The Well We Dug Ourselves

I worked forty-two years for the same family before I owned a single acre of my own, and I want to say that plainly, because people hear "landless laborer" and think it means something temporary, a stage a man passes through. It wasn't temporary. My father was a seeri for the Gill family. I was a seeri for the Gill family. My son, for two years before he left for the city, was a seeri for the Gill family. Three generations working soil that never once had our name near it.

There was a law, someone told me later, from 1964, that said a third of the village common land was meant for us. I was already an old man when I heard this. Nobody in Bauran ever saw that third of anything. The land got passed to men who could put a Dalit's name on the paper and keep the harvest for themselves, and everyone called this legal, and in a narrow sense it was.

The well sat at the center of the village, the way wells do, as if it belonged to everyone by the simple fact of being in the middle. It didn't. When I was a boy, my mother carried two pots a mile each way, twice a day, to a spot along the canal where nobody minded who filled a pot. I did the same until I was near forty. It is a strange thing to measure a childhood in the weight of water. I could tell you the exact ache of it, low in the shoulders, worse in summer when the canal ran thin and you had to go further to find enough.

I am not going to tell you it made me strong. That is the kind of thing people say afterward, when they need the suffering to have been for something. It didn't make me strong. It made me tired in a way that never fully lifted, and it made my mother's shoulders uneven by the time she was fifty, and it took years off her that nobody counted because nobody was counting.

What changed, eventually, was smaller than you'd expect. My sons and I dug our own well, on a strip of land my wife's family had managed to hold onto, three streets from the Gill house. It took us most of a dry season. We hit water in October. I remember the sound of it more than the sight, a kind of give in the earth, and then the smell of wet stone, and my youngest son laughing the way boys laugh when something finally works.

We didn't dig it to prove anything to the village. I want to be honest about that. We dug it because carrying water a mile is a hard way to spend a life, and we had finally found a way not to. If the Gills noticed, they never said. If the panchayat noticed, they never said either. That is its own kind of answer.

I am seventy-one now. My son who left for the city sends money and doesn't talk much about Bauran when he calls, and I don't push him to. My grandchildren will likely never carry a pot of water anywhere in their lives, and there is something in me that is glad of this in a plain, uncomplicated way, and something else in me that knows the ease came late, and came small, and came only because we built it with our own hands rather than because anyone decided we deserved it sooner.

I have made my peace with how it went. Not because peace was owed to me, and not because the accounting ever balanced. I made my peace with it because I am seventy-one, and the well gives water, and my sons know how to dig one if they ever need to again. A man can carry a grievance his whole life or he can carry water. I carried water long enough to know which one gets you where you're going.

Translated By: Gowthamm Mandala & Akshay Bhatti