this time. He became aware of the enormity of his crop loss. So he did what he had postponed for so long. The cannon then burst to my igniting promptings. He hit back. He used his not so useable onions. The vollies were hurled. But his canon shots ended as monumental, metaphorical and spectacular failures. He missed all punitive attempts. Like an impish oaf I ducked, using all the experience and agility born of village games. The pulpy, squashed onions hit the wall behind me.

I can only thank God for the absence of cricket in Grandfather’s life, that there was no cricket when Grandfather also played games as a boy. Otherwise, his throwing skills would have found the target to good effect. Getting a stinking squashed onion on one’s face is too big a punishment for any crime. Isn’t it?