As a young boy I grew up in villages. I also attended boarding school in a hill station. All that was a long time ago. Amidst the slow pace of life in a village up in the hills around Mukteshwar in Uttarakhand, I am reminded of the past — with village and hills rolled into a compact little package. Nostalgia is imbued with sentiment. Regular city life with its cut and thrust imperatives, assaults the senses and deadens them. In fact the shutting out of sentiment and nostalgia is a coping strategy. It is how we deal with the rough edge of competitive existence, since we are continually required to prove ourselves better than others, simply because that is the inexorable and unchallenged logic of our participation in urban society. Here up in the hills, the senses awaken, alert to the inconsequential, like the little sounds by tiny birds, the gentle rustling of fallen leaves, the haunting whistle of the breeze as it dances through sharp pine needles, and of course the almost maddening buzz of hill flies that assuredly are more insistent than insurance salespeople.
I for one have never romanticised village life. last November I was in a Bengal village to be a part of my maid’s wedding. The pristine south 24-paragana surroundings at the edge of the Sunderbans were enchanting, but more haunting was the decrepit state of affairs of the village folk, with zero economic surplus, and the resultant ignominy of enforced migration as a wage workers. My present station is happier. It has successfully excavated nostalgia and sentiment from the deep recesses of my memories of a past that I not only cherished, but one which, I must confess, has had a fundamental role in shaping my being. The primary importance in my present station is people. Work is secondary to personal relationships. The source from which all else follows, even commerce, is how you relate to the people around you.
The village where I am resident (in a cottage built up from ground up) is not entirely non-prosperous. The land is fertile, the trees droop from the weight of fruit, mainly apricot, peaches and pears. On very flat stretches, you see little white flowers dance, trapping under them the secrets of a healthy potato crop (the famous Haldwani potato). Wheat and rice are grown in patches. Cows provide milk. The stores have pretty much everything. Six kilometers away is a little township called Batalia (from where you turn for a 6.5 km drive up to Mukteshwar). Meats and other provisions are aplenty in Batalia. Thanks to Uttrankhand’s intelligent power policies, electricity supply here is better than what it is in Gurgaon. And some villagers have pooled resources to build a little dam uphill from where water is abundantly sourced around the village. By the way, the sarkari supply works too, but the private arrangement is more reliable. So this is a village where life is not too tough. The weather is bracing, kids go to school, the fruit business keeps loads of people occupied, and birdsong fills the valleys.
With the material aspect of life adequately compensated for, the mind bends to the luxury of the natural beauty and the quality of human communion. The unhurried pace of every little thing, like waiting with a smile for a mini truck to unload before the narrow single lane road can allow you to pass. By sharing warm tea with the people (labour force in urban vocabulary) engaged to work on flattening you land to create terraces for plantation. You pay them and yet you share a commonality of presence when you sit and eat and talk together. labour does not create hierarchy; it is merely an important necessity. People who walk by drop in bushels of fruit. It is their housewarming gift.
Plucking fruit, or even asking for some from lots that are being loaded onto trucks are not considered rude. I have been encouraged by a landlady to pluck the choicest plums from her orchard every time I have trekked past her property. Money is important to people here. And there is native cunning when it comes to negotiating work. Yet, it is not the defining index of life in these hills. I am learning more these days than I have in some time now.