Kingsport

HIKING THROUGH MITHILA

Whenever I type Bihar my computer suggests that the correct spelling would perhaps be 'bizarre. I, of course, stick to my own spelling even though I do think that things can, indeed, be very bizarre in Bihar. Come to Mahadevamath in the remote north of Bihar and the landscape that greets you in summer is that of a desert: no trees, no grass and no trace of green. You can see an occasional goat but there are no cattle. Except for an occasional shrub it is dry sand everywhere; there are a few sand dunes too. Nothing very bizarre except that the perennial Tilyuga and the mighty Kosi flow only a few kilometres away and if you dug say 5 to 6 feet deep you would get more water than you could ever possibly use. But for installing tube wells you need some money which the poor people of this region just do not have.

In village after village you meet old men, women and children, but no young men. The young man of the village has gone to distant lands in search of jobs. Once a year he comes home and brings some money to pay off the usurious mahajan(money lender). Perhaps, he also brings home clothes for the family and toys and trinkets for the children. Once in a while he brings in AIDS.

This is the Indian part of Mithila, the land situated between the river Gandak in the west, the Kosi to the east, the Ganga to the south and the foothills of the Himalayas (in Nepal) to the north. This area of Bihar is also known as Tirhut which is derived from the Sanskrit Tirbhukti, the land of river banks. It is crisscrossed by many perennial rivers and a large number of rivulets. The rivers of this land are largely responsible for keeping the Ganga still flowing, when her waters have been nearly used up in providing irrigation upstream, and when she is receding from the river banks of even Varanasi.

It is believed that sage Vishwamitra was doing penance here at Mahadevamath when he felt thirsty. His sister, the Kosi came tumbling down the mountains to quench his thirst. The Kosi discharges enormous quantities of water that could irrigate large tracts of land both in India and Nepal. It could also yield enough electricity to light up most of Bihar and Nepal and perhaps our neighbouring states too. But here in Bihar we have lost our sensitivity to mythology and we have little use for science and technology. In stead of being thankful for nature's bounties we have dubbed the Kosi as our river of sorrow.

And water is not all that we have. Let me take you to Dullipatti near the Indo-Nepal border. This area is believed to contain oil. A few years ago the Oil and Natural Gas .Commission (ONGC) did dig for oil here but gave up saying that these oil resources were commercially not exploitable. People here are not satisfied and they feel cheated. There are reports that just across the border Nepal is prospecting for oil and if they are indeed lucky we would have reason to believe that they are stealing our oil.

Oil is usually associated with deserts and seas. Here in Mithila we have lush green fields above and plenty of fresh potable water underground; and, if you dug deep enough, you might even hit oil. There could possibly be oil in the Gandak basin too where again the ONGC gave up after a cursory attempt. There may or may not be any oil in the region but the Gandak and her tributaries certainly yield gold. Poor people work all day long to pan out gold from the river sand. It is all very clandestine: so while the middleman's middle gains in girth and his house in height, the actual worker just about manages to survive.

We have had something more precious than even oil and gold. Mithila is the land where deep philosophical discourses were held. Scholars from afar came to Mithila to study the scriptures and hone their debating skills. Now the great teachers of Mithila are no more and the sight of students, fleeing to distant universities in decrepit coaches of an insensitive railway system, makes one's heart sink.

This then is the land to which I wish to take you for one of my journeys This is a journey for which there are no tourist guides and no guide books are available. At the end of any journey you wonder whether you would like to undertake that journey again and, more often than not, the answer is 'No'. But the journey which I am going to describe is one that I would be happy to undertake over and over again : it is amongst the journeys to my very soul, for this is where I belong. And I am indebted to Pandit Tara Kant Jha who permitted me to accompany him, for without an indefatigable person like him to lead our team, I would not have even thought of undertaking this journey.

We start

So let us start at Mahadevamath. Reaching this god-forsaken place can be difficult enough but we make it, I in my tiny Maruti 800 and my other friends in their Hindustan Ambassador. The smallness of my car turns out to be actually an advantage. The friendly villagers, some of whom happen to be my patients, give helping hands and actually lift up the car wherever planks of the ancient wooden bridges are missing.

We hold a public meeting after which a top leader of our party flags us off...It is now a long walk that we set in for. The landscape becomes bleaker as we move on. Soon we come to the bank of the Tiljuga river which we have to cross. There are no bridges but a tiny leaking boat is available.

The boatman's assistant has kept clods of clay ready. He takes a handful to plug the leak, using another handful as soon as the first one is swept away or rather swept in. The boatman is engaged in rowing while his assistant is busier still in preventing water from leaking in; I look on with horror at the goings-on. I ask the boatman why does he not use something which would not be swept away so easily, say a clump or grass or rolled leaves of a tree. He smiles sardonically and pointing out to the landscape asks 'where is the grass and where are the trees?' I persist and point out that a peace of rubber from, say a used vehicle tube, would work better still. He gives a smile but sways nothing. In a place where there are no motorized vehicles and but few bicycles, a piece of rubber must be hard to come by. Safely on the other side we look back at the Tiljuga as she moves on for her tryst with the Kosi. We need be in no hurry to bid goodbye for we shall soon be back.

The landscape we encounter is no different again, the same sand and the same desert scene. We are five of a team to propagate the ideology of the party whose All India leader had flagged us off at Mahadevamath. The land is but sparsely populated We do meet a few people though, but find ourselves disinclined to discuss high ideology in a place where the people's needs are more mundane and where their daily living entails a severe struggle for existence. We confine ourselves to pleasantries as the people give us knowing smiles: they know why we have come and know also why we never broach the subject.

We walk on and on in the scorching sun and talking requires some effort. The absence of small talk and the very effort put in for simply walking helps wonderfully to go in for reveries and the subject that engages my mind is naturally the desert. I have never seen a desert, not even our own Thar. So why not think of the biggest desert of all, the Sahara?

The Sahara is sometimes called the Garden of Allah. It is very sparsely populated. Allah took away the excess of men and beast so that He could walk unhindered in the vast expanse. The native nomad actually loves this land. The original desert nomads guard their isolation very fiercely; outsiders are not welcome. Their water is very precious, being so very scarce, and they almost revere their water sources. Any waste or misuse is sacrilege. There is the anecdotal tale about a few Italian tourists, smeared with sand after days in the desert, stripping themselves and splashing in the cool waters of a tiny lake in an oasis. This was sacrilege: they were butchered to death and their bodies were thrown down a ravine. And there was the case of the Dutch lady who had her arms hacked off. She was left to bleed to death in the desert by her own guide. Had she committed a sacrilege too or was it a case of simple robbery?

The scenario in the desert to which I am taking you is different. The people here have seen better days and there is plenty of water still. You can still see bakharis (big containers made of bamboo and plastered with mud for storing food grains) outside the houses of the relatively well to do. These bakharis are kept outside the house under the open sky and nobody touches them. As for water you can drink it to your heart's content. You can even splash in the water of the hand pumps if you so like; there are not many hand pumps though. For sinking hand pumps you need money and most of the residents here are too poor to afford them. A thought strikes me: would it not be simpler to sink a hand pump when travelling in a group and then either to leave it as a gift for the local people or to uproot it to be used elsewhere again? A single pipe length of say 20 feet should be more than adequate and the whole process should not take more than an hour. An ostentatious thought, but in the Sahara the bigger caravans actually find it easier to dig a well than wait for the older wells to slowly fill up as they draw water from them. We need not worry about what happens in the Sahara.

Our thirst and hunger are taken care of

We feel thirsty and our local guide takes us to the nearest hand pump. There is some greenery nearby and a lemon tree too. There is a hut for the owner. The ladies and the children live inside while the male members live outside the hut. Its owner takes us to the shade on the side opposite to the sun. There is however, little shade - it is midday of 25 May 1995 and, as we learn later, the hottest day of the year. We are offered all the water we can drink and flavoured with lemon juice too. The host would have liked to offer us sherbet but is too poor to afford it. We are happy to drink water as it is.

The Sahara has its oases. Our this desert has patches of grass and in places that tall grass, the bamboo too. The bamboo serves as the local timber while the tiny grass provides nourishment to the foraging goats. There are no cattle for the grass growing here would not sustain them. A goat is different and would forage on whatever is available. These goats are the backbone of the local economy - small girls tend them as do the smaller boys.

There is a single-teacher primary school but the teacher rarely turns up. He is a government servant but is worried about his daily bread. The government does pay him his salary but not necessarily on the first day of every month, not necessarily even every month. These children have heard of the CharvahaVidyalaya : they know the meaning of charvaha, they do not know what a vidyalaya is.

Having quenched our thirst we move on. The land is stark and even trees cannot survive; they cannot survive if immersed in water for long. The few huts that we see are situated on relatively high ground above the high floods. Even these are evacuated during the floods and their occupants move on to higher and safer places. There is little that they possess. As for the hut, that is swept away, they reconstruct it with their own hand. As we move ahead we also move away from the area of high floods. The area that we now reach gets flooded too but there is some high ground as well.

We have covered a few kilometres; we do not know how many, perhaps ten, perhaps less for there are no roads and no markers. We trudge along the edges of the fields, sometimes across them, for they lie fallow. It is past midday and hunger pangs have started. There are no restaurants and no dhabas in a place with no roads. We are in Mithila where people in remote villages would beseech you to stay the night and would offer their lodgings for the purpose if you go to them after sunset and sometimes even if it is only late afternoon. But nothing can be farther from our minds than staying there.

Hunger, of course, is a different matter. And soon a very pleasant sight appears before us; there is actually a pucca building made of brick and mortar. This is the place where we can expect some nourishment which is not denied to us as we make ourselves comfortable in the few chairs outside in the shade of the house. And delight of delights. the house owner actually knows some of our names and identities. We have come unannounced and it takes sometime before the meal is ready. The fare is simple but satisfying. In Mithila you cannot take single helpings. As the host plies you with food every helping has to be repeated. You ask for a spoonful of rice and you get two. It is OK if the second helping is very small but it must be two. Clearly Mithila has seen better days. The owner of the house is fairly well off by local standards. He has retired from government service but his sons are holding jobs in distant cities. As we relax outside in the shade after our meals, it is time to talk of many things.

My attention is directed to the peacock perched on a distant tree. There are actually two peacocks, one each on two different trees. They do not appear to enjoy very happy relationship with each other; they look in different directions and do not see each other eye to eye. Somebody working in the distant Punjab had brought a pair of peacock chicks during his annual holidays hoping that, when they grew up and attained maturity, the village would have a whole family of peacocks. These chicks lived amicably with each other for sometime but soon parted company; they are both males. The owner is sorry for them but does not know what to do with them. The nearest zoo is about 200 kilometres away. So the villagers leave them alone. During rains these peacocks still perform their beautiful courtship dances looking for their elusive mates.

It is now time to return. Luckily we cross the Tilyuga while there is still light. As darkness falls we reach a village where again a few persons recognize me as their physician. They even show their prescriptions to me and seek advice. We get some very welcome tea too. It is remarkable that in a place so poor that they use only small oil-lamps, not even the inexpensive hurricane lantern, they still offer us tea. It is pitch dark now and my small flashlight kept securely a few kilometres away in the glove compartment of my car is of no help. We pass between tiny hamlets, situated back to back, with a passage in between, just wide enough to allow us through in a single file. As I move on I can actually feel myself rubbing against the walls of these mud houses. With no flashlight to provide illumination I am indeed afraid of horrible happenings with slimy creatures wriggling out of the orifices in these walls. The villager who leads the way offers comfort of sorts.

Once in the open we make our way to our vehicles parked not far away and, as I ensconce myself in my diminutive Maruti 800, I feel almost at home.

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