v                  The Story of Chinta's Family

I visited my mother at the Moore Homestead in 1978 and got to know something of Chinta's history. Chinta was our "paniwallah" (waterman). His duties included drawing water from the Homestead well and keeping the tubs in the bathroom and the "gharras" (mud vessels used for storing drinking water), and washing clothes. Chinta was blind and had been blind since he was a boy, which was when he first started to work at the Homestead. In 1978 he looked to be between forty and fifty years of age.

My mother sometimes had evening prayers in which Chinta was invited to take part. At a prayer gathering that was meant for my mother, a companion who lived with her, and my sister and me, the two children visiting from North America, Chinta said a prayer that went something like this. "Bhagwan (God), Why did you make me blind? Why did you inflict my family with so much misfortune? What was our fault?"

Following prayers I found out what Chinta meant. Blindness was in his family. Certainly in the males. His older brother had become blind, his younger brother was going blind, he was blind. He could not tell the difference when a light in a room was on or off. The older brother had hanged himself from a tree in his village. Chinta spoke of his fear every time he crossed the railway tracks coming to work or going home from work. He was afraid one day he would be caught by a train, perhaps in stormy weather or when there was a distraction. He said boys used to bump him for fun. Chinta's troubles at home were manifold. His mother was a cripple. She lost a hand and a foot under the wheels of a train when she was collecting coal. A coal train that stood for any time at the station in Karmatar was immediately invaded, with the connivance of the police and the railway officials, and coal was thrown out of the cars. His mother's difficulty, Chinta explained, came from the missing limbs belonging to the same side of her body. It destroyed her balance. The younger brother was in danger of losing his job. If that happened, there would be more mouths for Chinta to feed.

The one source of relief, so far, was Chinta' s married daughter and her family. Her husband was all right and she had not shown any indication of blindness. She had two children who were Chinta's chief joy.

My mother and I talked of Chinta' s predicament and my mother arranged with the Karmatar Branch of the State Bank of India for Chinta to receive a pension. In his village, Chinta became a man of respectable means. Not for long. When my mother died in 1980 Chinta had the Bank pay him the lump sum my mother had intended to last for several years and made the money over to his daughter. The transaction gave him great happiness and I hope he never regretted it.