Pandey was a part-time dacoit, or so I heard. It might have just been rumour, but Pandey never denied it. Other than the moustache he liked to twirl, and the grin, he really did not look the part. He was a small man, five-foot nothing, and innocent of any air of aggression. On the other hand, I must confess that he never mugged me or anybody that I know, so maybe when he was off the farm, hidden in the bushes waiting to ambush a victim, he changed completely. My only knowledge of him was through the story of his larcenous work at our farm in UP.

One way to earn money from a tractor in rural India is to rent out its use to those who don’t have one. They pay for the diesel and the labour done. The driver pockets half the money and the rest is set aside for maintenance of the tractor and other such sundry expenses that are the bane of farming life. Pandey did the odd job for the neighbouring farms, but if nobody was around he’d pocket the full payment and neglect to inform anybody about it.

The tractor was perpetually short of fuel and in constant need of some small repair work or the other.

He would be caught once in a while, when my parents would arrive at the farmhouse and find the tractor’s engine still warm from work, and newly made marks from the huge tyres as obvious incriminating evidence. He would bow his head and grin uneasily at the harangues that would be his due, but since they had no actual proof, and since nobody at the farm would speak against him, he was able to continue his little escapades.

It didn’t make him a rich man, neither this nor his rumoured night-time activities. He was a poor man in one of the less prosperous parts of a poor country, it would have taken much more than petty larceny for him to be able to break through the barriers that life had set in front of him. Had he indulged in racketeering, murder, kidnapping and other assorted mafia-related activities, he might have become rich and powerful. Maybe even powerful enough to run for local elections and become a Minister of State as other more ambitious criminals from the city have done; but Pandey was not a city man, nor did he operate on that scale.

He lived in a little thatched hut not far away from the railway tracks that ran behind the farm. He had (illegally, of course,) expropriated a small patch of land on which he was growing some crops.

Though he stole some from my family, we found it difficult to summon great bitterness for his deeds. My mother often said, “Either they are intelligent and cheat you, or they are incompetent and will make a mess of everything. The best of them have long left the farmlands to make a better life in the cities.”

But it did cause a problem. It is hard to pay higher-than-average wages for long, especially when you know your people are cheating you. My parents tried often to upskill the workers at the farm, give them more opportunity. For example they paid for Pandey to get his Heavy Motor Vehicle Licence and he used it to work for them, and he used it to steal from them, simply because he could.

Once, though, Pandey got caught. My parents only lived at the farm at the time of high activity, during harvest and sowing, otherwise they travelled back and forth. With my mother’s diabetes, it would have been impossible to stay for too long, as the unreliable electricity meant that her insulin injections were hard to maintain. But whenever my parents came to the farm, they would be announced. My mother, as a former school principal, made it a habit of asking children which class they studied in, and rewarded them with small change for candy when they were able to tell her what they were learning. It wasn’t very much, just enough to get them candy at the corner store, but the children loved their small rewards. For the two miles from the main road to the farm we would be followed by cries of, “Salaam, Behni! Salaam Babu!”

So Pandey had two miles of warning that day when he found himself working on a farm that he wasn’t supposed to be. In his panic he tried to drive straight back to the farm from the field he was working at. Instead of taking the road he tried to go over the railway tracks straight from the field. As things would have it, the gradient was too high and the undercarriage lodged in the tracks at such an angle that he could neither go over, nor reverse.

In complete despair, he realised that the only way that he could present himself at the farmhouse was by abandoning the tractor on the rail tracks to the delicate ministrations of any train coming along. He did the only thing that he could do. He got down from the tractor and spread himself before the machine to be in the way of any oncoming train. “Mai Behni ka saamna nahin kar sakta!” he wailed, unwilling to face my mother after abandoning the tractor to potential destruction.

My parents found him at the railway tracks, got the tractor unstuck, and Pandey continued to work for us. This is the criminality in rural India, funny at times, sad at others, always far more complex than any theory of it that I have heard described in urban India.

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