Nanja

Nanja wiped the sweat off his brow happily. His brown skin shone.

He couldn’t recollect a single day when, for the major part of the day, he didn’t have the salty rivulets running down his face.

He had sold his cycle-rickshaw. He wouldn’t need it any more.

It was time to retire.

He was going back to his village to live with his son.

All his life, he had ferried people across the city on his cycle-rickshaw. He had been fresh, youthful and strong when he began. Now his brown skin was leathery, his arms and legs had begun to get weak.  A few of his teeth had fallen out, simply and without warning.

It’s the plastic tooth-brush, he thought ruefully. Served him right for giving up the neem stick he used in the village.

 It was time to wind up, time to play with his grandchild. Eat home-cooked meals. The thought filled him with a yearning.

His wife had died a few years back. She had cooked, cleaned, and looked after him and their son, while he used up every iota of his energy trying to keep a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, and getting their only son educated at the college of agriculture.

He had had to learn to cook and other household tasks when his son moved to their ancestral village with his family. He wanted to plough their own lands and use the knowledge he had gained at college. The fields had been looked after by Nanja’s older brother up until then.

Nanja had let him go, just as he had to let his wife go. He had actually been happy that their ancestral lands would at long last be tended by their rightful owner.

He had wanted to return with his son, too, but his attachment to his customers kept him back, if only for a while.

There were school children whom he took to school. There were office-goers whom he ferried back and forth. He had taken them to school when they were younger. There were wizened old ladies and men about his age who were regulars.

He knew he would eventually have to cut strings.

His son sent him weekly letters asking him to stop working and return to the village.

The most recent letter said, “How much longer do you want to struggle, all by yourself- and why? You are sixty-five, do you want to collapse from overwork? We also want some of your time. Somu misses you a lot. Try to understand appa. Come home.”

It was always Somu, his fifteen-year-old grandson, who missed him in the letters, only Somu.

 Nanja understood the unsaid.

His heart gave in to his son’s plea.

One day, he sold his rickshaw to a neighbour who had been pestering him to part with it for a long time.

He did not write to his son or send a telegram.

Pushing his meagre belongings a, a rusty tin trunk, rusty tin trunk Nanja set off, a song on his lips and a pang in his heart.

From his seat by the window, he could see the landscape change.

From the torn metal near his feet, he could see the road rush past.

The song on his lips grew and grew as the dusty bus rattled on. Once the bus reached his village, the song entered his body and took over his entire being- heart, lungs and gut.

The cows were returning, and little boys herded them back to their sheds.

It was dusk.

He breathed in deeply, greedily. What he breathed in every day was so different.

The air was layered with the smells of wood-fire, cooking, hay, the fields, and cow-dung. Smells that he was born into.

He walked the one kilometer stretch to his son’s mud brick cottage.

His son sat on his haunches, smoking a beedi (a cigarette made of tobacco rolled in a dry supple leaf). On seeing his father, he jumped up and ran to grab his tin trunk, throwing him a shy hug.

At last! Thank God! Why didn’t you tell us!

Incoherent with the suddenness of his father’s arrival, he yelled out to his wife and son, and they came rushing out, wondering what had happened.

They took him inside, everyone talking at once.

Nanja looked around, taking in everything about the house.

The last time he had visited was many years back, along with his wife. His parents were alive then.

It was almost the same.

His son hadn’t changed anything.

The same mud walls covered with the white tribal patterns, just as he remembered them.

 

Nanja ate till he was full.

He loved the steamy-hot fluffy rice, he could never learn to cook it like this.

He lay down on the woven-rope cot in the open courtyard where he could see the stars and the moon which had waxed full.

His grandson snored gently.

Nanja had just told him the story of how he had left their village and gone to the city, many years ago, to make a living. The little boy had wanted to know.

Nanja covered the boy’s legs which stuck out from under the sheet and lay back satisfied.

He was back where he belonged.

This is where his parents had breathed their last.

This is where he would like to return to the elements, his ashes mingling with the earth in his fields.

He fell asleep after gazing at the dark and shiny sky for some time.

The next morning, when Nanja awoke, the Sun was out, shining down hard on him.

Somu, his grandson, had left for school. His son was in the fields.

His daughter-in-law brought him a tall bronze glass full of water and a neem twig.

He chewed at the bitter twig, making one end of it into a sort of rough brush, and cleaned his teeth happily.

He had missed all this. The plastic toothbrush never really sat well with him. 

When he had finished he found a glass of frothy milk and some roti from last night waiting for him near his cot.

This is what he had grown up eating. Stale roti dipped in milk.

I’m going to the fields, he announced loftily and walked off.

He met many an old friend on his way.

The cheerful enquiries and bantering filled him with happiness.

He came home at sundown with his son. They had gone home for lunch and then gone back to the fields. His son had done well. Their fields had been yielding well.

That evening, when they sat under the tree right outside the house, sipping tea from large steel mugs, Nanja asked his son something he had been itching to ask him all day.

Son, what’s with the children in our village? Don’t they go to school?

So many were at work in the fields today, it seemed like our Somu was the only one at school.

His son updated him on the extreme poverty that the villagers now live in. It wasn’t this bad earlier. The recent famine had pushed the once-comfortable farming families below the poverty line. Most of the families cannot afford to send their children to school anymore, he said in his matter-of-fact manner.

What about the free schools? asked Nanja.

Appa, they don’t even have enough to eat. To send them to the government schools is not possible too. The costs of uniforms and books….they just don’t have the money.

Nanja fell silent after that.

The whole week, Nanja went to the field every morning with his son, returning at sunset to play with his grandson and eat fresh, white, fluffy rice with lentils and vegetables.

At night, he slept under the starry sky along with Somu.

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Nanja pedaled furiously.

His shirt clung to him.

Sweat trickled down his face.

The hot black road crackled under his rickshaw wheels.

He sat astride his recently purchased second-hand cycle-rickshaw.

His customers, young and old, rejoiced.

There was no one like Nanja; their safe, reliable Nanja.

They were curious too.

What made you return, Nanja? Asked the Professor of Economics

Nanja’s reply struck him dumb.

He was back to earn more money, he said.

The children of his village had to go to school, he said, pedalling all the while.

He had seen them work in the fields, and it had broken his heart.

They had to have a fair chance at life. He had not been able to think of any other way. He would not ask his son for money; he had his own family to look after. There wasn’t enough to spare.

He had thought all week, and here he was.

The professor, ashamed at the thought of his own easy retired life, went home and forgot all about it.

Nanja sat under the banyan tree outside the professor’s house.

This is not so bad, he thought. God has made me strong. At least when compared to other men my age.

I will work till the end.

And my son will take back my ashes and sprinkle them in our fields.

The end.