CULTURE
Mystery of the missing toes
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Exclusive extracts from Manoj Das' recently published, episodic autobiography of childhood in an Oriyan Village.
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FOR any celebration or function in our house, the entire village came together spontaneously and worked like a family. It was not necessary to allot work. They knew who should construct the special wedding platform, who should go shopping, on whom would rest the task of cooking, who was to serve, and so on. Father's cousins were more active than Father in organising the celebrations.
At last came the much awaited day. From early in the morning, friends and maids who saw Snehalata through a series of rituals surrounded her. There was frequent blowing of conch shells. Laughter of ladies inside the house and the hullabaloo of relatives and villagers outside charged the atmosphere with excitement. Under a thatch sat the sehnai players and drummers, with some very aged people for their immediate and attentive audience. Yudhistir saw to it that they were served with pans and hookahs at frequent intervals.
Evening set in. A villager came running, gasping for breath, to report that the bridegroom's party should arrive in an hour's time. From the top of the tallest coconut tree that he had climbed for the purpose, he had seen fireworks against the sky over the village beyond a mile-long paddy field.
Any member of a bridegroom's party, whatever be his status in his own community or village, was a VIP. He wouldn't live up to his role unless he proved himself extremely touchy. He was entitled to feel peeved even if he found the mosquito that bit him in the bride's village plumper than in his own village.
Villagers, one after another, were coming with reports on the progress of the bridegroom's party. Soon we could see the rockets rising high and bursting into sparkling flowers. The procession, headed by musicians and trailed by a curious lot, the bridegroom and his father riding two palanquins borne by six bearers each followed by the members of the party constituting its middle portion, reached the small earthen embankment at the northern end of our village. Respectable men of the locality and a number of our relatives in their best dhotis and shirts — some of them had wrapped themselves up in their prestigious woollen shawls even though it was summer — had already gathered there to receive the party amidst a sea of village folk. It is difficult to explain the eagerness of everybody to steal a glimpse of the bridegroom, jostling and elbowing his or her way close to the palanquin, even though he would be on public display only minutes later.
I was dying to be with my pals and witness the crawling procession, but I had been made to hold a bottle of rose water, which I must sprinkle on the guests as they sat down on carpets, leaning against bolsters. I was trying the scented water on myself when someone shook me and asked in a whisper, "What happened?"
"What?"
"Why is your grandmother so agitated? Why are the ladies on the verge of tears?"I had no idea. I rushed into our inner apartment. Inside a room several ladies — aunts and other venerable ones — stood obviously upset.
"Tell us once again — did you see correctly? Let me hear you describe him!" my mother's mother was examining a cousin of mine, a girl in her teens.
"Ai! He is handsome, adorned with a butterfly moustache too, but... "
"But?"
"I looked at his feet again and again, keeping pace with the palanquin... "
The girl wiped her eyes and mumbled in a cracking voice her tragic discovery, "As I said, he does not have a single toe. Really, none at all, none, I swear!"
"Hm. I'm going to cry a halt to the wedding. Think of a girl in a million like our Sneha, a veritable fairy, to be sacrificed to a toeless stranger! Sporting a moustache, is he? Why didn't you, stupid girl, put a burning matchstick to it? growled Grandma looking menacing.
The music had grown louder. Deafening crackers were bursting repeatedly. For a moment I forgot the shocker burst by my cousin and rushed out into the open.
The palanquin was lowered. Amidst the chanting of hymns and helped by Father, the bridegroom alighted from it. At once the bridegroom's servant took his socks — which matched his skin perfectly — for ritual demanded that his feet be washed. Lo and behold, all his toes emerged intact.
I handed over the rose-water sprinkler to an eager relative and rushed to Grandma and disclosed the mystery of the missing toes. She smiled. "I knew, my grandson Manmath could not have settled for anything inferior to a diamond among his classmates... " said Grandma hugging my blushing sister and blushing herself.
Chasing the Rainbow: Growing up in an Indian Village, Manoj Das, OUP, Rs. 275.
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