Childhood memories – some hazy, some sharply contoured and some imagined and exaggerated – are a serviceable reference point for assessment of change in the lives of people over time. The shifts and constants appear clearer if the lag between the periods in question spans decades. It helps if you have been absent from the scene most of the time. Because what is a routine, everyday affair for locals, is not so for a relative outsider. The change, from the latter’s perspective, is always starker and better defined. This very advantage of distance is what goads me to pen Dhenkanal Diary. This column would explore several facets of the district – its beauty and banalities; its past and present; its challenges and opportunities; and the ebb and flow of its life in general.
The brightest memory from the days more than four decades ago remains the bullock cart ride from the heart of the town to the cropped fields on its periphery on the laps of grandma every harvest season. The town ended quickly, as soon as you touched the dusty road to Dakshina Kali temple and beyond. People became scarce and the shrubbery along the cart path became thicker. Occasional gunshots from the Police Reserve Line, when personnel took aim at the bull’s eye painted on the stone wall carved on a hillock, punctured the overwhelming silence around. A vast expanse of cropped land and grove dominated by mango trees greeted you as the bullocks led you to a thatched clay cottage encircled by a fence of bamboo sticks and thorny plants. This would be home for a couple of weeks.
The settlement of tribal Juangs close by was a favourite playground and immediate destination. With a bunch of naked kids for company, you were welcome in every home. ‘Pakhala’ and variations of dried fish dishes waited everywhere. With acres and acres of land to run around and hundreds of trees to climb, food was not a priority though. So we went without a care in the world, plucking wild berries, hunting squirrels, taking a dip in the makeshift wells, catching tadpoles from drying streams, looking for fish in shallow waters on farmland and doing whatnot. For someone about six, the idea of heaven could only be an approximation of this.
Forty years down the line, a bypass road, a section of NH 55, cleaves through the vast territory of crops and trees. The concrete monstrosity stretching kilometres has emerged as a disruptor of the pristine, ever-blissful beauty of nature. The long, soothing silence is gone. The groan of thousands of heavy vehicles plying on the road all day and night is a constant assault on the eardrums. Dust-escaping wheels float thick in the air. Bullock carts are replaced by ubiquitous tractors and ponds have given way to heaps of land-filling material. Trees stand desolate, waiting for noisy kids to climb them.
Then there is fear, of crime and criminals of many shades. They lurk somewhere close, weighing on your mind all the time. Ready with threats, weapons and scant concern for the law, they can strike at any time. The memories of childhood had no scope for fear. As you notice bike-borne youngsters descending on vacant spaces around you, armed with liquor bottles or pouches, the new emotion grips you tight.
It’s certainly not the place of one’s childhood. Urban civilization has launched a brutal, irreversible assault on the bucolic landscape, decimating its lazy charm and understated elegance. Perhaps it’s good, a necessary evil. The nation prospers, the state prospers and so does the district. But the change still rankles. The thought of returning to the Dhenkanal of one’s childhood after decades amid the humdrum of metro cities is now grappling with a second thought. What one finds is only a sprawling graveyard of happy memories.
