A headache no pill will cure

The author feels headache is mostly caused by stress

In my experience, the underlying cause of headaches is, more often than not, stress. So when for the nth time, our helper, Kamini, complained that no medicine was helping her debilitating headache, I asked if all was well. At first she insisted it was. “The doctor says I’m perfectly fine except that I need new spectacles,” she said. “I wear them all the time, but the headaches persist.” I knew that Kamini, hardworking and disciplined as she was, would never exaggerate her symptoms. So I asked again how things were at home, and her eyes welled up. “Perhaps, it’s these long, frustrating conversations I have daily with my family back in Odisha,” she said. “The more I talk to them, the more I realise that while we’ve changed a lot after moving to Delhi, our family and village haven’t evolved at all.” I remembered it had been a while since she returned from her annual vacation back home. Why was she feeling this way now, I asked. To answer my question, she settled down with a cup of tea and told me her life story. 

“We moved to Delhi after our crops failed for the second year in a row,” she said. Money was scarce in the village, jobs even scarcer. So Kamini and her husband, Kumar, migrated to Delhi. He got a decent job as a mason, while Kamini stayed home with their school-going children. Then, a long spell of jaundice rendered him unfit to work for a couple of months. “To literally stave off starvation, I took up a job as a domestic help,” she said. After he recovered, both realised that two incomes were better than one. “Five years later, when our children completed school, both joined undergraduate courses by correspondence and also started working part-time,” she said. Their financial condition improved dramatically.  

Meanwhile, back home, Kumar’s elder brother remained in that endless cycle of crop failure and debt. Both his children dropped out of school to help, and the family became further mired in poverty. “After we saved some money, we bought a plot of land in the village and began building our own pucca house,” she said. When the well-meaning Kumar told his brother to keep his share of the farm, the brother demanded a share of the new house as well. The village elders took the brother’s side, saying Kumar should share his wealth. “Nobody understood that if we had some money, it’s because all four of us worked very hard for it,” she said. “Unlike his brother, who sows a crop, sits on a charpoy waiting for the harvest and then cries when the crop fails.” The couple couldn’t fathom why the brother did nothing to spread his risk — get some work through NREGA, sell locally woven saris in city markets or migrate to the city like they had.

Living in Delhi had changed their work ethic, I commented. Kamini nodded: “Whatever people might say about the big bad city, it has taught me the value of hard work and I’ve, in turn, taught that to my children.” Why did they want to build a house in the village in the first place, I asked. It seemed to me like none of them would be able to adjust to the slow pace of village life any more. “We’d probably go crazy if we had to leave the hustle-bustle of Delhi and live in the village now,” she said. “But what can we do? It’s our home after all.” 

I gave her a pill after she finished her tea, but somehow knew that it would do little to cure Kamini’s headache.