---
layout: post
title: "Basti Live"
date: 2012-01-11 15:37
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The summers are always long. No matters how good a family you got, or how much money to spend; they do at some point or other start boring you. The point is everybody starts looking out for unconventional ways of killing time.
I am 21, single, with no interest left in my education. I am miserable. Therefore my drive to find crazy ways to kill my time is much stronger than the rest of the population. One such way is dirt biking. I usually take my bike out in the morning or late evenings and set off to far off villages. Well most of these villages are not electrified, neither does any of them has roads laid out. I believe that these villages can be developed as great dirt biking locations, although I am not pretty much certain that they are fit enough for human settlement. During one such expedition I came face to face with what movie analysts would call dark comedy.

There is this hamlet called Haidurganj on the Gorakhpur-Basti highway. This Muslim dominated locality is exactly like the dozen other villages spread across the highway, except for the fact that it has a mosque which is more magnificent than any other you would find in entire Gorakhpur. The floor is entirely laid with high quality marble. The marble was specially imported from Rajasthan for the construction of the mosque. There is brilliant calligraphy done on the inner side of the dome wall. It would make Steve Jobs proud.  Rahman Chacha tells me those are verses from the Quran. He knows the best. He did it.

However it’s not the mosque which brought me to this village.

One evening while trading with speed I saw a huge crowd encircling a farm tractor. It seemed that the entire village had suddenly developed a reverence for that vehicle. Actually it was Azlaan Shah, an octogenarian from the village, who needed some serious medical attention. He had been ill for quite some time now. He was being carried to the medical college. I noticed something peculiar about the direction in which the tractor left. 

It went in the direction opposite to that in which the Gorakhpur Medical College was located. 

So were the villagers really tired of Azlaan and wanted him dead? On further inquiry a few people present around told me that the vehicle had left for the medical college. That either meant there were two medical colleges, or I was wrong. I had full faith in my knowledge and more so in the government’s inability to open two medical colleges in the same district. Armed with conviction I went to the only source of reliable information I had, Rahman Chacha. What he told forms the crux of the story.

The facilities available at the state run Gorakhpur Medical College are so unreliable and the treatment so costly that the villagers had lost all trust. The only option they had was to rush the patient to the capital, PGI Lucknow. Such was the state of affairs that the villagers had actually named the Basti-Lucknow stretch of the highway as the Medical College Road. To supplement my dose of enlightenment Rahman took me to a village tour. Characteristic of any eastern UP village there were a large number of rice fields all around. After every half kilometer the crop seemed to be greener, denser and thicker. It appeared as if those five by five stretches were better nourished. 

Rahman had an explanation for this.

According to the village custom the dead were supposed to be buried in their field. After the burial was done that five by five stretch of land was cemented and a stone raised in the honor of the dead. The stone had a few verses from the Quran along with the name of the dead. This should be done when a villager dies. The cementing prevented any further growth of vegetation on that stretch and rice plants would make their way along the boundary of the grave stone. 

In this village the grave was dig as soon as the village folks knew that an elderly was ill.

The villagers knew that the guy would be dead before he could reach Lucknow. A six hour journey was asking too much from the patient. Mourning would invariably start once family members saw first signs of critical illness. The Gorakhpur Medical College was a half an hour ride nobody undertook.

There is always a twist in the tale.

Some disobedient fellows time and again manage to escape death. They were brought back to the village amidst great fanfare. What happened to the five by five stretch of land?

During irrigation the dug up part of land had a lot more water accumulated in it, than the adjoining areas. Water retention being the key behind a good harvest, the crop there would be thicker. 
It was not extra nourishment through Urea, rather the unused grave which brought about the surplus harvest. The harvest one year, Rahman tells me, was so good that the Panchayat even considered applying for the “Ideal Village Award”.

That was my last visit to Haidurgunj, perhaps I was disgusted, and maybe I lacked courage. I would never know what happened with the grave of Azlaan. 

Peepli Live may not be fiction. Look around.

From the pen of <strong>Abhishek Pandey</strong>,
Chemical, IV Year.
