I don’t know how old Satai is, or even his real name. Satai is a designation, of a badhai , a carpenter. His vocation has become his name, and that is the only way I have seen him addressed in the three decades that I have known him. He’s still a robust man, in his middle years, and looks surprisingly similar to what I remember him looking like when he worked on our house in the 1980s. He was the carpenter who did the woodwork of our little house in Gorakhpur. We joke that it bears his signature — almost everything is just slightly askew.

Or it might just be a trick that memory plays on vision. The small changes that have happened are invisible because they have happened so slowly, and I project back into my memory the picture that I have of him now.

If his features have not changed much, his circumstances have changed even less. A month or so ago my mother called me up and said she wanted me to buy him a bicycle. His old one was in a bad shape. I agreed.

She said she had rarely seen such delight in a person’s eyes when she told him about the bicycle. “Maybe I have seen somebody so happy only twice or thrice. He is going around the farm telling people how generous you are. That others may have achieved a lot, but they don’t take care of their own.” Unfortunately one of the reasons Satai’s circumstances have not changed much is because he is a little unreliable, and a fondness for alcohol makes him more so. After selling his old bicycle, and depositing with my mother the ₹500 he received in exchange, he disappeared, leaving my mother worried.

He resurfaced only when I was visiting Gorakhpur. He arrived before I was up, bringing with him another carpenter, to fix a few things around the house. Humidity is a problem in the terai belt with its high water table, and wood warps and rots. Everything needs maintenance, but Satai doesn’t have a phone, and it is only through the village whisper network that one reaches him, or he reaches you.

As I sat down for breakfast, he came smiling, said that he had told everyone in the village that he had two other children, my sister and I, who would take care of him. With his grand statements and exaggerated style, it was easy to overlook the slight slurring of his speech. I could not tell if it was age or something else. We talked of how much the cycle might cost him, and I gave him two ₹2,000 notes. He turned to my sister with a query, and it was only then that I realised he did not recognise the notes. “It is four thousand,” she told him, and he cheered up. Maybe he thought I had given him less than he needed. When he said he had walked to our house, I gave him another hundred for transport.

He returned in a couple of hours with the spanking new bicycle, immensely proud, with a receipt that he showed to my mother, saying he had told the store-owners to write her name on it too. It read only, “Satai mistri”, but he does not read English. His speech was much more slurred now, and a little later I heard him swearing. In an expletives-laden speech, he said to me, “Those people gave me the wrong keys.” He could not get them to fit in the cycle lock. I did it for him, and he was on his way, although I wondered if he should be on a bicycle in his condition.

But do these gifts mean anything? The gifts that we — who lack for nothing — bestow on those who have next to nothing?

My sister and I studied in Gorakhpur for a bit. Our privileges have ensured that our hard work translates into the gift of achievement. And those without the same privileges, with much more work to their credit, still flounder at the margins of society. We still re-enact feudal roles of patronage in a country which is almost seven decades into its democratic life. My mother often tells me that she fears I will lose touch with my roots, but what are they to me except pain? These roots tie me to tales of tragedy I cannot escape or remedy. I am one of the lucky few, but what good is it if all I can do for my own is gift a bicycle?

Omair Ahmad is the South Asia Editor for The Third Pole, reporting on water issues in the Himalayas; @OmairTAhmad

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