Hashiye Par For a Tree to Grow

Originally published in Dogri, Hashiye Par takes such a close look at the lives of the very poor in the Chenab valley, Jammu that it reads like an account by an insider. A work of fiction, it depicts the life of that segment of society which, for ages, has been pushed to a life on the margins. It portrays the lives of the fishermen, labourers, farm hands, and other weaker sections of the society who are the poorest of the poor and belong to the most backward classes. Madan/Maddi is a sickly and passive man. He lives in abject poverty on the outskirts of a village with his wife and four children. A tottering old hut built of reeds is his home and catching fish from the nearby river his livelihood. Madan and his family seem to have been caught in the whirlpool of penury and all its attendant miseries, until Kamal, the eldest son, secures admission in an engineering college with the promise of pulling out his kin from the dark abyss of destitution. The family which bonsai-like had been pruned this long, eventually finds a root to draw sustenance from the land to grow to its full potential.