Rakesh
Tripathi looks like a man at peace. Its 7 am, a couple of days before Diwali. I
am having tea with the kirana store owner, on the porch of his house, next to
his shop. He is dressed in neatly ironed trousers and a cotton shirt, with the
crisp crease line a testimony of the effort put into dressing. Rakesh is a
resident of the village Ramnagar, about 20 kms away from Kanpur city in the
northern state of Uttar Pradesh. His kirana store is an extension of his ancestral
house which his family shares with his parents, two brothers, and their
families. It is at a position of advantage since it is located in the heart of the densely populated small
village, colloquially known as "Chandani Chowk of the village".
Rakesh is 34
years old. He is “12th standard pass” from the nearing government
college. He tried to study further, two years of BA, but could not clear the
exams, since in his own words, “studies never interested me”. Right next to him
you see a copy of “Amar Ujala”, a Hindi daily, which he, and friends and customers
who visit the shop will read through the day. I ask him what he reads in the
newspaper. His response, “political news followed by cricket”. When asked why
he finds those interesting, Rakesh’s thinks a while and says because local politics
affects him daily. The area gets its share of power, roads, subsidies and even
laptops for college kids based of the party in power.
I asked Rakesh
if he has ever lived outside the village. Once when he was a younger man, a
relative called him to Delhi for a job at a shoe factory. As a youth, Delhi
sounded like heaven and he needed to earn and save money for his younger
sister’s wedding. On asking why he left, Rakesh said he hated the city. Living
in a cramped room with two others, eating badly, and being away from family;
Rakesh calls it life of an animal. “Poverty in the village is an inconvenience
but poverty in the city degrades the soul. Here, an elder is always an elder,
the poorest of your neighbors would be treated with the same respect; but in
the city, nobody would offer you a glass of water if you were poor” he says.
Besides, the
area is rife with opportunities because of its proximity to Kanpur, he tells
me, and gives me the example of Kanchan, his wife, also an earning member of
the family. Recently, a large hospital opened up across the highway at a
distance of approximately a km from the village. Kanchan works there as nurses’
helper, along with his younger brother’s wife and several other women from the
village. They are paid Rs 2,500 a month. With the added income, Rakesh and
Kanchan dream of sending their 8 year old son, Shubh, to an English- medium convent
school next year. Shubh is very smart, he tells me. They will save money so
that they can send him to an engineering college when he is older.
But isn’t he a
Brahmin, I ask him, and doesn’t it bother his family that the women work in a
hospital, an unclean place? “A Brahmin will always be a Brahmin”, he says, “The
job cannot take away the fact that we are blessed with superior mental
abilities. Jobs are a requirement of the modern life, and they are just fully
utilizing the development work going on in the area. Till last year, there were
no jobs available for women. Both the women take a bath with Ganga-jal added
water (few drops of water from the holy river Ganga) before they enter the
house”. He has a lot of faith in his caste. But what about the houses where the
bathroom is located inside the house? He finds my question amusing. “Why would
anybody build a bathroom in the middle of the house?” he asks me in turn. I do
not have an answer to that.
So his family must now be well-off, with
the shop, the salaried jobs and agriculture? Not well-off but they get by. His
younger brother used to work in a factory in the city, but the factory shut
down and now he is unemployed. He is a self-trained electrician and earns some
money by doing local repairs. A printed, Hindi sign in the shop advertises the services.
The family grows wheat, pulses, rice, oil seeds, cattle feed and potatoes. The
family doesn’t own any cattle anymore, but cattle feed is easy to grow, doesn’t
require much water, and sells for good money. Agriculture is not a profitable
business. They own more land than most, but he says that you can only grow
enough for the entire family to eat. He says his family is highly respected in
the area and respect seems to mean more than money. I notice that Rakesh always
talks about the “the area”, rather than just the village, and I ask him what he
means. It turns out, the area comprises of several other surrounding villages,
connected to his through marriages, shared resources (such as the Bore-wells
used for irrigation, Schools, Govt Clinic etc) and countless generations of
shared experiences and friendships.
On asking what he would like to change,
he says everybody has their share of problems. He wants to set up a photocopy
machine in his shop, since there is a demand for photocopy in the area by older
students, and no other shop owns one. His younger brother’s job and elder
brother’s health are also something that worries him, but finally, as long as
everybody has God’s grace, everything will be fine.
By now, Rakesh has dusted the shop and
lit incense in front of Lord Ram’s picture kept at the place of honor. The kids
of the family have come in to say good-bye, and gone off to school, dressed in
clean uniforms and carrying Mickey-Mouse water bottles. Chandani Chowk is
buzzing, with people moving past each other on their bicycles and motorbikes, greeting
each other with loud “Ram Ram”s. The village day has started. I thank Rakesh
for the tea and walk back home, deep in thought about life lessons from a
village “elder”.
