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Country wheat, city chaff
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Folklore Soon it will be threshing time in the fields. R.V. Smith takes a peek at the rural life and comes back the wiser for some rustic wisdom
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Threshing will be the main activity in the fields around Delhi soon. Threshing machines make work faster but they are a nuisance all the same, claiming human limbs in the bargain. This has been accepted as an occupational hazard now and so the tears
that are shed over the loss are not idle ones, but those whose bitterness is tinged with determination.
Stroll around these fields in April and find out for yourself the intensity of the work that takes precedence over anything else on the farm, where those who labour under the sun eat their thick rotis with onions, eyeing the sheaves that are yet to the threshed. If in one of these a bird has laid eggs, it lies untouched until such time as the feathered friend finds it convenient to transfer the nest elsewhere.
Look at those women blowing the grain in the strong wind to drive away the chaff. They are sturdy specimens of the region adjoining the Capital and their arms are just as strong as a man’s. . But not everywhere does one find women in groups. There are fields where a man threshes with his son for helper and a woman and her daughter-in-law blow away the chaff, the grain coming down in a gradual motion to form a huge mound of clean wheat that looks golden in the strong sunlight. And there are places where only a single woman blows her burden in the breeze. Linger on till the sun sets behind the distant trees in a golden halo. That’s the time when the chores are over for the village folks and they relax on stringed cots among the sheaves, which are precious to them. Here they eat and sleep at night too. And as the hookah is puffed you hear a witty tale that has come down unsullied over the years. Hear it through and you will return home a wiser man.
How much of life we miss we only realise when away from metropolitan existence. Here in the fields the air is free of exhaust fumes and tempts one to breathe deep until the women start arriving, with lunch for the farmers on their heads, and balancing it just as they would a ‘chatty’ on their dainty way from the ‘panghat’ of the village well.
Good and bad days
As the farmer ate his meal one spoke to him about his life. His mouth full of roti and chilli pickle he confided that there are good days and bad ones. On Monday and Saturday a man will not plough with his face to the east. On both these days the demon of the four directions (Disa Sal) remains in the east. He wiped his brow and quenched his thirst with the water his wife gave him to drink. “Wednesday is good for sowing and Thursday for cutting the crop,” he added.
“Now it is as pleasant as it should be. But you should see the fields in the summer months when the loo blows like the devil here and we wonder if the rains would come at all. And talking of the devil, I’m worried about my son. He has gone to a hamlet in the north. And today is a Tuesday”.
One asked why this concern and the man cited a rural belief. “A farmer will not go north on Tuesday and Wednesday, south on Saturday and west on Friday and Sunday because of the influence of Disa Sal.” As one shook one’s head in disbelief, the peasant knotted his brows, probably wondering why city dwellers remain immune to age-old rustic wisdom.
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