All in the nature of things

IF timely rains and solving calculus sums pleased my father, the radio breakdown and the incalculability of the farmers’ woes irked him equally. Dwelling on the farmers’ summings-up, he would refer to Mike Campbell’s explanation on how he went bankrupt: ‘Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.’ (Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.)

Suddenly, here comes the coronavirus, and with it death, job losses and hunger. While we are collectively clamouring to oddly chase away the virus, there goes viral a matter that agriculture is the heart of the economy and that farmers hold the key to weather the hunger crisis. Fortuitously, parallel problems aside, the just-past prolonged winter promises a bumper rabi produce and a leeway for a rainy day to them.

The lockdown-induced unavailability of combiners or of migrant farm workers takes me back to the 1980s, when all farm activities, from ploughing, sowing, reaping and gleaning to flailing or threshing, were carried out manually, mainly by household members. What takes two or three days today, took at least 30-40 days then.

In mid-May, 1985, as threshing ended late night, my father made me and my brother stay in the fields. With the radio on, we lay tired on the granary floor, looking skyward and talking of the agrarian, romantic nuances in the movie Mera Gaon Mera Desh. The moon looked fuller, brighter and closer, as if eavesdropping on us. Suddenly, it began to be sparsely eclipsed by the moving black clouds, the walking shadow of which fell on us. Hot winds, turning into breeze, began to blow furiously, intensifying our concern and efforts to cover the granary and chaff with bricks and home-made tarpaulin, but in vain. One hour of torrential rains, blustering winds, terrifying lightning and thudding hailstorm turned the fields into pools of muddy grains, rendering us poorer than before the sowing. The trees stood bare-branched. The ramshackle radio sounded sullen. The moon now gazed at our pain, loss and anguish. The calamitous rain had even washed our tears.

Winter or summer, rain or drought, a farmer is always on a rollercoaster, trying to balance fear and expectations, loss and gain. Sometimes, he is desperate for the rain, and other times, fears it. The vagaries of weather strike sudden blows to the gradual woes, keeping him in arrears, almost always. His is a strange kind of relationship with nature, which also goes against the grain. Yet, he sows with hope and sees the crop growing with hope. He cultivates optimism and meaning, even when he may grow losses and suffering.

Cropping his hopes, the social, political and systemic fault lines bite the hand that feeds them. Pennilessness is vicious, indebtedness killing. Aren’t our 24×7 optimistic frontline workers caught in the ironic plot of ‘as you sow, so shall you reap’?