Langda: The Lame Farmer and His Astonishing Gamble with Fortune

 **July 2006

Quite unexpectedly fair-coloured for the boys of his community, a copperish-brown crop of hair and a sparse beard of the same sort distinguish him further, and a deformity of the leg even further.

Nicknamed *Langda* by the uninspiring verbal fact it virtually denoted, the person is an heir to almost nothing from his immigrant lineage in this part of Haryana.

He has to dig a well virtually every day to fulfil the needs of his wife, a dim-witted, buxom, rotund lady, and four equally differently abled children.

We must have mentioned his lanky lad who ran away and whose fate we are yet to finalise, even in our imagination.

The eldest is a sturdy fellow. He can work, but the motivation, cleverness and urge behind the same objective are absent. So he very often runs away from work.

The youngest son is clever and seems to have been honing underhand manoeuvres as he steps ahead on the path of boyhood. Some cases of petty thefts in the neighbourhood have been reported.

The fourth kid is a girl, a rather fair-coloured, not-so-good-featured but decently attractive girl of about thirteen.

She minds her hairdo and the donated second-hand clothes.

The way they live and the circumstances they are in almost ensure the arrival of the day when the girl will lose her virginity, partly on account of her own adolescent curiosity, but majorly on account of some bubbling, bursting-at-the-seams urchin vagabond.

But our main concern is the father.

If not for that missing substance in his leg, his body would have presented the spectacle of a slithery, athletic body.

The man drinks hard, works doubly hard.

In fact, he works to sustain his need for alcohol.

But just as we thought that his way would any day meet an ignominious end, the man has sprung a surprise.

He, like farmers of his ilk, survives on farming rented land, putting all other claimants in a terrifying tizzy.

He has rented land at fully double the prevalent rates—one lakh for four plots of land.

Some say he will meet his doom.

But such guts either make or break.

And they seem to make, if the returns—paddy on an average, ₹25,000 per plot; and ₹70,000 per plot from tomatoes—stick true to his expectations during the coming year as well.

He has sublet the plots to a few others.

And there are as many furrows and sections of different vegetables as are possible under the circumstances.

They are squeezing every penny's worth from the land.

They drink doubly hard and claim that they won't be drowned even if they rented a plot for fifty thousand rupees.