Imaginarium

English names for Hindi/Urdu terms used in this piece

jowar – Sorghum/Milo

bajra – Pearl millet

Khala – Aunt/ An Urdu term of endearment to refer to an older lady.

After a sumptuous meal on a Saturday afternoon at Ali Pasha’s place in a little hamlet called Aragidda, Ag was sitting in the living room of his thatched roof house. It’s a living room that doubles, triples and quadruples up as different rooms depending on the time of day and the people inside the house at the said time. Fanning himself with a green coloured hand fan, Ag had his eyes roving across the room as every object of utility seemed like a trinket to him.

The lunch was a great relief after a heady day of travelling across various villages in the area as the sun was beating a rather merciless sadistic drum of heat from the early morn. The progression from an innocent dawn to a devious day is extremely smooth in this part of the world. Midnight and dawn don’t even seem as half truths for what portends the next day.

Sitting relaxed on a mat made out of bamboo, Ag was conversing with Ali’s mother, a fifty something charming lady with a smile that seemed permanently embossed on her creased face. She spoke a variant of Hindi that was a cocktail of Hyderabadi Hindi and Urdu with acute Telugu inflections and intonations, adding more colour to her personality. As both of them eased into their respective speech styles, she took a few grains out of a sack and said, “Yehi jowar, jiska roti abhi ko tum khaaya.” ( This grain is jowar and the roti you had now was made with this.) Ag had never seen these grains and had a huge grin on his face, a child like wonderment upon seeing it. There was a bigger sack underneath the opened jowar sack. Playing with a handful of jowar grains, Ag asked her, “Khala! Is bade bag mein kya rakha hai?” ( Aunt! What is in this bigger sack?). Effortlessly lifting and moving the 30 kg jowar sack, she took out a few grains from the bigger sack now and said, “ei ko bajra kate hai” (This is called Bajra). Her speech was a mix of surprise and delight. She was surprised because there was nobody in her world who didn’t know these trusted soldiers, jowar and bajra. The surprise was nicely tucked away in her delight as she began explaining the process of jowar cultivation. Ag sat there, eager eyed listening to every drop of intricacy that went into his lunch. Ag’s sole contribution in the conversation were various exclamations from a soft ‘oh’ to an exalted ‘Oh’. With a subdued melodrama, she said, “Hamare ko 2 aceran khetan hain, jisme hum jowar ugata”( We have 2 acres of farm in which we cultivate jowar).

After her detailed matter-of-fact tutorial and before the birth of silence between them, she asked Ag – “Aapke jameen mein kya ko ugta hai?” (What is cultivated in your land?). There was a genuineness in her question, curious to learn about what Ag grows in his farm in Mumbai. Ag couldn’t control the smile on his face. He said, “Huh! you have 2 acres of land here and you can only grow one thing at a time in a given patch. We, in the cities, have more limited land than you do but we can be limitless in what we produce. We don’t need monsoon to reap what we sow.” She stood in front of Ag with an unchanged morphology of smile and asked, “Kya matlab? Tumhare fasal ko pani ka jaruvat nahin?” (What do you mean? Don’t you need water for your crops?) With a cold static smile, Ag said, “No. No water. No sun. No rain. No fertilizer.” Looking straight in her eyes, he said, “We don’t need to depend on such things.” Stretching his legs and reclining on one of the four wooden pillars that held the room from collapsing, he said, “It is all organic, Khala”. Wiping out drops of sweat from her forehead, she said, “Mujhe kuch samajh nakko aata, saab”( I am not following you at all, sir). Stretching his smile into something more expansive, Ag said, “Khala! For us, our house is our land and our land is where our house is. The two are not distinct. What we grow in our houses cannot be flattened and cooked. Neither can it be eaten. It is only brewed for a long time in our heads and chewed in our minds. I am not even sure if our minds chew them or they chew our minds and minds don’t digest as well. Do they? We feel heavy and bloated without eating and feel hungry after a full meal. Is it because what we brew for so long, turns bitter and hard to chew but we still do so out of habit?” Khala laughed out loud at this point, interrupting Ag. Putting back the bajra grains in the sack, she remarked casually, “Abhi samajh mein aaya ki aap ko jowar roti itna ishtam kyon laga”(Now I understand, why you liked the jowar roti so much).