India Brooding

He perhaps misses his family said my friend. Perhaps not I mused. He only visits them — a wife and three children — back in rural Bihar, once a year. And he only stays with them two weeks. The rest of the year he has worked in the city: years in Mumbai, some in his native Patna, and nights and days driving trucks carrying construction material for a building contractor. Like most men who live on high roads he was more used to dhaba food than fare gently spiced and cooked by a woman. The two week sabbatical in the village was too short to give him back the flavours of home-made bliss. He looked at my steamed vegetables as if it were cattle feed. He preferred mounds of rice spiked generously with nothing but salt. That’s what he had eaten since he was a child. No great delicacies could now woo him away from a palate creased by poverty. Back in his village a chili with roti is standard meal. Sometimes a chili also becomes a luxury. He missed that in my home.

Did he miss other things I wondered — like being tender with his wife, spending time with the children, learning how they are growing up, changing each day, becoming other people? When one lives apart how are such intimate relationships nourished and nurtured? Are there gaps that are never bridged? Was he even aware of these gaps or was it a natural way of being? As it seems to be with countless men like him who migrate to cities and never go back. In my own home the gardener, the driver, the cook and those who come in and out — the carpenter, the plumber, the electrician, the phone man, the gas man, the vegetable and fruit vendors are all men who have left behind families in nameless villages where they return, if lucky, once a year. “Gaon gaya hai” is a refrain often heard when one or the other is missing. And when they return they do not look any different, neither sad nor happy. They wear the same faces. They never bring back tales of nostalgia. They do not shed tears missing their families. I have never questioned the fact that they do not. But what about the women they leave behind? Are they not shedding tears, living love-less lives? What is the emotional state of a nation that accepts such fragmented families as a natural state of being?

The looming presence of this large dark man made me sit up and ask questions. Isn’t it poverty that is responsible for this state my friend asked? It is not just economic poverty but poverty of relationships. What perhaps begins as a search for livelihood leads to other deprivations that brood in quiet corners, such as my own kitchen where he sits oblivious to the scent of roses, even to his own sweat that encircles his own being.