A walk on the countryside road

 

India is developing very fast. The roads are being built at a hair-raising speed. We see world class road building technology and engineering equipment at the construction sites. They make roads very quickly, a smooth cakewalk like a knife cutting through cheese. During good old days the money would start from the ministry and it would trickle down to a measly percentage as the famished tar and asphalt was poorly dumped. It would break up in the next rainy season. It was a slow world carried by slow-moving files and still slower archaic road rollers. Now it’s quick and lightning fast. The road-building machinery and construction firms have taken the game to a new high. The roads are good. Any give and take in the process, the subtle game between construction conglomerates and ministries is beyond the understanding of common people like you and me.

The other day I was walking on the narrow countryside road connecting my village to the neighboring village about three kilometers away. It’s a musty humid desultory evening. The monsoon has been lenient so far. There is plenty of grass and bushes by the sides, especially bhang. It’s almost a monotony over the farm-sides at this time. And the poor people who need to opiate themselves to forget the burden of life can have a free hand at it. They expertly move their hands through the leaves and gather the dust to smoke weed. Two old people are walking slowly and there they stand under a jamun tree. One of them, the physically better one, shakes a bough and there is a drizzle of ripe purple juicy berries. His still older companion gathers them in a little plastic bag. They will eat to their full and carry the extra stuff for their respective favorite grandchild.

The road is in bad condition. It is far away from the direct administrative scrutiny. Small-time contactors can take liberties as in the old days. A new layer of asphalt gets washed away after just one rainy season. The farmers hardly complain. Their tractors also don’t grumble about it. And there I come across something reminding me of the good old slow-paced days: the old-style road roller, a faded yellow iron elephant. They are repairing a little section where the road has completely vanished. The triple drum roller—three drums for wheels—slowly whines and winces over soil, gravel and concrete, trying its level best to do its compacting job diligently like an old worker. It’s all iron from head to tail. The diesel engine puffs and huffs, billows big bales of smoke. In comparison to the latest engineering vehicles, it looks a rudimentary horse-drawn roller of the last to last century. There is a lock on the fuel chamber. There is another over the engine chamber. The iron elephant has to spend lonely nights on a solitary narrow road at nights so its engine and fuel have to be saved from the farmers.

When I return by the same path after an hour, I find the iron elephant resting. Two Bihari operators are mounted under the iron canopy and watching videos on their mobiles. A third workman is sitting against the front roller, his legs spread out. I hope he hasn’t put up a challenge that to move ahead they have to go over him.