Mills & Boons

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Rice Mill:


There were no rickshaws (man-pulled carts) in our Village during my childhood.

The well-to-do had convertible well-fed-majestic-double-Ongole Ox-drawn carts (the hood was up when they carried genteel landladies) with wheels of wood covered by screeching metal fittings.

The posh rich had carts run on the same lines, but with silk hoods and rubber-covered wheels.

The poor traveled in single-bullock carts. The bullocks were as famished and skeletal as their owner-drivers. (This recalls an ad put up on the Post-Office Wall by an IIT student: "24-inch Cycle for sale...1940 model Rayleigh...owner-driven").

While the famous Ongole oxen ran at top speed at full-throttle (the driver tickled their genitals with his joy-stick or toes as the case maybe), the bullocks were immune to all such crafty devices; they couldn't care less.

My HM father used to get a few bags of wholesome paddy every year in the harvesting season as his share of the crop of a 1/4 th acre of absentee landlord holdings (that was before land reforms, such as they were). The paddy in the gunny bags was downloaded into deep pits dug in front of our rented house and re-filled. Before dumping, the floor of the pit was inlaid with plenty of dried neem leaves. They really took care that no infestation took place for years; such was the power of neem.

Once in three months the pit was 'opened' and a couple of gunny bags of paddy were lifted and uploaded onto a single-bullock cart. The driver was hired to take the bags to the Miller in the next village and get back the rice and husk (useful as fuel).

And I had to accompany the driver in the 'front seat' beside him to oversee the milling process so that the Miller doesn't play dirty tricks.

But a born-woolgatherer like me was (and is) totally unfit for such invigilation duties.

With the result that on returning home, I was accused of not preventing the Miller from adulterating our rice with stones and pebbles.

(The 'stones' in the above remind me of a Chandamama story of my childhood: this kid found a couple of stones in his plate of cooked rice and exclaimed: "Here are two Shivlings in my food!". Rebuked severely for his impertinence, he bleated: "And I was scolded and beaten up yesterday in the Shiv Temple for pointing to the Shivling and saying: "There I see a huge dripping stone!")

The adulterants come in a variety of 'grades' depending on the quality of paddy and the kind of customer: poor folks with stale and rotting paddy got jet-black bull, horse, and rat shit; the middle class got snow-white stones; while rich folks never went to the Miller: they had a platoon of servants and farmhands at their palatial two-storied duplex houses (a rare symbol of prosperity) to de-husk their paddy in stone-mortar-pestle-pounds of king-size proportions (they stole some of the rice alright, along with the hearts of chhoti-malkins once in a while...our own Shahib Bibi aur Gulam....or is it Lady Chatterjee's ...sorry Chatterley's... Lover?).

The Miller held forth his own viewpoint: the Controlled Economy of Chacha Nehru didn't give him a viable profit if he were honest. What if he adulterates a little? The end-users always 'clean' their rice anyway before cooking, no?

That way the poorer who got black mud and rat-shit as bonus were gladder: it is easy to pick these apart from their white or brown rice. It was the middle-class upstarts who got fine white stones that were most harassed: it is so difficult to pick them out or separate them. Only expert practitioners with hand-held bamboo chetas could do the subtle physical separation of mixtures . I am told there are 9 subtly different techniques of separation using hand-held bamboo chetas for various mixtures such as rice-stone; rice-dal, dal-jeera, jeera-mustard and so on and so forth!!!

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Lord's Boon:

My first thrilling experience of riding in a horse-drawn tonga happened when I was an eight-year old underweight kid.

Our whole family went on a pilgrimage to Tirupati, where there were no taxis or town-buses then. Apparently a pilgrimage to Tirupati is never considered complete unless you visit his spouse's temple in down-hill Tiruchanur, 5 miles away by a rough road.

There were plenty of tongas waiting for custom in their stand. All of them demanded Rs 10, while my father would give no more than Rs 5. An intense session of haggling ensued at the end of which one tonga-owner standing apart agreed for Rs 5.

All of us were loaded into his tonga whose horse seemed healthy like a veritable stallion compared with the other famished ones. And there was this perennial problem of 'load-balancing' so that the horse is neither weighed down nor uplifted from its frame. After a couple of seat-adjustments, I found myself at the very back of the tonga which looked very nice to me since I could have a panoramic view of the Eastern Ghats hills and dales, flowers and fields and gentle breeze in the ever-stuffy downhill Tirupati.

And as soon as the green signal was given the stud ran at lightning speed jolting and cuddling its inner passengers. Having never crossed the 5-mph of bullock cart travel, this was Heaven to me.

But suddenly at the 3rd milestone the stallion stopped to a grinding halt. His driver tried all tricks to put it in first gear, but it said: "nolle proseque"; "nothing doing". The driver then got down and tried beating his animal with his joy-stick.

The Gurram (my surname meaning horse) got mad and apparently gave a violent back-kick; for I found myself suddenly hoisted like a projectile and after a couple of somersults found myself sitting on the wayside rock in the (unsmiling) Buddha posture.

And the stud broke away from his harness and started running at full speed with his owner-driver chasing it, leaving his cart and its load of the surviving passengers inclined down on to the road.

After recovering their standing postures and testing for broken limbs, the entire family disentanlged themselves from one another and the cart and stood by the wayside, forgetting for the moment of my wherabouts till I got up and joined them to their astonishment that I was walking!

Dusk was setting in when (by the Lord of Tirupati's grace as my mom told us) a lone empty tonga that was willy-nilly following us all the way from Tirupati at a leisurely pace halted by our side, and offered to reach us to Tiruchanur for a mere Rs 20.

My father was silenced and all of us had a safe but slow journey then on.

gps: "Don't ever haggle in Tirupati....if at all you find yourself there (I don't see why you should, after reading this charming blog)"



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