Devarakonda diary - 1

I am not trying here to run down the joys that we get dealt out in life, but the thing is, they do tend to be universal. Difficulties on the other hand have so much character. Sometimes they are so nuanced that they seem to come tailor-made for the person they afflict. It is possible to tell so much about a person from the kind of troubles they land up with. And it is a perfectly true cliche that people tell strangers their immediate troubles. It is one of the reasons I like travel. Not that I have some ghoulish fascination for human suffering; it is just that it gives me insights into lives other than mine. Perfectly whole viewpoints, opinions, lifestyles and minds - just not mine; it is very liberating. It is interesting to see someone's life, and then by an act of transference my own, as a construct of multiple elements and then view those elements individually.
And just because it will be nice to remember her by, I am putting down an account of a woman who travelled next to me on the bus to Devarakonda.

Returning home from visiting/nursing a probably pregnant daughter in Hyderabad. Desperate to get to Mallepalli before sunset because it is a ten rupee auto drive away from her home in a nearby village. She has a cell-phone but only has a few operations under control. She manages to call someone at the village to try and get someone to pick her up, but doesn't get through to the person she wants to talk to. There is a missed call. She doesn't recognise the number (she can't read), but we hope it is from the village and so she asks me to try and call back. Now I am the last person you need in this kind of situation and without knowing quite how, I connect to the very person she has been trying to avoid. A little background on this individual. He is married to her step-daughter and as a consequence feels that he is meted out step-mother-in-lawly treatment from her, despite her having been to excruciatingly conscientious pains to be perfectly equal in her behaviour all these years. My guilt mounts as he calls about seven times in the next hour trying to convince her to stopover at his village claiming her for his also sick wife. She turns him down with wonderful courtesy each time.
See, my lady has hens who have been handed over for safekeeping to neighbours. But neighbours never do more than their bare duty, do they? Then she is also worried about two other hens who have disappeared to lay eggs. Nobody to find and gather them. She also has to light the Tuesday lamp for the deity. Plus she needs to tend to her orange saplings which will yield fruit in about three years, hopefully. Till such time she depends on her sons'-in-law generosity, because her husband is a wastrel who obviously spends his time living and quarrelling alternately with each of his daughters.
The son-in-law (the one she has been staying with) has covered her bus and auto fare but for a meal she will have to get home.
My lady is tired and worn-out and somewhat offended for being treated in turn like a punching-bag, wet-nurse, provider and matriarch.
I think she is also a bit hungry, but she only plans to cook in the morning on account of the probability of finding snakes in the firewood after dark. She is very worried that she has possibily hurt and offended the only member of her family she is genuinely fond of, who does make unreasonable demands like the rest of them but does so probably more out of petulant affection than selfishness.
Mallepalli arrives ten minutes shy of dusk.