Living in Wilderness

Growing up on a large farm with no cable television, erratic electricity and no friends. But there were snakes, hyenas, deer and the stars in the sky. 

Evening Scenes at the Farm

I sat by the fireplace in the living room, mulling what my life would be like in ten years’ time. It was New Year’s Eve and I had stayed up in order to assert my youth. Like every year, I was the only one awake in the house. The thick layer of silence surrounding me was occasionally broken by an owl and the not-so-gentle drone of my family snoring.

For as long as I could remember, this is how I had spent every important occasion of my life, sitting by a fire in this existential frame of mind. We lived on my family’s farm in a nondescript town. We had no immediate neighbours, only acres of lush green land punctuated by marshes and orchards. The only human beings that I interacted with regularly, besides my family, were the labourers and their children on the farm.  

For a while, I had no idea that a world existed outside the peripheries of Nagla Farms in Palia Kalan. I had no friends beside my immediate playmates; they can’t, in fact, be classified as friends because the power equation in feudal relationships prevented these from being equal relationships. So I spent my time alone, day-dreaming about the dramatic life situations I would find myself in; my biggest influence at the time was Bollywood. There was only one cinema hall in Palia and we weren't allowed there. We weren't allowed to go anywhere, save social functions with family friends, and these were scattered erratically through the year. If someone visited unexpectedly, it was the social event of the year. The excitement of hearing the drone of an unfamiliar car at the start of my driveway could make me giddy.

I spent most of my time listening to the stories my great, grandmother told me, stories of when she first moved to Uttar Pradesh from Pakistan. Snakes were a big part of all the stories she told me. They were everywhere—in the kitchen, by the mud stove, in the lawn and sometimes in the most unsuspecting places like behind a painting or the toilet. We learned quickly to identify the poisonous from the non-poisonous. My father’s youngest brother would wrap a grass snake around his hand, and watch with glee as people were traumatised. Much of my excitement at this time came from living my uncles’ lives vacariously. I would watch from the sidelines as they fought about music, poetry, food, sport, animals, fitness, girls. Sometimes, I was their social experiment where they would bounce off random theories off me. We were all a little bored, but happy. 

In the middle of nowhere 

I developed a love for nature, and animals as there was nothing much to do on summer nights at home, except lie under the open sky and identify constellations. One of the first things that hit me when I moved to Delhi was the fact that all stars had gone missing. Sometimes, we sat by a mustard field and watched the sun set. Sometimes, injured deer would stumble into the farm, and I would tend to them before the forest officials came in. The first time I heard a tiger roar was through the thin walls of a mud hut as I waited for it to pass. It was the most terrifying experience of my life. Walking through the farm alone as a child was never a good idea, one could encounter anything from a wild animal to a psychopathic killer. At the time, though, I didn’t see it this way and drove my mother sick with worry. She decided to send me to boarding school. Besides, for families like mine that live in such remote isolation, it is the only means of a getting a good education. 

When I came home for the first time from boarding school, it was the silence that haunted me. It hung in the air, thick and heavy. My father’s brothers who had lived with us until then had left. My grandparents were visiting them. It was only my parents, me and acres of wilderness. After being surrounded in a dormitory of 70 girls, it was overwhelming. Never before had the prospect of isolation hit me the way it did that winter after I first experienced life outside a farm.  The days spread out in front of me endlessly with more hours in them than I could imagine. Restless, I would swing for hours on a stretch to calm myself down or go for long solitary walks and cycle through endless fields until I had exhausted myself.

Every day I hoped for something, anything, but nothing ever happened and after the shock of the first few days of desolation subsided, I began to experiment. There were no places to go to, beyond the local market and the jungle. There was no television as our home was too far away for a cable connection, and Doordarshan depressed me. I turned to books and music. For the next eight years, I experimented with many ideas. I began with theology and art, only to reject them for idealism and writing.

The electricity supply was erratic. Everybody relied on a generator, often the diesel would run out and as the house lulled itself to sleep, I would sit and write poetry in the candlelight. Sometimes, I would paint. The only thing I could hear was the ticking of the clock and my pen scratching the paper. I began to love the night for its comforting aloofness. In winter, the hyenas would start to howl right before midnight; they sound like children howling or groups of women wailing. On those misty, eerie nights I would push myself to read Poe by candlelight for the thrill.

Sometimes I’d feel lost in time, in another century. I’d take a book and wander off to some quaint corner and live there. I read almost all the time, stopping only to write or listen to music. Music is personal. It is my window into a world that I was yet to see and it filled me with longing and made me hungry for life. I started to sing and cultivate every kind of artistic ability that I thought I was capable of. Reality was so banal that I chose to dwell in what I thought my life would be like. I kept a diary to talk to because I found it difficult to have conversations with anyone around. I was often ridiculed for my grand expectations of life; it was my mother’s contention that I had acquired these after reading too much. Sick of my romantic notions of life, she urged me to engage with those around me, but the more she pushed, the more I shied away.

I meandered about life preoccupied with whatever caught my attention at the time, playing out different scenarios and living in a world that was so fantastical that even I feared it would cease to exist if I shared it with anyone.

Eventually I had to move on, and make my own way in life; I moved to a city and did everything I had imagined I would. But I soon realised that no matter where I was, I was always going to be that girl who thrived in isolation. After one is left to their own devices for so long, it becomes difficult to be anybody else. I still live alone and dwell mostly in my imagination. Social interaction is a chore, and I still have great expectations from life and I now know that more things change, the more they remain the same.