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Saturday 31 March 2007

Reference to the Context

Reference to the context
by Punam Khaira Sidhu

REMEMBER high school literature class and the questions on “Reference to the Context” (RTC)? Well, RTC does have a place outside of literature class.

As a young revenue officer, directly after my training at the Direct Taxes Academy in Nagpur, I was posted briefly to Chandigarh .

I discovered that the outwardly uniform façade of a suited-booted official does not reveal much. City slickers like myself, with all the arrogance and impatience of youth, urgently needed to develop an empathy. As I grew on the job, I discovered that persons too need to be understood with reference to the context of where they come from and how they have made the journey to where they stand today.

There was the efficient Inspector who smelt strongly of dung that I put down to bad hygiene little realising that the young man had to cope with a perennial water shortage in his village and that his early morning duties included cleaning out the cowshed before he started for office on his trusty motorbike — all well before I had even opened sleep-heavy eyes to the new day.

And then there was the young UDC whose office notings made me run out of red ink. I was impatient with his grammar until I visited his home in the interiors of Haryana to attend his wedding. After a two-hour drive, the bumpy kutcha road was never ending, his home had just one “pucca” room, his primary school was under a gnarled banyan tree, and he had walked over 10 km, one way, each day to go to high school. I couldn’t help admire the young man’s perseverance and drive in the face of extreme adversity to get himself an education and then a government job. I was gentle in my admonitions thereafter.

But the woman who taught me my most valuable “RTC” lesson was my first peon Kamala. Each day she greeted me with the widest smile and left only after I had exhausted my probationary zeal, often well after office hours. I must confess to being judgemental when I saw her accepting “bakhshish” from the tax fraternity or napping on the job. It was when she fell ill and I visited her at home that I discovered that she had a husband who was bedridden after a stroke, a crippled son and two young daughters. Her day started at 4am and ended well past midnight. I wondered then how she kept the home fires burning and still kept that beaming smile on her careworn brow. Thereafter the occasional snore from her only told me that she had been up late, nursing her loved ones.

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