The Women Who Walked in Nobody’s Shadow

Notes from the field on polling day

They came from places where tears hold more water than most ponds. Or hand pumps.
They came from rural cobblestoned lanes where even seasoned thekedaars are too scared to build roads, lest dacoits intervene. (And the dacoits, we learn, are getting younger and younger here).

The cobblestones here are not your hill station dream stroll, so longed for, slated for holidays, but a hard, tough road where road rollers haven’t deigned yet to reach. On stones cut possibly by these women, they walked in block colours, uniformly covering face with ghunghat, feet in chappals.

Sometimes looking out for each other, in twos or small groups.

Sometimes walking in a single file.

This was no song and dance stuff. Voting had started, booths opened at 7 am and they knew what they were heading towards. Together. Clutching a white little something in their hands.

One cannot, in all likelihood, think of any other day in the year when the tar that criss-crosses India sees the shadow of so many ID cards on its indifferent turf – all in the span of a day. One can’t really tell if the fingers gripping the pehchaan patras are chapped, but visceral memories of hands held remind us of the softness that is sandpapered by circumstance and the vicious yet polite fatalism that mixes with feudalism in these parts.

What is unarguably certain is that the I-card or the parchi or the Aadhaar is held firmly, and matter-of-factly as they carry on. With the modicum of possibility, a change in leadership brings. Everything in their gait, pretty much the opposite of drama queen. As we walk past them and smile, they smile back tentatively and it is only when their eyes fully meet ours that the smile spreads full beam, as it often happens between women. A spontaneous connect.

We know these women. They are the first adivaasis to farm on hard land in hilly Bargarh, which used to be thick forest once upon a time. They are those in whose sickle-armed hands crops have grown, crops have died, due to less rain and no water channels. They are those you can hear the sighs of in Panhai just as they load their heads with wood to catch a train and sell it the same day. The equation in their heads being, one meal for their family that night.

She could be 19-year-old Sangeeta from a Dalit family in Bhauri, closer to Karwi town, who works a sewing machine after returning from college.

She could be a stone crusher. A stone quarrier. A construction site labourer, and MNREGA job card holder – the women mazdoors of Bundelkhand are, after all, keeping a very strained rural economy afloat.

But they are not a vote bank yet, enough for somebody to specially look out for them.

On a daily wage, a day off for voting is simply money not earned. How does one calculate the daily loss they must have incurred, we wonder, as we see them walk back home in the blistering noon sun? What GPS in the world can grasp these kilometres of hope against hope?

While the women walked, the men talked. In groups, on bikes and tractors that they rode on to go vote. Public transport was missing on a day which is meant to create governments for, of and by the people. And so it was that they walked through farm fields and pagdandis, alongside railway tracks, and crouching under faataks. A landscape that scrubs you into immediate submission, from the mud that falls off the craggy walls, locally called morem, which is only deceptively spongy with stones lurking underneath. It is also all dusty as subtle hell. There are plants withering away in the unexpected February heat, a heat that hits the skin like a family tree of blossoming prickly heat. As you go along this undulating cragginess, you suddenly hit a non-perennial rivulet and a rocky tapering cliff that again seems gently reclining, but is known to go from dry to slippery and steep to stuck in a matter of seconds.

It’s the kind of landscape that has a way of making a place in your heart with its ruffian turns, but it also never quite lets you forget how it holds heart crushing truths within. The Vindhyas here maybe a broken chain of mountains as is the delivery of public goods by the netas, but there was something else tangible on voting day in Bundelkhand. Something in the forgotten promise of the nation state – that we are all equal as citizens. Or can perhaps hope to be for a day.

These women didn’t wait to find out. They walked maybe thinking of these things. Not as a protest march, but a silencer guide for everyday doers. Quietly. Willingly. Showing up, in a spirit that voting percentages can hardly fathom.

The voting centres were curiously all called Adarsh Matdaan Kendras. Cynics can bullet point this as a futile urgency, commentators can go into clichéd loops about how democracy wins, but from first timers to bent by (literally) time old timers, the women of Bundelkhand came from the bruised corners of this, our nation-statehood, putting a silencer on the need to show or demand group validation, be it selfie or state policy.
Whoever wins their vote, they have already won ours.

Tisha Srivastav, a part time editorial consultant with Khabar Lahariya sends in snapshots of her experiences in Bundelkhand reporting, with Bundelkhandi reporters. Catch her live-tweeting some of the action here!