Of little people, rolling stones and leaf huts

As I walked towards the little leaf hut, few kids ran before me to show me their house.  I entered the hut (Kumbha) and found that I could barely stand up straight.  My head almost touched the roof.  An earthen pot on a small wood fire was the only asset I found inside the hut. In the little time I got to rove around my eyes across the room, I remember, I did not find anything else.

I came out and went to the nearby brick building where some men and women had gathered for a meeting.

There was an array of brick houses built from Indira Awaas Yojna, which lined the settlement. The houses looked quite empty.

“We got the houses from the BDO” informed one of them.

“So, why don’t you live there?” I was curious.

“We don’t like living inside a brick house.  We prefer our leaf-houses” I was told.

“So, what do you do with the brick houses made from the Yojna?”

“We tie our goats there!”

I was in a little hamlet inhabited by the Birhor tribe, in Chouparan block in Hazaribagh.  I was working with a Volunatry Organisation which was working with this community in thrift and agriculture. That is why I could visit the hamlet and peek into their amazing life, at times.

I would always find them outside their huts. They were mostly found sitting under warm sun, all of them together.  Apart from the little agriculture work, they were mostly engaged in rope making.  The kids lolling on the sand did not go to the school and were around the hamlet all day.

This hamlet had a women’s thrift group and had elected a smart, smiling lady as the President.  Although I do not recall her name, I still remember her pleasant disposition and her confident gait when she walked up to the cluster meeting, one day, with her accounts registers and small metallic cash box, to get the accounts of the group, ‘audited’. She had found a silver earring lying somewhere, on her way; she had picked it up and wore it in one ear, flaunting it.

There was another Birhor hamlet in the Barhi Block.  The group had a smart young guy, who had been to the Block Development Office and the Barhi market. So, he had seen enough of the world.  He also led the hamlet in most of the community construction activities and was very much a modern man.  I had accompanied him to his hamlet once for some work.  While the hamlet residents were busy in the construction work, I sat by a small stream with a young girl of the community.

On that particular day, I remember, I was quite down, emotionally.  I was missing home, the weather was bit gloomy and I sat quietly by the stream, reminiscing about mundane as well as serious things in life.  I had been picking some small stones which were rushing past, in the stream.  In few minutes, the stone would turn into small sand and wash away.  After sometime, it became a play and I enjoyed doing that; letting the sand gush out of my fingers along with the stream.  

The Birhor girl was talking to me about the forest.  About the birds, the countless herbs which grew,  which made all ills well and how they were losing the wisdom with each generation because no one wrote them down or documented anything what-so-ever.  When she saw me involved with the tiny stones, she said, “These are weaker stones which flow away with the water, as sands.  They are dead rocks.  Alive are the rocks which do not break down even if the flow is fast and the water hits them hard.” That day, in that gloomy late afternoon, sitting in the forest, the nameless Birhor girl rendered to me, life’s lesson which even she did not know, she did. Only I knew how much I needed the lessons on that particular day.

In the same hamlet, was an older man, by the name Rajkumar Birhor, who had been suffering from serious cough. Our colleague accompanied him to Barhi and decided to get the blood checked.  We all doubted tuberculosis and wanted to start the treatment early.  However, Rajkumar was furious at the idea and shouted, “Maine apne baap ko kabhi khoon nahi deeyaa…tumhare aspataal ko doongaa?” (“I have never spared a drop of blood for my father; do you think I shall donate it to your hospital?”).  Such was his fury that our colleague treated him to his favorite rasgullas to ease the tension.

The challenge was doubled, when the blood test reported everything okay.  Even as we sighed with relief, we were equally worried that Rajkumar, knowing that he had no TB, would be very angry that some of his precious blood was drained unnecessarily! 

Our organization had been trying to introduce Japanese method of rice cultivation, among the Birhors.  In our project site at Karma village, the activity took up speed and the project team consistently discouraged them from what they would otherwise do: begging door to door. We thought we had settled them into a decent livelihood, when suddenly one day our team member, found some of the residents begging at the office door. Worth mentioning is, when they realized that it was our office, they took to their heels and later totally denied having begged even once.

Such was the interesting life of the Birhors.  Life stood still at the hamlets while the world hustled and bustled on the Grand Trunk Road, barely 2 km away from them. Even when the glitters of a modern life slowly approached them, in the guise of Government Projects for settling them, our Birhor brothers and sisters found warmth around the hearth inside their little leaf Kumbhas.  

Chooha’s Diary

Please! My name is not Chooha. I belong to the chooha species and I don’t have a name.  Since I am not a member of Homo Sapiens or any of their pets’ species, they don’t care enough to give a name.  Only two mice in Disney’s imagination have received names till now.

But that is not the subject of my story.

I want to tell the world, that in last few days, I have learnt two life-lessons:

   1.                  Small is beautiful, small is strong.  I may be small but I am not helpless

       2.                    The humans are actually afraid of us, so they are after our life

See, I am not under-estimating them.  But they did. They initially ignored my presence. Later, when they found the droppings on the kitchen slab, the lady of the house was alarmed.  I know it is the sheer obsession with cleanliness, not that she will get a plague.

But then the bugles were blown and war was on.

They closed all doors and windows and holes and hollows, they knew.  What they did not know was that my magnificent presence was already there near the small gap in the pantry. For few days I had a lovely treat of flour, biscuits, wood.  See, we are not very finicky.  If not food, we will do with wood.

But then the humans were threatened again.  They care a lot too much about their life, almost believing that life will never end.

So, they chased me once.  I must agree, I ran for life but then I had fun too.  I like dangerous games.

Only trouble was that the lady saw my route.  She turned out to be smarter than I had thought.

The next evening, they put a sticky mat at the kitchen entrance, intending to catch me…dead or alive.  The smart humans did not know I was smart too.  I have seen one of my heartthrobs getting stuck at the malicious sticky mat and losing life; so I was careful. 

But then I had to bite the wooden doors with the belief that someday I will be able to make a hole to enter the kitchen.  I very carefully moved aside the mat.  I had to be extra careful with my long tail. I continued biting off the wooden door.

Next day, I can imagine, the lady could not have comprehended what was happening.  She put the mat once again, and again. Again and again I neatly moved the mat and did my job.

I tell you, humans are a threatened species.  They will do anything to claim their space over everything on Earth..and few years later, on Mars. Only, be sure, the initial experiments will be carried out on us.

Anyway, the fourth evening of war was on and they placed the mat vertically, obviously imagining that when I try to remove it, my whiskers or mouth will get stuck.  They imagine too much!

But then, I did my job again neatly, removing the sticky mat like a door being opened.  While doing that, I noticed that few small cockroaches and a small translucent baby lizard were caught and were dead. 

The family got a new mat then.  As it would have happened,  the naughty neighbourhood kid got caught in that when the kids were chasing each other.  The family members spent a day scrubbing the glue off the floor, the kid’s legs, off the wash room.…

But I am walking free even today.  They have now closed all the avenues but I visit there just for the fun of it and my sheer need for innovation.  Innovating new tricks to fool the endangered species.

The war is on.  I am not worried about life coming to an end.  They are afraid.  They live long and die very old and sick.  Not us.

Oh! The humans…

Till I die, I will enjoy them.

They moved my cheese

I will move them......

Homecoming

The blue-green bus made its way to the muddy village bus stop and Shaila alighted from the bus.  She took a deep breath to smell the wet air.  It had rained and it was still cloudy when Shaila reached the little hamlet strewn across the hill.

It had taken twelve hours in the rickety bus to reach this village.  The villagers had waited for her arrival.  Her mother, whom she lovingly called Mani, had left the mortal world the previous morning.  The neighbors had informed her and asked her if they should wait for her.

Shaila reached her home, which was about half a kilometre from the bus-stop.  She could feel sympathetic eyes following her.  “This girl’s mother has died”.  Everyone seemed to whisper.

There was a crowd near her house.  No, there was no wailing heard.  In about twenty hours, the initial shock had subsided and the women were sitting calmly.  Few men were standing outside, puffing on local cigars.

She could see all the arrangements made outside her home, to take her mother in the last journey.

Shaila did not feel one among them. They were not her people.  She did not belong to this remote, hilly village which not even a post office would be aware of.  She was from another land.  She was different.

As she entered an unusually quiet room, she could see her Mani lying peacefully, with her hands holding on to her sacred text. A sudden pang of anger took over Shaila. She was angry at her own disability to do anything, she was angry at her Mani’s stubborn decisions, she was angry at everything and she was helpless.  She felt helpless among the strangers around.

What followed was a series of rituals which left her no room to grieve in private.  The village priest arrived with élan and took over the rights to the rites. 

She could sense that the villagers were sorry for her.  Not sorry that she had lost her Mani, but sorry because she was too urban to know any ritual that is usually conducted in the village.

She could see that this time she was allowed to perform all the rites which were supposed to ease her Mani’s passage beyond this world.  She had severed the ties with the village when, after her Babu had died few years back, she was not allowed to perform any ritual since she was a girl.  A girl could not appease the ancestors and bring peace on a household where death had its devastating dance cruelly staged.

She knew very little of the rites performed by the village priest and his aids.  Mani and Babu had sent her to boarding school early in life,  from the hill life, for there was no proper school in the tiny hamlet they called home.  After Babu left, Mani had refused to leave the home although Shaila had time and again urged her ailing mother to join her, for a better health care. But Mani was insistent upon spending her last days at her own place.

Shaila had no regrets for her mother. Mani had a good life. She had been loved by her life partner, respected by the extended family, regarded by the entire village as a woman of great virtue.  She lived her life on her own terms and died in her own style, on the earth chosen by her.

The days that followed, saw Shaila in middle of a perplexed life situation.  By some queer rule, she had to cook her own rice on the wood fire, forego slippers, have bath before sunrise, and wear only the traditional rough cotton cloth. 

But in middle of all these, the neighbors would sometimes, walk in with cooked food, obviously feeling sorry for the urban girl who would have found it so difficult to manage the wood fire.  

At times, some of them would get some hot water for her in the wee hours of the morning, apparently to ease the pain of their village daughter.  

One day the village priest visited her, praised her parents and then advised her to move around the village, visit the people.  While leaving the house, he advised her to wear her slippers since it was the middle of a bad monsoon and she should not be very harsh with herself.

Shaila noticed, these people did so much but spoke so little, seldom did their emotion find words.

During the next few days, as she took few rounds in the village, she noticed that a school had been built in the village and little children walked all the way to the school, in the early morning rain, wearing big polythene sheets over the heads.  Some cycled up the gravelled path.  And the school bustled with laughter. There was life there.  There were new roads coming up and few cemented shops had popped up in the bazaar.  Shaila realized she knew the village so little.  She had left it so long ago.

During the wet evenings, the village women gathered around Shaila to listen to all the stories she brought from the far away town.  Of honking vehicles, pitch black streets, high buildings and rice which had to be bought from store.  The women gathered around a little fire and chatted about her mother, about their common sisterhood, of their own world and of skies they never saw, of paths they never treaded on. 

After few days, the mourning officially came to an end with a festive mood where the villagers invited themselves to Shaila’s house.  There was rice, spicy curries, fish and there was the locally brewed wine.  Shaila laughed to herself, watching them submerge in a festivity.  They submerged and then emerged a smiling lot, her own people.  She felt a sudden ache and a pleasure at the same time, wishing to reach up to them, to each of them. To these people, to her own people.  The mourning had ended.  Life had moved on.

Early next morning, the sun shone softly.  There was dew on the leaves and grass and the sunlight danced with myriad colours, like a child had cried all night and woken up smiling in the morning, after being pampered, loved and cuddled.

It was to be a grand farewell. She locked the house and handed over the key to the neighbor and asked her to use everything she wanted, in the house.  Everyone followed her to the bus stop.  Some gifted her pickles, some packed some raw rice for her so that she could avoid rice bought from the store.  The school children brought her lace-bordered handkerchiefs with her name stitched on them, one handkerchief for each day of the week. 

As the bus arrived, for the first time she heard these people break into a loud wail.  They said it felt as if Mani was leaving again, taking their soul away from them.  The loved her Mani.  Her beautiful Mani.

Shaila boarded the bus.  Few children followed the bus to some distance until the bus conductor shooed them away.

Shaila waved goodbye once again.

She would return.  Return to her own land, to her own people, to the land she belonged.

The Homecoming would happen....

The day of the SCORPION

I am sure, anyone my age and with an interest in the Bollywood, do remember the evergreen song from Madhumati, where the young, ravishing Vaijantimala dances around, with her beautiful smile, singing to the sweetest of tunes and complaining of a Scorpion Bite. Yes, it IS ‘Charh gayo paapi bichua’ from Madhumati.

I promise you, in real life, it would not be that fun dancing around when the scorpion poison makes a stride towards your one and only heart and you decide on what is the LAST WISH on earth.  ‘Saiyaan ko dekhke utar gayo bichhua?’ No, thanks. Not even Dilip Kumar can cajole the single-focussed Bichua ka zahar to make a U-turn.

How do I know it? Well, I, once was the Vaijanthimala of a real life drama, sans Dilip Kumar, ofcourse.

So, the story goes life this…and a REAL LIFE one, this is:

Once upon a time there lived a young rural development professional who was posted in a remote block in Hazaribagh.  Her name was Anindita. As a part of her gruelling induction process in her new organisation, she had to stay in a village, Mahuatanr, for about ten days, with a family.

So, I, that is Anindita was quite enjoying my stay with the family.  One fine morning, I had my usual bath at the well.  The day was busy.  It was the sowing season and the entire village was busy in rice plantation.  I had all my toiletries like cold cream, talcum powder, etc in a polythene bag, shoved away in one corner of the single living room, which the family had. 

I put my hand inside the bag, hurriedly, conscious of the time ticking away. Suddenly there was ONE BIG STING, my finger hurt badly and suddenly in a reflex action, my hand jerked itself away in one instant.  Only then I noticed the little devil, in a confident gait, slowly ramping its way out of my bag.

A red coloured small scorpion, after having done its job, walked away, where, I do not know.

I only knew that I had a tearing pain in the hand and it was fast spreading all over, to all my fingers, up to my elbow and then shoulders. The pain covered me and I had perspiration on my head.

My host had observed the last part of the drama, of the scorpion striding away.  She wasted no time and gathered the entire family in the compound.  News spread as fast as the spread of my pain and I calmly seated myself at the threshold of a room with number of visitors sitting on the compound, praying for me.  I tried to smile and look casual, to avoid any kind of worry for my host.

There was no medical practitioner in the remote village nor was any easy transport available. The villagers did whatever they could to ease my pain.

After a short while, a tall person draped interestingly, appeared, holding some peacock feathers.  The villagers made way for him.  He expertly put some herb-paste at the tip of the bitten finger and efficiently brushed the peacock feathers on my head and hand, chanting few lines.  This went on for a few minutes.  He then announced that the pain may take a day to subside and then took his leave. So, this was the only medical assistance I received.

The villagers dispersed in a while and then everybody proceeded with the paddy sowing work.

The pain did not subside but I tried to concentrate on the festivities and the community banquet till afternoon.

By late afternoon, there was yet another challenge to my tolerance.   My host announced that she wanted to visit the Tilaiya haat (weekly market) to buy the provisions which she needed for hosting lunch for the village, for the sowing day.  She suggested that I accompany her, which will make me feel good.

So, there I walked, 5 kms one way, climbing up and down the hilly path.  The first thing I did on reaching the Tilaiya Haat was call up my best friend and inform about the incident.  That was the first time I felt like breaking down and tears trickled down.  I did not inform my parents.

After spending few hours, we returned. It was an uphill walk and my host smartly walked up with a sack of 25 kg of potatoes on her head.  I was panting and gasping for breath.

As we reached Mahuatanr, the menfolk were busy plucking the transplanted saplings for next day’s sowing.  As the Sun God made its way down the sky, my pain also made its own descend, albeit very slowly.

The pain left me after 24 hrs but the memory did not leave.  God bless you scorpion, you gave Vaijantimala a super hit song and me, a reason to write this note.