India: Priceless Lessons from a Penniless Society

Priceless Lessons from a Penniless Society

The rickety bus, ornamentally embellished in psychedelic colours, pants for breath as it pauses while scrambling up the corkscrew contours. A little girl runs towards the bus, her thin legs kicking up a cloud of dust all along the trail. Her hair and the envelope in her hand – both are flying in the gentle mountain wind.

“Uncle, you could take this to my father?” she asks the driver, handing him the envelope.

The driver nods. The girl stands there, smiling and waving to us as we resume our journey.

The image of this girl keeps returning to me and reminds me of a unique world and of my days spent there, where simplicity was not just another word but truly a way of life.

The remote Himalayan village of Gangoli, sitting on a forested ridge and facing the eternal snows, is too insignificant to be acknowledged with even a feeble dot on even the most detailed map of India. A benevolent NGO had taken the initiative of training the hill people in the techniques of earthquake-resistant construction and deputed me to this village for the project. Before sending me there, they had briefed me about life in the village and I had reluctantly mentally readied myself to spend the next few months with uncertain electricity and without running hot water, with just a radio and without the luxury of remaining 24 X 7 connected with the world down below. 

I had no car, not even a bicycle, and depended on the overcrowded local buses for transportation. My temporary home, a room in the house of one of the villagers, comprised of a mattress on a wooden floor, my clothes and a few books. My suitcase doubled up as the writing desk or dinner table as the situation demanded.

The children of the village, though they went to school, barely had money for educational accessories like pen, pencil or paper. Yet, one of them would often come running after me yelling, “Didi (Sister)! Didi! You forgot, Didi!” waving my ballpoint pen in the air which I had absentmindedly left behind. What I lost, they protected. What I assumed would always be available to me, they never took for granted.

Some of the days, I used to make my own dinner. My quantitative judgement of the grain was never exact and there was always an extra spoonful, which was happily lapped by the two children of my host. What I considered waste, was delicacy for them.

The gift of Gangoli was the boon of limited options and for a full year, I was under the tutelage of an extremely efficient and effective economy, where every single thing was put to multi-task and recycled till it faded naturally, but never forcibly destroyed. My empty toothpaste was remodelled (top part cut off) and used for storing spoons. The empty pails of paint were used as buckets for storing water. Any trash was always examined over and over again for salvaging the scrap, which might well be the missing piece needed to resurrect a radio.

 The nights in Gangoli were bitingly cold, and in spite of the branded blankets I had carried up from the plains to counter the climate, I shivered, which made me curious as to how the villagers with their meagre resources tackled the problem.

I asked the old lady, the mother of my host whom I found perpetually basking in the sun all through the short day, but never sitting idle- either chopping onions or mending clothes while sunning herself.

 Hearing my question, a smile surfaced on the sea of wrinkles as she nonchalantly pointed to the bundles of hay spread out in the sun.  “Keeps us warm all through the night!” She looked at me from top to toe and pointed to the layers of woollens I had piled on myself, “Remove these and let the sun seep into your blood and bones! Too much of a good thing only makes it bad! If you keep on adding sugar to tea, after a point it no longer tastes sweet, but bitter!”

The words of the wise woman remained with me even after my stint was over, when once again I had access to everything I had been “missing.” It was only then I realized that I did not require or even enjoy much of it. I craved for the soothing simplicity, the blessings of few possessions and almost nil distractions, which had allowed me to connect to myself and the world around, where nothing was needed and nothing was extra.

I still do.

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