From Plow to Plate with Love

My granddad on my mother’s side had his own paddy fields. He sold them piecemeal to marry off his eight daughters. However, he continued to farm on fields he took on lease. Nothing could stop a man from doing what he had done all his life. He had his own pair of plowing bulls, two pairs at the most. Like each of his ten children, these bulls too had their own names, no different from those of men.

     After every harvest, my grandfather would send a share to each daughter’s house. Having been brought up by a veteran rice farmer, each of his daughters knew very well how to put the paddy to the best possible use. My mom was no exception.

She boiled some of her share, at times with bulbils of yam as a treat for us kids. She spread some of it under the sun on a bamboo mat to dry, before gathering it up into a sack and sending us to the miller to make flour out of it.

The carriable portion to a teenager, having packed up in a repurposed plastic bag and sealed with a burlap rope, would start its walk safely seated over my head. The bag took the shape of my head making a crushing noise, shrouding my head from ear to ear. The grains would be talking to each other just as we do when the teacher leaves the classroom. I would hear the music of hard labor under a scorching sun, firmly treading ankle-deep in muddy water.

 Negotiating the mood swings of the monsoon, the sons of the soil would enter into a bet with the sun. Those bets, looking back now, were nothing but a sheer gamble for survival, the way it has always been for food producers. The gambler never had any regrets, though many times the sap in the grain failed to bring it to fruition, making a whole season’s crop go to chaff.

The character Alvero in JM Coetzee’s novel The Childhood of Jesus quotes a poet saying that bread is the way the sun enters our bodies. How poetic, and how true.