A Village Boy's Struggle

On wedding days, the dusty road through the village came alive.

Bullock carts were pushed aside, charpoys were moved into courtyards, and children ran behind every car that arrived from the town. The smell of wood smoke, frying sweets and wet earth filled the lanes. From the bigger houses came the sound of laughter, utensils and wedding songs.

Raju would stop whatever he was doing and watch.

The city children stepped out in clean clothes and polished shoes. They spoke Hindi easily and seemed to carry a world with them that Raju had only seen from a distance.

His own world was smaller but full of things he loved—the pond where the boys caught tiny fish, the neem tree where they played in the afternoon shade, the hand pump where they fought over turns, and the fields that stretched beyond the last row of houses.

His father had two bighas of land. His mother patched his shirts until there was hardly any original cloth left. But Raju never felt poor when he was running barefoot through the fields with his friends.

It was only when the city families came that he noticed the difference. One summer, a family arrived for a wedding with a boy named Sameer. Sameer was about Raju’s age.

For two days, Raju watched him play with the other children. On the third afternoon, he brought out his tin truck—the best thing he owned. One wheel was bent, but Raju had repaired it himself.

He held it towards Sameer. “You take.”

Sameer pushed it across the dust and laughed.

Soon they were sitting under the neem tree, making roads with their fingers and sending the little truck through them. They drank water from the same metal glass and argued about whose road was better.

By evening, Raju had forgotten that Sameer had come from the city. The next morning, Sameer’s family left.

Raju stood beside the road as the luggage was loaded. Sameer waved from the car window.

Raju waved back.

The car disappeared around the bend, leaving a long trail of dust behind. Raju stayed there until the road became empty.

He carried the tin truck home.

A few months later, his father sent him to school in the nearby town.

At the village school, Raju had been one of the best students. In the new school, English stood between him and everything he knew.

He could solve the maths problems. He understood the science lessons. But when the teacher asked him to speak, the words would not come.

One day, while reading aloud, he stopped halfway. A boy laughed. That evening, Raju sat outside his house, staring at the fields.

“I don't want to go back,” he told his father. “They are all better than me.” His father found him a tutor.

Raju went back.

He struggled, learnt, forgot and learnt again. His marks improved. Maths came first, science after it. English took years.

Even later, in Delhi, fast English and polished manners sometimes brought back the same old feeling—the boy standing at the edge of the wedding crowd, watching others step out of cars.

But the feeling did not last as it once had.

He began to remember the things he had grown up knowing: how his father managed a bad harvest, how his mother stretched a handful of grain through the evening, how boys from the village could repair a bicycle, work in the fields, bargain in the market and find a way when there seemed to be none.

Raju kept learning English.

He just stopped using it to measure himself. Years later, he returned to the village.

By then, Raju was working for a multinational company in Delhi. He had become comfortable speaking English, travelling for work and sitting in rooms with people from different parts of the world.

But as he walked along the old village road, the place seemed much smaller than he remembered.

The neem tree was still there, though its branches had thinned. The pond had shrunk. The old hand pump stood beside a broken wall. The fields looked smaller too.

A car came towards him from the town. It passed in a cloud of dust.

A boy sat by the window, looking out at the houses, the fields, the trees. Raju slowed down.

For a second, he saw himself sitting years ago, watching the village from the other side of a car window.

The car moved ahead.

Raju watched it disappear, then picked up his bag and walked on. The road was quiet again.