In the Village

We sit in the balcony, done with the dinner. Moths and butterflies flutter around the light bulb; electricity is more regular here and the insects abound in this wilderness. Some of these insects come tumbling down, perhaps burnt by the heat of the light bulb; you should be equipped with robust reflexes lest they find their way into your eyes. Beyond the light from this light bulb is darkness of the night that oscillates with the rhythm of the lunar glow. The darkness of the night however is not vacant. Chirping of the crickets fills this emptiness, almost deafeningly. Crickets appear to rule this place at night. In the colossal darkness of an abandoned village where puny lights make a feeble attempt to compete with the night, crickets sing songs of glory to their mighty delight, almost mocking the flaccid human presence. At this time of the night fears are different: tigers, snakes and solitude. What draws my folks to this wretched place, I wonder.

At its glorious days, this village hosted nearly 20 households. Now the count is only four. Earlier, they started moving to Besi (lower part of the hill). More recently, they have moved to cities or abroad. Older buildings have been brought down and their construction materials reused. Or, they have toppled down on their own, their walls and beams crumbling down from lack of care; their ruins now remain hidden underneath the wildly growing grasses and shrubs nourished by monsoon rains. The village is a relic of the past, now a playground for the nature.  

In the morning, I venture out to Besi to visit villagers. This is how you do it: start at one corner and go house-to-house saying hello. You do not pre-inform them. So you never know who you will meet, what they might be doing when you meet. One of them was taking shower in the open when I met. We pretty much completed our entire conversation while he was taking shower, me sitting on a bench, him answering and questioning while applying soap, washing, and changing his underwear. He even took the opportunity to point out to me the scar of his inguinal hernia that was repaired at Bir Hospital, unperturbed that his pubic hairs were peeking out. Most of the households have older people only. The younger ones are away: to cities or abroad. The village is not without activity, however. The fields are still plowed and planted. Many of these households still have cattle; actually it was noticeable how goats were bustling in several of these houses: bird-flu has made goat sale quite profitable. The whole of the Besi has running water now (it has actually been nearly a decade since they used the local government fund to set up water supply; money was used for the construction materials, they contributed the labor). While fetching water took significant portion of their time before, that is not a concern now. Rather, some of these houses have set up make-shift ponds using water from these taps and put fish in it. I hear there are a few folks around the area who have been doing commercial fish farming and made a fortune out of it. Electricity has reached each of these households. Villagers carried the electricity poles on their own and planted these poles to bring electricity. Many now have TVs at their homes. They have even connected the village with a dirt road to the nearby larger road (which still is a dirt road but it is included in the government’s plan to be paved). They had asked for the local government money to get a dozer to trace out this road. These inner roads, however, are not useable. Rain has taken away parts of it and it remains covered with grass for the most part.

You go from one house to another listening to the stories and struggles. They are the stories of a 79-year-old man cutting grass to feed his cattle and that of this city-dwelling brother who had to have heart surgery in his 50s, a retired government officer who comes to the village to fill his vacant time: his driver cooking food and him tending the fields inherited from his father, of a school teacher torn between his job and difficulty of getting workers to tend to the fields, of a young girl who has come to another villager to ask for Hari Bansha Acharya’s “Chino Harayeko Manche” and who gets it with a precondition that she returns it in 2 days without any stain, of an old man who is hurt by how he has been treated by others, of all the women who have gone out to a nearby temple to celebrate Teej and have been dancing to the Teej songs shrieking out of a cassette player, of the village empty of the women because all of them have gone away to the temple, of a young man who has returned from Malaysia and plans to go back soon and of his pot belly; of his green shirt with iPhone written on it,  of a child who has been having fever and vomited once; of his pulse and temperature and belly, of an old man who is sad that all his orange trees are ruined by a disease…

They are stories of livelihoods, of a drive to pursue prosperity and comfort, of fears, of happiness, of envy and of disgust. This society has already seen some of the darkest days in the political wrangling. But what struck me was how they have more or less stayed the same. Even before I could search my memory to come with a proper identification of these villagers, they would have already addressed me with: Eh Kanchha, when did you come? It was as if I was never gone for them. The village seems to have a life of its own pace, certain constancy. Things might change around them, but they are steadfast in their daily strives and everything else is peripheral, transitory and fleeting.