My dear brother Nantu who is interested in ordinary people and how they live got more than interested in a person whom we would not even notice in our midst. He discovered some down-to-earth facets of the man’s character and told me a whole lot about him – a lot more than I could assimilate in my early youth. But, what my brother told me stayed on my mind vividly for many decades. The man’s name was Panowa who made his living like many of his working-class community did at a tea stall in Gauripur market. My brother made the discovery of the lovable man during his visits to the tea-stall. You would see that Panowa was man of conscience and a pillar of strength in the face of enormous multi-dimensional adversity.
I had seen Panowa on many occasions standing at the corner of a pan-shop smoking bidi and listening to others, while he hardly doing any talking. He had long curly hair which came up to his shoulder, and unkempt beard. His clothes were always dirty. He wore a pair of sandals made out of discarded automobile tires by an enterprising cobbler. He did not talk much except when necessary. But, he was a nice lovable person. Nonetheless, he stood out as a defiant non-practitioner of normal hygiene and cleanliness in daily living. And people loved that aspect of him simply as a point of reference when talking about degree of cleanliness and shabbiness of people in the town. Paniwa-10 was the highest one could get, not any higher. He knew that. But, that didn’t bother him a whit. Because, there was a compensating skill in him and he was absolutely sure of that – he made excellent spicy ‘singaras’, the best in town in all seasons of the year for many years going. And the people had been lapping his singaras up for years in spite of his widespread reputation of uncleanliness, in attire to be sure.
He lived just on the edge of the town with his old mother sharing a single tin-roofed shack with some mango trees in the small yard and couple of milk cows which his mother depended on as her income. He didn’t have any family of his own – he never married in his thirty five years of his uneventful life when I came to know about him. The owner of the tea stall where he worked left him alone to do his own things which he did well. So, he was his own boss at the tea stall and he loved that freedom of doing things as he liked. It gave him a measure of self worth and meaning. His mother asked him often to get a wife so that she could die in peace when her time came. He kept silent whenever the matter came up. But, she got on his nerves by repeating the same thing again and again. Finally, being able to stand her pestering no more, he exploded in uncontrollable rage as much as a rebuke to his mother as to his own situation in life, “Khach, khach. Buddi, the old irritating lady, you have seen nothing but poverty in all your life. You were born in poverty; you lived your life in grinding poverty. You want to die in peace so that many more could be born in more poverty. Remember, when your daughter comes to see you, you can’t provide her and her children even with something to eat.” and stormed out of the shack. The inner space for comfort, security and solace he built for himself over many years of his adult life was being penetrated by none other than his own loving mother and there was no excuse for that, he argued.
After his outburst of anger, he moved into a back room of the tea stall for some time. At the end, he was repentant for his rude behavior and cried in the presence of roomful of customers when he was asked why he lived in the tea stall instead of his house. He came home, looked at his mother and cried again. The old lady didn’t raise the question again about his marriage or anything else. But, when Panowa was not home, she just complained to others in the neighborhood at the top of voice about his son’s rude behavior and errant ways of life without a wife while sweeping her already-swept yard. Not venting her displeasure would send a wrong message to her neighbors and she did not want that. She would not let a dead leaf from the mango trees stay in the small yard for long. That was her own way of copying with the harshness of a changing way of life for his son without being married. Every one else she knew was married when they came of age at fifteen or sixteen or even earlier. That was the natural law as enunciated by her religion. She could not understand why his son didn’t understand the simple thing.
Panowa did his daily duties unerringly and with great devotion and precision and regularity. He never willingly missed his work. The first thing he did in the morning after getting up was lighting up a bidi and taking long leisurely puffs while in deep thoughts about what specialty of singaras he should make that day to keep his customers happy and coming back to his tea stall. Without that he would be unemployed and that would be a disaster. That brief interlude being over, he would take a stroll to a nearby bush by the river with a shinny multi-purpose metal container with a long spigot filled with water from their water-well to do his usual natural things. The bush was the communal lavatory used by both males and females with a simple code of conduce – no male would use the bush when a female was there. After coming back from the bush, he splashed fresh water drawn from the same well on his face and cleaned his water container with sand and a piece of coconut husk to give it a shiny clean gloss. He would that again for drinking water. He put on his lone shirt. He did not change any other clothes because he did not care to have any at the beginning of his adult life when his father was alive and took care of his family as best as he could, and now couldn’t afford to have any. It was kind of minimalist view of necessary things of life born out of After taking a bath in the river, he would come home with a new sari which he bought for his mother along with his lungi. Without giving the sari to his mother, he would lay it on his mother’s barren wooden cot. Making sure that his mother was not anywhere near, he would stand before a big picture of goddess Durga, the goddess of destroyer of peoples’ misery, the picture that he hung up years ago on the wall of his shack after obtaining that picture from a Bidi manufacturer. He would put a few sticks of incense into the mud floor before the picture and light them up. He would murmur a few words in memory of his father. Panowa thought up the whole simple ritual one night many years after his father’s death when he was heading home after work thinking about his father, mother and little sister. His father was an honest and hard-working man trying to provide for himself, his wife, Panowa and his little sister Panchali. His father sold roasted peanuts, spicy cooked unshelled gram lentil and ‘chanachur’, all made in his shack, out of a small glass-enclosed box in a corner of the market on ‘market-days’ and roamed around in surrounding villages the rest of the week. He carried that box on his head cushioned by his gamcha wrapped like a ring, and a light wooden support on his back to prop up the box when he reached a destination. When it rained, he was out of an income and they all sort of starved. Mangoes, which they could not sell, provided some relief in the season. His mother hardly slept at night when mangoes ripened. She went out to collect mangoes when she heard a thud of falling mangoes in her yard. The meaty yellow mangoes were easy targets for early-rising neighborhood boys who were always on the lookout for something to eat. And stealing mangoes added an extra edge to their desire. For Panowa’s family, mangoes were a precious commodity for the family’s survival in the lean rainy months. But, Panowa did not want deprive the boys entirely. In the years when he helped his father in roasting peanuts, cooking lentils and doing other things for his vending business, he was home most of the day. Taking advantage of his mother’s absence from the shack when she took their cows for grazing around the nearby school yard, Panowa called the neighborhood boys to their yard. He would climb up on a tree, selectively shook branches high up on the tree so that his mother’s squinting eyes didn’t miss those mangoes in her estimation of what she had. Then he gathered the fallen mangoes and distributed them among the boys delighting them all. His father looked the other way all throughout the whole clandestine operation. The boys affectionately called him Panowabhai, brother Panowa. As a reciprocal gesture of good-will towards him, they followed him silently up to their side of the culvert over the drainage ditch as Panowa came out of his shack and headed to the market. Panowa, maintaining his stoic silence, never exchanged a word with them. He didn’t want to be their role model.
If a sense of heart-felt solemnity graced the observance of Panowa’s father’s death anniversary, a sense of merriment and revelry marked the observance of the ‘holi’ festival. On that day he also had a hair cut, a shave, an elaborate bath in the river duly observed by a crowd of children, wear new clothes he bought for himself, and he gave a sari to his mother the usual way. After the bath, he would head straight to market to buy meat, a commodity which escaped his meals for most of the year, for himself and his colleagues at the tea-stall. The he would elaborately cook meals for them all including the owner. The meal was on him. A few drinks of strong country liquor and a good meal would prepare him and his friends for a night-long merriment and revelry. They wrapped their heads with ‘gamchas’, they would take out their ‘dholocks’, heavy brass-metal ‘khanjaris’ and little cloth pouches called ‘khotuas’ to hold abirs and buy red-colored fine talcum ‘abir’ to smear themselves and others who happened to be by. They would sing songs of extreme sexual fantasy and dance in circles in a frenzied spirit of liberation. They challenged onlookers to join in their fun and many did. There was no boss, no class, no babus – all barriers came down. The revelers, their individual beings lost under liberal sprinkles and smears of ‘abirs’ and their inhibitions unburdened of any pretense, were joined by other revelers of the same make-up and spirit, and few ‘hijras’ added some spice to the festive spirit. The air would be filled with full-throated expressions of joy punctuated with ‘chara rara, chara rara, rara rara, rara rara…’ This was their day and they would make full use of it. And they did. They would go to the homes of people they liked and smeared the men with plenty of abirs and teased the womenfolk of their beauty and coyness in songs – all in fun and good spirit. When the revelry ended late in the morning, they revelers were too exhausted to go home. They slept wherever they rested. Some found a secluded corner by themselves to get warmth and affection.
Panowa would get up and go home. He had a job to do. Coming home, he would fill his lota with water and start his daily routine in the bush. But, he would not let go of the intoxicating flavor of the ‘Holi’ festivities of the night before. He would splash his face with cold water. But, he would not take a bath nor would change his clothes. If it was fine with Panowa, it was fine with people.
Some of the abirs from his hair, beard and clothes would fall off, and the rest would gradually be buried under layers of sweat, dust, grime and soot from the oven till it was time for Panowa to take hair cut, a shave, a bath and a set of new clothes to begin the cycle of his mundane life again.
By Kalyan Dutta-Choudhury
San Francisco
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