Arjun Poudel
For five of the formative years of my teens, I spent more time overall in ploughing fields than in reading books. I started ploughing our family farm in Kavidanda soon after I had turned fourteen. I started with soft-ploughing, which means ploughing on a plot that has already been ploughed at least once. Depending on what type of crop is to be planted on a particular plot, the required number of ploughings varies. If you are readying a plot to raise paddy seedlings, as many as six runs of plough may be needed.
Middle-class Brahmin farmers like my father considered it below their status to man a plough at the time. Touching a plough on its furrow had the consequence of automatically losing your caste. They, nonetheless, owned oxen that had been trained to pull the plough behind them as well as all the requisite accessories like the plough itself, ploughshares, yoke (juwa), strap (nara), oral baskets or masks (mukhautos), and stick. Farmers like my father hired a helping hand who could harness the oxen and till the farmland for them. Like most farm-workers, such helps got paid for their work on a daily or monthly basis; only a few of them stayed with and worked for a family on an annual basis.
My family was lucky to receive for almost a decade the help of a person versatile on farm-related works – a person whom we all called Gharti Dai. Every time I have recalled him since I left home, he has brought along the recollections of Gabriel Oak (Thomas Hardy’s similarly versatile protagonist in Far From the Madding Crowd). Each invested his everyday farm chores with the same degree of diligence and disciplined efforts. One key difference between the two is the latter’s prodigality. Shy, soft-spoken and nonchalant, Gharti Dai would nearly always disappear for three or four days after he received his monthly pay. He would return home only after he had spent all the money- most of it on drinks. I and my brother pressed him more than once for his first name and address. The only response coming forth was “You can call me Gharti Dai.”
Gharti Dai thatched highly water-resistant roofs that endured for years. The precision with which he extracted the bands of bamboo-bark (choya) from their stem or spread manure and fertilizer across a plot never failed to amaze my dad. If he tied a rope into a knot, few others would be able to undo it. If our cattle showed any symptom of being unwell, he would be the first to detect it. In fact, nobody else made my dad’s participation in card-game circles as carefree as Gharti Dai did.
During weekends and holidays, it used to be my responsibility to deliver to Gharti Dai everything he needed while he was ploughing for us – snacks, tea, lunch, drinking water, nuts, chewing tobacco and sometimes cigarettes. When I reached him with his lunch, he would let the oxen rest in the shade of the lone tree of Melia azedarach (bakaino) in our dhaankhet (farmland that is suitable for paddy). If I ever reached for his stick after handing him his lunch, he would say, “we should let uncles take some rest, they are breathing heavily” – “uncles” being his pet name for the oxen. One of the oxen that had a roughly diamond-shaped white mark on its forehead was called “taare (starred) uncle.” And because the other ox had a bigger and lower-hanging dewlap, it was called maale uncle or, more often, maale goru.
After he finished his lunch, Gharti Dai would pour some tobacco dust into a palm and roll it into a wad. He would then carefully insert it into his mouth and place it between his cheek and lower jaw. Turning toward me with a smile, he would then say, “Won’t you now try holding the anau?” An anau is a handle that a huli (ploughman) firmly holds in order to keep the plough steady as it furrows along and to direct it this way and that as needed. I was on my feet even before he completed his invitation and, thrilled at the opportunity of holding a moving plough, would surreptitiously approach the anau.
“Stay at least a meter away from the Maale uncle, or you will get kicked by its hoof,” he would caution me. At times, the oxen walked too slowly, making me raise my voice into a loud ‘ho!’ Gharti Dai would approach me and say, “All you need to do is touch the tail of the slow-walking uncle with your stick. Have you ever seen me shout?” He was right, he rarely shouted at the oxen.
When we finished that run of the plough, we would switch to leveling the plot just ploughed. Although riding a leveler was a more thrilling experience to me, Gharti Dai would not let me go near it until a year later. One reason was that I was not weighty enough to crush the pods under the leveler alone and for both of us to ride together would be too heavy a burden on the oxen. Another reason for Gharti Dai’s apprehensions about my riding the leveler was that one often gets ejected as the leveler bounces on some large and hard pods along the way. You can even have your feet crushed by the leveler in place of the pods.
My training in hard-ploughing, like that in leveling, didn’t start until about a year later, when I was in ninth or tenth grade. By hard-ploughing, I mean ploughing either a piece of land that has remained barren for long and been used as a pasture or a plot from which paddy crop has just been harvested. We tilled such land by using a plough made largely from cast iron. Only the ploughshare was pure iron. It was manufactured by what was then Nepal’s only factory to produce agricultural tools – the one in Birgunj. This plough turns all of the clay it unearths to its right, unlike the traditional wooden plough which evenly distributes the clay to both sides.
Because hard-ploughing displaces the clay only to the right, a ploughman must alternate between two different ways of ploughing that I call center-to-margin ploughing and margin-to-center ploughing. Center-to-margin ploughing proceeds in the clockwise direction, while the margin-to-center one follows a reverse movement. If one repeatedly ploughs from the margin to the center then the central furrow gets wider and deeper, with the result that over time a large part of the mass of clay in a particular plot gets displaced to the margin. In this situation, the role of leveling becomes both harder and more crucial than it ordinarily is. Soft-ploughing is indifferent to the scenario described in this paragraph.
I now wish to relate how Gharti Dai taught me center-to-margin ploughing in one of the medium-size plots in our Dhankhet. The plot was roughly 30×15 meters in its dimensions. When you take your oxen into a new and as yet untilled plot, they tend to feel rather rudderless and do not know which way to walk. You need to nudge them repeatedly by touching or patting on their flanks. Since the chances of the oxen going astray are very high at this phase of ploughing a plot, ploughmen employ a subtle gesture to make the oxen stop at a short notice.
Most ploughmen used a short and sharp “ho” to set the oxen in motion, and a long “huh…h” to bring them to a stop. Others ordered the oxen to move by striking their palate with their tongue and producing a sound like “gluck.” Gharti Dai employed a short humming sound to order the “uncles” to walk. He asked them to pause by means of a squeaking sound produced from the left corner of his mouth when the two lips are pressed against each other.
On the morning of my first lesson in hard-ploughing, Gharti Dai and “uncles” entered the aforementioned plot from its Western end. He first made them walk straight by touching their outer flanks turn by turn with the end of a long stick in his left hand, as he lifted the plough with his right hand. After they had walked a dozen steps or so, he produced the squeaking sound and the oxen stopped immediately. Gharti Dai left the oxen and began to walk slowly toward the lone Melia azedarach (bakaino), in whose shade I was standing with a mug of tea for him.
Gharti Dai first blew a long gust of air into the mug, as he was wont to do when the tea was freshly out of the kettle. This tea, however, had walked over a mile and significantly cooled down. Realizing this, Gharti Dai blushed a little and then finished all the tea in one shot. After quickly licking the corners of his mouth, he said that he would let me plough after he has made a few furrows.
Gharti Dai made a first and deeper-most furrow of about 15 meters in length right at the center of the plot. This being the first furrow, he had to constantly press the plough down with his right foot while hopping on his left foot. He then lifted the plough, made a quick U-turn and made another equally deep furrow parallel to the first. Then a third, fourth, fifth and sixth. At the end of the seventh furrow, he didn’t lift the plough any more. Instead, he simply nudged the “Taare Uncle” – the one on the left- harder and longer than he usually did until both the oxen had made a complete right turn and then another right turn. This process repeated at the Western end of the plot and then came a long squeak from Gharti Dai’s mouth, bringing the “uncles” to a stop.
I then realized that my turn to hold the anau had finally arrived. I did hold the anau and pressed it downward with all my strength to ensure that the turbulent plough stayed steady on the furrow. After the season’s paddy harvest, the plot had dried for over a month and our neighbors in the farm’s immediate vicinity had brought their cattle to graze on it. As a result, ploughing was harder than I had expected. Each of my palms received large blisters in no time. I could feel streaks of sweat flowing down my back even though it was a cold winter and the sun was barely visible in the hazy sky.
Gharti Dai directed me to use one of my feet to press down the plough everytime we approached a corner from which a right turn was to be made. Doing so, he said, was important for two reasons. One, the oxen can just continue to go straight if you don’t put extra burden on them with one of your feet, while you nudge the “uncle” on the left to turn rightward. Second, there is a greater likelihood of the plough leaving its track when a turn is being made, than when ploughing proceeds straight.
After accompanying me for three or four rounds, Gharti Dai went to rest under the azedarach tree. Being thus left to my own devices, I wrestled with the anau, unearthing countless pods large and small along the way. Our Taare Goru was notorious for charging at passersby. Excepting Gharti Dai, my mom, dad and grandmother, everyone in the family was viewed with suspicion and hostility by this bovine “uncle.” Many a times, it had loosened itself in pursuit of passersby dressed in bright red or yellow. The entire neighborhood had been terrorized during the two or three occasions Taare Goru had roamed it on the loose during its ploughing career.
When it saw Gharti Dai resting under the azedarach, it raised its head, rolled its eyes back at me and blew air forcefully out of its large nostrils. It did so three or four times, and each time I pressed down the plough with my foot, causing it to bear an extra burden. In due course of time, however, we ceased to treat each other thus, perhaps because Taare Goru progressively got more and more tired. When the plot was done, the two uncles were utterly exhausted and had foam in their mouths. I, on the contrary, was basking in the sense of a tremendous accomplishment as I surveyed the plot the four of us had just ploughed.
Thanks go to Shova Didi for supplying me with the name of Melia azedarach (bakaino), and to Melissa for reading a draft.
[Previously a lecturer at TU and Apex College, Arjun Poudel currently lives and works in Boston, USA.]