Remembering Guddu…

The sun ruthlessly rained fire as the car came to a halt in front of the rundown brick house; I opened the car door and stepped out in the middle of a cloud of dust. The searing wind recurrently slaps me across the face as if to remind me that this is one place I don’t belong.

Muttering curses under my breath I put on my sunglasses, shouldered my bag and walked a few slow steps to the gate and entered to the scene of an elderly woman plastering cow dung on the floor and an aged man making a bamboo stool while a man in the prime of his youth slept like a log on a cot nearby.

I said my greetings and introduced myself upon which the old woman hurried to get me a glass of water and the old man beckoned me to sit beside him. He asked me how my father was doing and how the last time he had seen me I was just a boy of two. Growing tired of the whole simulation I asked about Guddu who was to be my guide in this depressing hellhole. The old man got up and woke up the brute of a man who sluggishly got up, came over and introduced himself.

To understand my predicament in this situation, you have to be aware of my father’s great idea for initiating my restoration. My father one day sporadically decided that I have drifted from the cold reality of life and decided to send me for a week to our ancestral village in Uttar Pradesh to learn of my roots. His rationale for this irrational act, 'you can never truly know where you’re going until you know where you come from ’.

So to discharge this fancy of his, I was packed off to ‘Mahabir ka Purva’ to be tortured into a superior perception of my roots. Guddu is a person distantly related to my family in some manner and had been appointed to take care of our fields around the village which judging from his manner I concluded he has by no means truly done.

So returning to the present after having a lunch of homespun pickle and ‘Khichri’ which by the way was the best I have ever tasted, me and Guddu set of to execute the itinerary of my visit commanded unto him by my father.

First we surveyed the fields, expanses of barren land reaching till the horizon, ‘what a waste of precious property rather, sell it off’ I thought then.

Then came the official tour of a school set up by my grandfather, the highlight of which was the teacher sleeping lazily in his chair while the children loitered around, what does he care, he’ll receive his paycheck by the end of the month, why should he be worried if the children passing out of the school don’t even know who the father of the nation is.

All along this trip I met many people (whose names I forgot as soon they were told), who would come up to me and ask me whether I knew them as if I had spent my whole life in this barren wilderness, all of them were in some or the other bizarre manner related to me.

Guddu over time became more agreeable to me, his first impression slowly dulled from my mind. He was not a lethargic good for nothing bum as I imagined him to be, instead he was quite a sincere, hard working chap who was unable to find worthy work and seemed to have given up in this quest of his.

He was quite a resourceful guy and knew everybody from the district don to the hired field hands very well. Anything you might desire Guddu can arrange, be it good quality seed, oiling the officer to pass a loan or even desi revolvers for that matter.

Just an ordinary happy go lucky guy doing all that he could to make ends meet for his family. His parents were pressuring him to get hitched but he wanted an established source of income before taking that step.

He told me stories of crime in which almost all young men in those parts seemed to be involved in to differentiating degrees. He told me of the frequent Hindu-Muslim squabbles that used to breakout almost punctually. He told me how each village is divided first into parts depending on which religion you prescribe to and further bifurcation on the basis of your caste in that particular belief.

He boasted of his contacts with the local don and was proud of the fact that all the gun sporting thugs knew him. Somehow the days used to breeze past in that good natured man’s company.

Meanwhile, I somehow managed to convince my father to cut short my stay from a week to five days. While saying my goodbye’s Guddu asked me to request my father if he could possibly arrange for a small job that paid anything around 5000 rupees, the sum that I loyally blew away every month on inconsequential habits. I promised to do all that I can to ensure he got a job.

Once back home I settled back into my old routine and forgot my pledge to Guddu. Two months rolled by and I had virtually forgotten all about his existence. One day my father arrived from office in the evening; ashen faced, he relayed to me the news that Guddu was dead, apparently a week after I left he had buckled under the pressure and had gotten married.

A month later, he and his elder brother in a squabble involving a small government tender had killed a rich Muslim man. They were taken into custody the next day. 2 weeks later, Guddu died in police custody.

I was stunned and stared at the ceiling in disbelief and a torturous notion came to mind, that if I had acted as promised, he might have got a job, he might not have felt the need to get himself involved in that petty contract. The Muslim woman would not have become a widow and her children orphans.

That blameless lass who just knew a few weeks of matrimony will not have had to live the remainder of her life alone, perhaps he might have had children, perhaps I would have met them sometime, perhaps that lethargic brute would have led a contented life.

I try not to think of him when I read of farmer suicides or bloodshed becoming an integral part of the Indian village politics but that naive smiling face always comes to mind.

The casualty of one man holds no consequence to anybody, not a soul ever thinks of the circumstances, the deprivations that coax these people to commit such acts.

No one ever thinks that if for no other rationale than all of us being human; we are accountable for these people’s fate. No, they never think about these things, to them ‘one Guddu dead - one less murderer in the world’.