UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. Stories of the soil

All writing arises from somewhere, carries the taste of its mitti, its soil. My mitti comes from Gorakhpur and Banda, the two small cities of UP that I have lied about and called “home”.

Gorakhpur is to the north, less than a 100km from Nepal, and my grandfather would take me to the roof of the farmhouse to see the Himalayas loom in the distance on clear mornings. This is the terai belt, rich with both the soil and water that comes from being so close to the mountains but not among them. It is known for its rich farmland, its mosquitoes and an infestation of bandits. The water table is so high that the water will seep through the floor of houses if the foundation isn’t laid correctly.

Sugarcane grown from this area is so rich that instead of the usual yellow juice, it sometimes bleeds deep green when it’s crushed. The guhr, lumps of unrefined sugar made from boiling the juice in large open pans, is sticky and almost black, so sweet that it is impossible to eat on its own like the usual buttery yellow guhr bought at the cornershop.

The people too are of the soil. They are soft, with round features. Their faces are often as lumpy as the guhr they roll with their calloused hands from the steaming pans, and their smiles can be as achingly sweet. But this is also a sticky part of the world — village, town or city. People cling together, for good or ill, mashed into close companionship. Roads are only barely navigable between splatters of cow dung, squatters, and strangely immobile policemen. An occasional truck will emerge from a maze of alleyways, startled and growling like a wild boar caught in the underbrush.

Gorakhpur is a verdant and organic place, tangled and solid, low to the ground from which it draws its strength and which it cannot leave. It is a place where electric gadgets jam, flicker and fail. Generators thump across the city, belching clouds of black smoke, expressing the displeasure of the rich, and no traffic light works for long. The people, like ‘free flow’ salt in a saltshaker, stick so close together that they block the few paths that individuals might have had to escape.

The contrast with the mitti of Banda, in Bundelkhand, on the edge of the great Deccan Plateau that has broken so many armies, could hardly be greater. It is a dry land, and the soil is a threadbare blanket covering the rock. The only plants in much of the region are tougher than the rocks, breaking the land over generations through twisted, gnarled strength. Water lies more than 100ft below the earth and is far beyond the capability of most people to reach.

In summer, there is a period called navi, nine days of intense heat when the grass burns in its own heat and birds fall dead from the sky. Temperatures exceed the cap of 50°C that would require district authorities to resort to emergency measures, and are ignored. There is a grand mosque there built by one of the nawabs of Banda, with a huge courtyard that becomes so hot that nobody can walk barefoot in it in the summer. Instead a thin strip of cloth, soaked in water, is extended for 100ft or so to the shelter under the dome, and the worshippers walk in a single file to pray for water to a distant god.

Sher Shah Suri, the Afghan general who built India’s Grand Trunk Road and initiated the administrative reforms that would help Akbar consolidate the Mughal dynasty, died besieging the Kalinjar Fort that lies not too far away here. They say his generals lied about an early victory to ease his passing.

The people here are dry too, of few words and fewer smiles. They remain separate no matter how closely they live to each other, with their own private shelters deep inside. But their smiles, when they emerge, are childlike in an innocence that is only possible among people who haven’t had the chance to enjoy their childhood years, so they store them up for the moments and people they love, surprising you with the newness, the shy intensity.

The mitti of Banda, of Bundelkhand, has another particular meaning for me.

Twenty years ago I accompanied the dead body of Sheikh Ahmad uz Zaman, my uncle and one of the people I most loved, across this dry, broken land. Habitations were few and far between, but it was Holi, and in that drab land, every stop was at a town where we were welcomed by coloured water, or powder thrown in celebration. Carrying that broken body to lay at a grieving mother’s feet, it had become intensely important that we protect the purity of the white shroud, interposing our bodies between the revellers in the opening of the jeep, which was the only vehicle that could be hired that day for such a duty.

We cried in warning, again and again, “Mitti hai! Mitti hai!” Because that is what a dead body is called, soil, and all we could yell was this was the earth that had risen and that we were bringing it back to where it came from. All we could say was, “It is soil! It is soil!”

All we could do was fail.

This is my mitti, the soil from which my stories rise.

( Omair Ahmadis an author. His last book was on Bhutan )

Follow Omair on Twitter @OmairTAhmad

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