NA
HANYATE
(It
does not die)
Last Sunday I
came across Marguerite after a very long time. It was a blustery morning; torn
clouds chasing across a slate grey sky, a strong wind whistling through the
entire city. Rain came down in sudden bursts, drenching the hapless buyers
& sellers of our little Sunday market. Marguerite was struggling with the bright
pink hood of her anorak that she has been wearing for at least last 10 years.
That is what I remember. Maybe she’s had it for even longer. She stood tall and
straight behind her flimsy stall, now the hood firmly ties around her strong
chin.
I looked at her
in amazement – she did not seem to have aged at all. Those cornflower blue eyes
were as sharp as ever, taking in everything, giving nothing away, framed by
crisscrossing laughter lines. Her figure stout, feet firmly planted to the
ground. Her slender hands strong and supple as she arranged eggs & cheese
& other wares behind the counter to protect them from the invading wind
& rain. Bending down and standing up, pirouetting like a woman one-third
her age. As I looked at her, I had to tell myself over & over again that
Marguerite was at least 80 years old!
I have known
Marguerite for a long time now. We met for the first time when I was
attending a sort of ‘Citizen’s Forum’ on organic farming, way back in the late
nineties, when it was a relatively new concept in this area of France, where
mechanized agriculture with GMO was the rule rather than exception. The vast
landholders couldn’t care less about what they considered to be airy fairy
ideas touted by ex-hippies turned green. But the ecologists here were
persistent. They sought and obtained some financial help from the local
government for organizing the very first forum in Caen. I was sent along as a
representative of the Regional Council.
Marguerite owns
a (relatively) small farm in a very remote village. Her family has owned the
farm forever, she told us during the conference. The only child to survive, she
had inherited the farm decades back, and had taken over from her father who
suffered from constant ill health. And they have been into organic farming,
long before it became a catch word in the fashionable circles in Paris. The
yield was just enough to keep the family in relative comfort. ‘I’ve never made
any profits in all my life’, she declared proudly ‘all that I earn goes to feed
and clothe the family & my animals’. Unlike their neighbors, Marguerite’s
family never produced any cereals – they specialized in fruits, vegetables and
salads. They raised goats & chicken for cheese and eggs. They had a few
milk cows. They were beekeepers too – their verdant orchards guaranteed an
excellent quality of honey. Marguerite is a natural story teller – as she spoke
I could see that remote farm in front of my eyes – the goats & chickens
ranging freely, the fragrance of the fruit orchard, the rancid smell of goat’s
cheese, the wet smell of the hay on the mangers of the cowshed.
The Quesnay
family (that’s her maiden name, the one she has always used) had another god
given gift – they were all excellent bakers. And they specialized in all types
of breads and cookies and biscuits and shortcakes, which they made from home
made butter and honey. They sold it to the local bakeries, and often in the
open markets of the neighboring villages. In fact, Marguerite’s little stall in
our Sunday market is famous for the bread and cookies. She bakes her bread with
all types of seeds - sunflower, flax, poppy and sesame seeds that cohabit in
perfect harmony with raisins, figs or chocolate chips. She sells small uneven
roundels of goat’s cheese wrapped in oak leaves, organic eggs that come in all
sizes. No fancy boxes, no calibration. She uses paper bags made from recycled
paper, sturdy cardboard boxes for her eggs. Marguerite is a living
representation of the green earth. At least that’s what I thought when I first
met her.
I had gone up to
talk to her at the end of the conference, all those years ago. Partly from
duty, but mostly because I was fascinated by her. And that acquaintance became
a kind of friendship, erratic but totally durable. I was a regular visitor of
the Sunday market at that time, and made it a point to go to her stall. She was
not always there – her son had willingly taken over the arduous task of doing
the rounds in the open markets. He was often there with his own family – his
wife & two young daughters, all of them lovely. But I was overjoyed every
time Marguerite was there. It gave us a chance to have a quiet chat while the
younger generation took over the responsibility of selling. Sometimes I met her
at other places – she was often invited to share her organic farming experience
in forums organized in different places.
I loved talking
to Marguerite. She was a mine of fascinating stories about all sorts of things.
I loved listening to her anecdotes about occupied France, the brave young men
who left to join the French resistance movement and never came back to the
village. About the deep anguish following the D-Day landing on 6th June, 1944
while the allied forces struggled inland, and whining planes flew over her
little village to bomb the German fortifications along the coast; about how the
entire French society changed in the few years following the end of the second
world war, the winds of change sweeping the entire country, right up to the
remote village school where she was studying. She left her rural cocoon for
long years, leaving everything behind to go to the University in Caen. A very
long journey for someone from her background, she assured me. A journey not
measurable by time or distance….
Those were
exciting days, Marguerite told me. It was the ‘Glorious Thirties’ in France,
and everything seemed possible. Marguerite belonged to that new generation, not
the ‘bright young things’ of London, but a determined lot that wanted things to
change. Women’s rights, mainly, to live as they wished, without the shackles of
birth, religion, the social rules - words used by her which I am faithfully
quoting from memory. A whole generation of women who recognized their innermost
strengths and desires, and fought hard to make them real. At home and at work,
in the fields, factories, offices. They made a life for themselves, and lived
by their own rules. A ‘city girl’ by now, Marguerite lived her life as she
wanted - a free & independent spirit. She participated in the nationwide
movement for making abortion legal, to the horror of her own family, who
threatened to disown her. She even went to Paris once to participate in a
gigantic rally, she told me proudly, following the publication of the ‘343
Manifest’ penned by Simone de Beauvoir and signed by 343 women, known and
unknown, who declared having an abortion in the appalling condition prevalent
in those days. For those historically inclined, abortion was legalized in
France in 1971.
All this did not
prevent Marguerite from getting married at the ripe old age (her words, again)
of 30 and starting her own family. And the subsequent return to her father’s
farm, leaving behind the city lights. She ‘journeyed back to her roots’, as she
likes to say, and has stayed there ever since, toiling the soil, raising her
own family & her animals, proud as an Amazon. Her children are well
educated – her daughter a nurse turned social worker, her son an agronomist who
prefers making the old family farm prosper rather than working for companies
like Monsanto. Marguerite is proud of her children, for, as she puts it ‘I
managed to make them dream my own dreams’.
At the age of
80, Marguerite still stands straight and proud, sure and serene, proud of what
she has done. She does not lament the modern society like so many of her
contemporaries; she still takes on the challenges headlong. Marguerite is a
fighter, a survivor, a dreamer, an achiever. She does not brag, she does not
flaunt. She stands there, imperturbable, rock solid, tranquil; she
lives.
I wanted to
write this eulogy to celebrate the likes of Marguerite, the quiet fighters who
permit us to be what we are today – citizens with equal rights and
responsibilities. To salute the generation of Marguerite who fought for what
they believed in. Quite different from a lot of women I know with ill digested
ideas, who think that every conflict is finally a gender issue. Women like me,
really, who have hardly ever had to fight for their rights, for their mere
existence, for living life by their rules. Compared to the likes of Marguerite,
incarnations of Gaea, we are just dwarves. Maybe one day we shall actually be
able to acknowledge it.
APARAJITA
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