Widow Street. Quite a macabre name, isn’t it? The name doesn’t exist in any official document. But this was how the story goes.
In the fringes of the town of Guwahati, more than seventy years ago, a country road stretched between vast farmlands owned and tilled by unlettered Karbi tribesmen. They lived in modest houses made of bamboo and hay in the surrounding hills. During the sunny afternoons under the shade of the coconut plantations, the tribesmen would take a break from their farming and sit down for lunch. Their food was very traditional. A plate of boiled rice. A bowl of fish soup. A small bunch of chopped vegetables. And occasionally pork and chicken. Fish were caught from the nearby Bahini River. Lunch was usually brought down from the hills by their womenfolk in bell metal utensils. Later, they would go back to working in their ancestral fields, growing rice and cabbages and potatoes, eggplants and tomatoes and lady’s fingers and whatnot. There were also sugarcane fields and banana plantations. When the sun goes down, the tribesmen would pack up and leave with their cattle and farming implements. At night, inside their homes up in the hills in the glow of kerosene lanterns, they would have a swig of rice beer.
Early morning, they would walk back to their fields from the hills in groups, chatting boisterously, and there they would work bare-backed wearing only a hand-woven cloth towel around their waists. In this manner, many a summer and winter passed by. Lives refused to change for the tribal people. Mothers gave birth to babies who grew up to follow in their family’s tradition. They never went to school because there was no such thing as a school. Instead, the sons helped their fathers in the fields while the daughters looked after the house. There was no history of village brawls, no money ever changing hands. The tribal people rarely ventured out of their village boundaries. Whatever they needed sprouted from their lands. Rice grew plenty. They had poultry farms and domesticated pigs and cattle. Fish would be seen literally leaping from the ponds. And they had blooming fields of sunflowers for oil. Oftentimes, they were drunk, but joyful. Because they were totally devoid of ambition.
Some thirty years later, as the story goes, three strangers who looked more like friends happened to pass by the village. The smell of the earth rose. The soil was totally undisturbed. Simple tribesmen lived there. So, the strangers chatted up the villagers. They said they could bring better clothes and good city wine. In return, they desired a small portion of their farmland where they could build homes. The strangers were even willing to pay money. The villagers had no objections to giving away a patch of land when they already had in possession vast tracts. Thus, when the three strangers asked them what they desired more than any, more than half of the tribesmen chorused promptly: “Wine!”
The very next morning, before 10 o’clock, the three unnamed strangers returned to the village. They hadn’t revealed their names until then because the villagers hadn’t bothered to ask. This time they came in a hired jeep with bottles of wine in a jute bag, fancy-looking clothes and wads of bank notes tied up with rubber strings. The villagers took them to be merchants. They generously distributed the wine bottles among the excited people, displayed the clothes and threw money which would be a pittance today but which seemed a lot at that time to the villagers. Many took the offered money, and a handful sold their lands in exchange for a few bottles of branded booze. The unlettered villagers couldn’t quote a precise price for their strip of land; they were unaware of the land valuation. Whatever was offered by the strangers was probably right.
More strangers arrived in the village the next day, likely friends or relatives of the earlier three strangers. They viewed the farmlands with the same interest and offered the same alluring gifts. Again, the bottles of booze were desired most. One by one, the land was sold away until it reached a point where there was no extra land for growing crops. The tribesmen had to retreat to the hills— the only place left on earth for them. They now had only their families, houses, cattle, and poultry to live by. It couldn’t be denied that they had been offered money as well for their land, but they had squandered most of it on drinks. They could live without good clothes or a warm house, but they couldn’t do without the hooch. To obtain more of this, they needed money. It was money which brought them down to the plains to work sometimes as daily wage labourers.
The strangers-the new settlers—were either into business or worked as small-time contractors. Most worked as government clerks. There was also one engineer, a few school teachers and one lawyer who rarely had a client visiting him. There even went the tittle-tattle that a thief had his hearth there. All in all, it was a run-of-the-mill neighbourhood. A few brick-and-mortar homes with galvanised iron roofs came up. The settlers hired the poor tribesmen to build bamboo fences in their land boundaries— the same people who had at one time been the proud owners of these vast lands. Although the place acquired a new look, there was still the same country road— a dirt road— going by between the houses which worsens during the rainy seasons. Pools of water would collect, and children happily floated paper boats in the drains. As most of the settlers had originated from faraway villages, they still domesticated cattle and goats and poultry and even pigeons in their new homes. They had come and bought the land here because they were employed in different government departments in the nearby town of Guwahati and they could tell the town would soon expand to these partly rural areas.
A sort of village it still was. Elephants would pass by leisurely. Fishmongers and vegetable sellers sold their stuff to the residents. The houses remained tiny, usually having no more than three rooms. The entire stretch of this road—which later to be called Widow Street—had a pleasant green appearance, with coconut and areca nut palms lining the land boundary.
Children went to school in the mornings. The men would leave for work by 9 o’clock sharp to catch the bus. The women sat on the open porches or visited a neighbour’s house on a pleasant day to share local gossip. Tribal youths would sometimes come down from the hills to hunt for birds with slingshots or air guns.
Not everyone in the neighbourhood could build a brick-and-mortar house. One man from a faraway district had arrived in this place much later with not many earthly possessions and bought a strip of land with money lent by friends. This was accomplished after much badgering by his dainty wife Angana, who hadn’t wanted to rot away in her husband’s village all her life. She brought her tender-aged son and her personal belongings, which her family had given her as a wedding gift. Her husband built a straw-roofed mud house with two rooms and a kitchen. The bathroom was about seven yards away from the house. In the dead of the night, if Angana wanted to answer nature’s call, her husband had to accompany her with a lantern. Unlike their neighbours, who had small concrete bridges connecting their land to the road across the roadside drain, they had only three bamboo poles serving as a bridge. It was cheap, but it worked. Angana would often buy oranges from a passing hawker who fondly gave away an extra orange to the child.
Now her husband, although his salary as a government clerk earned him no less than the other men in the neighbourhood, had burdens galore. Apart from maintaining his wife and child and looking after their everyday needs, he had to provide for his elderly widowed mother, two jobless brothers and a sister who had eloped with a tabla player but who abandoned her for another girl. Forced to bury all her shame, his sister had to come back home for a roof over her head. So, all these years, Angana lived in the same mud and bamboo house without any electricity connection whatsoever. Her husband went to the office wearing the same white shirt, grey trousers, and leather sandals and had to put up with the daily rants from Angana. In frustration, she had even snapped relations with his family.
The child was growing up and her man couldn’t even buy his school books on time. Sometimes in the morning, while sipping black tea and biting on a crusty cookie and sitting on a cane chair, she would stare at the ordinary mud walls of her house and then turn her eyes to the nicely designed houses outside. She would sigh. The least her husband could do was to provide an electricity connection so that her child no longer had to study under the feeble glow of lanterns.
But her man remained unfazed. Instead, he would go away to watch a nearby theatre show, perhaps to flee the gloom in his house. He didn’t bring joy to Angana’s life, and never took her travelling anywhere. His obstinacy and uncaring behaviour resulted in frequent squabbles between them. The nearest neighboring woman would sneak up to the bamboo fence, cup her ears to listen to the heated arguments and then sneak away again to tell the other women in the neighborhood about what she heard. All of them derived sadistic pleasure from it. One morning, just as her man was about to set off for his office, Angana stung him with many dramatic words. This angered her husband so much that he took off his slipper and brought it down on her face multiple times. He left, slamming the bamboo gate. That day, he didn’t return home. The neighbourhood women visited Angana, uttering words of sympathy when in reality they enjoyed seeing her thrashed. Angana sat on the porch bench all alone until the late evening hours, but her husband didn’t show up that day at all.
In the morning, he returned, still in a violently angry mood, but he didn’t say anything to Angana. She dreaded asking him where he had been or where he had stayed, so instead, she cooked a quick breakfast before he left for his office again. Not only was their run-down house a source of much derision and laughter among the neighbourhood women, but their regular fights added to the ridicule. Angana had only a radio for entertainment, unlike the neighbours who had black-and-white televisions. However, the radio was stolen one night by someone who had broken into the house by digging a hole through the kitchen. It was widely suspected that the thief had visited the house in the daylight hours and noted the exact location of the radio.
Given the chance, the neighbourhood women would often make cutting remarks, but Angana bore it all patiently. Already, she was suffering in the hands of a callous husband, and she didn’t want to suffer anymore. If a beggar entered through the bamboo gate, she would give him a penny or two or a bowl of rice. If the neighbours visited her home, she always treated them nicely with milk tea, cakes and sweets. Still, they openly scorned her and thought Angana didn’t belong to their elite group. They were niggardly and usually wouldn’t serve more than a simple cup of tea and thin biscuits or a couple of slices of bread.
A wealthy newspaper owner kept having this strange, repeated vision in his dreams to build a Lord Ganesha temple to ward off the illnesses in his family. The dream even showed him a certain place in the fringes of the town of Guwahati— a place with a fish pond, a river not too far away, hills garlanding the horizon and a handful of homes nearby. The newspaper owner, although unaware of the location of this place, considered it auspicious for setting up the temple. He started making enquiries before someone told him that perhaps he should try the road where Angana lived. He promptly arrived and saw that the place indeed matched the description in his dreams. The newspaper owner purchased the pond and the adjacent vast, vacant plot of land at a price the original landowner couldn’t refuse. Work on the temple got underway, and the construction was over within a few months. The local residents were the first to start offering prayers. Every morning after her bath, Angana would visit the temple and bow down before the deity, praying for better days.
Years passed. The place didn’t look like a small village anymore. Brick walls replaced the bamboo fences. Neighbours no longer kept farm animals on their property. Not even a rooster was seen. Telephone lines had arrived. The place had developed into a town and was on the way to becoming a part of Guwahati, which had in the meantime become a city. Shops, both large and small, lined the main road and every available lane, giving the place a distinctly commercial look. There was a huge bazaar where even people from far away came to purchase vegetables, fish, and meat. There were several drugstores, garment and grocery shops, restaurants, a gas station, a cinema hall, book and magazine shops, stationery shops selling pens and pencils, a small hospital, electronics and hardware stores and even a couple of wine shops.
The neighbourhood boys and girls had grown up into youths and started going to college. Although Angana herself had never graduated from school, she saw to it that her son burned the midnight oil. He went to medical college and eventually became a neurosurgeon. Her husband had retired from government service in the meantime, like all the men in the community. With his retirement money, her husband was now able to build a relatively better house, which Angana had cried over so much. That her son had also become the only physician there had brought a new reverence from the neighbourhood women. The old jokes circulating had died. The empty fields where children had played cricket and football were taken over and barricaded with high brick walls by their original owners, who came from villages and built stately houses on them. Even some coconut trees growing on the edges of the land had to be chopped down by the State Electricity Board to make way for power lines. Decades ago, when there were only a few houses, one needed only to stare out the window or stand on the porch to get a glimpse of what was happening kilometres away. Now, high-rises had sprung up left and right by new owners loaded with money, as well as by old landowners who had retired from service and started building multiple-storey houses. There were even a couple of apartments which effectively blocked the outside view. People could no longer even hear the sound of wild beasts from the nearby hills.
However, some of the old ways of life still lingered. The jolly Bihari newspaper delivery man still came on his bicycle, and the jovial Nepali milkman regularly came in the morning with his milk churn.
Several more years flew by. The roads and lanes were now of gravel as built by the contractors unlike in the past when it was of plain dirt and later topped off by rock dust. People were able to purchase motorbikes and cars. The sons and daughters got married, and most of them went away to live in other cities. Angana’s son remained with his mother as he had a well-paid job in a private hospital in Guwahati.
Age was fast catching up with the men and women in the neighbourhood. Some were already starting to lose their memory, and some were losing their marbles. A few walked with the support of walking sticks. One man, a retired banker, suffered a stroke and was the first to die. Soon, more and more men followed. Weddings and funerals became a regular affair. The women started donning white attire. Angana’s husband had passed away, too. Her once flowing and lustrous dark hair had attained a grey colour. Wrinkles were starting to show on her brow, but she hadn’t thinned. Rather, she had put on weight. Her son had built her a two-storey house. For their convenience, he employed two housemaids, a cook and even a personal driver. And one day, he had even put on a wedding ring.
However, the lives of the neighbourhood women were getting worse. Most of their sons had failed to get a secure job because, in their better days, they had just idled away and squandered their parents’ money. In the end, some of the mothers had to sell a portion of their land to pay off bank loans after the businesses their sons had set up had folded. Two families had taken huge bank loans after mortgaging their property, failed to pay the capital or the monthly interest on time, and the banks seized their lands. Now, most of the widows had to survive on meagre family pensions and room rentals.
Angana was also a widow, but there was a sunny brightness on her moon-round face, the happiness which had been denied to her by her late husband. She had nothing to complain of, not when she had a daughter-in-law who much respected her, who saw to it that she had her meals on time and even had this habit of massaging her legs as Angana slept.
With daughters married off and husbands gone away for good, the widows thought it fit to get their sons married, too, regardless of their income. At least, with the arrival of a girl, they would have an extra hand in the house. But only if it was to be so. The sons bought girls who behaved like a quiet bird in the beginning, before they soon started rebelling against house rules, and particularly turned against their mothers-in-law. The sons, believing their wives, clashed with their mothers and one day threw them out of the house.
The widows, feeling abandoned, were too proud to weep or prostrate before their sons. They decided to beg before the temple, instead. It had now started drawing a sizeable number of devotees. Every morning till the early hours of the evening, the widows would be seen sitting in front of the temple with aluminium bowls in hand. People visiting the temple would bend down to give coins and currency notes.
Only some old residents, the fat-bellied owner of the corner restaurant, and some business owners knew well about those widows and where they actually came from.Widow Street. This was the name they gave, and this was the name that lived.
