Toiling for a change that never comes

Satyawan Malik

The Haryanvi ragni ‘Saari kaum taraki kargi ladke aur jhagadke, zamidar tera haal dekhke mera kalza dhadke’ (All communities have progressed through fight or struggle, but the unmitigated plight of the farmer makes my heart come into my mouth) is a poignant tale of farmers’ distress. My father, stopping trigonometry, would tune up the radio to listen in the algebra of farmers’ ordeal. Three viewpoints, he remonstrated, stay with the farmers: one, ageing farmers don’t easily reconcile that their youthful days are over; second, they long rely on gharelu ilaj until aggravated beyond repair; third, their temptation for capricious loans runs equally with the needful ones.

In the late ’80s, farmers would keenly gather radio broadcast weather reports. Once our neighbour, overnight, reaped his unripe mustard crop fearing forecast of heavy rain, misconstruing the warning which concerned another region. Nothing was left for a rainy day. He had five acre and four issues. Three daughters were lastly joined by a son. His concern: who would inherit the ancestral land? The son eschewed his studies before class X exams to fully focus on agriculture and help his father. 

A tractor was negotiated to bring in the long-awaited prosperity on loan, some from bank and some from moneylenders. Unfortunately, it just added to the acrimonious pendency. Two acre had already been pledged to arrange the wherewithals to marry off the eldest daughter. Two daughters were still unmarried. Amid growing dissensions, the father-son duo exercised austerity that agriculture demands, or imposes. The rice crop, though, had yielded some profit, and the early signs of wheat crop were fine. 

One dark, chilly January midnight, my father and I reached the fields to take our turn for canal water irrigation after them. Like most farmers, he trusted his old wristwatch, 5-10 minutes behind ours, saying ‘maine radio se milayi thi’. But tonight, they weren’t at the transit point and the waters had overfilled two acre of wheat crop; the rest laid water-less. From a distance his son sought help to pull out his semi-conscious father from a deep water-filled trench. His voice was the guide, for the mist and darkness intertwiningly shrouded the night, causing zero visibility. He was rescued from the pit, dripping and shivering. His ankle was bleeding and the bone cut deep with the spade he wielded in the dark. Months of self-medication turned it dysfunctional. The ankle was badly swollen, as were his predicaments.

Now, the mother-son duo faced ferocity of the groans of low MSP, loans, injuries, rains, drought, weddings of sons and daughters, and of death. As the last week of November saw a massive march of the farmers, who spend nights out in the biting cold to feed the nation, to Parliament, the ragni echoes in my mind.