MUSINGS
On the highway
MINI KRISHNAN
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Sometimes city life makes us too closed to recognise and accept gifts given generously.
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Illustration: Surendra
On a glorious morning in May 1982, just after the first rains in Karnataka, our elderly Fiat was wheezing along the Mandya highway. This was before the era of airconditioned cars from Korea/Japan/Germany so if we hit 60 kmph, the wind outside set up
a satisfying roar and we thought we were flying. It was also a time when my architect husband could persuade me and our daughters (too young to argue) to believe that his site-meetings could also be our holidays. Many an hour did we spend under a dripping umbrella while he stormed about on moonscapes where his projects were shaping.
Well, as we drove along, I was admiring some of the most fertile farmlands of India when my husband pulled up and stepping out, said, “I’ll just take a look at my Dairy Development site...” and walked away through a path in the fields planted with sugarcane where two men with files had been waiting for us to come by. Now I knew why we had taken this picturesque detour. Not because it was picturesque. I settled down to an hour-long wait at the very least, during which time the children hopped on the road and argued about whether it was “sugar cane”, “sugarcane” or “sugar-cane”.
I opened the door, stepped out of the car and looked up and down the road. Except for a dignified-looking bullock leading his sleeping owner in the opposite direction to the one we were travelling in, the highway was deserted. City-bred and city-bound as we were, I felt a rush of wellbeing as the breath of a region of plenty sighed and fell all around us. Years later, when Ramachandra and Padma Sharma translated Kuvempu’s House of Kannuru, the opening lines of the novel matched my memory of the way the road in Mandya looked that day.
Quite suddenly, a man who had been cutting sugarcane in the field, walked towards us carrying some sugarcane sticks and his aruvaal. “Oh no,” I thought to myself, “how shall I tell him I don’t want to buy any of his cane?” As he climbed feebly up the gentle incline to the road, I noticed his stained clothes and worn face and felt both the pressure of anxiety and the discomfort of not knowing the local language. How was I going to distance myself from his wares without looking standoffish or close-fisted?
Misunderstood gesture
When he reached the road he was just a few feet away from me. He smiled and held out the cane to me.
“No-no,” I signalled and smiled desperately, hoping to be understood.
Again he smiled and dipped his head this way and that, rolled his eyes and held out the cane. My daughters of eight and six, who had been playing behind the car came to a standstill. The farmer placed his aruvaal on the ground, the cane sticks on the car and signalled that he didn’t want money.
Then — what? What did he want? I wondered.
“For the children....for the children,” he said hoarsely, in words I couldn’t follow linguistically but grasped intuitively because he pointed towards them and mimed how good the cane would be, to chew.
I felt helpless before the force of a generosity I had completely misunderstood and underestimated. How accustomed I had grown to city trade and how unprepared for gifts from an impoverished Indian. It was impossible to tell how old he was because his face bore that ageless look that hardworked rural people have. But his message was both clear eternal: offer what you have to the passing stranger and ask for nothing in return.
Email: minik@satyam.net.in
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