Time-travel

The train stops at Muniguda for two minutes. It is a small station, only 2 platforms. I got-off the train, walked out without an incident and met a dusty, untidy town. A yellow auto-rickshaw and an orange mini-bus waited on red ground, on either side of the broad, short flight of stairs.

Having grown-up in pre-liberalized, socialist India, venturing into deep-country has a quality of time-travel for me. There’s a healthy chaos, a sovereign indiscipline, neutral public spaces, unhijacked by commerce and life, yet unstandardized.

The auto-driver attempts to dupe me. I postpone my nostalgic indulgence, get a local opinion and trim his quote by 30%. He acquiesces without throwing a tantrum. It’s not too bad I guess. He made his move, I made mine. We played fair.

At the Living Farms Block Center, I met local Kondh aadivaasi boys, Prakash and Krushna, who graciously offered to host me for the next little over a week. By the time we started for the Sahada village, 34 km away, on the newly constructed roads of the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojna, the sun was all set to call it a day.

The town receded into the village and the village gave in to the forest in incident-free transitions. Just like I got-off the train, on to the station and out into town, incident-free. When villages reasserted, the forest took a step back. The Kondh have a way with their woods. The woods have a way with their Kondh.

The road was not too broad, quite adequate for the volume of traffic it served. The sky was dark and cloudy, the breeze heavy with moisture but pleasant, big trees lined both sides of the street, buzzed with fire-flies. It made me beam down to the gut. A scorpion crossed the street at a merry pace.

Big beady drops came down on us, initially at a pace that one hoped to dodge. I reached for my rain-jacket to cover my laptop bag. Prakash held up the umbrella for Krushna, who was riding. Soon the assault intensified and we were really not Kevlar-bound. We sought shelter in the foyer of a home with an attached grocery-store.

The man of the house came out and fumbled around for a lost key. His wife followed. They chit-chatted in the native language, Kui. The man stank of mahuli, liquor made from the flower of the Mahua tree. In the Niyaam Giri forests, if a sound is uttered in any language but Kui, the hills would morph, they warned, and the trespasser would be lost in a warp.

It rained for an hour and then possibly it was time for the water-man to go to bed. So we were back on the road.

As we pulled-in home, a human form that had lain on the porch got up. It was a mad-woman. She had taken up residence in the porch that was barely broad enough to park a bike. She sat perched on the low side-wall during the day and rolled into a ball at the same venue at night. The boys let her be.

I don’t mind ‘mad’ folks too much; mostly because mad is a relative concept. You would be equally mad in the mad-man’s assessment. Only that he’s not so keen to impose his perspective on the world. In that, he seems saner to me.

In a world where an outfit steals and poisons communal water supplies to produce a sweetened toilet-cleaner and then has the gall to pitch it as an agent of happiness, camaraderie and even world-peace.

Where men who would regard themselves educated, sophisticated, even wise, acquiesce and become party to this arrangement, instead of taking-up arms against it.

Where to be ‘the most recognized brand’ is a haloed aspiration and attracts the ‘best’ talent. Strip-off the jargon and it is just euphemism for ‘mine is bigger/ better than yours’, a trait of a mind that has not progressed beyond early adolescence.

In such a world, who is to call another mad?

*

Dinner was cancelled as it was deemed too much of an effort with the kerosene stove and all. The boys had bought biscuits and I had a pack left from my journey. It was a hearty biscuit and sweet-bun meal and lights-out, a little after 10.

*

The new day began before 6, rather effortlessly. As I walked back from brushing my teeth, the mad-woman was sanitizing the insides of her mouth with a pikka, a beautiful roll of Saal leaf, stuffed with what’s locally called Dhooan Patta (smoke leaf). It was a rich shade of brown, due to its ‘farm-fresh’ pedigree, about 5 inches long, rolled to a mini-chillum form.

After this introduction, I saw the pikka everywhere I went. Cleaved between the ear and the temple or held nonchalantly between the first two fingers. The joint being fat made the index finger crook over it, giving the bearer a ‘bad-ass’ look, even if it were a 70-year old grandma.

Not so with the mad-woman though. She just looked empty. Or I didn’t bother to look hard enough. She blew shapeless puffs of smoke and intermittently spat copious volume of saliva, rather sonorously, ‘puchuk’. Her hair, a frizzy boy-cut and face studded with snazzy adivaasi jewelry. The more adventurous might describe her as a spent-out rock-n-rolla. I am a bit blasé for that.

*

The morning called for an early start so the plan to eat was shelved again. I tuned-in to my system to check for hunger-pangs, didn’t feel any. I wondered if I was trying to not be too imposing as a guest.

When I signed-up for a Vippashyana retreat many years ago, a meditation program that requires participants to practice silence, sexual abstinence and not use intoxicants for 10 days, I was a regular smoker, user of alcohol and a recreational marijuana-man. However, it was none of my vices but the fact that the last meal of the day was a light snack at 5PM that gnawed me endlessly.

I wondered if Rahul Gandhi was right when he said, ‘poverty is a state-of-mind.’ Maybe hunger too, like poverty, is a state-of-mind. Maybe the bloody junkie is worth more than I ever gave him credit for.

The mad-woman spits like clock-work, once every 4 minutes or so, a voluminous blob of ‘puchuk’. It is the only thing that breaks her emotive monologue. She’s both parties in the argument, the narrator and the audience. She delivers the punch-line and she’s the one laughing.

*

A father and a son walked past me as I was returning with Krushna from a not too great first outing to the woods. Daddy had a strong odor on him.

: Yahan log khoob Mahuli peete hain? (Do people consume a lot of alcohol?)

: Haan. (Yes.)

: Fir pee ke, ladaai-jhagda bhi karte hain? (Do they get into brawls when drunk?)

: Haan, karte hain. (Yeah, they do.)

: Aur auraton ko bhi maarte hain ghar mein? (Do they also beat their women?)

: Sob.. sob. Sob karte hain. (Yes, that too.)

That's a heart-breaker! Even paradise isn’t all that.

*

This is the second essay in the series of short writings based on my experiences during recent travel to the villages and forests of Niyaam Giri in Rayagarh district, south Orissa. The tour was kindly facilitated by Living Farms, an NGO doing stellar work with local Kondh aadivaasis on food-sovereignty and farming related issues. Food-sovereignty is not the same as food-security, which for the most part is a Govt-purported farce.

The Niyaam Giri are home to the Kondh deity, Niyaam Raja and to extremely rich bauxite reserves that, some commentators believe, have already been sold on the global commodity futures market through hundreds of MoUs signed by the Govt. with large mining conglomerates, Indian and foreign.

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