Wang Teng
Date: 5/22/2007
Draft 2
Title
(Introduction & My reaction) Poor people lead miserable lives. Different people may look at it from different angles. Most would feel sad and frustrated; some, however, may feel quite different, as Ajit Babu, the narrator did in the story “The Grass-Eaters” by Krishnan Varma. In the story, Babu, an average poor Indian tramping with his wife, did not have a stable place to live, and got nothing to eat but piles of grass. However, he did not seem to be sad but just the other way about, quite optimistic. Varma used a very humorous tone to tell the story, which is quite meaningful and needs to be explored more deeply.
The first time I read the story, I felt miserable about the poor life Babu led on one hand, but I was quite amused by the way the story is told. Overall, my first impression of the article was “How come Babu would be so optimistic when he confronted some many tragedies”. And after I reread the story, I thought the tone used in the story should be considered as Varma’s aim to express the bittersweet feeling of both the average poor Indians and Varma himself.
(Explore the story & Tone) Humors can be sensed almost everywhere in the story. When Babu lived in the footpath, he woke up one morning and find that “the woman beside me was not Swapna at all but a bag of bones instead. And about fifty or sixty or seventy years old.” Here, it can be concluded naturally that the woman beside Babu was not his wife but an extremely slim stranger whose age could hardly be examined. “Then came Swapna, fangs bared, claws out…Next came the woman's husband, a hill of a man, whirling a tree over his head, roaring. That was my impression, anyway. I fled.” His wife and the woman’s husband were so furious to see this that one of them acted like a furious reptile and the other a muscular King Kong.
When they found “A whole wagon for ourselves—a place with doors which could be opened and shut—we did nothing but open and shut them for a full hour—all the privacy a man and wife could want—no fear of waking up with a complete stranger in your arms.” It is quite fun to imagine a man and his wife doing nothing but cheerfully open and shut the doors of a wagon for an hour. And “a complete stranger in your arms” just makes us reflect back the previous scene in the overcrowded footpath.
Babu “found it an intensely thrilling experience”, but his wife, Swapna, did not like the wagon. She told Babu “she (short pause) did (long pause) not want (very long pause) her (at jet speed) baby-to-be-bone-in-a-running-train.” Here, Varma used something like “pause” in the brackets and hyphens between some words to reveal the rhythm and speed of her speech, which is often applied in dramas, creating a scene as if we were really listening to Swapna, It is most amusing to see this kind of vivid theatrical effect in this expression.
Apparently, Babu did not seem to be a bit frustrated even when something terrible like “minus one ear” or “lost one leg” happened to him. He even gained some sort of happiness from those sufferings that would have driven most of us cry. He seemed to be optimistic most of the time. But wait, is that what Babu really felt? Were all the average poor Indians so content with their lives?
Maybe it would be better to reflect the sentences above again. When he described the woman he did not know as “a bag of bones”, Varma actually described clearly the appearance of a woman lived in a footpath—an average poor Indian at that time. While we laugh at the couple “did nothing but open and shut the door”, regarded it as “privacy”, and “felt I was God”, a feeling of sympathy will arouse because we all know that the doors are just basic needs for normal people and there is nothing to be that satisfied when we just possess our own doors. And besides the theatrical effect of “at jet speed”, it can be noticed that Swapna was rather reluctant and grievous when she claimed she had a new baby and did not like the running train. All of the above directed to the feeling of sadness—just the opposite of what Babu seemed to be.
(Slight change of the tone & Author’s attitude) If we go on to the latter part of the story, we could find a slight change of the tone—still very humorous, while plus some kind of sadness. We would see what we want to get out of the tile--“Grass is our staple food now”. When Babu claimed him and his wife as “The Grass-Eaters”—the name that is more like an animal rather than human beings—we may notice the low living standard of the Babu’s. “I make do with a loin cloth and Swapna with a piece slightly wider to save our few threadbare clothes from further wear and tear.” clearly tells us that the Babu’s did not even have decent things to wear. But what was all this for? Just finding a way to “reduce the consumption” of their life.
That was exactly what was happening to the average poor Indians. At the end of the story, a vivid snapshot of what was happening in Indian cities is shown: people “loot nearby shops, break street lamps, take out a procession, hold a protest meeting … and set off crackers.” —on the whole, a catastrophe. Poor people would just do something extreme when their basic needs of life are not met. None of us would laugh at these scenes.
But at the bottom of Babu’s heart (or to say, Varma’s heart), he did want a change of his life, since he mentioned his son, Prodeep, “is in the Naxalite underground.” The Naxalite movement is aimed to change India’s structure by liquidating estates and distributing land among the rural poor. But the desire to change was not very strong. Besides that the movement is still “underground”, Babu was not powerful both physically—he was a bare-boned, nightblind man who got only one ear and one leg; and mentally—he talked Prodeep just as a son “to do our funeral rites.” His power was too weak to make some changes. Therefore, he could just lower his living standard to survive and tried to grasp some “happiness” in his no happy life. And that is the tragedy of his life. He admitted at last, in a quite serious way:
Our life together has been very eventful. The events, of course, were not always pleasant. But, does it matter? We have survived them. … We live very quietly, content to look at the passing scene: a tram burning, a man stabbing another man, a woman dropping her baby in a garbage bin.
(Conclusion) Throughout the story, we could see how Babu could be so “content” with his poor life. Although the tone of the story may seemed humorous, still it cannot be considered only as a way to show the optimistic attitude of Babu while he led a dead-end life, but as a way to reflect the bittersweet feeling of the average poor Indians--they had no alternatives for their lives, so they were just content with the fact that they have survived the difficult times.
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