Grass, Patriarchy and the One Against

It’s only after a day that I ask Khullu Dhanu – of Rajput ancestry - what his full name is.  ‘Khilaf Dhanu’, he answers and laughs readily when I follow up by asking him exactly what he is Against: ‘Ask my parents, they named me!’ This guy, incredibly fit like true Pahadis, with a ready, winning smile and a generous nature, runs up and down four thousand feet of Himalayan hillside the way I scroll on Facebook, so we bond well (like begets like, you see, and I have just had my pun for the day).  So, we chat about things, the way men who have never grown up to understand modern day niceties do.

Along the way I ask him about his kids. 
‘Just two. Both are boys,’ he says and adds, ‘So, we didn’t need to have any more children.’ He laughs, with simple sincerity, this man whom I have grown to like so much.   
Gets me thinking.

All through these early October days – while in the cabs, walking the hillsides or sipping a sweet-milky tea by the road – I see women and girls carry back-bending loads of grass, trudging up slopes or picking their way gingerly down steep damp paths of stone and crumbly mud. I see small groups of them on their haunches all day (try that, will you?) cut the grasses below chir pine trees or under broadleaved oaks with dexterity and fluid motion.  

These loads of grass will be hauled midway up poles and trees in their farms for storage.  The menfolk will help in this task, but cutting grass?  Cutting grass is a women’s job.  

Four years ago, in October, I had seen women near here thirty feet up oak trees in community forests, lopping branches for fodder for goats; a wrong step – just one - and it would be all over.  But Winter - dull, bitterly cold, grey days of snow and frost – is weeks away and the livestock must survive till the Melt in March as must humans.  Stocking up on food too is a woman’s job;  in those fields down in the valleys by the Pindar and Sarayu, fields of native rice and ramdana (amaranth), I only see women at work, old moms and young grandmothers, harvesting, stacking, hauling; there is musical banter and light-heartedness in the air as they work, but, make no mistake, this is hard, rigorous, purposeful toil.  
The men folk help out too, those who did not migrate or returned in 2020, but it isn’t a partnership of equals……

Gagan grins at my observation.  ‘My neighbour has just had a boy.  After five girls.’ he says shaking his head, ‘Now they will stop the production line!’  He tells me that he only employs women at his micro-enterprise; they are sincere and responsible and trustworthy.  
But not equal……

That evening, I am at Shubham’s store, waiting for the rain to stop.  He is away, and his younger sister is a tall, thin girl with a fetching smile and friendly manner.  She has a year more of college in Nainital to finish and I have been told by Kiran and Renu, her neighbours, that she is assiduous, ambitious and motivated.  Perhaps she has no choice.

‘What will you do next?’ I ask.
‘I am preparing to write the Civil Services exam,’ she says, with the confidence and assertion that would win any heart, ‘English is tough, but Sociology and Hindi are fine.’ She thinks for a few seconds. ‘I think I can make it,’ she says with a shy smile.  

It is impossible – utterly bloody impossible – not to be touched.   
It isn’t just the rain that retreats soon after, Patriarchy does too for a moment. Optimism lives in a thousand homes like that little one in the hills.  May it win.