A small sad tale

 

It happened about three decades ago in a village in Haryana. Subhash son of Kuchi Ram Valmiki was good in studies at the village school. His elder brother was a cleaner at the school. The teachers would praise him for being good in studies and standing first in the class.

A lone eagle in the little community of untouchables who had it in him to cut through the vital voices of casteism and undo a bit of historical injustice carried by the small community in the conservative village.

During middle school, he would go and clean classrooms after the school was over. One has to do something extra to undo the inherited disadvantages at the caste and community level. So the boy would work hard in studies and in cleaning the rooms to somehow beat the intergenerational disadvantages and lead a normalized life without too much of road-blocking social stratification. And education was the tool to offer resistance to the caste-born structural, oppressive ‘othering’, a systemic dehumanization of the low-born people.

A ruffian boy from the dominant farming community also accompanied him sometimes. This boy was exploring his adolescent sexuality in a deeply traditional society where the word ‘sex’ was a taboo. Not being able to find any avenues to vent out his curiosity, he wrote sexually explicit messages on blackboards in girls’ rooms. The valmiki boy was blamed for it and severally penalized for the offense. Deeply, historically entrenched practice of untouchability was still powerful enough till that time to allow the teachers to touch him very intimately through sticks, slaps and kicks.

He was kicked like a dog by many teachers (all upper caste guys, diehard conservatives and very eloquent in making a low caste realize his low status). With inherited pride they pulled his hair and he was dragged around by the exclusionary social patriarchs—menacing marginalizing motifs of casteism and stigmatization.

The punishment must have been far less severe for a boy of upper class. Without any doubt about it. Punishment for the same offense is hierarchical in nature. Inequitable distribution of justice. This also seems to be a powerful social law, as effective as any natural law.

After the humiliating punishment, he felt stripped of all dignity and social standing he had built for himself through studies. His enthusiasm to rise through social ranks was silenced forever. He crashed into the lowly place of his untouchable community, lost interest in studies and after some time dropped out of school altogether.

A small, malnourished, black, fox-faced boy he then tried to turn handsome like his ideal hero Mithun Chakrovarty, kept stylish hair, wore heeled shoes, went to Bombay to pursue his dreams, and finally returned to the village to work as a casual laborer to feed his four children and a cantankerous wife. Little summary of his life: a subtle fossilization of caste identities.

Strange are the pathways taken by the lurching lorries of our fate. Some erring moments unleash massive miscalculation and topple the table itself on which one is trying to play the cards of destiny.