Uncle is gone, Vilas’ wife announced to me a few days ago, as she was passing by my field. It was a bolt from the blue and it took me some time to process. Even as our worlds were in so many ways far apart, Vilas’ endearing nature and constant tit-bits of advice flashed.
Both literally and figuratively, he hand-held us, imparting understanding, and more importantly, his caring and sharing both of traditional knowledges of seeds and seedlings, was something I was going to sorely miss. The thoughts racing in my mind were – how could I carry Vilas’ societal legacy forward? How could I ensure that his family is enabled to keep cultivating the field – something that he would love to happen, as he looks down upon it and upon us all?
On a hot summer afternoon, some years ago, while we were working on my little field and the community classroom children were romping in the field and learning some farming too, a man wearing just a red short pant was looking at us wistfully from the pathway in front.
I could not understand what he was looking like that at us for. He somehow then got down into the field, and told us he liked to see children taking interest in the field. He said he gathered the ropes of field cultivation from his father as he accompanied him to the field unfailingly each day. But he didn’t see the same interest, he said, in the Gen Next.
It was the foreboding of a time that was coming, and that he hoped against hope would not happen. There is joy in working in the field, he said. He had even left his tailoring work to work full time in the field. Though having just begun messing my own hands in farming then, I had already abandoned the romantic notion of revival of farming, split into glamorous activities that seemed and still seems to erase the hard work. It is not about stray activities of sowing, transplanting, growing vegetables. It is about weeding, manuring, maintaining the water sources (commonly ondo) ….in other words nurturing the farm.
Therefore, his passion for farming mesmerized me. Understandably gen next would not be interested, because the returns in monetary terms from the hard work and the time put in, are not commensurate with what you can earn through other occupations. And that is possibly also the reason why the family remained economically backward. Why should people involved in farming remain where they are? Why should they not have financial stability of the kind that the burgeoning middle class who would buy his vegetables have? Nevertheless, he plodded on.
Seeing some of us take to farming enthusiastically, albeit not full time like him, he felt good that he was not ploughing a lonely furrow. And he was a great source of encouragement to us. It is not easy to keep going to the field everyday, where all the work involved is not jazzy, as portrayed in some ‘green’ photographs of Goa’s rich heritage, like those of women transplanting (ah, it is back breaking work). In this scenario, it was certainly helpful to have some sort of a role model for farming and farming practices.
His imparting nature was reflected when he would stop by and enter and show us the correct way to do things. His tips have been invaluable. For instance, when you make beds, he told me the breadth of the bed had to be the stance width if calculated between the feet in an easy stretch position.
Once he even came with a whole big jarful of seeds for us, from the stock he had painstakingly saved, by drying the red amaranth (tambdi bhaji) and banging it against the floor and spreading it out further to dry. The following year, he could not even save seeds for himself, because it had rained erratically at odd times, and the seeds could not be dried and saved, and he rued the changing times – even if he did not know the expression ‘climate change’.
It pained him to have to buy seeds which were beyond his budget. You get only a gudd’di-bor (bottle cover full) for Rs. 20/-, he said.
And then I was thinking, seeds need to cost that much for all the work that goes into saving them, but he needed to get subsidized seeds, and who knows why he couldn’t get them. I understand some of the challenges chasing agriculture department schemes. It needs a documented interest in the land, which is understandable as a scheme stance, but a challenge for specially the tribal communities (and in many cases even others), where their interests in the property may be inscribed in the names of their forefathers, if at all, in the survey records, and they have no way to establish that, within the existing systems, or there are too many takers, or vested interests.
I also learnt other little things from him – such as how to steam beans in the field. Vilas indeed shared his knowledge so freely and was very welcoming in his field. The only caveat was to be careful where you tread, lest you unwittingly tread on a patch where seeds are already sown.
As is wont to happen nowadays, the fields are being reduced to holders of garbage, left right and centre.
Both because tenants in people’s houses do not have means of garbage disposal, possibly because the houses itself may be illegal and not documented, and because of a lack of civic sense. Therefore, one finds even glass pieces in the fields. Vilas would sternly warn me when I ventured into levelling the field in the rainy waters barefooted, not to take that risk, as I could get injured with any pieces that may have been thrown there. Such was Vilas’ caring nature.
With Vilas having faded into Goa’s sunset, one can remember Vilas and farmers like Vilas, by carrying forward their sense of passion, valuing their traditional knowledges and the culture of imparting and giving and caring.
(Albertina Almeida is a lawyer and human rights activist)
