Shaken Roots and Broken Fruits

 

The overloaded tempo pickup, piled high with the provisions of a poor household stuffed in huge sacks made by stitching empty fertiliser bags, had to make an effort to move on another of its chugging journey. After all, domesticity carries weight, however limiting the situation and resources of the tenants.

So the small carrier vehicle, barely visible under the piles of clothing, bedding rolls, plastic cans, cheap kitchen utensils, plastic drums, a refrigerator, a bicycle, fuel wood, dung cakes, paddy chaff and much more, made the decisive move.

In the driver’s cabin, two small boys, one four and the other just over five, sat between the driver and their sister who sat by the window. The excitement of the journey making it almost another fun-game for the little boys. They were too small to feel the pain of getting transplanted again, like little saplings of paddy can be grafted at other place.

The girl was 14 or something. At this age she could feel the pain of this tearing: shifting from a home set up with so much of attention, focus and labour. She wore her school dress, white salwar kameez, maroon jersey and dupatta folded to form a V across the front. It was her last day in the school and in the village. With much effort and teary eyes she had said bye to her classmates and the teaching staff.         

It was 19^th of January and a close call to being able to complete the academic year. She thus missed her final exams in the village school just by a month or so. Before boarding the pickup, she was heard discussing the matter regarding the school leaving certificate. Just weeks to go for the year-end annual exams, it indeed was a close miss. Her serious expression bore the vestiges of this pain. Within the limited circumstances of their household, she had been a diligent student, taking her homework very seriously.

‘Bye, bye, bye....’

The children from the neighbourhood raised a see-off chorus among the plume of smoke let out by the vehicle as it made an extra effort to start the journey.

Most probably they won’t be meeting again in life. And the fact that till a day before they had played so wholeheartedly, totally absorbed in childhood oblivious to the bigger causes and worries, as if life was just endless fun with the same friends at the same place, brought tears in the girl’s eyes. She tightly held the huge bag of books held in her lap.

So in the days to come, the excited voices and shouts of the playing children won’t involve the ones who just left. The two little boys were tireless, voracious elements of childhood fun and frolicking. Still beyond the shackles of schooling, they just drew out every ounce of untamed energy to loiter around, picking out any opportunity to turn it into a game.

The house which saw the provisions taken out again acquired its melancholic look like it bore before they had moved into it.

Another carrier tempo arrived at the small square in the village neighbourhood. With a tangible feeling of sadness, the women from the locality gathered to see the family off.

Charpoys were laid over the carrier railings, a buffalo and two calves, one very small just born a month back and the other from the previous delivery, were straggled up onto the back under the charpoys, some more bundles were piled on the charpoys forming a platform over the carrier’s railings. Now was the time of departure for whatever was left behind by the first vehicle.

The women embraced the pretty girl. Since females were involved in this see off, a few eyes had their share of moisture. Even a rented house takes roots. And when someone, especially forced by situations, gets going, suddenly cutting the routine life in a friendly neighbourhood, you feel the pain of it.

The girl was medium built and had big eyes which seemed to take a parting, nostalgic pan-shot to take it to the new place. A woollen dupatta tied around her face, a nose-pin exotically adoring her shapely nose, she looked suitable for a matronly parting kiss on her forehead and a blessing on her head.  

The mother, worn out by the excess load of multiple children and labour in the fields, appeared more agile than her situation may have allowed. She took leave of the ladies, holding the hands of the ones with whom she had become really close, the friendship cosily hatched during the free hours that offered the opportunity for the typical female gossip. She climbed into the cabin followed by the girl in light green salwar kameez. The girl had a pair of badminton rackets in her hand, which she held against the windscreen as her younger brother, younger to her by a year or two, climbed into the seat and shut the window.

The vehicle moved. The father would follow on his bike, pillion ridden by a boy relative who had come to help them in this hurried shifting. The family patriarch, forty or something in age, wore a black piece of cloth tied around his head. He had a full, dense salt and pepper beard. There was pinkish glow on his cheeks doused with freckles of worries and recent suffering. He walked with certain calculation in steps, as if feeling chained to some restrictions, as if a careless step would give him pain somewhere, especially the posterior.          

The vehicle moved. So did the bike. The square got empty as the children dispersed to play and the women got into their household chores with a touch of sadness.

All through the process of loading their provisions, in unmaking what he, his wife and the elder son and daughter had made with tireless work, the family patriarch bore a sombre expression. One could even trace some faintest sign of a mysterious smile on his face. It but wasn’t a smile. It was the print of acceptance, of surrender, of unquestioning acceptance of the piece put by destiny in your bowl as you toil to survive. This state has its own unique regality, and may be mistaken as a smile.

The bike was gone, turning around a corner in the street. The house was padlocked. A rundown house having enough space for a poor family and their buffalo to knit them into a sheltered unity to fight for better days, or at least a life at the same level, if not worse.

The owner of the house, who stayed in a big, newly built house at the village periphery, padlocked the main wooden door which opened into the barn, followed by an inner yard, two rooms at the back and one upstairs. It will see a lonely night today and they will lie down among their packed provisions at their new destination tonight.

****

He was here in this village of Haryana for almost a decade. Just like water naturally trickles down from the higher to the lower surface, so do the people driven by the hard situation of poverty. They move from the areas of limitations to the ones having better resources. The family belonged to western UP. The region’s agro economy was a few rungs below Haryana across the border; the boundary formed by a recalcitrant and famished Yamuna. With its more intense agriculture, the region west to the river was the natural point of movement for those feeling it hot to survive in the east.

He was a tough worker, so was his wife who matched him in cutting down lines after lines of harvesting furrows. They shifted from their predominantly Muslim village in western UP to this predominantly Hindu Jat village in eastern Haryana. They arrived with three daughters and a son and straightway got into the never-ending offers of agriculture labour in the wheat and paddy fields.

If you keep your head down, don’t speak more than required, don’t make your presence felt more than the barest minimum required and that too only at the places where you are supposed to be, and work almost double than expected in lieu of the daily wages paid to you, then survival flows like time flows through inanimate objects.

The migrant couple just worked and worked. The best known fact, apart from their stand-out religion, was that they cut unbelievable acreage of golden ripe wheat under the scorching sun in April, May and June. Respect is difficult to come by for a migrant agricultural labourer, but even the sturdy local work brutes had to fetch out a few words of appreciation in this regard.

The eldest girl was married. At the cost of litres of sweat under the sweltering sun, the family’s fortune showed better prospects. A tireless worker can ask the almighty for as much luck as would be sufficient to get him continuous work. Of this there was aplenty in the village.

Even the snail-paced society of a village has its faint rumblings and churning events. There is always someone or the other moving to the city. Someone having a class three or four government job and a little holding of land, both of which combining to take his prospects to buy a house in the nearest town, leaving the village house either under the care of relatives or renting it just at nominal rates to someone like our migrant from the neighbouring state, doing it not for money primarily but basically to have somebody to look after the property, for it’s believed that an unoccupied house sees its decay in just a few years. There is always some nostalgia because old roots go with some fight against the foot soldiers of time. His time had been spent among three or four such houses in the village.

Poverty has its own caste, class and religion. So in the usual routine of life, it was as subdued and unassuming a family as any other in the non-Jat communities in the village. The Jats carry humungous attitude. One has to be careful not to puncture it. There is a tacit social understanding. Allow and help the Jats in keeping the crown of their ego on their head and there won’t be any problem.

It thus went well. They got mixed at the rung of any other non-Jat household in the village. He never missed to join people whenever a Hindu pyre was lit in the cremation ground. The children added their share of energy to the limitless tomfoolery the village children engage in. The wife had a little circle among the peasant women. She had an agile tongue and could rapidly recall harmless anecdotes to please the local women. The girls mixed with the girls of their age.

All seemed to go well. Or was it?

****

Cow protection became one of the driving forces of the state policy with a nationalist party coming to power. Well, nothing wrong with that. In the changing agronomy, cows have been replaced by more economical buffalos, leaving poor cows to stray around, eating garbage, dying of hunger on the roads. But then an issue, in its political version, remains just a populist rhetoric serving partisan purposes instead of helping resolve the problem. The cause of gau mata was enthusiastically taken up by the vagrant youths caught in the chasm of ‘the will to do something in life’ and ‘the capability or guidance to get something really done on the ground’. The gap is easily picked up by the misguiding hands that brainstorm the young flagellant self to get into some funny show of bravado, patriotism and nationalism.

A boy from the village took the clarion call of cow protection too seriously. He got funds to operate a small veterinary hospital to treat stray cows. The hospital, run from a depilated one time ice-making unit, whose owner had decamped after defaulting on his loan, leaving it abandoned and in the clutches of insolvency and auction laws, became the den of entertainment for a group of youngsters who needed an adda for drinking and co-related forms of fun in the category.

That is the problem with extremist politics. The decent people stay away. The excitement of crossing the line seduces those who have the groundwork of illegalities, a position wherein they very conveniently interpret their escapades as valour, guts, bravery, patriotism and nationalism. The most important thing is that they are ready to hate, and even kill.

A cow is one of the most evolved quadrupeds, definitely deserving all the love, affection and care that the Homo-sapiens can manage. Its mere presence purifies the surroundings at the level of energy field. No wonder we worship it. But how many of the political careerist Hindus know about the real worth of gau mata beyond the grand plans of communal polarization? The vision of a cow-full Hindu Bharat Rashtra is one matter. It can be interpreted as a form of deshbhakti as well. But I have seen cows and pigs sharing the same garbage at dumpsites. Rhetoric and sloganeering gets votes in cow’s name but hardly makes any positive change in the life of millions of stray cows. They suffer as they have been doing for decades.

Now when the buffalos had taken the place of the cows in the agrarian economy, the issue of cow at the debating stage was the shiny occupation in demand. Anything related to cow gave you good image and if managed properly, and with a stroke of luck, one could even catapult oneself from the fringe to the centre-stage of political power.

The young nationalist in the village was all absorbed on the surface turbulence regarding the issue of cows and saving India from the evil-minded minority. As for the service to his private self, the proclivities such as over-drinking, visiting brothels, including paid sex services to a docile, feminine homosexual official in corporate in Delhi, was something that could be put into a separate compartment, closed, beyond the pricks of conscience. For as long as he could hate Muslims from the core of his heart, and thus assured of his patriotism, no other deed of his could put him in the dock questioning his errant ways.

There was hardly any communal fodder to reap in this part of Haryana. But he was not the one to miss the little chances available to bring his patriotic theories into practice. His Facebook page was always waiting for some first hand, real life contribution to the cause of nation building.

Just outside the village, by the road, there was a mound on a patch of Waqf property. The plot of land still reminding that the village had Muslim families in the past who left for Pakistan in 1947. The rest of the Waqf land had been taken on 99-year-lease by some influential farmers, leaving this mound and the small chunk of land around it, as an abbreviation, as an assurance to the secular fabric of India.

A Muslim friar had set up a blue-tiled peer shrine, reinforcing the fading facts that Muslims once stayed in the village. They had houses, they had land, but the partition-time storm changed geographies and demographies. 

A hunting lion preying upon a grasshopper, for fun, for amusement, but more importantly to satiate the inner hunger, to keep the faculty of hunting alive, also a reminder that things can be grabbed by might.

To save the Hindu honour, the gau rakshak thrashed the fragile shrine keeper who had started to have some notes and coins in his purse. The dalits, starting with the bhangis, had started to pray at the peer shrine, perhaps hoping for more kindness by a Muslim fakir who didn’t believe in caste. To the overzealous foot-soldiers of Hindutva, of course there was danger to Hinduism here with a Muslim shrine cropping up on the mound. He swung into action. Getting some slaps and a wrestler style throw-down, the old and frail Muslim ran away. The honour of the land was saved. He installed Hindu Gods in the freshly tiled tiny shrine room. All this was gloriously displayed on his Facebook page. And congratulatory messages poured in hundreds.   

On the social media there was always something to sharpen his Islam-phobia. His little crusade, shared with pictures and live footage, got long trails of likes and comments on the FB page. Life seemed to acquire a purpose. He even thought of moving onto becoming an MLA in future. However, it was far way down the line and a lot many things to be done meantime.

He was on the lookout. As much as he believed in the cause of quenching his carnal desires, he believed in the cause of the nation also.

****

Apart from the side that wants us to excel and get highlighted as someone exemplary, using the clichés and prevailing prejudices, there is, alongside, a part which pulls with its raw force, driven by the basic instincts.

The cow vigilante eyed the young beautiful Muslim girl who went to the fields with her mother for wage work in the fields. Her big eyes, oval face and nose-pin mixed the two parts, the passion to get recognised as a famous rightist from the area and the carnal force of unsheathed passion. In fact it became the one and the same thing. Taking a chance at the modesty of a Muslim girl, apart from obeying the call of blinding passion, could well as be taken as a chivalrous deed on communal grounds.

He pursued her, first subtly, expecting her to get the point and surrender to his youthful handsomeness, and later, in the face of her being completely unaffected and nonchalant to the cooings of his desire, pretty directly. It went to the extent of grazing his shoulder against her as the girl evaded and just moved on as if nothing had happened. The girl, advised by her mother, just saw through his overtures. It was safe for them that nothing of any sort surfaced that would put them in the spotlight.

On his part, even some reaction to the side of denial would still have kept the dog on pursuit even though on a leash. But this complete impassivity, as if he didn’t exist, as if she won’t think of him more than a roadside stone, made him feel insulted, sent his soul sizzling with jealousy and hate.

Spurned, he was waiting for an opportunity to strike. India is but decently secular. Unlike Pakistan, here one cannot take outright liberty with the minority, however overpowering the blizzard of desire and communal motives. There have to be reasons, and appropriate ones by the way, otherwise there were enough farmers to question such behaviour amounting to mistreating somebody, whoever it was.

Helpless in failing to pursue the direction of his desire, and believing himself justified in his communal rant against the minority, he was heeding time to strike.

****

The local culture was driven by the agricultural push and pull. More than being condemned for your religion, you stood a better chance to be appreciated for your hard work. So, miyanji, as he was called by the villagers, spreading his identity to an almost nameless, see-through transparency, of being just like that, simply, earned loads of praise for his unrelenting stamina to work in the fields and thus raise his brood of children with his sweat. More the harvesting lanes vanished, the more furrows he vanquished with his sickle, the bigger fodder bundles he carried, the villagers, if nothing more, gave him unqualified words of praise.

The family just worked tirelessly, so tirelessly that even the most pun-prone villagers didn’t take a jibe at their having many children.

That’s how you develop roots at a new place. You aren’t supposed to create ripples in the fluid picture. You must add to the local values exactly in the manner they exist. And for God sake please, please don’t experiment. Just increase the proportions of the existing values. Do things exactly the way they want it. You have to dissolve the outstanding edges on your persona and merge in equal proportions in all directions and all individuals. You shouldn’t be someone’s special friend; you can’t simply afford to be anybody’s enemy, it needs no repetition.

So the agrarian society didn’t feel any disturbance even in the wake of the social media’s communal propaganda and the world-over prevailing Islamophobia.

In the marriage-time community feasts, his brood of children would go uninvited, and people just took it as normal as somebody who been cordially invited.

Miyanji would be seen among the mourners as the Hindu pyres were lit in the cremation ground. They were here to share all pain and happiness that occurred to the villagers.

How simple this world would become if the train of life could run smoothly after picking up with pain and much efforts.

One thing is guaranteed that after becoming the target of somebody’s hate, you already become a victim even before the real consequences born of the hate-driven actions start. It’s simple cause and effect, like someone throwing stones into a pond. There will be shaking of the waters.

We sometimes, voluntarily or involuntarily, with an imperceptible force driving us, barely giving us a chance to do the real calculation, end up changing the lanes where the mundane life was comfortably chugging ahead. Do we do it to shake off the monotony which becomes boring? Do we do it with the spirit to get into something adventurous? Or is it just unavoidable push and pull of the destiny? It’s not even that the old track was too unbearable. Still we just end up changing it willy-nilly. It stays a mystery why we suddenly change the track and almost topple the cart. Maybe to take the short-cut, to make it a bit more convenient, and hardly realise before overstepping many lines defining our small but safe world. It may even involve crossing the legal lines. Not that we are monsters and biggest of sinners. The transgressions are humane, much as they get us temporary, facilitated gratification, these land us in trouble also.

And nobody falls off the line in complete awareness.

For the last few months, miyanji was making more than usual trips to his native place in western UP. Unusual in the sense that a daily wage earner, having set up his home and hearth at a distance from his native place, should have hardly any reasons to waste wage days, time and money in being off the scene, unless under exceptional circumstances.

The trips became almost weekly in nature. Better clad, bathed, off work and far happier in look, miyanji somehow stood off. The anonymity which hid him in the grit and grind of agro-work now got dispelled. The result was his visibility.

‘He is up to something!’ many eyebrows got raised.

Now here is a common known fact about his native place. It’s ill-famed for illegal country-made weapons. With Haryana almost upstaging UP and Bihar in terms of directionless youth biting the illegal bullet, the illicit pistols found a ready market to the west of Yamuna.

Even to the simplest of a farming brain, it was a case of two plus two making four.

The gau rakshak got the opportunity to hit the nail on its patriotic head. Boiling with his nascent nationalism, he ran to inform the police.

With greater enthusiasm miyanji was picked up by the police, tortured and made to eat the bitter side-fruits of the tasty pie he had come to like for the last few months. Some country-made pistols were recovered from the vagrant youths in the surrounding villages. The wires were connected to the supplier. It was substantiated.

Majority of such cases don’t reach the courts. It gets settled well before that. The police are even more enthusiastic in getting it settled ‘outside’ as it’s more lucrative to them. So all the facilitation done, a limping miyanji, carrying the marks of vengeance by the cat-o-nail on his bum, purchased his deliverance from the clutches of law at the first stage, and walked for some weeks morosely. Meanwhile the gau rakshak, his onslaught having been justified, launched his communal fusillade.

He had an argument to slap in the face of anyone who asked him to tone down and leave the limping miyanji in peace.

‘Vaah, vaah so much for your kindness! Do you take a guarantee on his behalf? Now illegal pistols, tomorrow he may shelter some terrorist. Bolo, bolo, will you be answerable then?’

So not many had the zeal to put up a roadblock to his patriotic fervour in contributing to the cause of Hindu rashtra.

‘I will leave no stone unturned till he leaves this place,’ he declared with point-blank finality.

Father of a young girl who had to go with her parents to the fields to help them, and given the odd hours, times, location, everything convinced miyanji that it would be a struggle now.

So off he went, packing their stuff in rucksacks and bundles, to a place which he considered safer for small illegalities that a local person, surrounded by his own people, can engage in without getting burdened with the fear of consequences.

There is a lesson though—a decade of diligence can be undone by some moments of mischief. It takes just a moment to fall and get undone.  

Flying with Broken Wings

 

It’s the last week of September succulent with ripe Dushera-time festivity. Normally it should have been bright and sunny, but then nature flummoxes, as much as we humans also do the same to it. Due to a climatic depression over the North West of India, it has rained almost continuously for the last two days. It cannot be worse for the richly grained paddy, which is sure to fall flat among the slushy fields, bringing the customary losses to the farmers, and in its wake hardly ruffling any feathers because the farmers are more attuned to losses than profits.

After two days of breaking many a farmer’s hearts, it stops drizzling on the third afternoon, and life immediately jumps to chug along the rain-soaked terrain.

Mehar Singh hopefully looks at the streaks of sunlight smiling like a child across the edges of a black cloudy dome. He feels happy about this sunny victory over the cloud. It’s a victory with which he easily identifies many correlates from his mundane life as a common man.

He has already cleaned his green TVS moped that just smells fuel to run smartly, as he proudly puts it, instead of guzzling loads of fuel like bigger vehicles with more speed, noise and the resultant accidents.

‘I don’t need fast speed. I am satisfied with its slow-paced run. And it just purrs softly,’ he never misses an opportunity to proudly sum up the benefits of his little moped.

There is a customized carrier attached at the back on the pillion seat to load the rolls of cot-making ropes and strings. He tightens the hold over the load, and then checks his tool bag having hammer, pincers and knife slung around the moped’s handle. He is full of enthusiasm for a professional outing. Whatever the shortcomings, these may linger on in some other departments but not at least in the domain of his spirits.

His 15-year-old daughter is worried that the weather may turn bad again. He laughs away her concern. Matarani will get me something for you. His daughter is fasting during the navratras. He assumes and wishes, almost blesses her in this regard, that if not for himself but at least for her fasting self the pious goddess will be kind enough to help him get some customers this afternoon, even though it’s too late for a touring cot-maker to set out at this time of the day.

As they say, a day is never enough for all those who don’t have a regular source of income and have to beat hunger, employing all that the sun can offer to light their steps most judiciously, fighting with frenzied ingenuity of effort every time they go out. There are no carry-overs to act advantageously in your favour. It’s a new war every time you set out. 

He is 50-year-old, but just like any other man struggling to survive using more of hands and less of brain, looks aged and beaten beyond his years. He is dark, gray-haired, gaunt, smelling of that typical smell of poverty: soot, grime and sweat topped with a drop of alcohol. He doesn’t drink though, but the hard distillation of life leaves enough alcoholic, painful remnants over people’s lives. It makes them forgetful of better luck and better times, makes it bearable at least, a sort of developing thick skin.

The street is muddy. His daughter looks with concern as he moves to the moped to kick-start it. For what it may, it’s the start of a short trip across the neighbouring villages in the hope of fixing a cot somewhere. For a poor man every chance to earn an extra farthing is as bright as a wealthy man making millions.

Although he is on the older side of age, consequent to his years plus poverty, yet he possesses baby steps. He walks with as much delicacy of caution and genteel spirit shown by a baby while balancing itself during the first tottering steps. He drags his feet, taking one more, then another, then another, each step a milestone, on the shaky stage that life is. It seems like he is walking on stilts, almost on wooden legs that don’t obey the calculations of his brain as the limbs in upper part of his body do. His torso appears relatively bigger on his thin legs.

His daughter seems to run to help him, but then stops herself because that is the point where his fine temperament loses balance to turn to anger. To turn it a matter of more concern, he doesn’t take his support-stick on his outings as a professional, possibly in order to avoid the bigger handicap of managing it in travel as well as while on the work.

Of his weak legs, the left leg is still weaker. Reaching the tiny, heavily laden moped, appears a milestone, and kick-starting another; followed by a string of unending challenges. For a person of disability, life is never in auto mode, like the luckier ones who can afford to be on off-guard assured by a safe, confirmed routine. It’s never-ending manoeuvring. But then that’s the best meaning of life: making every second count; making every step matter. At each step it means avoiding a fall, so at each stride there is a victory to cherish. And he manages it most of the time.

With extra effort he lifts his almost lifeless leg to put it on the kick-starter. The machine responds to his push, it purrs to life in one stroke. This success, this surety of the single kick-start, and a liability also because he cannot afford to pound strike after strike in a barrage of strokes on the kick-starter on a lazy machine, comes at an extra cost to his resources.

The engine of his moped has to be extra alert to cover the space left vacant by his disability. The machine thus needs more-than-regular service. He may fail to take medicines while sick, but he doesn’t show any trace of carelessness in getting his moped serviced well before the due date. The moped’s health is more important for this man who has a full disability card issued by the state health department.

The tiny engine purrs with life and away they go. His hard-fought caution and the vehicle’s small wheels working in combo for a little chapter of common success on a mundane day in the life of a poor man.

Now the cot-maker would go into the streets of one of the neighbouring villages shouting charpai banwa lo—get your broken cot renetted and fixed. A cot is still a prominent item of utility in the countryside. While at work, he folds his legs in somewhat half vajrasna posture, the knees supporting the ground, the toes turned to support his bent back because he cannot go down beyond a certain angle.

His hands have gained where his legs lost. These are strong hands. They have to put some extra effort to support him. So his tough hands and still stronger willpower take on the job as he expertly weaves ropes to construe a taught, nicely patterned cot-netting. At other times, he is pummelling down the wooden frame bars with his hammer to crush any asymmetry in the constitution. At still more times, he is expertly repairing the charpoy legs. The enforced habit of moving slowly, and not running after too many things in life, seems to have given an expertise in the art to him.

Engaged in his business, you just cannot make out that it’s a disabled man at work. He is taking life fully head-on like anyone around.

A bad situation disabled a part of his body, but his spirit seems unscathed. It happened 15 years back. He used to sell rolls of woollen thread to earn a living for his family comprising a wife and three children, one girl and two boys. His wife was pregnant with their fourth child at that time.

He had travelled by a state roadways bus. The moment he got down, a bike hit him, plunging him down with full force. His upper back hit a brick. Snap. He heard the sound. Don’t think anyone around heard it, but he heard it louder than any noise in life. It was inside him. Sharp, shrill and sinister. A part of him broke down. The creepy sound which left its everlasting imprint on his each step, every moment, veritably each thought. It still flashes, sending tremors of fear, agitation and hopelessness across his frail body.

The PGI Rohtak, crammed to the gill with overflowing miseries, nonchalantly took this another unfortunate patient. So much was needed to be done at the government medical institution but the resources always fell short and the number of poor patients kept piling up. At state hospitals your agony and disease needs to be lesser than the others to give you any chance of recovery. The relentless tale of the patients’ miseries subdues all efforts to bring sanity and order.

He kept lying there for a couple of months, was shifted from one dirty, overflowing ward to another, and helplessly shared bed and miseries with other patients.

All that an overworked, helpless government doctor can tell a critically injured poor man is: ‘It’s God’s will, pray to God!’

Faith is the best pill they can offer, their efforts and resources always falling short in the face of unending beelines of patients.

He was paralysed neck down. The doctors told his wards to seek miracle from Gods. Medicines they said can be continued till their economy allowed them, which won’t be too long given the fact that they hardly possessed any resources.

After almost rotting in dirty sheets, in pitiful wards, bedsores made hospital a place of greater misery than a station of hope and relief. They brought him back, not exactly looking for a miracle, but expecting to see him through the final leg in his journey, peeing and shitting in bed.

It’s the phase in life when the caretakers, fed up with the stench of death, want actually to be relieved of the onerous task and to clear their conscience they have to say, ‘Only death can relieve him of the pain and suffering.’

Lying he was there, a burden, a shitty stinking creature, closer to death than life. He ranted a lot at his wife, who in the final stages of her pregnancy bore through the soon-to-end, as she helplessly assumed, barrages of foul words brimming over her husband’s lifeless lips. Using his only working faculty, his tongue, he threw abuses at her while she helped a beedi to his mouth. He simply took long draughts to convince himself that he was still alive.

He cursed the cot, the famed Indian charpoy. If you hit the cot, permanently or semi-permanently, it will eat you up, they maintained. To be alive meant you spent the minimum time of your waking hours on the cot. The more of your waking hours spent on the cot, the germs of death crept closer to you. With him lying on it all the time, death was guaranteed, slowly like termites eating the roots.   

He felt creepy, crawly creatures swarming his brain, emerging from the cot-netting, crawling over the bar and coming onto his face. He hated his cot more than anything else in the world. In fact, he hated all and everything in the world. After all, you cannot die as a loving person, liking everyone and everything around. All was well with the world while he was dying. He hated everything even more for this.

While he was withering, as they surely expected him to, his wife gave birth to a pair of twins, a boy and a girl, slightly bigger than the rats in the house, each weighing less than a kilo. The doctor declared them to be critical like their cot-ridden crippled father.

While they were taking them to another doctor, Mehar Singh, a bit in control of his mind and emotions, put up an effort to say, ‘Ask the doctor to save at least the girl’s life. Otherwise the people will say that to breastfeed the boy we allowed the poor girl to die.’

They looked at him in surprise. After a long time he seemed in tune with his usual upright self.

All of us have our own share of miracles, so even this poor family had theirs. The twins survived. The doctors told this fact very clearly to them.

Now the girl, the lakshmi of the house, is considered lucky by her father for more than one reason. She keeps navratras and counting on whose luck he sets out on a rain-stormed afternoon, hoping her prayers will get him something during what little remained of the day.

Well, going back to his post-injury times. Even the most optimistic souls hardly expected a miracle in this case. All accepted the countdown to his demise. But then fate stumps us. It plays its offbeat cards sometimes, so that we continue holding onto the myth of miracles. For the concept of miracles to survive we need to have them now and then.

A poor, paralysed man needs miracles more than anyone in the world. And luck sometimes favours the poor as well. 

Mehar Singh’s sister was married in some village in a neighbouring district. A man in his thirties was shouting in her street, ‘Khatmal maarne ki dawa lo!’

It was a cot-bug killing potion seller.

Now definitely there was a link: the cot, bugs, death and the poison. Miracles have their own magical potion.

The bug-killing medicine vendor had a bagful of unknowable potions made of his secret formula as he boasted. A group of women was haggling around him in gossip. The topic of paralysis somehow cropped up given the womenfolk’s flippancies hurtling in all directions on a range of issues when they gather at a place. Paralysis, the ill-famed lakwa. Some word, in some phrase, caught it and brought the topic to the centre-stage. The word crept up in the discussion like it was a bedbug to be annihilated under his thumbnail.

She told him about her brother’s plight.

‘Everyone says now he will only shit in the bed till he dies,’ sisters always have sobbing emotions for their brothers.

He made five pudiyas of a henna-like greenish powder.

‘Don’t blame me if his death comes speedier. In any case, he will die as you say. But with this, he may have a shot at life,’ he absolved himself of any unseemly consequences.

They deliberated a lot over the powder before finally taking a chance. A chance at life, in the face of sure rotting death, came out to be a better bargain.

Fifteen years later, Mehar Singh can claim that nothing can taste more bitter and horrible than the paste he was force-fed, either to die swiftly, or to live at least a non-shitty life.

He still remembers, over all the tastes of life, the taste of that green powder, like he does, and will do so throughout life, the crack-snap sound which overhauled his life in a moment.

After administering the paste, thus taking doctoring in their own hands, once the real doctors had failed, or call it this way that his poverty took him only to a point in the healthcare system where the doctors just declared it a will of God the moment you needed critical care, they waited in anticipation.

He felt like throwing up. His innards retched. But nothing would come out except saliva and white froth bubbling over the lips. His pupils dilated. Death’s churning they suspected and looked at each other, blaming and pardoning each other at the same time. ‘It was the will of God,’ they had accepted it long ago.

He felt like throwing out all of his innards but nothing except white foam came out. A strange revulsion was cascading through his wooded body. Late in the night they kept a watch over him, holding a glass of Ganga jal, the holy water, to give him a sip at the final breath that would absolve him of all worldly sins.

However, instead of fading away, deep down somewhere in the mysterious corridors of life and death, where the agents of living and fatality are busy in an endless combat, he was clawing his way back. This again he will remember throughout life. The touch of his fingers on the rope-netting of the cot. The touch of life.

By the sunrise next day, his hands miraculously stretched out. He could move them back over the head like you raise hands when asked to surrender with the only difference being that here it wasn’t surrender. It was subtle triumph. It was like a creaking, wooden scarecrow holding out hands to scare away the birds. Instead of the birds, his wards got scared. They took it to be the death rattle, as if his soul was escaping through the raised hands.

There was hardly any hope. The people from neighbourhood gathered to arrange the cremation. The relatives were summoned. Mehar Singh but flummoxed them all with a smile and a desire to have the worst-tasting paste again, not that he liked it, but because it seemed a ladder out of the well of death.

For the next four days, they served him the paste made of one pudiya each day. And miracles do happen, because they simply do. He could hold a beedi in his half-alive fingers. He felt like a King holding the baton of supreme authority.

For the time being, the mysterious concoction seemed to kill the bugs of mortality and tilt the scale in favour of dear life. They ran to sought out the bug-killing medicine seller. He of course, as can be expected, increased the price manifold and gave them 15 more pudiyas.

Each time it tasted worse than before, but he wanted more of it. One per day, at any cost because he was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, even though it found him sweating like a pig with the effort to swallow the impossible-to-eat thing.

They ran to get more of the pudiyas. His upper body got some faint traces of creepy sensations, a pre-sign of some jerky mobility. Waste up he could feel the faint trace of being alive. Another month down the line, his semi-wooden legs saw him taking much-laboured short, shaky movements with the help of a stick.

Now he wanted those pudiyas more than he needed the air.

‘Just one more month and even my legs would have cured fully,’ he says with a shadowy grudge which casts a cloud of gloom over his fighting spirit.

Well, the chance winds of luck rarely see us perfectly through to the shore. There is always something more that could have been done.

Mehar Singh ran out of his sip of luck after a couple of months of miraculous unspooling of the knot of fortune. It got stuck again. The bug-killing medicine vendor vanished from his rented room. Many said he was under debt and ran into anonymity to avoid debt trap and start a fresh innings somewhere else. Mehar Singh felt like a batsman getting out in nineties. So near, yet so far.

For a poor man the stroke of luck is never sufficient.

He was back in the stream of life, though with stiff legs that moved slowly with careful deliberation, one little cautious step at a time. Still it means a lot to be in the rut of life, if not speedily, even slow movement will do. Speed is the choice when we can easily move. And any movement should be taken with gratitude when faced with the stony immobility of death. The tiny distance covered at a low rate means a wealth because it connotes life. He didn’t want to run. He could do a bit more than mere crawling. He could stand and take baby steps. But then here, in this busy street of life, you just cannot afford to be around without paying the costs. You have to pay to be there in the thoroughfare.

The moment you grab a fraction of life, you are forced to work to keep holding it. As a slowly walking person now, he was, inevitably, unavoidably, faced with the question of bread and butter. He wanted to live, not like a beggar, using his disability as a candle light to melt hearts to fetch little charities. He wanted to live like someone who did something to earn some crumbs of dignity apart from some bare minimum money to feed his troupe.

Luck has hardly any place in a poor man’s house. No sooner the euphoria of getting a non-shitty life was over than the bigger question of survival took the centre stage. Hunger is beyond life and death. It’s unsparing. It creeps more eagerly into poor huts to come ruling the air inside; and stands at a respectable distance in the corners of the palaces, meekly obeying the masters. His youngest children wailing, he looked at the wretched cot which nearly became his death bed.

He won’t forget the sight of this cot either. Giving it a challenging look he moved out. Waste-up he felt confident of taking life head on. But the legs play no less part in running the show of life. How he wished he could have that goddamned thing for one more month.

Starting the show of life on weak infirm legs again appeared a daunting task. Everyone out there looked so healthy and almost running to a glorious destination. It was so difficult to come to terms to the creepy crawling speed which required utmost focus of body and energy of mind. He felt like collapsing on the very same cot.

I’m going to weave the best of these goddamned cots. The thought came of its own. He could not have claimed any ownership on it.

With lurching, tottering steps, holding his walking stick dearer than life, he reached the little town nearby, and used all of their money, to the last paisa, in buying cot-making hemp ropes and strings. In fact, he surprised himself by his guts to dive headlong into an enterprise in which he held little experience, excepting long time back when he helped his father in weaving cots and mending the broken cot-nets. However, a task when attempted at the professional scale acquires completely new dimensions.

His purchase of string rolls hanging from his shoulders, he entered the streets of the first village he came across on the way back. He surprised himself in shouting the offer of his services. It was encouraging indeed. He had taken the leap of faith. But then sometimes the leap of faith, its first step, proves more important than the entire journey. Sometimes what matters is the will to do. If you have it in you, irrespective of your skills and abilities, the inertia pushes you into the ring of existence, bringing you unexpected chance shots at life. Well, that’s what makes the game of life so interesting.  

An old farmer beckoned him from his barn. He had three cot-frames to be re-netted. Having fixed the price for all three, Mehar Singh sat down on his weak knees to start the innings. Having the will power is one thing, but to carry out the task skills are also needed. He seemed to have forgotten where to start from. The robust old farmer, wizened and tempered by the time’s rasp, laughed, had a pun at him, called him a little plume-less peacock, and shouted tea for both of them.

Mehar Singh’s hands were shaking out of nervousness. He appeared clueless as to what to do. He forgot even the little things he knew about cot-making. His mind went blank. If not a straightway beating, as a cripple he expected at least a discounted reprimand by the old farmer.

‘You have hardly any legs left. But instead of begging you decide to earn a living. That is enough job for the day, son. Now relax and have tea first,’ the old farmer patted the novice cot-maker on his shoulder.

‘At least you hands are strong enough to pull the strings and hammer down the sides and legs of the cot-frame. One doesn’t need legs to run while mending cots. On top of that you can see like an owl. Even blind people weave chairs,’ as the old patron’s words got soaked into his sullen spirits, the pall of glumness was lifted from Mehar Singh’s soul.

The old farmer then initiated him into cot-making at the professional level. His instructions were so simple and methodical that the process appeared a fun game. He helped him hand-to-hand in the first two cots, and watched him netting the third one as a lenient judge.

‘Not bad. You will not die of hunger with this skill, son,’ the happy mentor declared.

Furthermore, his guru paid him the full amount for all three charpoys.

Sometime just mustering up courage to start against all odds is sufficient to be victorious.

Mehar Singh felt like flying on his weak legs. Sometimes a drop of water is sufficient for the desert, just by being there, because it keeps the hope of the rains alive.

With his rickety steps, he found himself hoisted onto the rails to move swiftly in spirit if not in letter.

He always felt proud as the father of five children, and prouder still to feed them through work.

Whenever life became tough, he felt that bitter taste in his mouth and that crack-snap sound buzzing though his brain. But he had got back this portion of life through the chronic bitterness of that mysterious concoction, so he had no reason to hate the sourness of life and circumstances. At least he was living and walking limpingly on a pair of legs which appeared still thinner below his gaunt torso.

The children in poor households grow physically slower, but mentally they pre-pone their arrival on the bread-earning stage. His eldest daughter and son are married. At their marriage, even the caterers would accept just a nominal charge, thus helping a man who tried to help himself. Long before the others take up your load, you have to be seen to be lugging ahead at the best of your capacity. Even charity seeks some reasoning in going into somebody’s kitty.

He is a proud grandfather now. His married son is a hawker of cheap clothing and roams the countryside to sell his wares to poor households primarily. Another son is a motorbike repairman. He was once stabbed 25 times. Mehar Singh has reasons to forget and forgive:

‘It was all in the legs and arms. At least they were merciful enough to spare the stomach, chest and heart.’

His youngest twin children are in tenth grade now in the government high school in the village.

And there he goes on his moped, repairing, mending and re-weaving charpoy-nets. His slow steps forcing people to slow down their pace, listen to his stories, and pay him some extra bucks for being a diligent survivor. However bad the times might be, the people still appreciate genuine efforts.

The life stops the moment we feel to be out of options. It starts the moment we take onto a choice. It may not run fast, but it moves, and that’s what is more important.

The Lost Beads of Sweat

 

Most of the people missed his real name. His lower caste defined a major part of what he was as a human being. To make it more specific, they called him ‘Kala’ suitably drawn from his dark complexion. For a proper, formal introduction, his caste stood as the surname whenever a misunderstanding arose about which ‘Kala’ was referred in that particular instance as every village had many people named as such. Hence, he became ‘Kala Chamar’ under this situation and got instantly identified; and immediately pushed into the corridors of unworthy, unimportant symbols in a caste-based society. 

Poverty straightaway gives you a mission in life, the mission to survive. You don’t have to give it too much of thought. From the earliest age you know it that you have to work to survive. That’s how most of the daily wage labourers arrive on the scene. He was no exception. He would happily take any job that came along.

Kala was a very diligent worker. His dedication to the work was usually praised to a fair extent. In a farmers’ society one has to sweat a lot while working to prove that you have given your all to the cause. He had plenty of this certification because he sweated like a well-meaning, fat pig. Well, even the saying had to be reversed here and people said even the pigs sweated like Kala.

He was very strong in built but his hair went thinning. The people had an explanation. His balding pate is meant to facilitate a smooth glide for the sweating beads, they said. After almost three decades of sweating, he had very well achieved the primary targets of a poor man. He had married and had three or four kids despite all the clashes, brawls and arguments with his wife. He had fixed a few bricks to settle his separate family life beyond the domains of his siblings. He also drank in the evenings just like majority of the labourers do at the end of the day, otherwise the night won’t provide rest and the next day will miss the action.

A problem arose in his early forties. He started sweating less. The people got suspicious about his dedication to the job. After some time, the amount of sweating plummeted down drastically. He isn’t putting any effort in work these days, the people gave their verdict. So they would go for younger labourers who sweated more profusely. As a result, his job assignments nosedived.

The reason he had stopped sweating was very simple. It had nothing to do with his willingness to give his all to the task. His high spirits to retain his status as the ‘sweating king’ by giving it all had ruined his knees. Now people also understood and consoled him that all would be well if he took another vocation that would make him sweat a bit less or not at all.

I saw him sitting on the steps of the tiny street shop massaging his unfaithful knees. It was damn hot and all and sundry, even those who merely took the trouble of taking out a needle and putting it back, were sweating profusely. So everybody looked very busy. Kala, but, wasn’t sweating. He had lost the tempo.

It was an exception to see him free at this time of the day, so I asked him about the reason. He tapped his knees and pointed out the culprits who had derailed his sweating life. Try something lighter, I told him and pointed out the counter of the shop behind him.

‘You can open a little provision store in the street. It’s very easy,’ I said.

The shopkeeper glared at me as if insulted over calling his line of job easy. Moreover, he must have panicked that I was planting the seeds of business rivalry in the street. If there was another shop in the neighbourhood his business would be halved.  

In any case, the momentum of three decades of hard work was still too much for the boring, sitting job of keeping a shop. He adopted the line of a wandering vegetable hawker in the streets. He had his rickshaw carrier piled with vegetables and pulled with, to make everyone happy now, with some beads of sweat. The competition was tough. In every street he had a rival bellowing to sell his fresh, leafy greens. The migrant Bihari hawkers were better than him in this regard. They shouted in so many unique cries to draw people’s attention that even the most dull-minded housewife would be forced to crane out her neck and ask what the matter was and ended up buying something.

Kala had been a calm giant. Pitching for sales wasn’t his forte. He mumbled his list of items like an old, retired bull in dull notes that didn’t challenge anyone’s eardrums. So he would pass the streets almost unnoticed with his little bit of beads of sweat. On top of it, his rivals had so many sugar-coated words that it appeared they were fleecing the clients. In comparison, the people found Kala rude and hence refutable.

The sum and summary is that his cart usually returned to his yard with enough load that would surely go stale. So the family had to force feed themselves with cooked vegetables to avoid losses. Overfed with stale vegetables, the couple quarrelled more and the children turned noisier. Kala was literally on his knees but he won’t give up, after all he had been an illustrious sweater. His past still had some rays to inspire him to work more, I mean sweat more.

Hugely overfed with leftover stale vegetables that found a place in the family’s stomach instead of the dustbin—because the latter would have been a catastrophe—he could afford to take a week’s break and think of a strategy that would outfox his rivals. He thought and thought and thought. Now this indeed brought him a lot of sweating because thinking was totally new to him and unknown territory. He found it the toughest job. He even thought of taking ‘thinking’ as an occupation because it left him with big beads of sweating and made him the Kala of yore. But then another gem of a thought convinced him that this ‘thinking’ job will leave his stomach empty. So he had to abandon the idea. And he thought more and got more sweat.

A passing farmer got very happy looking at the shiny beads and said, ‘You seem to have regained the old habit of working really hard, do you need a job now?’ 

His hitherto unharnessed mind gave a rich crop. Kala had the gem of an idea that would bring tears of agony to the eyes of his rivals. Even in the happiest spirits, he was not in a position to share it with his wife and children because that may aggravate the situation a bit. It had to be swiftly carried out, promptly like a coup.

Next morning, he got up early, bathed and went to the town vegetable market to purchase an assortment of items. Coming back home, he crept around like a stealthy tiny mouse to the best product in the house, which competed with the cheap television set in defining their lives. It was the sky blue refrigerator, the purveyor of coolness in the scorching sands of their lives.

He started putting out the meagre items contained in it. His wife stood with her fists on her prominent love handles by the side of copious belly fat and looked ready to use them if the need arose. The fridge was empty and she was just ready to pounce upon him for this mad act. Kala, relieved from the emptying job, walked up to his wife and offered the rarest of sweet endearment he could manage with his gruffy notes. In any case, she retorted with her shrillest notes and punched away his gentle shove and hit hard at his nape.

As the scheme stood open, there was literally mayhem in the house. The children cried and his wife shouted abuses and hollered out her ill destiny for getting married to him. But Kala was not to be dissuaded. After all, he had given it so much of thought, even to the extent of getting profusely sweaty again. She could feel it that he was so determined that if she tried to stop him, he would first break something in her body and then walk over her limp physicality to try loading the refrigerator all by himself. And that would imperil the shape of the dear object. So she called a few neighbours to help her husband.

The refrigerator was loaded onto the rickshaw cart. Kala expertly fixed it with ropes so that it wouldn’t fall but could be opened at will. Then he crammed it to the guts with his vegetables and set out to beat the rivals.

‘People need cool, fresh vegetables. Now they cannot ignore my stuff,’ he proudly declared.

People surely noticed it. People certainly like fresh vegetables but given a chance they would prefer a fresh spectacle even more. The refrigerator grabbed more attention than the fresh vegetables inside. The spectators shouted, clapped, whistled, hooted, booed and put out many varied exclamations born of a new exhibition. The sale was almost the same as earlier but he surely stole the limelight. 

He was moving with great effort because now the load was manifold. His body was getting the very same sweat beads of old times. It was putting a great strain on his knees. The ice in the freezer was thawing. There were beads of cold inside the container and beads of heat on his body. I saw him pulling his heavy load on the road outside the village. He looked like an old bull lurching to some destination. Since he was sweating so profusely, it meant he was giving his best to the trade. And many were the people who remarked, ‘Kala indeed is very hardworking!’