Translated from the Hindi by Vikas Jain
A Positive Change1
There was a village by the name of Beera in the Patna region. An old, helpless Gond woman known as Bhungi lived there. She didn’t have an inch of land or a home to live in. She only had a parching oven. The villagers were accustomed to having just one meal a day of parched grains or gram flour. That’s why there was always a crowd around Bhungi’s oven. She ate whatever grains she earned from parching the grains of others. Sometimes she ground them and ate the powder. She slept in a corner of the shack beside the oven. She woke up early in the morning to gather dry leaves from all around to light the oven. One always saw a mound of leaves close to the oven. She lit the oven in the afternoon. But on Ekadashi and Poornmasi, the oven was not lit, and on the days when Thakur Veer Singh, the zamindar of the village, ordered her to parch his grains, she had to go to bed hungry. Not only did she have to parch Thakur’s grains free of cost, she also had to fetch water for his household. She lived in his village and, hence, he had the right to extract work from her without payment. This could not be considered injustice. The only injustice was that he never gave her a tip. He felt that if he had to pay her something, then what was the point of unpaid labour? After all, the farmer had the right to make his oxen work the field the entire day and then tether them to the pole without giving them fodder. And if he did not do that, it was not because of his kindness but because of sheer necessity. Thakur, in principle, was averse to paying wages. He had no concern for Bhungi because she wouldn’t die even if she went hungry for an entire day. Old people did not die so easily; they were adept at giving the slip to the Angel of Death. And, God forbid, even if she chose to kick the bucket then, in her place, another Gond woman could easily be installed at the parching oven.2
It was the month of Chait and was one day before the festival of Sankranti. That day, in Bihar and other districts, people partook of gram flour from newly harvested grains and also gave it away as alms. People had not lit the stoves in their homes. Bhungi’s oven was teeming with people. She didn’t have a moment to spare. She was getting annoyed with customers for showing undue haste and said, ‘I’ve just one pair of hands, not two. And if I don’t parch the grains well, you’ll call me names!’ In the meantime, two big baskets of grains arrived from the thakur’s house with the order to parch them immediately. Bhungi was alarmed. It was already afternoon, and it was difficult to parch all the grains before sunset. If she had had one or two more hours of work, she could have earned enough grains to last the following eight days. But God didn’t show her this much pity. Instead, He sent her these angels of death! Now she had to burn herself at the oven through the night. On top of it, they’d find fault with her for no reason—‘the grains have decreased in amount’, ‘you haven’t parched them enough’, ‘you’ve parched them too hard’, ‘you’ve taken too much time’. She put aside both baskets despairingly.
The servant warned her, ‘Don’t be late, you’ll regret it.’
Bhungi replied, ‘You can sit here and wait. When I finish parching, take them along. Chop off my hands if I touch anybody else’s grain before finishing yours.’
‘We don’t have permission to sit here, but see to it that they’re roasted by evening.’ Warning her, the servant went away and Bhungi started parching the grains. The other customers raised a clamour: ‘We’ve been waiting for two hours and you haven’t parched our grains. How will we have flour tomorrow?’
Bhungi said peevishly, ‘What can I do? It’s Thakur’s job. If I don’t do it where will I live? Didn’t you have a tongue in your head? Why didn’t you ask his servants that if they dumped such a huge quantity of grain on me, how could I parch yours?’
Helpless, people picked up their baskets and walked away. Bhungi became busy in her work with frantic energy. But it was no joke to parch grains weighing about a maund, especially when during the course of the work one had to leave the roasting and rake the embers to keep the oven warm. By late evening she hadn’t finished even half the work. She feared that the zamindar’s servants would be on their way. And as soon as they arrived they’d start abusing her. She became even more frantic. Her gaze was fixed on the doorway while she kept working the oven. The sand cooled down and the grains came up half-parched. Her hands were frozen from working the heavy iron ladle continuously. She didn’t know what to do and began to weep. ‘I don’t know why God has forsaken me! So many people die every day, even death has forgotten me. Those who suffer in this world aren’t shown any mercy in the other world too. Who cares for me? I shed my blood to earn some grains. But Thakur is always after my life, simply because I live in his village. Is this small patch of land worth so much? There are so many plots that lie fallow in the village, so many households that lie deserted. Those lands do not produce kesar, then why should I live under threat all the time? And at the slightest excuse they threaten to dig up my oven and throw me away. If I had somebody to protect me then
