‘Field Day’

Photographer - Chase Bradburn

Field Day

Breakfast was boiled tapioca and flat rice stirred in red tea, and an abundance of bananas from the plantation. We sat on the porch where the farmer’s heavy hats and coats hung amongst his scabbed shovels and boots, and watched the wooden cottages slope down the hill in different colours. There were men pushing wheelbarrows and motorbikes down the alleys towards the main road, watching us with little or too much interest. The North-East wasn’t uniformly picturesque, though the hills were unlike most of rural India.

    The farmer dropped us in the middle of a highway running across a vast golden gorge. He told us that he had a meeting at the cooperative society about pork rearing, and that we should hitch a ride back to the village before nightfall. Enisha said that her picture of the village headman had been everything but soft-spoken and unopulent, and that she hadn’t envisioned him carrying a barrel of gasoline in the back of his pickup-truck and complaining about the cost of labour. I shrugged and adjusted my SLR camera across my chest as the pickup rattled into the distance till it could no longer be heard, though it was a long time before it faded out of our sight.

    The hill on top of the mountain looked exactly like an apple eaten around its core. It was starkly different to the untouched gorges and their gentle slopes of grass. The conical hill had long eroded and crumbled clumsily over itself into a giant pile of dusty, yellowish boulders. A row of dump-trucks lined the crusty bay around the hill, like insects perched inside the crater of a moon. A scattered group of men, women and teenagers were hunched across the pile, wrapped in faded towels, makeshift turbans and caps. We heard a rhythmic crunch of spades as workers plumbed the mountain for limestone, turning it into a massive quarry.

    Enisha had wandered off to find the woman we had met the previous day. She worked with her two-year old child bundled into a cloth on her back and slung around her forehead. The base of the hill had been hollowed into a row of caves and I waltzed through their large entrances, watching the drivers chain-smoke bidis and chew an endless supply of betelnuts. A drilling machine faced the cavities as though it had a mind of its own, and the caves were cooler and quieter inside. The workers had clearly tunnelled through the earth for years, though they migrated every season. The ones who weren’t local came from Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Assam, Nepal and Bangladesh. Our documentary focused on a village beyond the quarry. Its geography was rugged and barren owing to its higher altitude and acidic soil. Agriculture was sporadic and the nearest school and clinic were miles away. The village we were accommodated in was close to a valley with a stream running through, and a road that led to the highway, making it easier to grow crops and transport them to bigger markets.

    The woman wore the same clothes as the previous day and sat around a pile of rocks, breaking them one at a time and dumping them into a steel container. The rocks were sold to construct roads and embankments, unlike the lucrative limestone boulders. She sat deep inside the cave where the darkness made it seem like it was night outside. An electric lantern hung in the corner and buried the world in a silent opera of shadows. She smiled at us and held her gaze, and asked us to sit down in her throaty language. Her eyes questioned us with a hint of mischief and she didn’t pay much attention to her baby. She was muscular unlike the men outside, and she seemed to behold a secret. Her Hindi was as bad as everybody else’s. We had grown accustomed to the tribals’ general disdain towards outsiders, and the special affection we enjoyed for being young and from a region unknown to them.

    We had spent the previous night arguing over whether it was too soon to ask the woman for permission to film her. Enisha said that the mine and its activities wouldn’t take long to film, and that it was important to capture the woman in her element, speaking in her tribal language. She reminded me that it was absurd to think of the hill people as isolated, and that filming the woman by herself would misrepresent their community. I picked up a rock and a worn-out hammer and sat down beside the pile. The woman looked at me and then at Enisha, and asked her to sit beside me. She had an air of calm and a childlike seriousness, and her thoughts did not stop her from beating the rocks. Enisha asked her if she carried her lunch and she laughed. She looked embarrassed and eager to tell us about her domestic life, and Enisha listened without interrupting her.

    ‘Sometimes my husband gets the pot ready while I cut the vegetables. It saves time,’ she grew serious again.

    ‘I have a small field of potatoes and cabbage and in the winter I spend my time there. This work pays us a daily wage and it’s helpful for our expenses, but the harvest we get at the end of the year give us what we make in two months here, and we also eat some of it. But mostly we rely on our chickens and cow.’

    Her eyes gleamed at me.

    ‘Are you making videos about the mine for a foreign company?’

    Enisha blushed. She hadn’t anticipated the woman’s knowledge about documentaries. We had orchestrated our entry into the quarry under the pretext of a research project, and had obtained a letter from the local university in return for the film. The department head frequently collaborated with independent activists and she convinced the principal that a film about illegal mining would propel the university’s research. The letter stated that the ‘students’ were required to document the tribals’ culture as part of their curriculum. The supervisor at the quarry was often inebriated, and the formal letter and our youthful appearance helped avoid any suspicions. I was anxious to start filming before somebody intelligible came along, but I finally understood Enisha’s plan.

    ‘It’s for a college project.’

    The woman smiled again and looked at us with her big eyes. I could tell what she was thinking.

    ‘After college, will you be marrying him?’

    The innocence in her voice almost made me grin, but she was looking at Enisha the whole time. She smiled politely and told her that we were thinking about it but our focus was on college. I shook my head and watched her as she drew the conversation back towards food.

    ‘I always used to make my lunch in the morning and carry it with me. But these days my baby keeps me up at night. My husband leaves later in the day to drive the trucks in a different quarry and he drops the food for me and the baby in the afternoon.’

    She looked around as if to search for their food and discover that it wasn’t there because her husband hadn’t arrived yet. And then an idea came into her.

    ‘I will be going home after five ‘O’ clock. You can eat with us and see the village. Until then, you can go around the mine, nobody will have time to bother you.’ She stopped beating the stone at last and sat with her elbows on her knees. ‘I’ll see if I can get a chicken, or maybe even a chop of pork.’ She said the last line to herself in her language and I felt a wave of guilt as I recognized the words, but Enisha sprang into action without moving an inch. She grinned at me long and hard and I knew that it was time to switch on the camera.    

Abhishek Udaykumar is a writer, filmmaker and painter from India. He graduated from Royal Holloway University of London with English and Creative Writing. He writes short stories, novels and essays and makes documentaries and fiction films. His narratives reflect the human condition of rural and urban communities. He has been published by different literary journals, and has made thirteen films and several series of paintings.