The idlers

 

The people in villages have lots of time for idle bantering, gossips, and spinning exaggerated tales of mythical proportions. They have tremendous lungpower for pumping funny as well as tormenting folklores. Men over hookahs and cards are more talkative than even women. The latter have lots of household chores to dispose off.

The idle minds are workshops of stories where facts and fiction mix to spin fabulous as well as harrowing tales. Mountains are manufactured from molehills. A little fact can be stretched both ways (good and bad), just by the sheer incidental flow of circumstances. If you are lucky—and happen to be a protagonist related to the said fact or fiction—it will be stretched to such mammoth glorification that you are at the risk of dying of heart attack because of the sheer shock of overjoyed self. If unlucky, the very same fact or fable gets stretched the other way around to the darker negative side. You will then surely become a monster instead of hero. Then you are in danger of dying due to heartbreak born of shame and embarrassment.

The people in chaupals have big needles to puncture each other’s ego. Someone was heard saying about someone, ‘He is not even a complete ‘I’ yet he uses ‘we’ to connote his presence.’ The context suddenly changed and another man emphasized his point with the parable, ‘A blind man can never be sure about the completion of his marriage—even when all the formal rituals are completed—unless and until he has his bride in his arms.’ To this someone more mischievous further increased the degree of possession to confirm the marital status. Then god knows how someone else ends up telling this joke:

Jat: ‘Listen you O old woman. Bring a chapatti. There is a dog at our door.’ Wifie: ‘There is no chapatti left.’ Jat: ‘Then bring my stick. Why allow him to go empty handed?’

Then again the wind changed and the conversational flow moved a decade back when a family that was known to be belligerent and aggressive was wiped out slowly over a period of time, the last man being murdered a decade ago.

Sukhi Ram, a long-limbed old man, was the surviving patriarch of a one-time big family having many lawbreakers who killed and got killed in abundance. The glory of their heydays gone, the sun setting, their clout diminished and shrunk to insignificance, the old man moved as a pale shadow of their former criminal glory.

One narrator in the gathering in the chaupal is telling this about Sukhi Ram:

Shekhar the barber would take full bantering liberty while giving a shave to the old man. The old man listened mutely, hardly reacting, almost surrendered to their wrinkled, rotten fate. Then, when the shaving was over, he spoke, calmly, with calculated pause: ‘Son, it’s a matter of time. Time changes everything. There was a time when I would thrash the likes of you with my jutis. And if the juti slipped off my hand during the strikes, the bearer of the juti strikes would pick it up and offer it to me with full respect so that I could continue with the beating. Wasn’t it honor to be beaten by me?’ Well, that was plain fear. But then times changed, as Sukhi Ram said.