Unripe Guava

Unripe Guava

I love February in Kolkata. The air is free from the dull smog of winter; sunshine is in the hue of pale gold, the sky is floroscent blue and everything around me is sprightly. The evenings come with mauve sunsets and the light breeze from the south, cool but not cold bringing with it the familiar fragrances of flowering plants. This is a time that makes me feel free and weightless, rid of shawls and cardigans but not yet sweating and puffing. The mid mornings of February also come with unripe guavas; vendors come from the districts around Kolkata bringing with them crisp green guavas, with a tinge of sour but sweet around the seeds. They are as juicy as leeches and as crisp as biscuits. The vendors keep a knife and black salt to cut and dress the guavas and serve them on young sal leaves or the broader leaves of the guava plant. I have a guava each on my way from home to the destinations of my visitations and on my way back.
No wonder then, when I was visiting home this February I too swooped over a guava vendor and immediately instructed him to prepare or me a piece of unripe guava, the best one in his lot according to my judgment. He promptly obliged and calling me as “Kakima”, he swiftly wiped the fruit and cut it and held it towards me with a dash of black salt. I resent the term Kakima, which literally means the wife of a father’s younger brother. Since I am never married I resent he assumption that my imagined husband should be the younger brother of the vendor’s father. A mashima or a pishima which are marriage neutral epithets are safer, but Kolkatans assume each woman of my age to be the wife of a man. Usually I fight and argue because I feel that stereotypes must be resisted, no matter how much small the effort is. But today I could not speak much because the sight of a basket full of luscious fruits was making my mouth water involuntarily.
I held out a ten rupee note towards the vendor. He took it and extended his palm for another tenner. Why? What is the weight of the guava? Is it not merely a poya (pau, or a a quarter kilo)? Yes, it is Kakima, the vendor replied. But unripe guava is selling at Rs 80 a kilo!! I felt the earth beneath my feet give way. Guavas selling at Rs 80 a kilo? The poor man’s mango? The fruit that is meant to be stolen and eaten by street urchins in the quiet soporific afternoons, the fruit which is neither offered to Gods nor to guests because of its low status as it panders to palettes of the young; that fruit now selling in the price of gold? Where do you get stuff from which you have to sell so expensive? The wholesellers, the vendor tells me are the ones who jack prices up. Crop has not been good, he informs me. What rubbish !! I have just been around the Jharkhand and Orissa and I can see a surfeit of food crops? Who says that there has been a crop failure? Its only the television that sometimes says that there is enough food and sometimes worries about declining food production.
My mind went back to the little picturesque villages in Orissa, presently under the wave of Maoist violence. I have seen guavas grow and sell at less than Rs 5 a kilo, tomatoes have sold for as low as 50 paisa. The Adivasis are looking for ways and means to sell their produce but never finding an access to the markets. They are trying to save their crops by trying to process them and even in the little processing that they have done, the farmers have only lost out. Free market is not faceless; it is a social network jealously guarded by vested interests and entry into the fold of its automatically equilibrating invisible hands is guarded by the invisible web of interests that allow only some to pass through the filters of privileged participation in the markets. To access the free market and make the impersonal free market forces work requires something else, namely political power. Politics, that the neo-liberal state keeps away as something totally as a force outside of the economy, is secretly the one which is shaping economies. Unseen to us, prices of food grains are going up astronomically because political power is now flowing from a small band of hoarders and speculators using food stuff to speculate and make huge gains for themselves.
The neo-liberal state is an unapologetic upholder of the rich and plays development against democracy in order to neutralize political opposition to its own brand of apolitical politics which allows the rich to get richer. Hoarding and speculating against food stuff is one way of making quick profits and indeed the hoarders are having a field day in the so-called Maoist areas starving farmers by forcing them to sell their produce at abysmally low prices and then controlling supplies to make prices for the retail market reach sky high. The surplus produce namely the quantity which remains with the hoarder after he relinquishes some for the customers is sold in bulk to the food processors like Kissan, or Druk or even Maggi. No wonder then food processing becomes cheap in India and attracts FDIs here. All of this is at the cost of a starving farmer and a starved customer, both of who will now find tomato sauce cheaper than fresh tomatoes and potato chips cheaper than farm grown potatoes. This explains why though food is becoming dearer, fast food is getting affordable; the falling prices of ice cream are a case in the point. Marie Antoniette’s dictum finally seems to be getting on; if the people cannot afford bread, then why not have cakes. Cakes, today, paradoxically are cheaper than bread and this is because the cake maker is more powerful than the producer of bread.
When we look at food processing, the industrialization of food stuff is allowed to become more prosperous than the producer of fresh food, we also have to look at yet another reason for allowing farmers to starve. The more farming becomes unprofitable, the more land the farmer will be willing to sell to real estate and resort developers. For years preceding the plan to develop Rajarhat, or Pailan, or Raichak or Nayachar, or Singur and Lalgarh, the operators in the wholesale markets have refused to lift produce from the farmers of these lands. The food speculators are in unison with the land mafia and indeed one is doubling up as the other. Bengal is the land of Ispahani, the man who almost single-handedly brought about the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 through the hoarding of food grains. Real estate markets, food insecurity and FDI into food processing, retail marketing of food and fast food chains together with a change in culture and television ads constitute the reason why most of us should be starving to help a few to make more profits.
I turned towards home with heavy steps and a heavier heart, the unripe guavas tasting like mud in my mouth. Just around Ranee’s home, I see a young woman squatting on the pavement obviously tired from walking. With her are her two infant sons, with a begging bowl and dressed in mourning clothes. Kakima, the older one says, can you help us? My father had died. How did he die I ask him? What did he do? I learn that the father was a bidi worker, casual labour, died out of malnutrition, no ration cards, could not afford to rent out a place in the city, traveled from the suburbs and collapsed out of exhaustion. The smaller boy was more innocent and therefore seemed relatively unhurt by the catastrophe that has struck the family. Can you give me a piece of the guava? I shrank back and clutched on to my buy with jealousy. No, not this, this is only one piece and I have many people to share this with. Sorry, I cannot help you with guavas. I had a chocolate in my pocket, here, boy, take this, it will help you stay filled up for a little while more. Share it with your brother. The older boy did not want the chocolate, he only said its fine Kakima, let him have it, I am not hungry.
As the boys moved into the shade where the mother was seated, I found a picture – the poster of Deewar !!! The two orphaned boys with a mother who was still shell shocked and had not donned the widow’s clothes as yet, helpless, shelterless and hungry. And yet the unripe guavas, on sleepy afternoons of the early spring were meant to be theirs, to be plucked by throwing stones and then to be chased by the grandma in the house and then they would flee but not without the booty. The real estate has broken homes to make buildings and with that taken away the trees that were as much a part of the homestead as the people were. With them have disappeared the innocence and prosperity of sleepy afternoons of spring in Kolkata and so have the unripe guavas from the platter of the young boys and girls. The richer can still buy them though their mothers insist that they eat a chocolate or a cake, or sometimes chewing a bubble gum is more in their way of thinking and tastes.
As I saw the two bereaved boys and their mother exhausted with despair, I sensed the older boy already taking over the burden from the other two, already in the process of becoming the breadwinner of the family, entering the world of child labour fighting abuse and exploitation all the way, to earn for his brother what he hankered from me, on this glorious noon of spring, a piece of an unripe guava.

Respected Shri Chidambaramji

This is a letter that my cook wrote to the Home Minister, Shri P. Chidambaram

Respected Shri Chidambaramji,
I am writing this letter to you in a state of extreme grief and shock. This morning (7th of January 2009) at 3.44 am I was picked up from my rented residence in Haryana on the ground that I was a Bangladeshi. I see in this a vicious design of the police and state to ethnically cleanse the migrants into the state of Haryana from West Bengal. I am so traumatized that I can hardly stand up straight and hence kindly excuse my ramblings as I dictate this letter to my employer in Bengali who is transcribing my words in English for you.
My name is Malati Patra, age 43, female and married and living separately from my husband Bablu Patra. My only child, a daughter is married with a child and lives with her in-laws and husband in Batanagar, Maheshtala area of Kolkata. I was Malati Haldar before my marriage. My father is Shri Ratan Haldar and mother is Smt Saraswati Haldar. I was born at my parents’ home in Jagadhatripur, 14 Laat under Kakdwip Thana of South 24 Parganas. I studied in Manmathapur Shiksha Bhavan High School. My father owns land inherited over generations and I too own land divided by my father among my siblings and I. I work as a part time cook in several houses in Eros Garden in Surajkund NCR.
My father –in-law, Late Bagambhar Patra lived in Patharpratima Thana of south 24 Parganas. My husband lives and works in Delhi while his family stays in the village in south 24 Parganas.
I live in a rented accommodation at the address given above. My co-tenant is a Bengali Muslim family comprising of a married couple and two infants. Last night this Muslim family and I were lifted by the police.
It was 3.44 in the morning and the police came with their faces fully masked. They were neither in their uniform, nor wore badges, carried no search warrant and the only feature that said that they were the police was that they came in a police jeep. I was woken up from sleep by a woman police who was holding a baton over my head. In the cold morning neither the small children nor the adults were allowed to even wear our woolens. I was in my night clothes and insisted that I wear my underclothes. The woman then stripped me and asked me to change in front of her. We were asked not to make any noise and the neighbours were asked to remain indoors and never to speak of the incident to anyone and not to ever discuss what they saw.
The police jeep carried us very far and drove us to a police station. My co-tenant was asked to pay Rs 75,000 to the police. As the police insisted that we were Bangladeshis, I wanted to call up my husband and my friends. They did not allow us to call up anyone. Then in the course of the arguments, they suddenly noticed my red and white bangles and my sindur that married Hindu women wear. Initially they said that I was faking my identity but it seems that there was one among them who caught on my accent and decided that it would be safer for them to let me go. Suddenly the police gave me Rs 30 and asked me to take a bus to Kashmere Gate from where I could board a bus to Badarpur. When I was coming out of the police station it was early morning and the children had started going to school. I asked the school children what the area was and it is from them that I learnt that it was Shahdra, Salimpur.
My co-tenant showed property papers to the police who tore them off. The man was let off after taking Rs 25,000 from him but his wife and children are kept back. One of the children is suffering from high fever and is not allowed to wear warm clothes.
My complaint to you is that in the name of terrorism you are creating an atmosphere of witch hunting where ethnic prejudices are having a free play. The state in my case has behaved like a non-state actor by assaulting the rights of a free citizen to reside and live freely anywhere in India. The state of India has abrogated the Constitutional provision by actively discriminating against the Muslims calling them as illegal migrants when Muslims are an integral part of the Indian population. The police have misused the state machinery to terrorize innocent citizens only to give vent to their ethnic prejudices, which in a multicultural democracy is a scandal. I am appalled by the callousness that you are showing in calling for an end to terror through non-state means of police vigilantism. I ask you why I will not think of India as a FAILED STATE !!!
It is not everyday that I can get to write letters. I can only speak and often my employers are not kind enough to transcribe my thoughts into letters. But today I am insulted as never before in my life and my employer is lenient towards me and so I will write more.
I want to ask you that if you the educated people salivate at the prospects of working in the USA and Europe and become NRI, why will not a Pakistani or a Bangladeshi be allowed to come and work in India? I myself want to go to UK as a housemaid then why not recognize the urge in every human being to wish to migrate to the more developed countries? Like a NRI, even a Bangladeshi or a Pakistani citizen has every right to migrate into economically more developed countries for their livelihood. If the USA or Australia or Canada or Europe did not allow immigration, all your elite NRIs would be only illegal migrants. We want to be a developed nation like the USA then why not allow work permits for non-nationals? I know that Bangladeshi migrants would push down my wages and squeeze my opportunities for employment but despite that I want all migrants who come to my country in search for a better life to be able to do so.
During my childhood in West Bengal I have witnessed the Naxal movement. I have lived through bomb blasts and assassinations. I know what terror in civic life is. This is also why I know that a terrorist lives in camps, is a loner and takes training with military experts. I know for sure that a man living with wife and children, worrying over children’s school and wife’s health is not the image of a terrorist. In trying to look for terrorists I can now see how you are harassing a part of your own population. What scares me even more is that your anti-terror posture is a way of eliminating chunks of Indian population out of the census count. The area I live in has about 20,000 households with a majority of them as the rich class. For the past three years many a times “officers” have come and collected forms and photos for making voter I cards but not a single family in our locality has an I card. This is your innovative way of striking off voters from participating in the voting process.
I have always been a follower of Mrs Indira Gandhi and I have remained loyal to the “dynasty”. Do you know why the “dynasty” survives? It does so because it has the same Sikh that assassinated Mrs Gandhi as the PM and the same Tamil who assassinated Rajiv Gandhi as the Home Minister. And despite such instances you count as your success in stereotyping terrorists as Pakistanis. Not every one can become a “dynasty”, you need a very different kind of disposition of a ruler to rule a big country and an ancient civilization like ours. I am sad that such an educated man like you have to be reminded of the Indian Constitution and the Indian statecraft from a semi-educated person like me.
I this letter I demand the following promises from you.
that whether Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Sikh or any other faith, you will never use police against law abiding citizens.
in order to create an atmosphere of calm and peace in the country, you will work towards the possibility of absorbing the populations of divided India back into the motherland where we all belonged before the divisive Partition took place so that all brothers and sisters can live peacefully in separate countries and yet together like one big joint family living in separate residences.
you will work towards the granting of work permit to Afghans, Tibetans, Chinese, Lankans, Africans and whosoever wishes to come to India as the sanctuary of the world to escape from Talibanism, terrorism and state repression.
you will uphold multiculturalism, globalism, tolerance and equality as India’s moral force. You will tread the Asokan path of Dhammavijay to win over terrorism.

Hoping to hear from you,

Yours truly,

Malati Patra