The Eligible Bachelor

 

The Eligible Bachelor

Long, long ago, there lived a man named Mulia in our village—fifty-one years old, dull-witted by reputation, but convinced he was still an eligible bachelor.

According to him, a man never becomes “too old” to marry. Why? Because—he reasoned—as long as a man can fetch fuelwood from the jungle, draw water from the well, pick vegetables from the kitchen garden, scrub floors during festive cleanings, or wash clothes beaten on a stone after boiling them with soda, he remains perfectly fit for marriage.

Mulia insisted he could do all these things; every woman, he believed, would love such a helpful husband. However, the rest of the village disagreed.

As a child, Mulia had no control over his bowels until he was nine.

Had his parents been medically aware, he might have been diagnosed with autism. However, both parents died young under mysterious circumstances, later described as a railway accident. The information arrived so late—and from such unverified sources—that by then all compensation files had already been closed at every level of the railway department.

Thus, Mulia was brought up by his default guardian, Uncle Vibhuti, who ensured that Mulia “outgrew” the suspicion of any congenital condition simply by surviving it.

He grew enough to be sent to school. There, he spent four years learning forty-nine alphabets and still could not remember them.

There was, however, a faint glimmer of hope. In arithmetic, he quickly learnt the numbers 1 to 10. He even grasped the magical rule that placing a zero after a number makes it ten times bigger. But he learnt nothing beyond that. Oh yes—thanks to this trick, he could form numbers like 20, 30, 40, and so on, though he often jumbled them midway.

He did manage to memorise one poem—or more accurately, one-quarter of one—from his primer. The lines stayed with him for decades, though in a scrambled, lottery-like sequence:

It is already morning, boys,

A time to sing rhyme, boys,

The garden smells sweet, and the breeze is blowing,

Get ready for your lessons without wasting time.

That quatrain served him variously—as a proverb, a nursery rhyme, a prayer, and even as an expression of happiness while bathing. Thus, it was enough to disprove the village rumour that “Mulia never learnt poetry.”

After six years of relentless effort, his private tutor finally gave up. Mulia somehow persisted in attending the local school but failed the primary examination in just two years. Thus ended his tryst with formal education.

At twelve, Mulia entered the practical world of agriculture.

He could plough—or at least stand behind a pair of bullocks shouting “Hyeee!” and let them do the hard work. Occasionally, he drifted into philosophical reflections on the purpose of human life or the truth behind birth and death—proof enough that he was a profound existential thinker. Whenever this happened, the ploughshare slipped.

On one such philosophical flight, the ploughshare cut a bullock’s hoof so severely that the animal remained unfit for cultivation for a month.

His master rewarded Mulia with twenty-one slaps, enough to make him unfit for work for a fortnight. He even lost the day’s wage.

Thus began his reputation as a village butcher—kasai. Everyone started saying, “Don't let him hold the plough—he’s an assailant, a butcher!”

But Mulia was not discouraged. Agriculture offered hundreds of jobs; surely one would suit him.

His next assignment was to weed paddy fields. The rule was simple: 1- Black-rooted plants meant real paddy—keep; 2- White-rooted plants meant wild paddy—uproot and push it into mud.

Unfortunately, Mulia understood the exact opposite.

By midday, the field shimmered white with wild paddy as Mulia uprooted every precious paddy plant along with the weeds and buried them in the mud. This marked the end of his career as a weeder in the paddy fields. From then on, he was known as “the lover of wild paddy.”

During the reaping season, Mulia was once again employed—perhaps out of pity, probably due to labour shortages, or simply because he never objected to being paid less than the lowest wage.

Working with great fervour, he sliced his own hand with a freshly sharpened sickle before lunchtime. Like an ambidextrous hero, he switched to his left hand. Within an hour, that, too, began to bleed.

By year-end, Mulia was injured, unemployed, and the butt of jokes for children half his age. Before long, he had earned enough nicknames to become a minor celebrity—not just in his own village but across the entire neighbourhood. Naturally, the following year, no one hired him.

Mulia had no land of his own. His paternal property had long been merged into Uncle Vibhuti’s holdings. So he began catching fish from puddles, half-flooded fields, and narrow monsoon channels. Whatever he managed to catch, he bartered for a meal—something to supplement the little food he received at Uncle Vibhuti’s house.

His uncle fed him in exchange for labour—rarely a fair deal, but at least Mulia didn’t starve. Fishing was one task he could manage without harming his targets too badly.

He also tried plucking berries, fetching water, collecting honey (after getting stung), gathering firewood, and doing dozens of other odd village jobs. In the end, failure followed him like a shadow.

Yet Mulia stayed on. He could have gone to town and taken up a job as a busboy in a hotel, scrubbing plates for strangers. But he could not abandon the soil that had mocked him, fed him, and shaped him. For all its ridicule, the village was still the only place where his heart felt at home.

He never visited a temple seeking change. Once, when he was a child, a story had filled him with hope—a tale of how the deity of a nearby temple had miraculously helped a man pass an exam. Believing that God listened to the helpless, he too went to pray.

He arrived just as the prasad was being handed out and waited shyly for his turn. But the priest looked past him, gave sweets to everyone else, and not a single granule to him. Mulia walked back slowly, his small hands empty, his heart even emptier, the purpose of his visit forgotten in the ache of being overlooked.

In his young mind, one explanation took root—that he was denied the sweet because he was an orphan. And that belief hardened with time. If God’s sweet was not for him, surely God’s temple was not for him either. Thus, Mulia grew up thinking he had no place before the deity, no right to stand where others stood.

One sympathetic neighbour, Dayal, a freelance writer of court documents, understood why Mulia had no land left: Uncle Vibhuti had conveniently “managed” it all in the name of protection.

Dayal pressured Vibhuti to transfer Mulia’s rightful share—two acres. Vibhuti agreed, with one condition: “If Mulia gets married, an intelligent wife will handle his foolishness.”

But no girl was willing to marry someone widely regarded as the embodiment of failure. So Vibhuti proposed a brilliant solution: “We’ll ‘buy’ a girl from West Bengal for five thousand rupees and arrange the marriage. The money can come from selling Mulia’s land.”

Dayal found the plan reasonable—after all, the sale proceeds of Mulia’s land would go towards funding his marriage. Eighty per cent of Mulia’s land was sold to Vibhuti. Trusting both uncles—one blood, one neighbour—Mulia signed happily, unaware they had teamed up against him.

It seemed as if Vibhuti Kaka had been hatching this plan for a long time—he just needed the right opportunity and a partner to put it into action. Now he had found that partner in Dayal.

A girl was “procured” through the interstate bride trafficking network of that era. Such girls, often shown as orphans or unable to afford dowries, were offered to desperate grooms across state borders. Understandably, such “procured” brides were assured that their weddings were contrived to be temporary ones!

When the wedding finally took place, not a single member of the bride’s family was present. Vibhuti himself sat as her guardian on the marriage altar. The ceremony was short and subdued. The customary feast was postponed by fifteen days for reasons unknown.

As for Mulia, he didn’t even know his bride’s name. But he was patient: on the fourth night, when the actual ritual union was to occur, he would surely find out.

Meanwhile, he obeyed every instruction of the priest—no brushing teeth with twigs (only mango leaves permitted), no shaving (inauspicious during the wedding cycle), no stepping outside (ghosts and witches might enter one’s body), and so forth. Mulia followed everything, letter by letter.

On the third day, whispers began circulating early in the morning. By midday, it was confirmed: the bride from Bengal was missing.

The entire village searched. The backyard pond was inspected—it was too shallow for even a goat to drown. The cremation ground was checked, for ghosts were notorious for luring newlyweds merely for their devilish pleasure.

But the bride was nowhere to be seen.

By evening, it was publicly accepted that she had returned to West Bengal. Vibhuti and Dayal shed theatrical tears. To avoid suspicion, Dayal set off on his bicycle to the bride’s supposed village.

He returned at 10 p.m., claiming: “The entire family has gone on pilgrimage, including the bride. Their neighbours said it was a vow after her marriage.”

Villagers doubted the story was fabricated. The village he mentioned was too far for a bicycle trip, investigation, and return within a few hours.

But by then, most of Mulia’s land had already passed to Vibhuti—his de facto possession now de jure ownership. Mulia was left with just a single fallow, waterlogged patch that no one wanted.

Vibhuti, displaying saintly generosity, took Mulia back into his household—feeding him in exchange for labour. His son, Shyam Sundar, later continued the arrangement his father had established, giving shelter to Mulia, his elder cousin. Mulia continued to do strenuous jobs his way—clumsily but faithfully.

Meanwhile, Mulia nurtured a cherished dream: he would marry again.

He refused to accept that he was too old or too inept. After all, he still believed he was an eligible bachelor—strong enough to fetch water, fuelwood, vegetables, and perhaps someday, even a wife. Money was no problem—there were takers, willing to buy his waterlogged fallow land for five thousand rupees.

But alas, no one remained to assist him in his marriage negotiations. Both Uncle Vibhuti and Uncle Dayal had passed away, and the interstate bride-trafficking network had long since been dismantled.

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By

Ananta Narayan Nanda

Balasore, 5/12/2025

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