The little world of farmers

Ranbeer is my share-cropper, an arrangement between an idle owner and a hardworking farmer. He has been very hardworking during our decades-long partnership. Earlier he worked very hard but now in his sixties he is retired from active farming, just plies the tractor, directs the farm workers, drinks, plays cards in chaupals, suffers fits of mysterious nature, raises verbal storms against his still strong and robust wife. He is fine with numbers and keeps a little pocket diary where he manages the accounting figures concerning our farming partnership to the last paisa. That is the simple broadsheet of his life. It’s an ideology-free life of a farmer, untangled, aloof from the snarling complexities of the mind.  

The doctors couldn’t give any clue to his swooning fits, so I gave him a spiritual certification that he goes into a Samadhi. He has no clue to what I say so just laughs at it, taking it to be just one of the poor jokes cracked by the bookish guys like yours truly. All of us are our own doctors, the best doctors in fact because we know our own system more than anyone else. I was once asking him about what and whys of his fits, how did he feel, etc. ‘Well, I hardly remember anything. It just strikes suddenly. When I come back to my senses, I always find a few drops of urine on my pajama and after that I feel very weak for a couple of days,’ he gave me the medical summary to diagnose the nature of his medical condition.

I researched on it and failed to come to a conclusion. So while the doctors failed to check his fainting swoons and fits, he devised a solution for himself. ‘The tractor jumps and shakes my body quite vigorously and due to this I don’t suffer fits while plying my tractor,’ he looked assured. After that he started spending as much time as possible on his tractor. His wife, who worked equal to two strong bulls in the domain of hard field labor, could draw consolation that hers wasn’t a case of total exploitation as her husband was at least contributing to farming as a tractor driver.

Then the myth was broken one day. Ranbeer all smug, and looking at the mouth-watering prospects of getting a full liquor bottle to drink in the evening with his pals, was plying his tractor on the road to the town. A couple of farmers were sitting comfortably by his sides on the mud-guards. Maybe it was the fault of the road makers. They had made it too smooth with a fresh layering of tar, so Ranbeer’s body didn’t shake sufficiently to avoid a fit. The tractor was running at a reasonable speed and the farmer lost consciousness suddenly without any prior warning or symptoms. Both his fellow peasants had to jump into action with the agility of a rat snake to avoid a common fit for all three of them in the roadside ditch. After that Ranbeer isn’t contributing to farming even as a tractor driver. His wife is aggrieved. She feels exploited in this one-sided equation. But she is helpless in doing work. A life-long habit of hard labor, her Ikigai, won’t allow her to sit idle. So she just cannot subdue her inclination to start walking to the fields to work and sweat out the miseries of life. But she harasses him a lot, cracks jokes, treats him like a child, and fires puns and much-much more.

There is some wild growth in a corner of one of the fields. A big cobra stays there. People talk about it with awe and wonder. The share-cropping couple has planted laukis. Ranbeer’s wife is helpless in doing hard work. She has to do farming work to keep her life meaningful. So she is busy in weeding out the extra growth among the vegetable vines. The cobra struck at her sickle-bearing hand. It was there under the vines. She fell back due to the shock and the offended reptile in fact crawled over her stomach. She was all alone in the field at that time. Imagine the shock and nightmare of a cobra strike.

I am presenting here her own words as I listened to her a bit guiltily and her eyes almost accusing me of partnership in crime as if saying it was your cobra because it stays in your field. Here goes her post-bite story:

‘I fell down and it jumped on my body and crawled over me. I couldn’t stand up. I started crying. Tried to get up but would fall down. Then I thought why die while running and repeatedly falling down. So I tied my duppatta on my hand, gave a cut around the bite and lay down weeping to die peacefully.’

After fifteen minutes her son arrived and took her to the snakebite healer who uses a secret herbal concoction for detoxification. The patient vomits and goes into diarrheal fits to cleanse the system. It works well. Surprisingly. The success ratio is almost 95 percent. Most of the snake-bitten people get cured.

She was up for terrible vomiting and diarrhea for a couple of days. Ranbeer felt inconvenience about it. ‘Put her cot near the washroom so that there is no unnecessary messing up of the place,’ he managed the situation as a firm family patriarch. Then he went to her cot and consoled, ‘You will get cured, don’t worry. Most probably the snake just gave a hiss on your skin and you panicked.’ Then he lamented about food not getting cooked on time, the usual inconveniences born in the life of a farmer with the wife getting bedridden. She listened to all this, not saying much but resolved to make it very tough for him once she got back to her feet.

These are very tough people. I wasn’t expecting her to go to the fields at least during this season. But she was right there at the farm doing the usual chores the very next week itself. Salutes to these courageous Jat peasant women!  

PS: She was earlier bitten by a snake while taking out dung-cakes from a bitoda, a conical dung-cake store covered with hay and straw. Ranbeer himself was bitten by a snake in the fields few years back. So they are veterans in the scary experience. The farmers world over lead such a tough life. But when it comes to setting narratives and building agendas by the power aspirants, the farmers and their cause lie at the base of their scheme.