Come into my ora!

Photograph: Preeti Verma Lal

But I am distracted by her dreadlocks that fall carelessly on her shoulders. "A ghost lives in it, I don't comb my hair because then the ghost would get miffed and I would die," Sumeri says. The flies are still hovering over my lunch, but little Munnia's lunch is safe. Sumeri's daughter had run to the neighbouring school for the mid-day meal and brought home some puffed rice, jaggery and sattu (ground roasted gram). She pours them in a large utensil, adds water and eats, looking at other jealous children with slanting eyes.

It is early morning, you can hear the winter breeze swishing and the mongrels yelping mournfully. Shukri Masomath and her brood are curled up on the jute sack that has been stitched together lazily. The door to their ora (home) is shut but there is not enough clothing to beat the wicked frost. Shukri crawls out of the room, burns dry twigs, pulls a cloth over her wrinkled skin and looks at her home made of supple sal branches that formed a truss on which dry sal branches were piled. The conical ora has a door that was made by warping leaves on twigs but the door is so small that you have to crawl in, you can't even hop in on your haunches.

At least I could not. Not in Shukri's home in Lokai village near Koderma, some four hours off Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand. It was not easy to find Shukri. She is a Birhor, one of the 32 Scheduled Tribes of Jharkhand, perhaps the most nomadic and certainly on the verge of extinction. I wanted to spend a day with the Birhors, but it is difficult to find a Birhor tanda (settlement) for they are scattered on the fringes of the jungles. When I called up BR Rallan, the Regional Chief Conservator of Forests, Hazaribagh, he almost waved a magic wand, found out about the Birhor settlements and arranged forest staff who would take me there. That's how I found Shukri and that's when I tried hopping into her ora but failed miserably.

It was a lesson. But even before that I had some lessons in tribal culture from Mahendra Sinha, who has worked with the Birhors for more than a decade. In the Lokai tanda I feel like an intruder. There is a young woman, her torso barely covered and a naked child pouring water on his soiled hair. He is squatting in the middle of the lane and the moment he sees me, he throws the mug, wipes his runny nose, and hides behind a tree. The barely covered woman turns her back on me and tries to stretch the cloth to cover more but it doesn't work. I feel awkward, walk gingerly, smile hesitantly and try to connect with them…. I can sniff curiosity in the air, I can see haggardly children scampering out of nowhere. I perch myself on an unhewn log and begin by helping Shukri pick the potato leaves that she is drying for dinner…

Shukri must be 70, her wrinkles reveal that much. Ask her and she challenges a guess. I say 70; she guffaws. Not more than 35, she affirms. Niranjan Kumar, the range officer, who was helping me with the translation explains, "Their day begins with sunrise and ends with sunset, things like age are absolutely redundant." All that hurts Shukri is that she is no longer goes to the jungle to hunt. She remembers how she would get up very early, make a rice-leaf gruel, pick up the traps and head to the jungles by 7 in the morning. All Birhors hunt for a living; all able-bodied men and women scour the jungles for hours and return with their prey that they sell in the haat (village market), buy some rice, have dinner and wait for another day. Of course, there's celebration when an unlucky boar gets ensnared in the large net and that evening all Birhors slurp on rice and meat, and get a little tipsy.

I had to see more and we head to another one in Chitarpur village where the Birhors have lived in leaf homes for more than 100 years. No longer; some Birhors have now moved into government-built brick homes. In one corner I can see three oras and while trying to walk the rutted pathway I bump into Sumeri Devi, her dreadlocks catching my eyes first. She invites me into her home and gets me lunch - lumpy rice and watery potato curry.

But I am distracted by her dreadlocks that fall carelessly on her shoulders. "A ghost lives in it, I don't comb my hair because then the ghost would get miffed and I would die," Sumeri says. The flies are still hovering over my lunch, but little Munnia's lunch is safe. Sumeri's daughter had run to the neighbouring school for the mid-day meal and brought home some puffed rice, jaggery and sattu (ground roasted gram). She pours them in a large utensil, adds water and eats, looking at other jealous children with slanting eyes.

Suddenly Sumeri hollers for someone, he is an old man with a monkey cap, frayed cardigan and a soiled dhoti. His steps are faltering and his eyes bloodshot. Chotu Birhor meanders by Sumeri's home and I get a whiff of the fermented brew. "No, I am not drunk, if I had the money I would buy daru (liquor) but I don't," he clarifies. Chotu has an antidote to snake bite; he runs his hands over the victim and banishes the venom. He says he spent years learning the mantra from his guru and it works perfect for scorpion bite also. "What about bee sting?" I ask. The old man sniggers, twitches his brow sarcastically and says, "Bee sting? I don't handle such petty things."

As I head back, I stop at another tanda in Sijua on the outskirts of Hazaribagh. There are no leaf homes here, all Birhors live in brick homes. A young woman is swinging a child in her arms. I don't ask her name; I know because Lilawati Devi is tattooed on her arms. She has been married for four years and in the typical Birhor tradition, the proposal came from the groom's family. When the families agreed, the bride price was fixed - Rs 10 in cash, some clothes, and rice, meat and handiya for the wedding feast. "No dowry, no gifts?" I want to know. "There is no money for food, who knows about gifts," Lilawati regrets her poverty. Even now Lilawati does not have many worldly possessions and she can only afford two meals a day, comprising mainly rice and dried leaves. At times she makes ropes out of tree barks or from yarn from synthetic sacks and sells them in the haat. There is not much to her life and she is certain of only one thing - when she dies she would be buried and dirt tossed over her. The Birhors who belong to the Proto-Australoid racial stock bury their dead.

I look at my arm, there are no tattoos there; instead, there is bruise that I picked while trying to hop into Shukri's ora. Shukri had given me some dry potato leaves for dinner and as I stacked that in a ceramic urn I wondered what it must be to be a Birhor everyday; I was one only for a day….Destiny gnawed at me. What if I were born a Birhor?

Published in Swagat magazine, March 2006