Hello suburbia, goodbye village

Chronicling the milestone changes in rural life that have been going on for a quarter century

Over the last twelve years these modest columns have from time to time chronicled not just the bigger picture of daily life in south Punjab, but occasionally more intimate glimpses into everyday ordinariness. Today is one such and it is emblematic of the changes in rural life that have been going on for a quarter century, and it is a milestone both literal and symbolic. The family has built their first house outside the village on the south side of the city. A real bricks-and-mortar house that saw my niece and her family move in over the weekend, and will be the base for her beauty-parlour business once she gets her certificate from the local vocational training college.

Very little had changed since Independence when I first met the family in 1993. They were small farmers, not rich and not poor, hardworking they made a decent living with a bit to spare. Nobody was hungry. Beyond farming there was a trickle of steady income from my sister-in-law who was a lady health worker. Education was sparse. Beyond my wife there was nobody who had anything more than a few years of primary schooling. The family house was a mix of mud, straw and some bricks. There was electricity and by the mid-90s a few landline phones. Then it all started to change.

By the turn of the century the future was writ large and village life had already moved towards a very different future. Land was being sold off, men were taking jobs far away in the cities and out of agriculture, more young people were getting educated and very few of them had the slightest desire to be a part of a medieval society with both feet firmly in the past. Within my own family all the women got education that is now being turned into an income stream. Those that have married — and several have chosen career over marriage — have limited the size of their families. None of the men are farmers today. The 14-acre plots have been whittled away, tiny hand worked fields come under the cruncher of mechanised crop extraction, and in slightly less than a generation the village is as dead as the proverbial dodo.

There is an unhappy scattering of those that missed the boat, had more children than they could sustain, a dwindling band of elderly and infirm stranded by a receding tide, a village school that has few to teach, a solar-powered water system that has brought potable water to every household for the first time that came too late — and a deepening hush as the chatter of kids fades.

Within days the new house has become a hub for the family. There are plans well advanced for the front and back of the plot it is built on to be used for a spot of urban farming. Estimates suggest that we could be self-sufficient for vegetables, with a possible three crops a year and a part-time job for somebody poorer than us to do the weeding and hoeing and watering. Within the year a small business will be operating from the house with plans for ‘another branch’ in a couple of years’ time. People are planning ahead, developing vision and purpose. Now that the house is finished my brother-in-law, the small farmer I met all those years ago, is exploring the possibility of running a pick-and-drop service, perhaps for working women in a city where more and more women are in employment.

The last link to the village will break when my sister-in-law, now a senior LHV in a decently paid pensionable government job — retires. The village house will be redundant and will linger on for mainly sentimental reasons before it goes back to the dust it came from.

It is all too easy to be sentimental for a past life and yes there are fond memories, but it was a hard and unrelenting life. Now there are quiet evenings with tea and chit-chat and mobiles and internet and big-screen tellys and a modest runabout parked in the garden. Nobody would think of themselves as rich but all will carry the memory of harder times till their dying day.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 15^th, 2018.

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