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Kathri the motormouth
Fieldshop
The figure of this agile woman very often blooms in my memories. I remember she has faded behind the curtains of time. But the memory lingers in the conscience. Her name was Kathri. An agile woman like a swift or swallow. Agility was her headmark.
Dwarfish stature, dark skinned, dark haired (None of them grey!) and wearing a Christian traditional dress of Mundu (Lungi) and Chattai covering the skeletal structure and the wrinkled dark skin of old age. She smelt of paddy as she had to work with paddy in the paddy fields every day in her life. An agriculture coolie as wage earner. She had a tone of innocence in her talk, though a motor mouth talking mouthful. Her age could not be computed, she said she was born in the year of the great floods. She lived in a small hut, covered on all sides and the roof by woven coconut fronds. The floor smeared with cow dung paste. The small no man’s land (Poromboke)was in the middle of the paddy fields, flowing adjacent, a small canal branching off the Vikraman canal, towards the east, bulging in the monsoon rains, sometimes overflowing.
I have not known her for long. Those days I was in my Higher Secondary classes. She often came home for odd jobs; she was agile like a swallow bird, quick and swift, with full of energy in the lean bony stature. But all what attracted was the simplicity all about her being in everything. More than the mark of poverty, she was all with a giggle, the personal worries never expressed perhaps hidden in the mind. She was poor, utterly poor. She ate with her family from the bunch of paddy stalks and the paddy given as coolie.
She ever had a bright smile spread on her face. Subdued talk. Ever looking happy. Old but healthy. Or was it that nobody understood her worries? Or she had learnt to put up with her sorrows and worries without letting it be known to the world outside? Or she did not care anything at all about her worries, that they were all her happy companions? No one cares to give you solutions except some advices which are already known to her. Sorrow is the personal right of each and every one never wanted to be shared.
She had another mark stamped on her by the community. She was a scheduled caste, born to serve the so-called upper caste. A stamp of existence, the social status conferred by the many century-old tradition, veiled by the frown of disapproval and displeasure towards the ‘low caste’.
But she served herself. She was serving herself. The abject poverty she was living in has never been writ on her face. She talked the good and never blamed anyone for her fate. Never gone to school, but knowledgeable as taught by the practical life. I was very much attracted and appreciated her every talk. I could only listen and never say anything as I felt I was not that erudite at all.
I learnt from her to be happy in whatever condition you are. She has disappeared from the earth; the bliss of death has taken her away to the abode of God Almighty. Will she be a low caste in the heaven too? Her soul has joined the Brahman and be moving in the cosmic cycle ever happily. Quite surprisingly in one night she came in my dream proudly sitting on the right side of God Almighty singing the harvest season folk songs!!
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