There were three of us returning from a Langar (free community kitchen). Our afternoon meal had been delayed to around 5 pm, but now we were all satiated.
As the sun also began setting, coolness was presiding and it was altogether very pleasant. Shoulder to shoulder, we three walked through the thin crowd, heading towards the tent in which we had to stay for the night. Simultaneously we looked around at the other tents. People had started coming out, some were sitting outside their little huts and tents on chairs or manjas (charpoys).
On to our left was such a group of old men, perched on chairs and a charpoy, talking to each other and looking at the passersby. We were quite conspicuous due to our pant-shirts and that urban look you can’t avoid having easily. Those men called us and offered us to sit and talk. Kudos – that was why we were there, to talk and know more about the protest!
They told us to bring three chairs from inside of their hut, and we did that and then we were listening to them, and questioning them.
“How long have you been here?” was the first natural question.
“Nine months,” was the doubtless reply. “We need to visit our village and homes time to time, but then we are mostly here, at the protest.”
They were three people – one slightly less than the age my grandfather would have been, and two others at least twenty years elder to my father. Two of them had long, flowing milk-white beards.
Before long, a fourth old man appeared from behind the hut. He was introduced to us as a man who had never even once gone back home ever since the protest had started. “He has declared that he will either win or die, but not return home like this, ignored and defeated,” said one of them.
And this man’s face told a similar story too. He had the most wrinkles out of all of them. It had a different kind of gravity, some form of sadness but audacity. Sadness would be a wrong word – it was something different, some emotion that had no name.
One of us asked the main man, “What’s the secret of your undemolished spirits?”
There wasn’t one secret answer to this question: such things are a culmination of myriad factors. But an unrelated question fetched a nearby answer.
The question was, “How do you spend your free time?”
They replied, “Oh, we either do some sewa (voluntary service) at a langar, or we recite paath (religious recitation). At other times, we talk and discuss about new developments related to the protest.”
They – three old men, and we – three young boys – completely different from each other. But sooner or later, we would have to realize that they were on a lookout for us: old trees were in wait of seeds who would carry the gene forward, and keep the fruit alive.
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