A little specimen of village childhood

 

Here are a few snippets from Shekhar’s illustrious life. In school the best piece of writing he accomplished (far better than any exam he wrote) was a  letter he wrote to his armyman father. His illiterate mother dictated the contents. The basic idea was about conveying his undisciplined, errant ways that were in reverse direction to all that was taught at the village school. It was to be concluded with a request to give him a spanking when his father arrived for his annual vacations.

He was ten or eleven at that time. She thought he wasn’t smart enough to temper with the contents at such a delicate age. But she was mistaken. Shekhar remembered at least the essence of antonyms taught at the school. So he wrote the opposite stating he was a good boy giving details of his obedient ways in school and nice helping tasks he performed at home. And all this, the letter concluded, entitles him to a prize, a cricket bat. So a couple of months later his proud father arrived with a cricket bat. But first it was used on his bum once he came to know about the truth.

Shekhar possessed great treasurer qualities. His clay moneybox full of coins, he was looking for the safest place to keep it hidden from his siblings and other thieves prowling the village streets. At dusk he went to the shrubbery outside the village, serving as open public toilet, dug a hole, put the treasure inside, placed the soil back, padded it quite firmly and put the locker of his defecation on the top as a firm seal of inviolable property.

He loved money and even at a delicate age understood that it takes lots of efforts to earn wealth. Ajit was a few years elder to him. He was tossing a one rupee coin with malicious glee. He was testing the money-making guts of the village brats. He pointed out a farmer’s big heap of defecation and challenged anyone to strike it down with a fist blow and earn the top prize.

Even the most rascally ones gave in. Not Shekhar. He made a ball of fist with his left hand, kissed the curled little finger at the base and struck with purpose and force, with enough power so that there was no space for the bet-maker to cry foul. The heap was flattened. He had a dirty left hand. ‘In any case it does the same every morning!’ he consoled the shocked group of brats around. After that he bathed in the village pond for half an hour holding the prize money in his right hand.

Apart from running his barber shop he manages a tiny dairy unit. It involves three or four cows whose milk his wife sells to get her share of pocket money to feel economically independent. There are plenty of gau and nandi shalas in the countryside where the farmers leave the surplus calves. It was a male calf that Shekhar had to leave at the cow shelter. Named Sanda, the baby bull was much pampered by Shekhar’s family.

Shekhar was very sad to leave it in the cramped space full of bulls of all sizes ranging from Hercules to motes. From behind the grills, they competed to eat donated chapattis, jaggery and other cattle feed. After a fortnight Shekhar committed the mistake of crossing over into the yard and call Sanda affectionately with a piece of jaggery in his hand. It recognized him and ran like a child rushing to meet his father. But a huge-horned bull got offended and as if accusing him of favoritism ran after him. When he jumped over the wall he felt a rough graze of cattle horn on his bum. It was a close save.