Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [7]
“I’m going to take Lakshmi to a local bull,” Ratna Nadar told his family one morning. “It’s because their fathers aren’t from around here that our calves died,” he said.
His neighbors decided to do the same but the attempt proved fruitless. The government agents had taken their own precautions. To prevent the peasants from having their cows inseminated by a local bull, they had had them all castrated.
The inhabitants of Mudilapa took heart once more when they saw the young shoots they had sown for their cows on the half-acre allotted to them by the government sprouting from the ground. At least they would be able to feed their cattle. Every morning Ratna Nadar took his family to the field to watch over the welfare of the future harvest. One day, they noticed that the grass had changed color. It had turned gray. It couldn’t be for want of water; the soil was still damp from the last rains. On careful examination of the stems, Ratna, and every other farmer in the village, discovered that they were infested with black aphids that were devouring the stalks’ outer layers and sucking up the sap. Calamity had struck Mudilapa. Was Jagannath angry? The Nadars and their neighbors went to ask the village priest to offer a puja to the great god in order that their fields might be restored to health. Without fodder, their cows would die. The old man with his shaven head traced a circle around a few shoots and began to dance, chanting the ritual prayers. Then he sprinkled them with ghee, clarified butter, and set fire to them one by one.
But Jagannath refused to hear. Consumed by aphids, the Nadars’ fodder died in a matter of days. It was September and they would not be able to sow again until the following spring. Soon their cow was reduced to skin and bone. The region’s cattle merchants got wind of the catastrophe. Like vultures they descended on Mudilapa, buying the animals dirt cheap while they were still alive. The Nadars had to resign themselves to letting Lakshmi go for fifty rupees, a little over a dollar.
The sale enabled them to hold out for a few more weeks. When the elderly Shunda, the grandmother who kept the family savings wrapped up in a handkerchief, had got out her last few coins, Ratna gathered his family around him.
“I’m going to the moneylender,” he declared. “I shall give him our field as security for his lending us something to live on until next seed-time. This time we’ll sow corn and lentils. And we’ll find a way of preventing those cursed little creatures from devouring our harvest.”
“Ratna, father of my children,” Sheela interrupted timidly, “I’ve hidden it from you until now so as not to worry you, but you must know that we no longer have a field. One day when you were away, working in the palm grove, the government people came and took back all the plots of land they found with no crops on them. I tried to tell them that insects had eaten what we had planted, but they would not listen. The man in charge shouted ‘You’re useless!’ and tore up the papers they gave us when they brought us the cows.”
The family fell silent, the despair palpable. Then a child’s voice rang out in the overheated hut.
“I’ll go back to rolling bidis,” declared Padmini.
Her courageous offer would not be accepted. A few days later, an unknown tharagar turned up in Mudilapa. He had been sent by the Madhya Pradesh Railroad to recruit a workforce to double the railway lines into the station in Bhopal, the state capital.
“You could earn as much as thirty rupees a day,” he told Ratna Nadar, carefully examining the date-palm climber’s muscles with a professional eye.
“What about my family?” asked Nadar.
The tharagar shrugged his shoulders.
“Take them with you! There’s plenty of room in Bhopal!” He counted the number of people in the hut. “There you go. Six train tickets for Bhopal,” he said, taking six small squares of pink paper out of his lunghi, a long cotton loincloth knotted at the