Footloose, NOS, The News International
harvest
Busiest month of the year
A day in Mari, a small village near Lahore, to witness waadi of the wheat crop that engages majority of the workforce, even those in cities &
By Sarah Sikandar
Mushtaq starts his day at four in the morning. Eats a breakfast of chappati with yogurt and fried egg and leaves for the field where he would be spending the rest of his day. His wife, in the meanwhile, milks the cows. She then feeds the cows fodder and their two pet dogs last night’s chappatis and milk. She will join him in the field in the afternoon. They live on the wheat and rice fields of Mari, a small village about fifty kilometres from Lahore.
I am not sure what Eliot, who thought “April is the cruellest month”, would have to say about the likes of Mushtaq, for whom this certainly is the busiest time of the year. The waadi (cutting of crops) season has started. It is time to reap the fruit of his year-long labour. Not that he has been doing nothing for the rest of the year which was spent in looking after the crop, trying to save it from pests, nourishing it with fertiliser and praying for the right weather.
Why is Mushtaq important to me? Because he works twelve hours a day under scorching sun to bring chapatti onto my table. If it wasn’t for him, my family would either be working on these fields or these lands would have been sold. I feel close to him for another reason. His daily grind reminds me of my forefathers and the toil that they endured to till the land that feeds me. His children remind me of the streets and dirty alleys where my grandfather grew up playing gulli danda and rolling old tyres with a stick. The last time I went there was on his death.
At this time of the year, the rural landscape of Punjab is dominated by the golden-brown hue of the ripe wheat ready to be cut. This sharp contrast of green and golden landscape is dotted with oblivious toiling mazaras, occasionally raising their heads to acknowledge your presence. Nothing in the world seems to be on their mind except the long leaves in front of them and their decreasing number. No noise can attract their attention and the mechanical movement of their hands, cutting the crop with one hand and holding the bunch in the other, is unhindered by heat or fatigue.
The image is familiar for I have read about this mazara in my primary school syllabus. Now I can see that what the textbooks exclude is the woman working in the fields: As oblivious as their male counterparts, with an equally speedy movement of arms, the sunburnt faces of these women make them all look alike – the “working women” of Punjab.
There are the lucky ones. They use the harvester. Out of the field in and around the village, I could see only two or three fields with harvesters. After the hard labour I had just witnessed, it seemed the harvester was, literally, doing the days’ work in hours. It was doing three things simultaneously – cutting wheat, sifting grain from shaft and emitting grain from one of its outlets which was later carried away by a trailer. I am told the grain will be stored in sacks. Only the well-off landlords can afford to import expensive machinery like harvesters. The rest are still working with their bare hands.
The sowing of the seed is a family activity involving every one, from the father to the youngest child. With the arrival of March, it is understood that men will be busier than usual. In some villages, the local melas are arranged to celebrate the fruit of their labour. That is a tradition that will hopefully survive as long as the fields do.
Farmers like Mushtaq have been working on the fields of landlords for generations. He is not sure if his sons will be doing the same or are more self-sufficient than himself. The future of these fields is as uncertain as the young men who now prefer white-collared jobs and want to live in the cities.