Aaji told me...

In Marathi, we call a grandmother, 'Aaji'.

My Aaji has come to stay with us for a few days. And Aaji comes with loads of stories of her childhood. She hails from a small village in Goa called 'Bori'. So for us urban kids, her stories always introduced us to a wierd, almost unreal sort of people.

When she was a kid, she says, Goan villages were divided into the Plantation Owners and their... well... can't call them slaves, really, but servants isn't the word either...
In Konkani, they were called 'Gadi'... where you pronounce the 'a' like the 'u' in 'burn'. The Gadis belonged to the lowest class of society. They used to work on the fields and plantations of the richer classes, even cook and clean sometimes. And the interesting part is that they were paid with a heap of steamed rice, a piece of Indian salmon with a few drops of curry and a loin cloth to cover their basics.

Plantations were called a 'Kulghar'.
They were basically beetlenut plantations. Well they weren't as big as proper plantations really. One Kulghar was like a small farm. Among the beetlenut trees, people usually planted vegetables and fruit trees that were necessary in the kitchen, like some spices, for example.

My Great Grand-father (Aaji's father) had brought a young orphan into the house before Aaji was born. Everyone called him 'Baakibaap'. He was a lot older than Aaji and her siblings and used to help with the menial work around the house.

Aaji says, Baakibaap was some sort of eccentric genius. He never spoke to anyone and there were never any complaints against him. As a pastime, he would go out into the forest and gather all kinds of creepers and flowers and dry and crush them. He made pastes out of the crushed vegetation and used them to cure sick cows of the village. Nobody knew where he got his knowledge of forest vegetation. He just... knew, she says.

Once, my Aaji was running around the verandah with a long, thick stick, the kinds shepherds use. Apparently, she found it lying in the ashes of dry leaves and twigs. It had one end burnt and splintered.
While prancing around with the stick, her brother suddenly pounced at her from behind the door of the verandah. And the burnt end of the stick went straight into his eye. The boy went hysterical! His mother took him into the house to take a look at his eye. But the poor child just couldn't open it. Aaji says, she could she splinters sticking out of his closed eye, which had already begun to swell. And with all the crying, the salty tears made the eye worse.
The whole household went beserk! Aaji started crying with guilt, her mother was wailing in despair and the boy was howling with pain and nobody could do anything to calm anybody.

Amidst this hullabaloo, Baakibaap ran out into the Kulghar. He returned a few minutes later with a long wild creeper. He sat on the verandah with a spice-crusher (made of hard stone, consists of a stone plate and a oblong, round stone to crush the spices with) and crushed the leaves of the creeper till they turned to paste. Then he laid the paste out evenly onto a large plate and put it out in the sun to dry.

In the meanwhile, he started to prepare a room, far inside the house. He dusted the room, then laid out a bed with clean linen in the centre. Then, he covered all the windows with dark cloth to block the sunlight. Then, he asked Aaji's mother to bring the boy inside and lay him on the bed.

A few hours later, Aaji says the paste turned into thick green jelly. Baakibaap cut the jelly into small squares and took it into the room. Everyone was ushered out of the room with only Baakibaap and the boy inside. The doors closed.

Inside the room, he sat with the boy's head in his lap and calmed the child. Then, carefully, he placed one square of the jelly onto his sore eye. He let the juice of the jelly seep into the eye. Then, when he lifted the square, a few splinters came stuck to the jelly.

Baakibaap patiently continued the process till all the squares of jelly were used up. Aaji says, the doors of the room didn't open until dawn of the next day.
But when they did open, the boy had only a slight swelling left.

A few days later, he could open his eye and a month later, no one could tell that he had almost lost an eye.