Waiting

The Saturday sun pierced through the minty clouds. Dattu put a hand to his eyes as he looked skyward. The bulls were eating weeds and wild grass; gone were the August days when Dattu would give them a good rub during their bath and juicy hay thereafter. These were days of the Indian summer, one of the worst ever to have hit the region of Ranzur. It wasn't like this always. Not in the distant past at least. Dattu remembered his grandfather singing songs of the giant green snake; the mountain range that ran almost parallel to the sea. If you trekked to the peaks, you could feel the swirl as the hot arid placid air of the plains met the cool playful breeze that carried the rain clouds over the range and watered the plains.

Now, the mountains were barren. The small blackbirds that lived in them, unique to the region, were long extinct. The western plains bore most of the brunt of the industrialisation of the black Maratha countryside. A lonely banyan stood at the top of one of the peaks. It was called the peak with the tree. You could see the lights of Pune if you climbed the peak at night. Of course, none of the city people who came to Ranzur did that; the climb was too dangerous to be done at night, not to mention that leopards used to stroll the drier slope of the mountains to nab any goats that had strayed from their flock and lost their way. But during the day, the scorching heat of the sun made it too much for the big cat to venture out of the jungles at the foothills on the other side of the mountains.

The shriek of a crow flying overhead broke Dattu's reveire. He heaved a sigh of exhaustion; the afternoon sun had sapped him of energy. He was longing for his wife, Manjari to come to the fields like she did everyday.

But she did not come, like she used to everyday. He knew something was amiss. For a farmer, the afternoon meal is the most important of the day, and he knew that Manjari knew this. For the seven months after their marriage and for 3 months before, when they were courting, so to speak, she would devotedly bring him his meal of onions, zhunka, and the delicious bajra bread that she made so well.

He wasn't angry, just irritated; he knew that there'd be a pretty important reason for her even to be late, leave alone not turning up at all. He waited for a while more, the sun was on the descendant from the zenith now. He realised that it would be foolishness to continue without a square meal in his stomach, he'd heard of many a farmer collapse in the sweltering heat. He unyoked his bullocks and started on his way home.

Longing

Manjiri lay in her bed, distraught with worry. The sun was about to disappear behind the mountains, the sky had turned a deep violet and the birds were flying home. The evening meal was ready, she had made a different vegetable dish than she had for the noon meal. It was palak, Dattu's favourite. He had grumbled about eating the same food everyday, like a prisoner. She had felt bad, like she had somehow failed in her duty as his wife. She knew it wasn't her fault, and she knew that he did too.

Poverty was a way of life, and gram, onions and flour was the daily fare. She was content, though. She had a tiger for a husband, handsome, strong, respected; a man who loved her like no other man, who sat with her watching the stars, holding her hand, painting the dream of a better life on the spotted sky. She liked his smile in the starry night. He was a shy man, a man who seldom let his face express himself, a man with a tight-lipped smile for joy, and a slightly raised right eyebrow for consternation, a man of action. In the pallid light of the starlit night, though, his face bore an unabashed joy that expressed itself in a warm genial smile, as he spoke of a time to come, when they would have a big house, with a courtyard and servants, with a tractor to till the fields; when his bullocks would be prized breeds that would be the pride of the village and his children would go to law college in the big city whose lights one could see from the one tree hill.

She was thinking about that smile when chuk-chuking of a gecko on the wall and the sound of footsteps outside the door brought her back to the present.