Daily Times

Bhag Bhari and Allah Ditta were born in the suburban village of Tibba Sultanpur within a larger family of struggling peasants who worked in the fields of the local Zamindars under varying conditions of involuntary commitment, binding, and obligations. Some had borrowed large sums from the zamindar for weddings, sickness, buying a buffalo or seeds and fertilizers. The others had undertaken to work in the fields in return for being allowed to till a smaller piece of their master’s land and lift its produce. There were yet another but a diminishing class that had been traditionally serving the local zamindar family for generations as domestic servants, maids, and in household help. Their men would at times do certain risky or not so pleasant a duty for their traditional overlords under peculiar circumstances. This class enjoyed a special confidant status and was treated better and differently by the zamindars. Bhagan and Dittu, as they were commonly called, married young and had a two years old son. Generations of hard physical work had given them a sturdy physique and capacity to endure severe weather.

It was a typically laid back, easygoing, and the sleepy small hamlet of South Punjab near the bank of an irrigation canal and connected to Tibba Sultan Pur by a narrow brick-lined road that carefully snaked through the neighboring fields. The road was badly pitted and some of its culverts were damaged by a heavy dozer that passed over them on its way to level a piece of land ahead. There was no running tap water, electricity, or gas and for that matter a school or a dispensary anywhere within miles. Except for the noisy tractor and hooting diesel tube well, modern technology had not yet invaded this nearly Harappa agrarian community. Their natural simplicity, woodsmoke, chuckling hens, loose herds of cattle with ding dong bells in their necks, and the rustic rather unglamorous environment with all its smells and sounds were still there.

Toiling cotton pickers of South Punjab eke out their wages and live precariously on the edge of a disaster.

The hamlet’s general ambiance was more like a life moving at a slow, leisurely pace but the more one imbibed it the more a feeling of emptiness and being left out gripped. This feeling would become more overpowering at the wheat harvest and an endless barren-looking brown landscape would spread right into the horizon dotted only by an occasional Sider or thorny Acacia tree or an orchard of mangoes and guavas here and there. While the brown dusty plain spread in its vastness suddenly but was quite inexplicably depressing but a kind of serenity inducing at the same time. It appeared to unplug one from the sizzling bustle of the urban life just like the calm after a bulldozer working in the neighborhood switches off.

Dittu lived in a mud-plastered two-room hut with no door at the boundary wall entrance, where in a corner he had placed a rough wooden manger for his donkey and the milch cow. Fewchickens stuttered in and out of the doorless doorway and in the courtyard the whole day but would religiously return home to roost in the evening, as the proverb goes. Bhagan would promptly round them up into their pen feed them with leftover bread crumbs and then attend to the cattle feeding and tethering them for the night while her son played with a run-down plastic toy that she had found abandoned by the roadside while returning from Tibba bazaar.

Cotton buds in the vast cotton fields had blossomed fully and the crop was dotted by white fluffy little balls while the plants had visibly withered to an ungainly dusty green and brown. The village was getting ready for the gruesome cotton hand picking. Like wheat harvesting cotton-picking also needs detailed preparations and is a very special occasion in South Punjab. Pickers hope to be well paid at the end, visits to relatives and family functions are planned and an air of expectations prevails. Cotton field dust mixed with pesticides mostly causes skin rash, itching, and difficulty in breathing that require frequent washing and breaks. Bhagan had worked out a modus vivendi to look after her son while working in the cotton fields. She would fix up a makeshift hammock under the nearest tree for her son to visit occasionally to feed him. August sun beats down upon the pickers, dust and humidity cause parched throats, thirst, and perspiration. It is economically quite disastrous for a picker to fall sick as he might miss his much-anticipated wages. This is where a rather hard game of work versus wages comes into play. A sick picker has to be replaced by another one and he is to be paid too. There is no safety net available to compensate the sick peasant.

For Dittu and his wife, the cotton harvest began perfectly and they were picking more than many fellow pickers. Dittu had promised Bhagan a pair of gold earrings as soon as the wages were paid. Though the wages are low the pickers hardly have a choice as the bigger landlords and cotton rates in the market usually decide the wages. Then the catastrophe struck. Dittu was bitten by a particularly poisonous snake and was being taken to the nearest hospital, which was at a two hours travel time when he expired en route. Bhagan’s little world crashed before her eyes. She and her little son were left alone and quite shelterless. She had to sell off her milch cow to pay for various loans and expenses.

She was now at the mercy of her extended family and the zamindar, which did not mean much in real terms except a kind of kinship net. She still had to earn her livelihood and food for her son, for which the village did not offer much of an opportunity. One day she packed her meager belongings, loaded them up on the donkey, made her son sit on top of the baggage, and quietly left the village in the hope of finding a job in Tibba Sutanpur. Slowly but with sullen tiredness she disappeared into the dusty haze that has hung there for centuries. Nobody has seen her ever since. Toiling cotton pickers of South Punjab eke out their wages and live precariously on the edge of a disaster. Dittus keep dying snakebitten and shelterless Bhagans drown in poverty and disease just as cotton blossoms get ready to be picked in South Punjab.

The writer can be reached at clay.potter@hotmail.com