Divine Broke

 

Divine Broke

Every odd has its style. I believe nobody could have understood the proverb better than Gandhiji, who coined a resonant nickname for those at the lowest rung of society—Daridra Narayan, the “Divine Broke.” Gandhi may have had a greater socio-political purpose in mind, but I once heard of a rural widow who embodied the spirit of the phrase without ever knowing its origin.

Greater purpose? I’m not sure. To me, even a small act of benevolence can hold as much significance as a monumental contribution. Otherwise, why would Shri Ram have praised the humble squirrel that helped in building the bridge between India and Lanka?

The widow—known in the village as Shibu Ma, after her deceased son Shibu—was neither wealthy nor destitute. Paradoxically, she became better off only after her husband’s death. While alive, he squandered money on gambling and disreputable pursuits, leaving the family in want. Alone, Shibu Ma worked diligently on her two acres—using fertilisers, nurturing her crops, and harvesting well. She even renovated the tank in her backyard. Rumour had it she unearthed two buried pitchers there—one full of cowries, another, perhaps, of gold and silver coins. Reality or folklore? Hard to say. Sometimes, I dismissed the tales outright; at other times, when I looked at the many large ponds scattered across our fallow lands within a kilometre radius, I wondered whether some forgotten ancestor had indeed hidden treasure while digging waterholes.

In our village, wealth had a simple definition: a family that could eat rice from its own harvest throughout the year was considered rich. By that measure, Shibu Ma had crossed the threshold.

Her improved status was visible in another way—her generosity at the annual Bhagavat recital. For seven days, a Brahmin reciter sat in a small hut, reading aloud all twelve volumes of Jagannath Das’s Odia Bhagavat—18,000 verses narrating the life and deeds of Shri Krishna—while a handful of villagers listened. At the end came a community feast, where rice and vegetables collected from households were cooked for all, regardless of caste. Shibu Ma was a prominent listener and benefactor. She even remembered many verses by heart.

One summer night, as usual, Shibu Ma went to bed at eight and was to rise at four. The previous day had been the eleventh of the lunar fortnight. She had fasted, eating only a couple of wheat chapatis—a rarity in our rice-eating land. Hungry and restless, she longed for dawn and her favourite pakhala bhata—water rice with pickle and green chilli.

That night, two thieves entered Shibu Ma’s house through the kitchen enclosure at the back. The kitchen was an additional room situated at the end of the rear veranda, with temporary walls and a door made of flattened bamboo. It was left unguarded and unlocked, but only secured from outside at night with an iron fastener. This made it easy to access from outside once the widow went to bed and bolted the inner door of the house. Even stray dogs and cats could easily enter the kitchen. Somehow, the two thieves arrived quite late at Shibu Ma’s house, and when they began their work, they decided to break into the kitchen.

It was just before the widow’s waking hour.

The fragrance of pickle reached her bed, hastening her rising. At first, she thought it must be a stray dog, but then reasoned: dogs don’t open pickle jars. Peering through the window, she saw two men devouring her food. She smiled at her own deduction. “They must be hungry,” she thought. “Only a starving soul eats at such an ungodly hour.”

In the dim moonlight, she also recognised them—Bowli and Baya, both known miscreants. She took pride in her quiet detective work, yet raised no alarm. She let them finish and go.

The thieves, satisfied and full of praise for the pickle, but at the same time, cautious of being caught, slipped away. Full for the night, they promised each other they would return another time—not for rice, but for her rumoured treasure.

The next day was the twelfth of the lunar fortnight, when Shibu Ma was supposed to end her fasting ritual by feeding a Brahmin. Instead, she packed two bundles of rice, potatoes, pickles, and vegetables—and discreetly slipped a five-rupee note into each. Five rupees—no joke! She sent them, through a messenger, to the houses of the very thieves she had seen.

When Bowli and Baya realised that the widow whose home they had trespassed had, instead, sent them food, they trembled. They knew well what usually awaited thieves in a village: lime and charcoal streaks smeared across their cheeks, garlands of brinjals and potatoes strung around their necks, and one forced to ride piggyback on the other through the village streets while the crowd jeered. Dreading such humiliation, they rushed to her house, fell at her feet, and begged for forgiveness.

But Shibu Ma feigned ignorance. “Who says my house was burgled? Nothing happened,” she replied. She never told her neighbours, nor the village elders. Had she done so, the punishment might have been harsher than the thieves feared, because Shibu Ma was then already a village bigwig!

And so, only she and the culprits knew the truth. To the rest of the village, it remained a mystery—like the rumoured pitcher of treasure unearthed from her pond.

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By

Ananta Narayan Nanda

Bhubaneswar

27-09-2025

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The Punishment

 

The Punishment

We, who were born in the 1950s and 1960s, have watched many things change before our eyes. Two memories stand out: the sudden reduction of poverty during the eighties and nineties, and the quiet disappearance of the house sparrow—the guraia of Hindi-speaking homes. Economists have their explanations for the first, but for us ordinary folks the two are inseparable: poverty retreating, sparrows vanishing.

Later, people added a third factor. They said the shift from mud houses with thatched roofs to brick-and-mortar dwellings destroyed the sparrows’ habitat. Some even claimed that mobile towers delivered the final blow. Whatever the cause, we lived through the odd coincidence—prosperity rising as sparrows counted their last days.

Those who have read the famous 1962 title Silent Spring may find broader arguments here. I, however, have only a small story to tell.

My friend Bhola was well-known for his waywardness. His father’s punishments never reformed him, for he always believed in—nay, delighted in—what he did. Once, his father gave him a simple duty: guard the paddy spread out to dry in the sun.

It was monsoon season. On the few rainless days, families spread their stored paddy on straw mats to dry. This grain, kept for months and then boiled and dried, was later pounded in a homemade contraption called a dhinki.

The dhinki was a rustic machine, a simple first-class lever. A six-foot log was joined at one end to a shorter upright log, two and a half or three feet long, its tip shod with iron. Together the two formed the shape of a “7.” Near the other end, at the pivot point, a cross-bar stick was inserted through the log and rested on a pair of fulcrums, keeping the lever a foot above the ground. When someone trampled the flattened rear end, the vertical log rose and then fell, pounding the pit of paddy with its iron tip. Repeated hundreds of times, this exercise yielded eight to ten kilos of rice, which women then winnowed and sieved into clean grain.

Bhola’s job was only to keep away the birds—crows, sparrows, and the noisy and so-called unruly seven sisters that arrived in gangs.

Here, though I digress, I must pause to speak of the bird called the “seven sisters.” English has done them a lexical injustice. First, they were branded “babblers,” as if their ceaseless chatter were nothing but noise. Later, they were renamed “seven sisters,” but even that was no restitution. The name only underlined their noisy togetherness—as though seven garrulous human sisters had gathered to make a clamorous uproar. In truth, they are not vulgar but charming birds who seem to have sworn to sink or swim together. One must learn from them how to be happy!

Back to the story. Bhola, a firm believer in creative disobedience, had other plans. Instead of keeping watch in obedience to his father’s command, he wandered off to the pond to pluck the ripened fruits of water lilies lying submerged. They looked like apples—nay, like dragon fruits in size but maturing underwater. Inside those fruits were mustard-like seeds, a delicacy when sun-dried and fried on hot sand. Bhola was sure that such an adventurous exploit would earn him his father’s praise—even if it meant disobeying orders.

Around 11:30, his father arrived to turn the grain, letting the lower layers dry. What did he see?

        Crows, cawing and feasting.

        Sparrows, twenty or more, chirping softly.

        Seven sisters, their chatter as loud as the crows.

It was unchecked merrymaking, a minor pandemonium.

Bhola’s father chased the birds away, but his mind had already settled on punishment. For him, paddy was Lakshmi herself—grain was wealth, never to be wasted.

Even if Bhola returned with a bundle of lily seeds, that gain could not outweigh the loss of sacred grain scattered on the ground.

So he punished him—not with a stick, but with a harsher order. Bhola was made to sit under the blazing sun and pick, grain by grain, every kernel of paddy the birds had flung onto the sand. Two hours of backbreaking labour lay ahead, with no shade, no respite. If that was not punishment, then what was?

He began his task, but something unexpected happened. The sparrows returned like divine helpmates. Unlike the wary crows, they showed no fear of Bhola. They hopped around him, pecking the grains with cheerful ease. The seven sisters had gone elsewhere for their party.

Bhola struck a bargain with the sparrows:

“You are my friends, little birdies. Respect my right—don’t touch the paddy on the mat. That is mine. Take all you want from outside. Help me clean it up, and then we both win.”

And they did. The sparrows kept their side of the deal, clearing the scattered paddy from the sand while leaving the mat untouched.

When his father returned, he was astonished. The sparrows, usually timid, were working alongside his son as if bound by trust.

He was filled with compassion for them. Were they angels from the sky, come to help a soul in trouble?

There was no wastage. The ground was clean, the grains eaten, not wasted. In that, there was no insult to Goddess Lakshmi.

So he forgave Bhola, the wayward boy. Not because the task was completed, but because punishment had transformed into a partnership—between human stubbornness and the loyalty of tiny sparrows, the divine birds.

Epilogue

That was the seventies. Today, sparrows in our area are no longer present, and poverty has also receded. We can debate causes, spin theories, and connect dots. But for me, the memory of that day remains vivid: a boy punished, sparrows bargaining, and a father discovering that sometimes punishment itself becomes a lesson in friendship, faith, and frugality.

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By

Ananta Narayan Nanda

Bhubaneswar

23-09-2025

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The Guardian Goddess

 

The Guardian Goddess

Once, at four in the morning, on my way to Bhubaneswar railway station, I noticed a pair of flower-pluckers at work. They were tugging at the last blossom of a crepe jasmine (tagar) plant, showing no hesitation in stripping the tree bare. We usually refrain from plucking the last few flowers; to render a tree flowerless is the worst kind of insult one can inflict upon it. But nocturnal flower-pluckers in this city are of a different breed.

A butcher, when he kills, has a sense of compassion for the animal—at least a belief that the last pain should be the least pain. But these flower-pluckers? They are careless, cruel, and almost entirely without compunction. And they do this to trees that do not even belong to them. Should I call them thieves? Opinions may differ, for they gather their booty only to lay it at the feet of the gods.

The somnambulist flower pluckers, with their god-given night vision, perform with the same effectiveness at night as they would during the day. If a blossom blooms out of reach, they will not hesitate to snap a tender branch, even after prodding with their crooked iron staves. Watching them, I felt an impulse to jump down from the vehicle and frighten them with a warning about cobras lurking in the jasmine branches—an urban joke, perhaps, like crocodiles in the sewers!

That thought of cobras instantly carried me back to my childhood and to my sister’s flower-plucking adventures. Remember, what I tell you now belongs to a world sixty years ago.

In our village, we celebrated a spring festival dedicated to the cuckoo gods. Younger girls would fashion tiny earthen idols of a pair of cuckoos and place them in niches on the mud walls of their homes. For five to seven days, these fragile idols of unbaked clay were worshipped with a profusion of flowers.

Such was the demand that a silent competition arose: who could wake earliest to claim the choicest blossoms? And these were all springtime blooms—amaltas (laburnum), shimli (silk-cotton), gulmohar, even mango flowers if they were late to bloom.

The earliest teams returned with overflowing baskets, sometimes lending flowers to their friends—creating a curious “flower credit market.” If a lender overslept one morning, she could borrow back from the very borrower she once supplied. Worship, economy, and camaraderie were woven into this fragrant ritual.

The cuckoo gods received prasad of powdered puffed rice paste mixed with the tang of raw green mango and molasses. This was spring’s own offering—mangoes yet unripe, flowers at their peak. Boys, though mostly excluded, lingered at the edges in hope. Only the favoured few were invited to share the offerings.

At the week’s end, the cuckoo idols were taken from their niches, placed on the boughs of mango trees, and bidden farewell with poems recited by the girls:

O cuckoo dear, must you now depart?

Till mango blossoms wake the heart?

The year ahead will weigh so long,

Yet sing for us, keep us in your song.

My story begins here….

One year, my sister and her friend set out at 3:30 a.m. for a distant amaltas tree, locally known as the Varun tree, half a kilometre away. She had been a young girl then; today, she lives only in memory, having left us twenty-seven years ago. Brave girls, they relied on the faint moonlight to guide them along the field path. But as they neared the tree, they froze.

A shadowy figure was performing sit-ups beneath the branches. No rival team could have dared venture there at that hour, so it could not be human. Their fear deepened when the figure began moving on its hands, upside-down, as though its feet sprouted from its nose like an aeroplane’s landing gear. The girls had never seen an aircraft, but they knew this was neither man nor beast. Perhaps, they thought, it was the spectral motion of a spirit—an apparition in levitation.

By then, they were certain: it was no human but a ghost—or perhaps a guardian deity of the tree. Some trees in the village were known to house terracotta horses and images of forgotten goddesses around their roots, which were worshipped only once a year on Makar Sankranti, January 14, or Vishuv Sankranti on April 14.

Terrified, my sister and her friend retreated without plucking a single flower. That day, they managed with borrowed blossoms, confident that the cuckoo gods would forgive their failure.

Words spread. Who was the strange figure? If not ghost or rival, then perhaps a goddess herself? Nobody doubted my sister—she was considered the ideal girl for her exemplary conduct.

To add to the mystery, a villager later dreamt that a goddess had demanded worship for her defiled amaltas tree. That dream was enough; the community accepted it.

From then on, the amaltas tree was sacred. Every 14th of April, the goddess received offerings of ground puffed rice and green mango. The dreamer himself would dance in a trance, shaking his head, clad in a sequined skirt, elevated briefly beyond the human realm. Only after the sacred mixture was offered to him would his frenzy subside.

My sister and her friend were forever praised for “discovering” a goddess while out in search of flowers for the cuckoo gods.

And now, I wonder if the greedy nocturnal flower-pluckers of Bhubaneswar too should stumble upon such a guardian goddess—one who guards her tree fiercely, who turns careless hands into trembling ones. Perhaps that is the only solution: for superstition to succeed where compassion fails.

Until then, the crepe jasmine trees must bear their pain in silence, stripped and scarred before dawn.

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By

Ananta Narayan Nanda

18-09-2025

Bhubaneswar

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The Matriculation Miracle

 

The Matriculation Miracle

The other day, while waiting at a roadside tea stall in Bhubaneswar, I overheard a man defend the practice of letting his cow roam the streets, clogging traffic and occasionally giving automobile drivers a nightmare. His reasoning was odd but delivered with conviction:

“Cows nowadays prefer the road,” he explained. “The fumes from automobiles drive away mosquitoes, so they enjoy a far more comfortable stay on the road than in a cowshed. Besides, if the Supreme Court can affirm the right of stray dogs to live on the streets, why not the right of holy cows? Are they less sacred?”

I had no answer. More importantly, I did not want to get entangled in an argument and end up branded a cow-antagonist. However, his words carried me back in memory to a different time when cattle were not left to fend for themselves on highways but returned dutifully each evening to their cowsheds.

In my high school days, every evening was marked by the sight of cows, calves, and bullocks streaming back from the fields, their bells tinkling softly around their necks. It was a village rhythm as sure as the sunset. If one animal failed to return, the family that owned it would not touch dinner until the missing creature was traced and brought back.

That was the custom. A cow, especially a bullock that provided strength for ploughing and carting, was as much a member of the family as any child. Losing one was not just an economic blow; it was considered a calamity, a breach of the moral order.

One summer evening, in a neighbouring household, a bullock did not come back. At first, the family assumed it had overgrazed somewhere and would soon wander in. But as the night deepened, anxiety rose. Lanterns were lit, and men and boys fanned out along the fields, the railway track, and the riverbank.

The search went on until midnight. Finally, the searchers returned empty-handed, their clothes clinging with dew. Everyone sat down to dinner except the head of the household, who silently pushed away his plate. His fast was an act of responsibility—he would not eat until the animal was back under his roof.

The next day dawned with more hope. The men scoured the countryside, some even walking to the nearby cattle fair, checking if a thief was selling the bullock. Again, nothing. The head of the house still refused food, lips parched but resolve firm.

On the third day, clouds gathered and rain lashed the village. Search parties trudged through mud, their torches dimmed by thunder and lightning. In the evening, exhausted and wet, they returned empty-handed once again. This time, the priest was consulted. He suggested a “relay fast”: the burden of abstinence could be passed from one family member to another so that the head of the household did not collapse. His wife took the baton and continued the vigil.

By now, whispers had started: “Perhaps the bullock has been stolen.” “Perhaps it fell into a ditch.” Finally, someone suggested visiting a famous astrologer, twenty kilometres away.

So, with nothing to lose, the bullock’s owner set off. The astrologer received him with a knowing smile, as though he had been expecting the visit. Without asking a single question, he declared:

“Your bullock is in the deep forest, tied to a sal tree. It has not eaten for three days. Go northwest, walk for two hours, and you shall find it.”

The man was astonished. No astrologer had ever spoken with such certainty. He felt like scoffing, but desperation has a way of lowering scepticism. He set out in the indicated direction, and after four kilometres—Eureka! There was his bullock, tethered exactly as described, hungry but alive.

The village celebrated. The astrologer’s reputation soared; his name was whispered in reverence, as though he were part prophet, part detective.

But the story did not end with the bullock.

In the next house lived a poor family with three children who, year after year, failed their matriculation examinations. The eldest would stumble in mathematics, the middle one in Sanskrit, and English was a common graveyard for all three. Their father was a man worn down by poverty and disappointment. Only the previous year, he had sold a cow to pay their exam fees.

When they heard of the miraculous bull recovery, the children’s ears pricked up. Two of them—a nineteen-year-old boy and his eighteen-year-old sister—decided that the astrologer must be consulted. If they were destined to fail again, better to know beforehand than waste their father’s meagre savings.

The third sibling scoffed. “I’d rather fail for the seventeenth time than waste more money on an astrologer,” he declared. But the brother and sister were determined.

So, one bright morning, they borrowed a sturdy bicycle. The brother pedalled, his youthful frame strong, his soft moustache waiting for its first shave. The sister perched on the front rod of the bicycle frame, clutching her satchel. The twenty-kilometre ride was long but not daunting for young legs filled with hope.

They arrived at the astrologer’s modest house, breathless but expectant. Before they could even narrate their woes, the astrologer fixed them with a piercing gaze and spoke in a booming voice:

“Why do you come to me after committing the forbidden act—even before marriage? If you love each other, that is one thing. But why indulge in what is forbidden?”

The words fell like stones. At first, the siblings were bewildered. But when the astrologer repeated his accusation, the meaning was clear—and shame scorched them. They, instead of protesting the false charge, leapt onto their bicycle, eager to escape.

From behind came the astrologer’s indignant cry:
“You haven’t paid my fee of one rupee and four annas, which I would have used to perform your expiation!”

The boy and girl fled home, shaken to the core. Whatever the astrologer had seen or imagined, his words pierced them. They turned their embarrassment into fuel. From that day, they studied with renewed determination, spending long nights over lantern-lit books.

When the results came, something astonishing happened: all three children passed. For the first time, not one but all of them cleared their matriculation. Neighbours who had written them off as hopeless were stunned. Their father, who had expected another year of failure, wept with relief.

Looking back, I wonder what the true miracle was. The astrologer’s uncanny description of the missing bullock? Or the shock he delivered to two desperate siblings, which pushed them to prove him wrong?

Perhaps both. Perhaps neither. But one thing is clear: faith—whether in cattle, custom, or even an astrologer’s cryptic words—can sometimes nudge people towards unexpected strength.

And so the story circles back to the present, where cows still roam the streets, no longer bound by custom or cowshed, while motorists swerve around them with curses under their breath. Times have changed. But memories of a fasting father, a found bullock, and three improbable passes remind me that belief, however misplaced, can shape destinies.

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By

Ananta Narayan Nanda

Bhubaneswar

13-09-2025

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Bhima: The Bandit with Arithmetic

 

Bhima: The Bandit with Arithmetic

Almost every community carries legends of a Robin-Hood-like figure, passed down from generation to generation, polished a little each time. Such a figure is tough on the rich but gracious toward the poor, robbing the former to provide relief to the latter.

In my locality, we have such a legend: Bhima. His stories still run from mouth to mouth, one of which I recount here as I heard it from a beneficiary himself.

The poor fellow was called Babaji. Ten years earlier, he had borrowed fifty rupees from the moneylender, mortgaging his half-acre of land. The condition was simple yet cruel: as long as Babaji paid five rupees interest each year, at the rate of ten per cent per year, he would be allowed to till his land.

But the moneylender had his own peculiar arithmetic. It was nothing like the great Indian invention of zero that once expanded the horizons of human knowledge. His arithmetic was designed only to fatten his trade and tighten his grip. He would say:

“You took fifty rupees. The interest is five rupees. You pay me five rupees? Good. That makes your total outstanding fifty plus five plus five, which equals seventy. Next year, we will have the calculation afresh.”

Thus, every payment Babaji made, whether of interest or toward the principal, was perversely added to the outstanding. Over the course of a decade, Babaji had already paid a hundred rupees, yet the moneylender now demanded one hundred and fifty rupees more.

Babaji wanted to break free of this endless trap. He thought of selling his big brass pot, used for feeding the cow. On a Sunday, he walked eighteen kilometres to the weekly hat (market), determined to sell it for nothing less than one hundred and fifty rupees.

It was a full-moon night, so business stretched until late evening. But no one offered more than fifty. Finally, Babaji sold the pot for that amount and started walking back home, worried about how to arrange the remaining one hundred. Worse, he feared being waylaid by Bhima, the dreaded outlaw who was said to prowl even under moonlit skies.

Near midnight, Babaji reached the big banyan tree near Bhima’s village. To his horror, there stood Bhima himself. Babaji nearly collapsed in fright.

But Bhima did not snatch his money. Instead, he touched Babaji’s feet—a mark of respect for elders. He asked where Babaji was coming from and why he was so late. Villagers always had stories of woe to tell, and Babaji poured his heart out: the brass pot, the debt trap, the desire to breathe free like any citizen.

Bhima listened, calculated quickly, and declared: “By my reckoning, you have already paid five hundred rupees in these ten years.”

The storytellers in our area still praise Bhima’s arithmetic as much as his daredevil raids on the British treasury. In fact, he was imaginative, devising a suitable formula on the spot to achieve the desired result. He was going to apply one of his patented formulas in Babaji’s case to match, nay outdo, the moneylender’s.

That very night, Bhima marched Babaji to the moneylender’s house. The man trembled, expecting robbery. But Bhima reassured him:

“I haven’t come to loot you. I’ve come to teach you arithmetic.”

Under Bhima’s fierce gaze, the moneylender admitted every twist in calculation. Finally, he agreed—very reluctantly—to return three hundred and fifty rupees that he had unjustly taken over and above the ten per cent annual interest.

Even after admitting his trickery, the moneylender protested. “But, Bhima, the agreement was not ten per cent per year but ten per cent per month.”

Now Bhima raised his voice:

“In five minutes, you’ll see what comes next if Babaji doesn’t get his money.”

Fearing the worst, the moneylender yielded. Babaji was free at last from his decade-old debt. Besides, he got three hundred and fifty rupees from the moneylender, thanks to the fantastic arithmetic knowledge of Bhims.

As Bhima departed, he smiled and said, “I don’t usually practice my trade on full-moon nights. But for you, Babaji, I made an exception.”

Thus, lives on the legend of Bhima the outlaw—a man of courage, respect for elders, and uncommon arithmetic—who made the poor breathe freely again.

Even after finishing my story, I feel like saying something more:

Legends are not just stories; they are the mathematics of hope, recalculating justice where injustice multiplies unchecked.

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By

Ananta Narayan Nanda

07-09-2025

Bhubaneswar

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The Proxy and the Rebel

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Here is another story that made an incursion into the age of the freedom movement just to sound authentic. It has no intention of writing historical fiction, but I have seen people in real life getting freedom fighters’ pension without an iota of patriotic feeling. Sometimes, one wonders how their patriotism died as they entered independent India. Anyway, it is a story out and out, standing only on imagination.

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The Proxy and the Rebel

Long, long ago, in the heyday of colonial feudalism, the zamindars—landlords without armies, without official posts, yet wielding unchecked power—were tasked with a straightforward duty: collect revenue from the peasants and deliver it to the British. In return, they enjoyed near-absolute authority over innocent rural folk. The law was said to exist, but it bent like a reed—unyielding against the poor, pliant before the rich. Between the zamindar and the peasant, the courts almost always punished the latter. Between zamindar and zamindar, the law merely mediated rivalries.

Among these lords lived a young heir, Gyan Vardhan Ray Bahadur, the son of a zamindar who had never attended school. Premier institutions in Calcutta, Raipur, Shimla, or Dehradun were reserved for those with both talent and wealth. Those without either remained confined to the care of local teachers, who taught Sanskrit, arithmetic, and scriptures at the landlord’s house.

But such pupils were often dull, unmotivated, and arrogant. The teachers, despairing at their lack of grasp, fumed in helpless rage. How could they vent their fury without risking their position? A zamindar’s son, like Gyan Vardhan, was beyond punishment. Yet there was a solution: a proxy.

A poor orphan from the village would be seated beside the zamindar’s son during lessons. His role was not to learn but to suffer. Whenever the landlord’s son failed to recite a verse or solve a sum, the orphan’s back bore the blows. He was beaten with sticks, slapped, and thrashed until the teacher’s temper cooled. He was not allowed to cry; tears only invited harsher punishment. Over time, his skin grew calloused, his spirit dulled. Still, every day he was flogged, for the zamindar’s son showed no improvement.

The zamindar’s heir, however, was a strapping youth—tall, curly-haired, and fair-complexioned. He looked better suited to acting in a dramatic troupe than to grappling with the tortures of arithmetic. The proxy, by contrast, was an emaciated child with no living family. He wore nothing but a gamcha—a loincloth—and his chest remained bare, even in winter. His name was Sukhram Das, ironically meaning “one who serves in the midst of plenty.” Whoever had named him seemed to have possessed grim foresight. Sukhram lost his childhood to his early appointment as the scapegoat of the rich.

Years rolled by. Sukhram, recruited at the age of eight, was now fourteen. He had memorised every prayer to Ganesh and Saraswati, mastered multiplication tables, and learned the alphabet—though no one had intended to teach him. The zamindar’s son, now eighteen, remained as foolish as ever, but more violent with each passing day.

One day, weary of his lessons, Gyan Vardhan ran away to a distant town. He had no plan for what to do, no vision for his future. By chance, he stumbled upon a procession of people in white dhotis and kurtas, holding flags and marching toward the seashore. Women, too, walked at the head of the crowd. Curious, he asked one of the participants what they were doing. He was told they were going to make salt.

Gyan Vardhan was puzzled. To him, salt was only a pinch in food—why would hundreds march for it? Yet his curiosity carried him to the seashore, where water was drawn in drums, wood was stacked, and earthen pots were set on hearths, filled with brine. He lingered until evening, fascinated by the gathering. Then the police platoons arrived and charged the crowd with lathis. Most dispersed, but when Gyan Vardhan tried to flee, he was caught and jailed. He learned only later that this was the Salt March of the non-cooperation movement led by Mahatma Gandhi.

He spent a year in prison. By the time he was released, his father’s zamindari had collapsed. For participating in an unlawful movement, their privileges were stripped away, and the family was reduced to a few acres of land. The grandeur of their prosperity had vanished before his return.

Years later, when India won independence, Gyan Vardhan found himself entitled to a freedom fighter’s pension. Ironically, though he had been a duffer at studies, he was now revered as a patriot, his pension allowing him to live decently without education or skill.

And Sukhram? With Gyan Vardhan gone, the little “education establishment” was dissolved. Sukhram was relieved, spared the daily torment of being a sitting target. By then, however, he had learned enough to qualify as a veranda teacher in the village. He taught children the alphabet, multiplication tables, primers, prayers, and Sanskrit slokas. In addition, he trained villagers in dramatic techniques for staging open-air theatre. Though unpaid for his drama instruction, he found joy in it.

Once, in 1972, during the Silver Jubilee of Indian Independence, someone curiously compared the incomes of both the proxy and the rebel and found the stark irony of their fate. Gyan Vardhan, once the pampered dullard, drew ₹500 a month as a freedom fighter’s pension. Sukhram, the boy who had endured years of proxy punishment, earned only ₹40 a month—five rupees per child—while his cultural service to the village dramatic troupe went unremunerated.

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By 

Ananta Narayan Nanda

Bhubaneswar

03-09-2025

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