Vignettes of a Village

“If city life is characterized by chaos, village life was all about orderliness,” he continued. “Unlike the present-day multi-class urban societies, in the villages of yore, while the Brahmins held the high ground in agraharamsand the intermediate castes occupied the middle ground, the peasants, and the artisans lived on the peripheries.So there was hardly any intra-class social interaction to speak about and that’s why I had no idea about the lives of the marginalized, but from the way they dressed and behaved, it was clear that their life was sustained on the economic crumbs thrown at them by the landed classes. The well-heeled among the privileged classes were wont to play rummy if not baestu,alsoa card game in which the loser becomes a lose-all kudael;oh, how women dreaded at the prospect of their men taking to cards, more so baestu,lest they should become kudael.That my mother prevailed upon may dad to give up cards he was fond of, I came to know much later; as she was wont to play a round or two of rummy with me and my friends, my dad used to grudgingly remind her how she had coerced him to give up his favorite pastime.”

“Well, but what puzzles me is the attitude of a friend’s wife, who having had drinks in her college days was averse to her newly wed husband having a drink or two.”

“That’s the illogic of women’s logic,” he said with a wink, and continued “Those were the prohibition times, so, sans the so-called Indian Made Foreign Liquors and with toddy being a taboo for the gentry, the potion of the peasants, the well-heeled went without a drink. Thus, blessed with one of the three W’s but self-denying the other, the ardent were wont to womanize; well the nature’s calls in the open opened up the opportunities alike for the promiscuous and the sex-starved men and women to indulge on the sly what with the bushes yonder providing secretive cover for illicit sex. By the way what’s this pride in one’s caste and the prejudice against the others’ after all that covert sexual inter-mingling for generations; and what about the bane of the home toilets that give with one hand and take away with the other; why while affording privacy to the personas, don’t they deprive safe ways for the straying folks; well, man seems to rob himself of the freedoms that nature granted him.”

“It may be the case with the middle-classes, but don’t celebrity affairs give a fillip to promiscuity?




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