Every year, we conduct
the Weather Insurance survey in Ahmedabad, Anand and Patan districts of
Gujarat. This year, during one of my field visits, I visited Pritiben Parmar’s (name changed) house
in Sitapur village of Patan district.
One of our surveyors, Satish
was already in the process of conducting the survey with Mrs. Parmar when I
entered the premises. They were sitting outside on a ‘chaarpai’ (bed).
The house had a pretty big cemented verandah, which was shaded and had with three
chaarpais. Their house was part of a cluster of five houses with a well being
constructed right in the centre of this cluster. They requested that I sit on a
chaarpai which I promptly did.
Mrs. Parmar was
answering the questions and Mr. Parmar, Prashantji was lying on a chaarpai smoking a pipe. Mr. Parmar interjected sometimes with stories seemingly
irrelevant to the survey. I couldn’t understand them but Satish and Mrs. Parmar
found them amusing. Around 2 pm when the school in Sitapur was out, around six children came running into the house. They surrounded Pritiben, very curious to
know what we were doing here.
Mr. and Mrs. Parmar
were grandparents to four children, the rest of the children were
their friends and by the looks of it, very fond of Pritiben. Mr. and Mrs. Parmar
were a jovial couple and I could see why the village kids enjoyed their
company. Around the same time, Pritiben’s sons walked in and their wives came
out of the house. At this point, all nine members of the Parmar household
surrounded Pritiben.
Soon, a few kids were
running around while a couple stood right next to me. The sons were keenly
listening to every question and were ready to help, should Pritiben be confused
about something. One daughter-in-law was winnowing jowar while the other had gone back inside.
The survey hit the hour mark and Pritiben was getting restless. I could
tell because she suddenly got irritated by the kids running around her in
circles and asked them to stop. In the next ten minutes, she asked Satish
twice about when the survey was going to end. Satish, being an experienced
surveyor, convinced her to stay the course. Prashantji, though still busy with
his pipe, had stopped narrating anecdotes soon after Pritiben had a fit about
the kids.
After about forty-five minutes, the survey was finally completed. Towards
the end of the survey, we require the respondents to sign on a receipt. One can
also put a thumb print if he or she can’t write. Pritiben asked for the inkpad
and pressed her thumb against it after which she proceeded to place her thumb
imprint inside the allocated area in the survey. Her grandchild Neha who was nine,
was taken aback by her grandmother’s action. She enquired about her
grandmother’s action and Pritiben responded by saying “Well, I didn’t go to
school, Neha.” Seeing her grandma use her thumb and not a pen surprised her. To
her, writing was a basic skillset which she thought everyone possessed. Neha
was naïve but I was impressed by her reaction, in the words of Jenny Holzer, “it’s
better to be naïve than jaded”!
*Names and
identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.
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