Day 3 : Not traditionally tribal

Quick life update before we move forward : Y’all know how careful I am with my phone. (hahahahahaha, okay never mind). Sometime earlier yesterday, Anu and I visited this house that had a nice clean vegetable patch with scallions / spring onions growing there and I got excited because I’m a proper city kid (loosely translating to farm noob). So I reached in to take my phone out to capture this magnificent sight and forgot that I already had my notebook, pen and bottle in my hand. So it slipped and fell. And the screen on the bottom cracked in 3 places. I know, what a way to spend the rest of residency, right?

A lot has happened in the last >45 hours. We dropped Sameer in Kotma, made our way to the SRIJAN office in Koriya (Khelhari, to be specific) and got further familiarized with the project that we’re going to be working on, for the next 2 months. We stayed for roughly 24 hours at the office (it has 5 separate rooms to accommodate staff and any random guests). SRIJAN has a norm that everyone who works with them would have to spend at least a week, staying with the 'community' - in the homes of any of the participant families. So with our luggage for the week and almost zero clue as to where exactly we’d be staying, we sat on the bikes and headed towards Doogla village, around 4kms away from Khelhari. We stopped at Nirmalaji’s house, the first house in the 'paara' (village version of a colony or street). This house has a huge exterior courtyard with a small vegetable patch on the side, along with the well and some small rectangular structure. On the other side was a cow shed with some cows and goats. There’s a huge mango tree near the entrance, which seems to be a pattern with houses in Doogla. Nirmalaji took us in and we met her sons - Sumit and Amit, and her co-sister Neetuji, (who looks a lot like my team mate Rushali from TFI. Rushali, a big hi to you if you’re reading this) with her 3 year old daughter Nitisha.

Nitisha loves her orange cap and doesn’t share it with anybody

Our task for the week is 1. to gain a very basic understanding of how the locals live - what they eat, how they spend their time, their family structure/relationships, services they have access to etc and 2. gather some information about their jackfruit trees - how many fruits they get, what they do with them etc. So we set out to visit any and all houses with jackfruit trees. We covered 2 paras with around 20 houses in each para and roughly 30% of them have kathhal/jackfruit trees. Thankfully most people here recognize SRIJAN, considering at least one woman from each household is part of SRIJAN’s SHGs or 'samooh' as they call it here. So the drill is that we introduce ourselves, initiate some conversation about their family, their garden etc. They in turn ask about us, about Dilli and our lives there and eventually we get to the star of the talk - the kathhal. Most of them make sabzi or achaar from the baby jackfruit. The trees end up bearing around 300 fruits in one season but the owners end up eating only around 10. Apparently the bhaalus come around at night and eat the ripe ones, which would’ve otherwise gone waste because nobody eats ripe jackfruit here. NOBODY EATS RIPE JACKFRUIT. Yeah, I’ll give you a moment to soak that in. Meanwhile you can also hear some grunts of disappointment from your Malayali friends hanging around.

Coming to our general experience living here, in almost all the houses there’s no constant water supply, apart from the well in the courtyard. You may not realize it but this changes everything. Taking a bath isn’t just something that you do when you want to clean yourself, it’s something you do when you feel fit enough to fetch enough water from the well, save it all in the tub and hope you don’t run out of water during the bath. The small rectangular structure that I mentioned before? Yeah, that’s the bathing area. The walls come up to my nose and there’s obviously no roof. The drain goes directly into the garden and one half of one of the walls is open and evidently nobody is even bothered about it, except Anu and I of course. Our urban upbringing made us cover up that gap with a dupatta and some bricks.

The weather in Koriya is quite wonky. It hits 40 degrees celsius during day time and goes as low as 15 degrees celsius during the night, unlike most areas where I stayed where the temperature difference isn’t this stark. So there’s no way one can survive without a blanket which we obviously didn’t carry with us. Nirmalaji kindly gave us a blanket that we can share. And the night sky is BEAUTIFUL. I remember seeing such a sight very few times before this. And the fireflies make it even better. Also, I think I’ve spotted some 37248593 types of wasps here. Not exaggerating at all. They come in all colours - yellow, green, red, blue, orange, teal etc. The buzzing used to bother me initially but now I get worried when the buzzing stops because in all likelihood it stopped because the wasp is probably stinging someone.

Most of the houses in Doogla have some vegetable patches/kitchen gardens but not all of them are healthy and growing well. One of the things that will really stand out to you (like it did to me) if you’ve only seen villages inhabited by farming communities, is the expanse of barren land everywhere. This is traditionally not a farming community. The Doogla people and the neighbouring villages have always depended on the forests for their sustenance so they don’t instinctively understand farming and agriculture. Their knowledge lies much more in fruiting patterns and uses of jamun, mahua, tendu, munga (drumstick), mango and other such trees that you’d find in the forests nearby. They collect and eat tendu fruits - these are fleshy and sweet, like a cross between sapota and litchi and kiwi. I didn’t know until yesterday that they’re called 'persimmons' in English. I found Japanese persimmons EVERYWHERE during my trips to the hills and I loved them so much that inspite of Radhika’s judgemental looks, I bought 4 kgs of them back then. They also gather mahua flowers every morning, dry them and sell them for 10-15/- per kg. There’s barely any local transport available and we’re walking at least 5 kms everyday, just to visit 4 or 5 houses. There’s no local market nearby and most of their food supplies come from the ration shop. The food that Nirmalaji makes is very simple and very delicious.

My amma has a huge bias that raising boys is mentally and physically much more taxing than raising girls, and she’s generally grateful that she’s never had to raise boys in her life. She sort of transferred this bias to me, and watching Nirmalaji deal with Sumit and Amit only reinforces this bias.

I’m still trying to make sense of this place and the people who definitely cannot ‘afford to be traditionally tribal’ anymore in the sense that the forests here cannot provide completely for their economic sustenance, moving forward. And they/we really need to find alternatives and long term solutions that are local yet innovative in nature that would not only let them live a healthy and happy life, but also open up new opportunities for them to follow their dreams and fulfill their aspirations.

Update :

1. This morning, we were finally able to connect with Sameer and listened to his Kotma stories. Seems like he’s already started 6823 projects there in these two days. Hopefully we’ll learn more about these in the next few days.
2. Yesterday there was a Bhalu attack and this young boy living in our para narrowly escaped the animal with a fracture in his hand. Balramji, from the SRIJAN team got worried and came to visit us to make sure we’re all right. The boy is in the hospital and is doing much better now.