Geetanjali Krishna: Dadi's lost legacy of wisdom

I often wonder at the richness that anecdotes add to statistics. While the bare numbers provide the skeleton, the stories add life to them. That's why I love to listen to stories, even the ones that aren't backed by solid numbers. Here's one I recently heard, which has had me bemoaning the loss of traditional wisdom from our daily lives.

A fortnight ago, Daya Devi died in her village near Karnaprayag at the ripe old age of 106. As three generations of her family got together to bid her adieu, their gloom was tempered by a sense of wonder at her long and healthy life. "Till a month before her death, she would regularly walk miles with her herd of sheep," said Ram Singh, her 40-year-old grandson who's a Delhi-based property agent struggling to survive in the sinking real estate market. He recalled how Daya Devi had never had an allopathic medicine in her life, not even an over-the-counter drug for a headache. "When Dadi took her sheep out to higher pastures, she'd collect all sorts of medicinal roots and herbs. She would always treat our childhood colds, coughs, fevers and injuries with mysterious concoctions and poultices," he reminisced.
 

Dadi used to vociferously ask her children and grandchildren to adopt more natural lifestyles. "But we were all too caught up with our lives in the city to listen," said Singh. Once, the old lady visited him in Delhi. Within days, she found it so intolerable that she went back to her village. "She said we breathed poisoned air, drank water from a machine and surrounded ourselves with bricks and mortar instead of trees and streams," he said. The old lady declared that she'd return to Delhi only if she ever developed a death wish!

Of course, her bucolic village in the mountains offered a healthier environment. "Being far from the highway, its air is fresh. The water source for the village is an underground spring, so clean that villagers drink straight out of it. The elders in the village, my grandmother included, believe that it contains life-preserving minerals..." said Singh.

Yet, over the decades, Singh and most of his relatives migrated to large metros in search of better employment options. They all gathered after her funeral in the old family home and mourned the loss of a generation of wisdom. "She used to plant rhododendron saplings in the rains, not just outside our home, but wherever there was some land available," Singh recollected. While other villagers planted fruit trees, the crotchety old lady scolded them, saying that the fruit trees would serve only a few, whereas rhododendrons were for not just people, but animals and plants too. "Today, everyone takes their sheep and goats to graze around those very trees, for the animals love their leaves. The dried leaves of rhododendron have also proven to be great manure, so the soil there has improved. So, Dadi was proved right..." he said.

Sadly, much of what Dadi knew, died with her. "As we grew up, in our haste to leave the village in search for greener pastures, we left her way of life far behind..." Singh rues. Today, he says, he's barely able to recognise a fraction of the plants that Dadi knew. Instead, most of his family, even the relatives who've remained behind in the village, relies on allopathic medicines. "Ever since I've returned from her funeral, I've been wondering what life has in store for me... Have I inherited Dadi's longevity when neither my father nor his three brothers did?" Singh wondered. I mused that instead of longevity, maybe Ram Singh should worry about Dadi's lost wisdom, which could have been a more rewarding legacy.