The unpolluted village cloistered by old and gnarled trees and edged with a canal, its surface painted with lotus flowers, their swaying leaves above the water and the trembling ones still on the surface.
To go beyond the place, the concrete bridge with iron parapets would have to be used and after it would be the narrow Imphal-Moreh Highway.
But for those who always woke up before the sunrise to work in the lowkol( paddy fields ) or in their ingkhol (kitchen gardens), they had enough in their hands to hold them back to their houses and in the fields till late afternoon ,and when all works were over the cattle would have to be taken care of. So, it was only young who would cross the bridge to be at the recently mushroming places.
It was rumoured that the pool places were filled with well-dressed people always cheered by their female partners, a Korean restaurant with the cut-out of a lady in Korean costume was outside the place, and these places rubbed shoulders stores where branded-clothes could be bought.
But this new environment seemed to have elbowed out the affordable and trendy Chinese products or Moreh goods. Whatever the trend was in the new ‘happening place’ those Moreh goods were still played an important role and despite having been elbowed out they were available few metres away from the spot in leaned-on hovels with their fronts concealed by the products suspended from wires.
If the village was courted by larks, chirpy sparrows and below the ambling cattle, then the trendy place was courted by latest western numbers, roaring noises of Bajaj and Hero Honda motorcycles and hatch back cars bought with siphoned off money. When the whole village was lit up by fireflies outside and the houses glowed with yellowish flickering kerosene lamps, the trendy place had the of privilege of being illuminated by bright incandescent bulbs generated by ear-splitting diesel generators.
His father was just a bricklayer who respected his profession and understood it. Though it was the last job any married man would pick, and the first that any willing and desperate person would choose, but the man could feed his family. His father inherited a small piece of land not big enough to farm ,so the man had no choice but to look for something when age was ripe for him to start helping his frail old man.
Tondon’s father wanted him to be schooled, so we had the privilege to attend the village high school. On Sundays he would go to help his father. He picked up the profession early and what his father did soon became what he could do. He never thought that working only on Sundays would compel him , after few years, to few days a week. The number of working days increased until it forced him to leave school and started doing full-time in far-flung areas of Kangleipak when his father was broken with hard labour and confined him to home with tuberculosis.
The school became a distant thing and the pictures of school and his friends would appear in his mind when he stayed awake in the tents set up with thick tarpaulin sheets near a gorge or by a stream. Soon those pictures were swallowed up by the recent incidents of here and there and the process was hastened by the day-long works, which could only be soothed by some rice wine and some boiled meat.
What the places and the hard labour had done to him was displayed in the disconnect between him and his family. This didn’t prevent him ,though, from putting his family before everything; there were bunch of siblings who were still in school. He wanted them to study well, since there were times when he ran into very educated people who spoke to him in English even though they shared their first language.
To be continued...............................
Comments
Post a Comment