An attempt at fiction.

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 “12^th 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”.