Skirmish between a cobra and a peasant woman

 Randhir 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 both of us to the last paisa.

The doctors couldn’t give any clue to his swoons 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 poor jokes cracked by bookish guys. 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 pyjama and after that I feel very weak for a couple of days,’ he gave me the medical summary to diagnose.

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 tractors 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 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. Randhir all smug, and looking to the mouth-watering prospects of getting a full liquor bottle and drink in the evening with pals, was plying his tractor on the road on the way to the town. A couple of farmers 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 Randhir’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. 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 Randhir 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, she just cannot quit it. But she harasses him a lot, cracks jokes, treats him like a child, takes puns and much-much more.

There is some wild growth in a corner of one of the fields. A huge cobra stays there. People talk about it with awe and wonder. The share-cropping couple has planted laukis. Randhir’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 ran 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 over 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 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. Randhir 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 dungcakes from a bitoda, a conical dungcakes store covered with hay and straw. Randhir 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.

A sweet-sour birdie nostalgia

Love is in the air. The air is cool as if suffused with a kind of lyrical prose. A pair of painted storks flies in beautiful bonhomie. Beyond the clutches of unwarranted passions, they are a pair for life and have come here down to the plains during the winters. Till fifteen years back there was enough room for them in the countryside. We had wastelands, waterlogged lands, ponds, tanks and streams. Now everything is taken by the humans to meet the ever-increasing resource scarcity.

We had thousands of birds, including ducks, migrating to our part during the winters. Sadly, as we moved on, maintaining our acrobatic balance on the rope of ever-tightening survival, with our hybridized dreams and dysfunctional desires, ever following the blurred forms of a forever receding future, those promiscuously vibrant times met a hasty end. Now every nook corner has farmlands, human habitations, factories and roads. The last sarus crane call that I heard in the skies above must have been more than a decade back. Those were big birds, almost the kings of the birdie kingdom. Their call was a charming and quirky bugling, a sort of high-pitched trumpeting sound with long-drawn notes that went sizzling in the air. Gone are they now. Even to recall them seems transcendental.

The sweet-sour pain of nostalgia sets up a world of collapsing verses around a poet who attempted to versify the magical mystery of nature around. But my ears refreshingly echo with the sound as I write this. For a moment it gives a semblance of familial comforts but quickly recedes as the present-time’s harsh and hard realities arrive and overtake with haughty urgency. The present is too tightly woven and always seething with grievances. That past lies now like broken shards of glass. As I look at them, there are sighs of estrangement floating around.

Love, longing and loss

 Loss, longing and love brewing a mist in the morning forest. He walks on a lone path. Then the sunrays streak in. Everything turns into love. Loss and longing glide away with misty vapours. Love is nothing but all the lesser emotions sublimated fully.

A little air purifier

 

Mother nature's little air purifier in front of our place. These green leaves are an extension of our lungs. But people take nature for granted and hardly anyone speaks in favour of these green tissues of our lungs. People usually complain of a couple of Cobras that stay here. A few sightings and people go paranoid. Why stretch your fears beyond a point. Just be careful a bit more, that's all. Use torch while moving in the dark. Walk gently to allow them to creep away as you approach. And they eat mice with relish. The area is almost mouse-free. And mother nature knows more than us. There were mice that's why there are snakes. And to ensure that the snakes don't crawl at each human step there are plenty of peacocks doing the rounds. They must be eating many little snake hatchlings to keep the number finely balanced. But who is there to keep a check on us? In our case only we can do it, individually and collectively.

Faith

 If we believe we have the capacity to do what we are supposed to do, there is no reason to believe in the higher powers supposedly guiding our way. But the question is, do we really know what we are supposed to do. All choices and decisions stand on the verge of either falling this way or that. Faith, at some point, is bound to have its final say. Faith is pretty free flying. Tether it to reason and logic, it hides immediately behind the dark clouds. It’s not there to be tamed by the chains of reason. It is good to put reason at the forefront of your skills like the steely jaws of a mighty earthmover. That’s a convenience, a skill to lead life on a day to day basis. Reason is a very good servant. Faith but is the master that guides the overall operation of life. By faith I don’t just mean faith in the Gods over there in the sky vaults. It primarily comprises our faith in ourselves, in our soul’s intimacy with the possibilities of joy, an urge to lead a meaningful life. Extraterrestrial faith is a mere supplement to our inherent faith in ourselves. Isn’t it faith in ourselves that we use all the reasons and logic to not only survive but also strive to be happy and joyful? In fact, we hatch ‘reasons’ to nurture our ‘faith’. Never lose your faith. It’s like losing what and who you are.