A leftover tale

This is the true story of a poor old woman narrated to me by my grandmother when I was a child. The events that occurred are close to a hundred years old. Malasabai was a ‘madi hennumagalu’ (ie a Brahmin widow) who lived in a village.

She was an old woman who had to keep her head shaved to follow the customs and traditions of society in those days. Brahmin widows were considered inauspicious for festivals and poojas, and generally undesirable during other times.

So, Malasabai used to lug water from a nearby well and tend to cattle through the evening and night. She had no means of living except for this job, which she did for two square meals, if at all provided by the landlord Brahmin family in the neighbourhood.

Malasabai would eat the leftovers from the landlord family’s dinner. Sometimes the landlady would push an utensil towards her and say, “Malasabai, this is the utensil used for heating butter, use the left over ghee for your bhakri (jawar roti)”.

The poor widow was an unpaid, overworked and exhausted servant working for the landlord who assigned other chores to her as well, apart from the water-lugging and cattle-tending. At dusk, while feeding the cattle, Malasabai would sometimes be so famished she would eat the oil cakes meant for cattle.

Long, painful years passed and Malasabai grew old. One day she fell severely sick and the landlord had a change of heart. He neither dismissed her nor forced her to work; he even gave her a place to live in and fed her bhakri and tawwi (roti and dal).

When Malasabai was nearing her death, she expressed her last wish, “Naanu chapaati muddi pallya tindu saaitini” (‘I wish to eat chapaati and a local dish prepared out of lentil and gongura and then die’). Wheat isn’t grown in north Karnataka and so it was expensive to buy some from some other place.

There wasn’t any money either, so the landlord approached the family guru and he gave two annas (one anna was 1/16th of a rupee in Nizam kingdom’s currency). They bought wheat and gave her desired meal and she died contentedly and in peace.

I believe that, in life, one’s desires are proportionate to what one already has. Poor Malasabai who was kept alive by the most meager and least nourishing food had a simple desire of satisfying her taste buds once before dying. Whither poverty of those days and the blatant and obscene expectations of today’s poor, who are upset even after accepting cash, TVs, cycles, saris, laptops, etc from politicians?