The Ratabari Rishkaw walla

This is a story about Ayub Ali of Ratabari.  No one has heard of either him or the place and no one ever probably will.  Nothing about them merits any serious attention.  Then why do I bother to tell his story?  When he no more walks the earth?  Because it is non-entities like these that still keep the world going.  It is these characters that still offer a glimmer of hope that doomsday is still eons away. 

By the way, I must warn that this account will be a bit lengthy.  Great tales about great people can’t be put in a nutshell.  As some wise man said, if something can be told in a nutshell, it belongs there.

First about the place.  Ratabari is a small village located at 24/36 N and 92/24 E coordinates in Assam.  It could not have cared less if it is, one squally day, transported to 92/24 N and 24/36 E.  Life and time whiz past Ratabari without so much as touching it, caught as it were in a time-warp.  Some fifty years back, all it boasted of was a road bisecting the village with lush paddy fields on either side, a few ramshackle shops, mud houses, an elementary school and a police thana.  Fifty years hence, nothing much has changed, except that the shops sport a more decrepit look.  The road sees respectable traffic, with doggy buses (trucks past their shelf life, converted into buses) transporting goats and humans between Dullabcherra and Karimganj.  There is a rail line connecting these two places and Ratabari has the privilege of being one of the stations in between.  One train plies daily making one up and another down trip.  Bangladesh is only a few miles to the west and Ratabari’s citizens, most of them at least, have ‘dual citizenship’.  Many of them during days ply their trade in Ratabari and the nearby big town Karimganj and as the sun sets, cross over to their homes to the neighbouring country.  Passport? Visa? BSF? You mush be joking.  Who bothers with all these hassles when in Ratabari, India’s international village, with no cross-border barriers?

On one cold February morning in 1990, I landed up in Ratabari at about 9 a.m.  As I got down the bus from Silchar, I looked around and was pretty certain that I had got down at the wrong place.  Damn! I could not understand Bengali, much less Sylheti, one of its variants.  As I was standing, looking very foolish and very lost, I had already become an amusing exhibit for the small crowd that had gathered.  Two urchins were tugging at my luggage and were laughing.  One old man with a goatee white beard, puffing a bidi and clad in lungi, looking very much our cousins across the border, was asking me something.  I pretended not to hear since I could make nothing out of the blabber.  I could have as well landed in Conakry, Guinea.  The thought suddenly struck me that  I had to spend the next few years here.  My bank is known for having offices at God forsaken places but this one takes the cake, I thought.  This place looks even ghost-forsaken.

As I was contemplating my misery, I heard a voice in Hindi.  Suddenly Hindi appeared to be the sweetest language on earth.  I turned to my right and saw the hero of this tale.  Name of Ayub Ali, I learnt later.

 ‘Saab ko Kahan jana hai?’ he asked.

  I mentioned.

 ‘Boitiye Hum le jayega’

And then I spotted his rickshaw.  Cycle rickshaws sport different colours and designs throughout India.  But the rickshaws of Ratabari really deserve a place in the British museum, after they become extinct.  Their ‘aerodynamic’ design assures maximum discomfort for the passengers in the least possible time.  It is meant to seat two but one and a half men of medium girth can barely park themselves in.  The seat slopes downwards at about 30 degrees with the result that unless you apply full pressure on your legs to bear your body weight, you just slide down.  Definitely the Ratabari rickshaw is an engineering marvel designed for some purpose by a genius engineer, only the purpose eludes me, the  hare-brained.  Well, Ayub was the owner of one such locomotive on which I climbed and sat.  The 2 Km joy ride to the bank started.  I preferred to keep to myself but Ayub would have none of it.  And so thus went our first conversation, reproduced in English.

‘Where are you from Sir?’

‘From Madras’

‘Madras, near Kolkata Sir?’

I knew of no Madras near Kolkata but poor Ayub’s world extends to a radius of may be about 10 kms around Ratabari, so for him Madras could as well have been near Dhaka.

‘You, the new field man in the Bank Sir?’

News travels fast here, I thought.  But ‘field man’?  Sounds like a post man.  Over time, I understood the lingo of Ratabari.  Rural Development Officers in Banks (a grand designation given to me by my Bank- does not it sound more pompous  than ‘Chief Operating Officer?) are called field men.

‘The old field man was very good, sir’

As if I would be no equal to him.

‘He gave me this rishkaw, sir’

For many in Sylhet, rickshaw is rishkaw and risk is riks.  So, if you are in Sylhet, you can be sure of a rishkaw ride full of riks.

‘But this rishkaw has gone to dogs.  Taking too much on repairs. I need a new one.  Can you give me one Sir?’

I suddenly felt like Emperor Aurangazeb, doling out gifts to his courtiers.   From a crouching position, I straightened up.

‘How much does a rickshaw cost?’

‘Now Rs.3500, Sir.  This one I bought for Rs.2400.  Bank gave 1600/- and balance subsidy from Government’.

We arrived at the bank.  Pretty imposing structure, I thought.  A cloth shop at the ground floor and bank at the first.  The cloth shop owner owned the premises and very often thought that he owned the bank too. 

From that day on, Ayub voluntarily became my personal chauffeur.  My home was at Sugar Mill staff quarters about a kilometer away.  The mill itself is now defunct, only the skeletal remains of the machinery remain inside a haunted factory;   Intriguing, how factories shut down and decay so fast in Eastern India.  The Cachar Sugar Mill was perhaps the biggest industrial hub in that part of Assam and so many families depended on it for sustenance.  As did many shopkeepers and rickshaw pullers.  Ayub had seen better days when the mill was running.  The mill shut down, his income dwindled over the years and he now barely manages a living.  He had five mouths to feed and he himself was not keeping very well. 

But not a single repayment instalment of our bank loan he missed.  A princely sum of Rs.80/- per month.  We would not have minded if he skipped an instalment or two.  But he seldom did.  Rain or shine, on the first of every month, he would come into the bank, softly panting, sweating from head to toe and hand me the money.  I would fill up a pay-in slip and he took great pride in signing his name, in English!  He is an illiterate but some how he had managed to learn how to write A U B A L I – his autograph.  The only rickshaw-wallah in may be the entire Karimganj district to sign in English!

‘Kya karega saab, Kishthi (instalment) tho dena hi hai.’

‘How much do you earn per day?’

‘About Rs.30 daily.  When the mill was running, I used to make much more.’

‘But if we give you a new rickshaw, the instalment will be about 140 bucks.  How will you manage?’

‘Hum sakega saab’

‘Kaise sakega? Tell me’

‘My daily repairs cost will come down and may be I can make more trips on a new vehicle’ he would justify his business plans based on his own viability study.

I had to visit several villages far away in the course of my work, and always took Ayub Ali with me.  When I say villages, picture in your mind a contiguous formation of about 50 mud houses, with thatched roofs, right in the middle of paddy fields and slush, covered by dense foliage, far away from the nearest road and have never known luxuries like electricity and water supply.  To such villagers the bank has lent and most of the time they would be unable to repay.  One may personally commiserate with their plight but as a responsible ‘field man’ of my bank with authority,  I had to at least pretend to collect the dues.  So off I used to go to about 10 villages per week in Ayub Ali’s chariot.  The undulating pathways over which Ayub pulled his rickshaw by hand were so narrow that the danger of toppling over always lurked.  The thrill of the  rides was nothing less than  what the giant ferris wheels in big amusement parks had to offer.  Ayub also earned handsomely by ferrying me on such trips which always cost about Rs.30 per trip. 

A year went by.  Ayub’s loan was almost liquidated and we thought may be now we can give the new rickshaw.  The sheer joy we spotted on Ayub’s face when we handed over the sanction letter still remains etched in my mind.  As if he had been sanctioned  a million rupees!  He immediately took our cheque and fled to Karimganj town, in searchof his dream machine.  At about 8 p.m. some one knocked at my door. Ayub with his gleaming Ferrari was standing outside.

‘What happened Ayub?  At this hour?’  (Midnight descends on us at about 7 p.m.)

‘I came to show my new rishkaw, sir”

‘Hmm. Pretty nice’ I went around the vehicle and officially made an inspection of the asset we have financed.  Though, I cannot tell a nut from a bolt.

‘Thank you very much sir.  You were of great help’

‘Oh, nothing.  Now remember this is bank’s money and you must repay 140 bucks from next month.’

‘Sure, I will, sir’

And sure he did.  There was again, as expected, no default.  How he makes ends meet has always been a topic of discussion among us but the regularity at which he repays has never failed to astound us.  Over a period of 5 years in that place, I had given (or rather persuaded my manager to sanction) scores of Goru, Chogul and Hans (cows, goats and ducks) loans and several rickshaw loans too but the repayment record of Ayub Ali was always unmatched.  After a couple of years, I told him that the bank would be ready to finance him for another new rickshaw or may be a cycle repairing unit but he was not very willing.  ‘I have to repay this first sir, and then I will take further loans.  May be, some day, I will own ten rickshaws.’ He would say. We wished he would. Ayub was our bank’s model borrower.  Our poster boy.  On our field trips to villages,we would show-case him as a role model for other borrowers.  ‘Repay promptly you must, then only you will get more loans’, we would preach. Other rickshaw wallahs were secretly jealous of him as he had become a chamcha of the bank sahibs. But he did not seem to care.

 

And one day, he died.

In the morning, I was waiting for him at my home as usual to take me to the Bank, but he did not turn up.  Instead, the news of his death did.  He fell ill suddenly at night and did not wake up from sleep in the morning. ‘TB’ someone said, ‘he smoked a lot, you know?’  And some said he used to drink like a fish, though I had never seen him in an inebriated state ever. The news shocked me.  Shamelessly, my mind immediately did a quick math of how much he still owed the bank.  May be about Rs.1000/- and now there it goes, down the drain, I thought. A borrower is only a book asset for a banker.  That he is also a fellow human being, with his own trials and tribulations is rarely appreciated by him.  I still look back with guilt at that moment when I heard of Ayub’s death and when the first concern that overtook me was his loan..  I still wish I could somehow rewind the tape and over-write that episode.

A month passed.  I had almost forgotten about him.  And then one Friday evening, a middle-aged lady with two children in tow, turned up at our office.  She had a cloth pouch in her hand.  The elder of the two kids had a terror-stricken face and his younger sibling with a running nose, perched on his mother’s waist, was bawling.  She was simultaneously trying to keep him quiet and talk to us.  She introduced herself as Noor Khatun, wife of Ayub Ali.  I exchanged a perfunctory condolence with her.  I was not sure about her purpose of visit.  By that time, I had managed to speak a smattering of Sylhetti and I asked her about her mission.

‘I came to repay the rishkaw loan my husband took’. 

I was dumb-founded.  How on earth did she manage Rs.1000?.  I knew for sure she and her kids were starving right now, with their only bread winner gone. I asked her about the source of her funds.

‘My husband sold off his old rickshaw two months ago, saab.  He got Rs.800/- out of that and had told me to safe keep it for emergencies.  The balance I somehow managed.’

My heart refused to take that money.  But my bank does not pay me for compassion,  it expects me to recover bad loans. 

‘What do you do now to maintain the family?’ I asked.

‘Doing odd jobs, saab.  My eldest son will now ply the rickshaw.  We will manage, saab’, she said without a tinge of emotion. Her eldest son was all of 15.

Trying to keep a stone-face, I collected the money and made out a pay-in slip.  Involuntarily, I pushed it towards her, expecting A U B A L I to miraculously appear on the depositor’s sign column.  Instead, she pulled a stamp pad and affixed her thumb impression on the piece of paper. The money was deposited, the loan was closed.  And a treasure snatched from a family wallowing in abject poverty.  That sum could have kept her going for another few months.  Provided succour to five starving stomachs.  But the bank, a sarkari appendage at that, does not take cognizance of starvation.  It snatches from whoever it could bully and meekly prostrates before whoever it gets bullied by. 

That is how our system works.  That is what our system does to the Ayub Alis of the world, who borrow in four digits for his lowly rickshaw.  If only he had managed to borrow in fourteen digits for jumbo jets, it would have been the lot of the bank to run after him, beg him and cajole him to take more.  And after the loans go bust, the banks would fall head over heels to restructure the same and if possible, lend more and go bust themselves.