My Unwritten Story

Just a few days back, I undertook major repairs and maintenance of my rented bungalow and its surrounding areas. The entire parking lot which was once black topped was now full of loose pebbles and overgrown grasses thus requiring a major facelift. I had the entire area dug up and then filled with fresh soils, sand and gravels to prepare them for fresh black topping. We had the Road-Roller machine employed from the stage of making the ground even till the entire black topping work was done.

On one Sunday morning, I was sitting outside at the doorsteps and watching the Road-Roller at work. The more I watched, something deep inside my being provoked my sentimental subconscious memories. I stood up and signaled to the operator to stop the machine. I then fervently requested him to allow me to just feel the machine. After he alighted, I climbed up and sat on the driver’s seat, ignited the engine and started moving the machine. The horror stricken driver started shouting at me to stop the engine while I just smiled and rolled the machine to and fro with some bit of professional touch! After awhile, the driver’s horror stricken face turned to a pleasant approving smile. After I stopped the machine and alighted, he requested me to explain how and where I had the experience of driving the machine. I simply told him that it was a long story!

Allow me to go down the memory lane and narrate that ‘long story’ of my experiences as a roadside labourer during my childhood days.

During my Jr. high school days, the three months winter vacations were always a busy time. It was the season when the rains would have just stopped and the cold winds had started to blow. It was during such times that the road construction activities would be carried out in various parts of our country with compulsory labour contribution from every household which used to be called the system of “Gungda Woola”.  As a budding youth in early teens, I would always volunteer to represent my household. This inclination came not because I was so much interested in manual labour, but more so because of my urgent need to feel and act as a fully grown up man rather than being considered as a child. I dutifully followed this arduous routine every winter vacation till I completed eighth standard after which the ‘woola’ system was discontinued by the government.

During one such attachment in labour contribution, I was sent alongwith my fellow village labourers to do the black topping works of the road linking Mongar and Lhuentshe. We were roughly hauled up in the back of an old worn out tipper truck and headed for the highway below Chali, where our camps were supposed to be located. After a torturous journey of about one hour which seemed like an eternity, we reached our camps which were made up of bamboo poles and dried grasses for walls sans roof, doors or windows. We collected our own firewood and after a quick dinner of golden yellow maize kharang and potato curry, we went to bed in the open sky. This place became my home for the next three months.

Life in the labour camp used to be the same everyday. At exactly 4 am early morning, a shrill whistle would be blown which was an indication that we had about 10 minutes to dress up, have breakfast of thin maize-flour porridge with cold leftover kharang of the previous night and then line up with our measly packlunch for attendance. The rowdy Indian Baider (Incharge of labourers) would start calling out our names in the highest pitch of his voice while we also made sure that we responded in the same pitch and with the loudest ‘yoe la’ (present sir). After the attendance was over, off we would go on the back of the tipper trucks to a place about 10 kilometers away from our camps where the black topping works were done. After toiling in the dust and black tar for six hours, it would be lunchtime. We would gather in small groups and have our own pack lunch consisting of the same golden yellow ‘kharang’ and potato curry in cheese and chilies. Although pathetic, when the body system is worn down with manual labour, these simple meals seemed the most tastiest! We would get one full hour of rest after which the torturous manual labour would begin again till the sun went down.

Evenings and nights were the best times for us youngsters. Our elders and the Baider and his staff would send us to the nearest village to buy local ara (local alcohol) for them. We would take that opportunity to check out the village damsels and woo them. I really cannot remember how many times I would have approached these girls offering them promises of a lifetime without even knowing whether I would be able to keep those promises since, when you are infatuated, sentiments warps judgement. But despite my fervent following, I was always singled out and brushed aside as an immature roadside Romeo. Although not very cold and perverse as I expected, they pitied my adolescent age of 16 and so they would expound me with plain assurances that I would get over this stage of innocent infatuation as I grew up. How rejected I would feel and how I hated that age!

Our bed was made up of the straws as mattresses, the maize kharang bags as pillows and our ghos as blankets. Lying down on the bed in the roofless enclosure and gazing at the stars directly above, listening to the sounds of the rivulets and night crickets till our tired bodies dozed off to the most satisfying sleep was sheer luxury that I wouldn’t enjoy in any five star hotels today!

On finding out that I was a student labourer among the illiterate villagers, the Baider and his staff slowly started treating me with a little more respect than the others. I now realized that, in the increasingly intensified struggle for supremacy in being noticed, my ability to read and write was an advantage and I was slowly becoming the favoured boy among my compatriots. I took advantage of the situation and soon befriended the Nepali Road-Roller machine operator and pestered him to teach me how to operate and drive his machine. As an inquisitive youth yearning to test new things, it did not take me long to pick up all the basics and start driving the Roller machine on my own. The result was that whenever the labour officers were not in the area, the Roller driver would hand over the keys to me and take a nap while I would happily operate the machine basking in the pure thrill of feeling the gigantic machine obeying the control systems that I was applying. Well, I passed the next two months as a hidden, standby and opportunist Roller driver and that is the short of my long story!

But, looking back at my experiences as a manual labourer, it has now dawned on me that those simple, yet proud moments has unknowingly helped me to prepare for the magnitude of tasks lying ahead in my journey of life so that, despite imperfections and crudities, those small insignificant snippets of my life had harmonized all aspirations of my human nature, thus, enabling me to fill up any regrettable lacuna that may have existed or may exist in my life. Although most of my experiences were rough and not at all made up of bed of roses, there is no denying the fact that this particular experience has contributed towards my on-the-job understanding of some of the fundamental axiom related to the trials and tribulation, hopes and despondency, joys and sorrows, and even love and hate of a roadside labourer’s life. Above all, I had learnt how to operate a Road-Roller machine, a skill that only few would care or actually have the opportunity to acquire. I had always saved those small incidents as memories that I can savour in while trying to find a compass for the future but never, ever imagined that one day I would blog about it!