Dust, Silence, And The Aravallis
Chinmay Khare
©
Copyright 2025 by Chinmay Khare
|
Photo courtesy of the author. |
Heat
had some weight to it that summer around Udaipur, the sort that kept
close to the ground and weighed upon your skin, so you could remember
your own breath. It was May 2025, and I had gone neither as the
tourist in quest of the glimmer of palaces nor the lapping of the
City Palace on Lake Pichola, but on a training programme in
fieldwork, hands-on exposure to the rural development issues that
encircled Udaipur's quieter peripheries.
By
mid-morning, our truck had shaken off the bustle and traffic of the
city, its horn becoming less aggressive as the road gave way to dusty
tracks and fields with stone walls no higher than a man. The Aravalli
hills lay serenely across the width, old, wise, and still, their
slopes sparkling in the mist. I was among a small group of trainees,
notebooks in front of us, wondering all of us what we were to embark
in search of, all of us, however, knowing that we'd be coming back
transformed.
Arrival
It
was our base camp, a small training camp on the periphery of a small
village named Kharbaria, 40 km away from the main city. It was a flat
building, a weathered yellow rectangle, with a solitary neem tree in
the courtyard, which was the only shade, and a hand pump where
children came each morning laughing and chanting in unison to the
thud of the lever.
Light
flickered on and off. The scent of dry earth and cattle feed was in
the air, and the evenings resonated with the hum of insects. At the
beginning, I was disconcerted by the silence of such emptiness that
stretched out into the landscape. But I grew to recognize its rhythm.
The villagers rose with the sun, cooked on wood-burning stoves,
walked for hours to the fields, and came home at dusk, weary but
unfaltering. Life in this place appeared to go in cadences of
patience.
Work
in the Field
Part
of our task during our training was to conduct participatory rural
appraisals, communicate with local farmers, and plot assets while
also understanding the social and economic systems that functioned in
the community. It had all seemed abstract in the city classroom, but
on the ground, it became very human.
We
arrived on our first day with a farmer named Ramesh in a field of
millet. His hands were thick and cracked, the color of the very earth
that he farmed. He spoke about the monsoon in awe and in trepidation,
how each year he looked at the sky like it was a living being that
decided the fate of his sowing. His son had gone to Surat to work in
a textiles mill; his daughter was in the local government school. I
asked him what he wanted for the next generation, and he gave a small
laugh and said, "Bas thoda aasan ho jaye jeena." Just
make life a little bit simpler.
That
line stayed with me. That line encapsulated an entire worldview,
resilience a given and not an option.
We
walked days between villages, scratching maps on the earth with
sticks, and hearing women tell how they had gone to get water from
dried-up wells. Some described the government programs that they had
heard about and could no longer access. Others simply wished it would
rain on a regularly predictable schedule. Each interaction stripped
away the assumptions that had accumulated before it, and I could see
how development here was all about modest adjustments to daily life
and nothing whatsoever to do with highfalutin policy.
Intervals
between Works
In
late afternoons, when the sun was less severe, I sat with villagers
in the shade of banyas and had a cup of buttermilk. Children remained
with us where we were and giggled at our clipboards and hesitant
Hindi pronunciations. One evening, the women asked us to join them to
watch them sing folk songs while they pounded grains. Their voices
rose and descended in harmony, full and deep and with an
old-fashioned rhythm. I did not understand all the lyrics, but I
could feel in their singing the rhythm of the earth.
It
was night. Power might go completely, and thousands of stars shone in
the sky in a way I wasn't used to in the city. The Milky Way was near
and almost tangible. I lay awake on a charpoy with the crude rope
biting into my back and was in awe at how frivolous and fleeting our
modern-day concerns were in front of this silence and grandeur.
Instructions
in Stillness
There
was a slow rhythm to rural Udaipur that initially challenged my
city-bred patience. Meetings waited until everyone had arrived, and
not to the schedule of the clock. Meals lasted across the evening
with interminable discussions. Gradually, the wind too took its own
time to blow across the courtyard. But in the slow rhythm, I was
discovering a richness of a sort, the potential to listen, to see
before leaping to conclusions.
One
day, I walked with a group of women to get water at a hand-dug well.
The road was almost two kilometres long and was quite hilly. But they
laughed and chattered and carried metal pots on their heads with
ease. I attempted to carry one, awkwardly, and collapsed after a few
meters. They erupted into laughter, non-maligningly, but in that
infectious laughter that brings a stranger into the fold. That
laughter, I understood, was yet another manifestation of resilience.
But
then, in our later discussion on community needs and mapping of
resources, I began to understand the subtle nuances of rural agency.
Here, these people were not recipients of outside help; they were
negotiators with nature and with the system. Development, to them,
was no promise from outside; it was a process inherent to them.
Exiting
and Contemplating
After
the training, we had a tiny farewell party under the neem tree. The
villagers had brought a steel plate of sweets and served water in
brass tumblers. The project coordinator bid farewell in Mewari, and
there was subdued clapping. But I could sense a silence of sorrow,
leaving something uncompleted, ending a book in mid-sentence.
As
our truck headed back towards Udaipur city, I gazed at the hills in
the rearview mirror. The atmosphere was becoming dense, the hum of
engines was back in earshot, and the color palette was transmuting
from the ochers of the landscape to the city grays. But I was also
leaving behind something ineffable, the silence, the humility, and
the lesson from a landscape that commanded respect, and not awe.
In
my hotel room that evening, I rubbed off the dust from my face but
discovered that some of it had remained deeper, not upon the skin,
but somewhere inside. The journey had started off as a professional
necessity, an entry in a schedule of training. But it had become
something else, a gentle reminder that to know a place was not to see
its beauty, but to hear its silence. Even now, months later, I go
through periods where I think of the line “Bas thoda aasan
ho jaye jeena” (If only life became a little easier)
by Ramesh. And whenever it rains in my city, I get to think of that
somewhere on the other side of the Aravallis, Kharbaria's fields get
to see their first monsoon, and those that I had known look up into
the sky, hoping, waiting, and being, as always.
Chinmay
Khare is a dedicated economist and researcher currently pursuing his
doctoral studies. He enjoys reading and expressing his thoughts on a
variety of topics across different genres and writing formats. Always
eager to learn, he seeks to explore new avenues and expand his skills
in both fiction and non-fiction writing.
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