Half the Answer
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It is a story, dug from what I have seen in my childhood. Our children cannot imagine how hard things used to be in those days. Some say they are best forgotten, and instead of glorifying the past days in literature, we'd better forget that. Nobody will give us credit for those lacklustre past; let us celebrate the present. I think they have a point.
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Half
the Answer
Fifty years ago, there
lived in our village a family of four—father, mother, elder son, and daughter.
They had no land to till, no paddy to sow, no wages from farm work to bring
home. Since they refused to work as farm labourers on daily wages, people
mockingly called them “Kam Chor”—shirkers. But how can one steal work
where there is hardly any to steal? The phrase was meaningless, a cruel tag.
Work
itself was scarce. In those days, the fields placed their faith in the sky;
rain alone was the farmer’s irrigation.
How
then did this family keep their pots from going empty?
As
a child, I discovered only half the answer. They herded thirty head of cattle
belonging to others. At dawn, the animals were driven to graze beneath the
vast, watchful sky. By noon, the herd was brought back to an enclosure, and for
this service the family received an unusual wage—one meal per month for each
animal. Thirty meals in all.
Had
a single person done the work, they could have eaten every day at the owners’
houses. But the labour was shared by all four. So the family carried that
solitary meal to the field, divided it into four portions, and swallowed their
meagre share without complaint.
Their
cash earnings came to ₹150 a month—₹5
per animal—just enough to buy sixty kilos of rice at ₹2.50
a kilo. That meant two kilos of rice a day, provided they bought nothing else.
Dinner could be stretched into a modest meal; lunch could be taken a
quarter-share of what they used to earn, just for arithmetic's sake. For side
dishes, they gathered green leaves or caught a stray fish in a rain-fed paddy
field. And for salt—sometimes oil or spices—they bartered away 100 or 200 grams
of their precious rice at the village shop, exchanging food for flavour.
That
was half the answer to my question, nay, my curiosity. The other half remained
hidden. Cattle-herding lasted only from July to December. From January to June,
the fields lay bare and the cattle roamed free. What sustained the family then?
I
never found out.
Now,
grown and grey, I no longer wish to. All four are long gone—perhaps carried
away not by time alone, but by the slow famine of their bodies.
The unanswered half remains an uncomfortable silence.
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By
Ananta Narayan Nanda
Bhubaneswar
16-08-2025
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Labels: short story
6 Comments:
A True picture of many families at that time.An excellent analysis.Pl keep on.I loved reading.superb presentation.
Thanks a lot for your appreciation. Keep visiting this portal to encourage me.
Very poignant Sir.
Thanks a lot for your appreciative comments.
A real story of hundreds of families
Thanks for your comments. Looking back we feel happy about how much distance we have covered sp far!
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