Written in 2015 during a fellowship year in Jawhar, Maharashtra.
He sits under the shade of the awning, a neighbour’s phone clutched in his hand, idly flicking ants, both real and imaginary, from his dhoti while waiting for his daughter to call. This is one of the few spots in the village where he gets cellular reception and so here he must sit. Occasionally a ball, carelessly thrown by one of the younger fielders, will sidle up and he will throw it back, a reprieve from the monotony. He glances intermittently towards the phone, willing it to ring. He has been here for well over half an hour but he dare not go back in case he misses the call, neither can he call her for the phone has no balance. He leans back and waits.
She wakes up at 6 a.m. like clockwork and reaches for the handa of water, scraping the bottom as she gathers what remains in her lota. She splashes half of it over her face, leaving the other half for her daughter who should be up by now. She calls out and her ten year old daughter emerges. Between them they distribute seven empty handas and stride briskly downhill towards the wells, calling out greetings to the steady stream of women walking alongside.
Twenty minutes later she finds herself balancing precariously atop the slippery, moss-covered ledge with toes extending over the green waters beneath. Bending over at the waist, she swings a thick rope and bucket setup into the water with a violence belied by the frail body, drawing up water that she transfers to the vessel her daughter is holding. Again and again, till each of the seven is filled. She stacks two of the smaller handas on her daughter’s head, gives her a third to balance on her yet immature hip and takes up the remaining herself. She slowly trudges uphill now, feeling acutely the sting of stones on her bare feet and the thirty kilograms weighing on her head.
The bus should be any minute now, he is told by his still positive fellow traveler. He has been hearing this for the past hour and his patience is now wearing thin. With impressive impassivity, the man besides him extends a hand to pluck another ripe ber from the low hanging branch overhead. They hear a distinct groan in the distance and a red state transport bus slowly makes its way towards them. No wonder it’s late for it is bursting at its seams — mostly children on their way to school — and the burdens seem to labour the far obsolete engine, which can barely compete with passing cattle. Slinging his bag around his body, he clambers onto the already crowded ladder, distributing part of his weight onto the window grill just within reach.
Students sit with vacant expressions, fanning their sweaty faces with the textbooks they are supposed to be studying. Their teacher has long given up trying to catch their attention and herself sits in a corner, waiting for the designated hour to toll. Should the current come back, complete the next five questions as homework, she says in parting. None of the students deign to respond, secure in the knowledge that it won’t.
Come 8 p.m. and they are ensconced in thin sheets and a dense blackness around them which is of little defence against the angry swarms of mosquitoes. Sleep eludes them and they end up talking into the silence, reliving old memories, as they have countless times before, till they drift off.
Drudgery, they call it. All those development reports and policy reviews and research papers which talk about challenges in rural India. It is drudgery borne of inadequate and unreliable infrastructure which leaves people decades behind their time. Poverty and a lack of economic opportunity are most certainly challenges which limit rural people but these systemic shortcomings play an equal part in preventing them from improving their situation. Where most people in urban India take for granted good telecom service or piped water, people here struggle on a day to day basis.
What’s worse is that they almost never recognize it to be a struggle. More often than not, these activities are so deeply entrenched in their routine that they neither know nor demand better. What an outsider sees as needless frustration manifests as bone-deep, unmistakable apathy, even reluctant acceptance that try as you might, you cannot shake from them.
Drunk men lounge around until after midday without an apparent care in the world. They are skilled artisans who can weave magic should they choose but with none to buy their products, why bother making any? People who, through sheer dint of effort, claw their way through are forsaken time and again by a system which is yet to recognize its failings. Barely literate women who make papad and laddoos and who eagerly, perhaps desperately, brandish their packets for sale are told by polished men in polished suits that they ought to make a website and send them an email. How do those men never see their blank stares?
So they choose instead to sit upon their doorsteps and watch the world go by. After a point, you are lulled into a void of nothingness and absolute pointlessness punctuated with events that commemorate the continuity of life — a birth, a wedding, a death — that might otherwise be forgotten in the sameness of every day.
All my life I told myself I was living in a bubble. Dubai wasn’t reality. It was too shiny, too fake, a mirage of malls and glitz and absurd ski resorts sprung in the middle of a desert. Then I come to Jawhar and now I’m no longer sure who lives in the bubble.