Gabar Singh

 

This Diwali, my sister and three brothers with their spouses, all above sixty, decided to celebrate the festival in the village. All my stories, anecdotes and adventures had an effect on them so they were curious to renew the contact with the village after a long time. Only problem was, they are not used to dealing with the cooking and washing dishes. Although cooking was something they could manage but washing dishes in cold weather was strictly NO. So, I had to search for a 'help' to do the chores.

 People have this tendency to overstate, exaggerate, so, when I approached Gabar Singh (not Gabbar Singh) from “Saur”, a village about 2 km away, they cautioned about his proclivity for liquor. He is actually a calm, stoic person not prone to exhibiting emotions.  Even when I joked about the 50K reward on his head, he calmly, unprovokedly pointed out, his name is Gabar Singh. All through the 10 days he cooked and washed dishes for us, he kept to himself not indulging in small talk, would disappear from the kitchen after cooking, remerge quietly at dinner time. My brothers had brought a few bottles of whiskey and a bottle of Bacardi rum therefore in addition to his monetary compensation I had kept this bottle of rum for him as a bonus. (villagers prefer rum over whiskey, the stronger the better)

Not that he paid any heed to our conversations, in fact he was quite attentive to all the things that were going on, just that he liked to keep a low profile. Once, while discussing murders in villages (only a couple in a hundred years, so big stories), I was not able to remember Bachchi Kaka’s name, he immediately helped with the name even though he was working in the kitchen while we were discussing the subject in the inner verandah. When, on the final day we paid him the compensation, I expected him to show some emotion on the presentation of the rum bottle, but even then, he remained stoic.

However, on the final day of our sojourn, while returning to Delhi, Meenakshi, my sister had asked him to give a few kgs of vegie Arbi (Pindaloo in our lingo) from his village “baaghiichaa”. As discussed, we found him there at the edge of his village waiting for us with a bagful of Arbi. We noticed a trace of conspicuous smile on his face, He would touch our feet again and again as is village custom (everyone junior touches the feet of seniors, I hate it), then I noticed he was smelling alcohol early at 10:30 AM.