‘I told you to turn them back. If one of them crosses the boundary, you’re going to be in a mess.’
‘Master, if a single sprout is trampled by my sheep, you can curse me a hundred times.’
Buddhu was still speaking timidly but he had already made up his mind to not take the sheep back. He thought to himself, ‘If I drive the flock back because of such a small matter, I’ll never be able to graze them.’
Buddhu was a strong man too. He owned two hundred and forty sheep and earned eight cowries a night by letting them stay in people’s fields to fertilize them. He sold their milk, too, and made blankets from their wool. Why’s this man losing his temper? he was thinking now. What can he do to me? I’m not his servant. When the sheep saw the green leaves around them they got restless and broke into the field. Buddhu beat them with his stick to bring them over to the boundary line but they just broke in from somewhere else.
Furious, Jhingur said, ‘You’re trying to force your way through here, aren’t you? I’ll teach you a lesson!’
He put down his son, picked up his staff and pounced on the sheep. Even a washerman would not have beaten his donkeys so mercilessly. He smashed their legs and backs while they bleated piteously. Buddhu stood there and watched silently, as right before his eyes the destruction of his army took place. He neither shooed away his flock nor said anything to Jhingur. He just kept watching the scene. In a couple of minutes Jhingur had driven the sheep away with his brute force. Having accomplished his task Jhingur said with the pride of victory, ‘Now, march on straight! And never think of coming this way again.’
Looking at his injured sheep, Buddhu said, ‘Jhingur, you haven’t done a good thing. You’re going to regret it.’2
To take revenge on a peasant is the easiest thing in the world, because his entire treasury remains exposed in fields or barns. He brings home grains after going through many natural and unforeseen calamities. If they are combined with someone’s enmity, then the peasant is lost forever. When Jhingur came home and told his family about the fight, they were really alarmed. They berated him, ‘Jhingur, you’ve invited trouble on yourself! You can’t pretend that you don’t know Buddhu. What a quarrelsome fellow you are. You can still salvage the situation. Go and pacify him, otherwise the entire village will come to grief along with you.’ Jhingur understood the situation. He regretted crossing swords with Buddhu. If the sheep had nibbled a little of his crop it wouldn’t have ruined him. We peasants should always remain servile for our own good. Even God doesn’t like us to walk with our heads held high.
Jhingur didn’t relish the idea of going to Buddhu’s house, but the others egged him on, so he finally set out for it. It was the month of Aghan in winter; mist had set in and everything around was covered in darkness. He had just come out of the village when he saw a fire blazing in the direction of his sugar cane field. His heart began to race. Someone had set fire to the field! He ran wildly, hoping it wasn’t his field. But as he got closer, his deluded hope evaporated. The calamity he’d set out to avert had already occurred. The scoundrel had set fire to his field and was destroying the whole village because of him. As he ran it seemed to him that his field looked much closer than before, and the fallow land that stood between didn’t exist.
By the time he reached his field the fire had consumed the greater part of the harvest. Jhingur broke out into a loud wail. The villagers came running. They pulled out lentil stalks and started beating the fire out. It was a deadly fight between the fire and the human beings. The devastation went on for a good part of the night. Sometimes one party had the upper hand, sometimes the other. The warriors on the side of the fire put up a valiant fight, and when they seemed to have been all but extinguished rose up again. Among the human warriors, Buddhu shone the brightest. His dhoti tucked around his waist, he took his life into his hands and leapt into the fireballs with the determination to subdue the enemy or die in the process. He escaped narrowly many times. In the end, the human warriors won, but the victory was worse than defeat. The sugar cane crop of the entire village was reduced to ashes, sounding a death knell for all their hopes.3
It was an open secret who had set the fire. But no one dared say anything about it. There was no evidence and it was pointless to talk about a case without any evidence. As for Jhingur, it became difficult for him to go out of his house. Wherever he went he had to listen to people’s imprecations. People said right to his face, ‘The fire broke out because of you! You’ve ruined us. Where’s your sky-high vanity now? You’ve destroyed yourself and the entire village. If you hadn’t picked that fight with Buddhu, none of this would have happened.’
Jhingur was more hurt by these jibes than by the destruction of his crop. He stayed in his house the whole day. It was the month of Poos, when usually bullocks pulled the cane press the entire night, the aroma of molasses filled the air, fires were lit and people smoked hookah sitting by the fireside. But now there was total desolation. The chill drove people indoors in the early evening, where they lay cursing Jhingur. The month of Maagh was even more painful. The cane crop not only brought prosperity to peasants but also sustained their lives. They tided over the winter with its help. They drank hot
