One sunny winter noon....

I was sitting under the shade of a tree. There was only one with ample shade to sit under on the long winding undulating road from Jhilmila to Pathariya, two villages in Dindori, Madhya Pradesh. Although it was winter, noontime sun was showing little mercy and I’d stopped to catch my breath. A wrinkled old man saw me and walked up to the tree. He was stooping slightly with age, was dressed in a dhoti, a sleeveless black vest and had a copper plate in his hand. I greeted him, as is the custom in the villages.

‘Where are you from?’ he asked. ‘Amarpur’ I replied, naming the village I was living in at that time. ‘So are you here for work? What do you do?’ I explained that I work for an organisation, non –governmental, which organises women into self-help groups and so on. ‘So how much do you get? A thousand, eh?’ ‘A little more, enough to get by’, said I. He approved of that and then some more queries followed. Do you have co-workers? Do you know which buses go to Amarpur? Do you always roam around alone like this? Yes, yes, mostly dada..... It was a leisurely conversation between complete strangers, indeed there is no similarity between him and me. I was enjoying his company and I’ll humour myself, maybe it was the other way round too! Then, ‘How much do these shoes cost?’ Having spent more than 6 months in the district, I could understand local dialect to a great extent, but the question caught me off guard. I actually looked at my feet to check what I was wearing. White Reeboks! A gift from well meaning parents who do not know what I think about white shoes and they insisted that I carry them to MP. Since they were letting me go alone at that time, I was obliging to all the rest. When it got really cold, I started wearing them too. Honestly, I didn’t know how much they cost and definitely, it was more than the 1500 odd rupees which was what he must’ve assumed my salary was!! I felt really ridiculous at that point in time and different reasons occur every time I revisit the memory. ‘Kuch 500 ke aas paas’ was my hesitant answer.

My turn, dada where are you from? Pathariya and the exact location of his house in the village was described. He then looked at his empty plate and asked, ‘have you had food?’ On hearing a negative answer, he said ‘You are walking around for these women and they don’t even feed you! Hurry to the village and tell them to give you some rice. How can you work without a meal in your stomach?’ I smiled, and he did too.
He was grazing his goats again when I returned next morning after staying overnight in Jhilmila. I waved and he waved back. ‘Have you eaten?’ he called out. ‘Yes, I have’!!