Geetanjali Krishna: Life in the middle of the road

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

It was a cold but sunny morning in Mirzapur. Driving towards the foothills of the Vindhya ranges, we almost ran over a small child who suddenly darted across a narrow village road.

"Look out!" we cried. The child was unhurt. His mother, seemingly unconcerned, was cutting vegetables on a charpoy by the roadside.

"You should be more careful about where you let your son play," I said. She looked up and said, "Well, I sent him to play on the road as it was safer and cleaner than playing in the mud!" We were astonished at the idea that the road could ever be considered as a safe place for children to play on. "Look ahead "" the older children of the village are playing a cricket match on the road," she said, "and didn't you notice all the elders basking in the sun on the road?"

She said that for people in her village, the road was not merely a surface for vehicles to move on "" it was the site of social interactions, the best place to dry dung cakes and certainly, the cleanest place for children to play in.

"Where else," she said, "can the poor mites play? The fields are all taken up with the winter crop and the fallow land is too dusty and thorny to play in. My son fell in a bush playing there "" and see how badly he's been scratched!" For people in her village, the road has another distinct advantage in the winter "" its black tar heats up in the sun, making it the warmest place to sit on. "When my son was small, I often gave him a massage here," she said, gesturing to the middle of the road.

"What happens in the summer?" I asked. For surely, the road would be too hot and exposed to be used for these purposes. "But it's the best place to sleep in at night, for outside our homes the ground is often uneven, which makes the charpoys unstable," she said. Also, she added, the trees by its side provide much needed shade, which the open fields don't have. When the snakes come out in warmer and wetter weather, the road is again a safe haven, for its pebbled surface is too rough for their soft underbellies. "That's why most of us prefer sleeping by the roadside in the summer!" she said. What about the traffic, we wanted to know. "There's hardly any traffic here," she said, "and the one or two tractors or cars that do pass this way everyday, easily see us from a distance and stop...just like you did!" And so we reinforced her view that living on the road was safe.

But safe it certainly isn't. Some years ago, a jeep ran over a villager sleeping by the roadside at night. The people from the village, enraged at the accident, lynched the driver and torched his jeep. In another case, a truck in Gopiganj bazaar in the neighbouring Bhadoi district, killed several fruit sellers sleeping by the road. "When these people insist on living virtually on the road, these things are bound to happen," said our driver feelingly.

He hadn't forgotten our close shave earlier in the day. We were driving on yet another village road at that time, and had to come to a halt because a tractor was blocking the way. The tractor driver had obviously met some acquaintances. We waited patiently till he drove off, leaving his companions sitting exactly where he must have found them "" where else but in the middle of the road?