The cucumbers hung heavy on the vines, punctuated by yellow flowers. Each bud foreshadowed the arrival of another fruit, ready to pluck in two weeks’ time. Tilu Di didn’t wait for the cucumbers to grow past their prime. All these years of tending to the earth and the hearth taught her that you could never really get rid of the bitterness of the largest cucumbers, no matter how you cooked them. She didn’t like how the overripe ones pulled down the vine from the fence-line, leaching the nutrients from the other fruits and making more work for her to prop up the green canopy again. 

​

Cucumbers aren’t so different from certain men in that way, she said with a raised eyebrow. 

​

*

​

Tilu Di had grown up in this part of the world, so was no stranger to the peculiarities of a landscape where saltwater and sweetwater meet. No stranger to big weather and the trouble it causes. And no stranger to the vulnerabilities of being a woman. Her birth was not recorded in an official capacity, but she knew she was born shortly after the nation’s biggest storm. She was ageless, smooth-faced and limber, with a long waterfall of black hair she wore clipped up in a twist. 

​

We’d gotten lucky today with the light breeze and nearly cloudless sky. It was a relief to sit in the shade cast by the leaves on the vines that had snaked their tendrils up the net fastened above the plot of land Tilu Di and her husband Bapon Da were renting, 1.5 bigha square. The plants grew rooted in the soil of the small earthen path that bordered the plot. This space had been their rice paddy field in the previous season and was now filled with water for freshwater fish cultivation during the monsoon period. 

​

Looking out across the Boro Beel, we saw a pattern of paddy fields-turned-ghers separated by earthen walkways to demarcate the property boundaries. A small river, a tributary of the Bhadra, runs through the beel. Its water has been diverted into so many canals cut by farmers over successive generations. The plots on the outskirts of the beel have to be maintained either by rainwater or by groundwater irrigation. 

​

Tilu Di was happy that even in the early part of the season, the monsoon was cooperating with their plans and providing just enough water such that they wouldn’t have to pay a fee to borrow a generator and pump from the Bishwas’s down the road. The elder Mr Bishwas was in the good graces of the officers at the Department of Agriculture, and his homestead somehow ended up with all the threshing machines and soil tillers that were donated ostensibly to the entire village of Pachchuri by successive development projects. Bishwas Sir was making some cash on the side charging his neighbours to use the farm equipment. Prices tended to spike depending on the desperation of the supplicant-farmer. 

​

This is behaviour that you would expect of someone already rich, not someone whose father worked on the same land as your father-in-law, Tilu Di whispered, even though in the beel we were out of earshot of anyone else.

​

*

 

When she first arrived in Pachchuri, Tilu Di was very young and largely unschooled in what she likes to refer to as ‘how the world actually works’. It was the day of her wedding, and she was afraid more than anything else. The one thought that comforted her was that her natal village was close enough that she could run away back home if needed. Not that anyone would allow her to stay, but the proximity felt reassuring. At that time, the family she was marrying into was under the helm of Tilu Di’s shoshur, her father-in-law, and they still owned a small but adequate amount of land in the Boro Beel. Bapon and his brothers were in charge of cultivating rice on the land that their father didn’t rent out to area tenant farmers. But her shoshur was not a good steward of the family’s land. Even though she was young and frequently underfed and overworked in the early days of her marriage, Tilu Di was a keen listener and took more of an interest in understanding the family’s financial situation than even her husband. Whenever there was a need for an immediate infusion of cash in those days, she noticed that her shoshur would always miraculously come up with the sum. This was well before microcredit lending agencies had taken a firm hold in the area. No mahajans or money-lenders seemed to trouble her shoshur either. It was only later that she understood that her father-in-law was selling off parcels of the family land to finance various ventures.

​

At one point a tenant renting from them sold the plot to an area strongman using falsified documents. Despite his protests and repeated trips to the DC Office in Khulna, her father-in-law was unable to recover the land, and eventually found himself in debt for his efforts. The legal mechanisms all seemed to favour the land grabber. 

​

Ours isn’t the only story like this, Tilu Di cautioned. You can see this kind of land-grabbing everywhere in Pachchuri and throughout this district, she said. Now, almost none of the landowners of the plots in Boro Beel are local residents. Tilu Di dismisses them as largely city businessmen with loose ties to the area, only caring about a good investment. The people who actually farm this land are renters and occasional day labourers who come to assist during harvest time. We looked across the beel toward the far embankment where we could barely make out a cluster of village homes at the horizon, with katal and kejur trees behind them.

​

It’s hard to overstate the disappointment and frustration. That her family now has to pay rent to use land that was once theirs is an unending source of grief. That they were living in the same house as the land they could rightfully lay claim to grew smaller and smaller in front of their eyes is an indignity. 

​

It is not like losing your sari because someone stole it from the line in the middle of the night; it’s like seeing someone else wear your most beautiful sari everyday and there’s nothing you can do about it, Tilu Di explained.

​

*

​

Tilu Di’s mother used to tell the story of being pregnant during what would become a nation-defining event. When the cyclone of 1970 tore through their village, her mother had been terrified not for her own life but for the foetus, her first child, at one point laying on the floor under a bed that had to be raised up on bricks to protect against debris. Storms are part of my experience, even from the very beginning, Tilu Di murmured. The next major storm arrived when she was a teenager, already married and living by the Boro Beel. 

​

What people remember most vividly about the 1988 cyclone that came through Pachchuri is that the roofs of homes were sheared off and went flying through the air. This was, luckily, before corrugated tin had become the material de rigeur, and so it was instead carefully woven thatch that were plucked off and sent aloft, an act of weaving in reverse. Homes were reduced to piles of rubble, trees snapped in two. These are two monuments of what should connote solidity and stability: the home and age-old tree, and so to see them cleft leaves a permanent impression. Those who had little to begin with, suddenly had even less.

​

Tilu Di remembered the ostoashi jhor – the Storm of ’88 – inaugurating her own political awakening. She was ready for it, and when the feminist organisation that had come to provide food, medicine and building materials for relief was later looking for members, she signed up. She liked how the organisers addressed everyone with the formal apni regardless of class background, and how the men and women leaders interacted with each other. Before joining, I did not know that the constant abuse raining down upon us as daughters-in-law, as women in society, was wrong. She did know it, in her body and how she’d have to carry herself in every place and in every moment, but having the space to speak openly about it, and new words for what could be different, was revelatory. She attended more meetings. She had her husband join. She became a leader herself. 

​

In discussions with other women, she felt the tight fist that was always inside her chest start to unclench. It was a strange relief to talk about the disappointments resulting from the decisions the men in her life made. She saw how vulnerable she’d been throughout her childhood, how her mother and other women tried their best to shield her from the worst consequences. In marriage she didn’t have the same protectors, but even then, she didn’t have it as bad as some. Even then it was only night after night of hunger, the new daughter-in-law spending the day cooking for the entire family compound. The new daughter-in-law eating last, after the men had scraped the bottom of the pot for their second and third helping. 

​

*

​

Tilu Di finds the work of cultivating crops provides a kind of satisfaction that can’t be replicated. Tending to the foshol and awaiting its abundance can be anxious but is also joyous. It connects her to a way of life that she thinks of as authentically Bengali. This landscape, after all, is the stuff of poetry. Think of Our Rabindranath! His family’s home is in Kushtia, just west of here!

​

She paused to stand and stretch, reaching out for a small cucumber that looked ready to be plucked from the vine. She rinsed two in the gher water below and dried them on the achol of the soft cotton sari that she had wrapped around her waist. We admired how green they were, and how sweet. Being able to nourish her family, especially her granddaughter, and her guests who come visiting, is, despite all of the hardship, something that feels good everyday. It may not be their land anymore according to the survey office or in deed, but this soil comprises something much more powerful: the family’s bhit, its foundation. No one can take that away.
            
Cultivation connects them to their forebears. Tilu Di points across the beel in the direction of her natal village. Our grandfathers’ grandfathers were the ones who cut back the jungle and made this into farmland in the first place. Back then it was all organic fertiliser and indigenous rice. Now it’s hybrid seeds, chemical fertiliser and loans, always loans at the beginning, and you have to hope that you’ll get enough rice to sell to pay everyone back and to be able to eat for a year. And you know how much rice we eat!

​

After Partition, the Hindu population in the southwest gradually shrank. Tilu Di heard that the wealthy families either packed up and left for India, or married their daughters to families on the other side of the border or said goodbye to sons who left to strike it rich over there. Success stories from relatives who left trickled in through word of mouth or the occasional letter in the early days. Now, mobile phone calls, particularly from Bapon’s uncle who married and settled in India, are more of the norm for relaying triumphs. Tilu Di wished she and Bapon Da could have built up their house, educated their children well before their marriages, and seen improvements in that generation. That was not our fate, Tilu Di sighed, subdued for a moment.              

​

A small but urgent voice cut through the stillness. Didima! We turned to see her three-year-old granddaughter beckoning from the shade of the trees near their home.

​

Maybe this is the one who will finally change things.

​

We plucked a few more cucumbers from the vine and took another glance at the beel before setting out on the path back home.

​​

​​

​​

Writer’s note
 

The beginnings of this piece emerged out of the Ethnography Beyond the Vignette workshop series organised by Grace H Zhou and Nethra Samarawickrema. I thank them, Hannah Michell and the other workshop participants for their insights and encouragement. I also want to thank Grace H Zhou for the invitation to contribute to this issue of Otherwise and for her thoughtful comments on this piece and collaboration over the years. Laura Moran and Fatima Raja’s generous feedback was invaluable to be in conversation with. 

​