Tales from the Valley

I'll post all my Rishi Valley posts under this heading, and give a brief background before I start. The background will be common for all posts.

Background- Rishi Valley is a place in the middle of southern rural India surrounded by farms, orchards, rocky hills and more farms. It also happens to be the place where I am working currently.

The following is one of the numerous incidents that has defined the whole Rishi-Valley-experience for me. Hopefully, more will follow.

It was an unusually hot day. I was on my way from Rishi Valley to Bangalore.To make this journey you have to hop onto a number of rickety buses and autorickshaws- that are more like a random assemblage of nuts and bolts that may all disassemble with the next road bump. As I said, it was an unusually hot day and my backpack with my laptop, clothes and an assortment of things I always carry but never use was not making things any easier. So as I stood in the bus’s aisle I cursed pretty much everything around me.

The bus made yet another halt and a hoard of people got in. Great, I thought. Just what I need. As the throng of people pushed inside, I suddenly found myself at the receiving end of a stampede in the narrow aisle. There is no way these guys can move in, I thought. There simply isn’t any space! A man tried to get past me. The grey hair on his beard were covered with dust, and yet stood out on his wrinkled, dark face. He was wearing what once must have been a white shirt and a white lungi. They looked more like brown than white now, just like his hair. He tried to motion to me to move so he could get past me. At that moment I don’t know how or why, I happened to look into his eyes. And as I saw the eyes of that farmer, I mused- ‘The tomatoes I had in my rassam today might have been from his farm’. I have no idea where this thought came from. It just appeared there in my head, out of nowhere. I imagined a single tomato making its journey from that man’s hand to my mouth.

I smiled, and let him through.