The Unadorned

My literary blog to keep track of my creative moods with poems n short stories, book reviews n humorous prose, travelogues n photography, reflections n translations, both in English n Hindi.

Saturday, August 16, 2025

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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6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

A True picture of many families at that time.An excellent analysis.Pl keep on.I loved reading.superb presentation.

6:14 PM  
Blogger The Unadorned said...

Thanks a lot for your appreciation. Keep visiting this portal to encourage me.

6:31 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Very poignant Sir.

10:54 PM  
Blogger The Unadorned said...

Thanks a lot for your appreciative comments.

11:22 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

A real story of hundreds of families

11:24 PM  
Blogger The Unadorned said...

Thanks for your comments. Looking back we feel happy about how much distance we have covered sp far!

2:02 AM  

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