Geetanjali Krishna: A rural idyll, boot camp-style

Come summer, and it seems as if everyone's looking forward to vacations. Meena, our cook, has been no different this year. "Every year we take the children on a pilgrimage, usually to Vaishno Devi. This year, after a gap of five years, we are planning to go home to our village in Aligarh in May," she said. "I've been telling the children how they're going to love swimming in the village pond and eating mangoes plucked from the bough!" Through April, all she could do was wax eloquent about the village. If I'd ask her to make dal, she'd talk about how amazing dal tasted when it was cooked on an open hearth. Show her any vegetable and she'd talk about how much bigger or tastier it was when it had been home-grown. Delhi's weather, too, she said repeatedly, wasn't a patch on Aligarh's salubrious charms, something I found tough to believe, but I held my tongue.

Anyway, she returned a couple of days back and asked if her son could surf the internet on my computer to research his career options since he was awaiting his Class 12 results. I agreed, and Sagar, her amiable 18-year-old, landed up the next morning. While he was browsing, I asked him how the trip to the village had been.

"The village was okay, I guess," he mumbled. "It was very hot and more uncomfortable than I'd imagined..." He told me that the last time they'd visited was in winter, when the weather had been good. This time, when the family reached, they found that in addition to the scorching heat, there was no electricity all day, every day. "Can you imagine?" he asked with all the incredulity of an urban kid, "they get power only for 12 hours - for 15 days during the day, and the next 15 days, through the night!" The first day, he said, was so hard that he wanted to leave immediately. "At night, I thought I'd be able to get some sleep under the cooler, but people worked threshers all night to make up for the lack of electricity in the day..." he said. The mosquitoes, filth, lack of proper toilets... his list of village woes just went on and on. I asked about the village pond his mother had been reminiscing about. "It was also okay," he said, shuffling his feet. "But the green goop inside made me hesitate to dip my feet, let alone swim in it!" Sagar's village boot camp sounded rather different to the rural idyll his mother had been looking forward to.

Later, Meena told me about their little plot of farmland in the village that supplied them with wheat for the year. "My husband has to go every few months to oversee it," she said. "We've always thought that soon Sagar would be ready to take on this responsibility. But children today just don't like village life any more..." When I mentioned the problems that Sagar had enumerated, she said that things had been much worse when she had lived in the village 25 years ago: "Anyway, it is Sagar's home and his land, he has to like it! Otherwise, where will he belong?"

I mused later that one of the biggest psychosocial problems migrants face is that their children have a hard time fitting in to a "home" they're barely familiar with. As for Sagar, clearly, he isn't bothered by issues of belongingness as much as his mother. "When people ask where I'm from, I always say that I've been born and brought up in Delhi - instead of saying I'm from a village I've visited precisely four times in my life!"