Hawking Roses at 2 a.m.
When I was in the 11th grade, I did an internship with PARI or People’s Archive of Rural India. One of my assignments was to write an article. For this, I ventured into the village beyond my apartment building and struck up conversations with a farming couple. Over multiple visits, I interviewed them and wrote this piece. This was from the end of 2018 to the beginning of 2019. I am sharing this now. The ages and numbers are what I documented at the time of writing this. Other details may have changed since the pandemic.
Date: December 2018
“I know how to grow everything. That’s what I know, so that’s what I do.” says 38-year-old M. Manjunath, who is standing beside his wife, Y. Laxmi.
They are sitting on their porch with tumblers of tea made with milk from their farm.
Manjunath is a farmer who lives in Chikkanayakanahalli Dinne in Tumkur district. It is also a taluk (a unit of administrative division, comprised of numerous villages) headquarters. He and his wife grow yellow, red and orange roses, carrots, chilis, tomatoes and more. Originally from Hoskottu, Manjunath has led a hard and hectic life, now Laxmi and he are enterprising farmers.
At the age of two, his mother died, and shortly after, so did his father. After his father’s death, he was raised by his uncle, whom he helped with various chores on the farm and field, and in return, “I got leftover scraps as sustenance and a roof over my head.”
When it was time to get married, his uncle promised Manjunath 20 gunta (a unit used to measure land in Karnataka) of land for the 20 years of work that he’d done for him. Forty gunta is the equivalent of 1 acre. He got married to Laxmi in 2005 and in two years, the couple had their first child.
Around 2008, the land value in Hoskottu rose from Rs 9000 to Rs 2 lakh per gunta and his uncle went back on the promise of the 20 gunta of land. Manjunath, Laxmi and their child were deprived of food, money and any medical help from his uncle, even during Laxmi’s pregnancy, all in the hopes of running them off of his land and home.
“We didn’t have even a spoon or a glass to call our own. We shared a single plate,” recalls Manjunath. In 2010, Laxmi and Manjunath, along with their child left his uncle’s home with only Rs 150 in hand, despite the 25 years of labour he spent working in his uncle’s field.
They left his uncle’s household but stayed in Hoskottu with the support, help and kindness of their community. Manjunath picked carrots at a farm at night and during the day he worked as a mechanic servicing vehicles, to make ends meet for his family. He earned Rs 300–500 a day.
Eventually, they saved Rs 60,000 by contributing Rs 5000 a month to a community chit fund in Hoskottu. With this, they leased three acres of land near Baglur for Rs 50,000 a year.
In 2012 Manjunath, Laxmi and their two children, Jaisurya and Sagar (now 8 and 12 years old) moved to the outskirts of Bengaluru, to Chikkanayakanahalli Dinne so that the children could enrol in an English medium school. They leased a farm along Chikkanayakanahalli — Doddakannelli road, for Rs 50,000 a year. The landowners get a share of the produce for free as well.
Urbanisation has left a stark mark in this area… Manjunath says less than ten years ago, all around his farm and home, the forests were dense and impossible to see through, and the village was just farmland with small huts. Now there are schools, corporate buildings and residential blocks that have replaced the greenery. He is the last farmer in Chikkanayakanahalli Dinne.
“We don’t know; they (the landowners) could build on our farm also,” he said when asked how he felt about the rapid and drastic urbanisation all around. Their future is uncertain and they fear the possibility of being asked to vacate the farmland. He points to the thicket of trees (which he calls a forest ‘kaadu’) that can be seen above the walls that bound the farm. “Only six years ago when we came here, everything looked like that.”
The leased farm is three kilometres from their home. Manjunath parks his motorcycle just inside the large gate. In the middle of the plot of land is a two-storey green-coloured house with loud chickens and a rooster roaming freely, a large, aggressive dalmatian and a German shepherd observing us as we walk past. Parked in the “courtyard” are three cars, one a BMW.
On either side of this house is the land they farm on. The first plot in a good season would be abloom with the leaves of root vegetables and splashes of red from bright chilis. The rains and a broken well destroyed the last two harvests. Carrots, though most tedious to grow, also bring them the most profit.
The house was built after Manjunath and Laxmi leased the three acres of land. Still, they pay the same amount of rent despite the loss of land that could otherwise have provided them with more to grow produce or flowers on.
On the other side of the house, lies a larger, more colourful plot of land where they grow all of their flowers.
Manjunath kneels low to examine the earth beneath the growth and digs his fingers into it. He talks about fertilizers and how all food waste contributes to the compost. He plucks leaves and flowers of varying sizes and colours to help explain which are suitable for sale, which are healthy and which are not, and the conversation carries in an unsteady flow of hand gestures and broken Tamil with a smattering of laughter and “sorrys”. He holds out a small, green leaf of a chilli plant with what looks like white dust on its surface. Laxmi calls it “kaila”. After trying to explain in Kannada for a while in many ways, Manjunath finally says “the white dust is like cancer for the plants”. Laxmi laughs, saying that the plants with the kaila on them are sold at Rs 10 less than the healthy ones.
Manjunath and Laxmi have around ten people from the neighbourhood who work at the farm for two hours a day when needed. They receive Rs 60–100 as wages and those who come every day to help with the weeding and cleaning get around Rs 300 as wages. Laxmi also makes food for all the workers. A large part of their income comes from the sale of their flowers, the workers who come to pick the flowers earn around Rs 2000 as wages a month.
Oftentimes, workers come with their spouses and the couples work as teams.
The women are paid Rs 400 and the men are paid Rs 600 as the latter also have to carry 80 kg loads as part of their job.
When asked about their monthly income and expenditure, Manjunath and Laxmi hesitate and say on average, their monthly income is about Rs 40,000–45,000 and their monthly expenditure on labour, fertilizers, pesticides come to about Rs 20,000–25,000.
They incur the highest costs on de-weeding, renting tractors, maintaining and preparing the land, and on fertilizers and seeds. One 100 gram packet of seeds costs Rs 1300, and they buy 30 packets at once. Their PDS (Public Distribution System) is in Hoskottu where they have to go frequently to get their foodgrains and other supplies at subsidised rates.
Manjunath and Laxmi work long days, that begin at dawn and end around midnight.
On market days, he spends about three hours at Hosur market selling their produce and flowers. On festival days and days where they have a really good harvest, he goes to the Bangalore city markets. To sell their flowers, primarily brightly hued roses, in the city market, he has to be at the market by 2 am.
Manjunath has a motorcycle on which he carries large tarp bags filled with roses to the market. But, additional costs are incurred when he needs to rent “tempos” or vans to carry more.
They never took out any loans to pay for their children’s education or for the land. He says if not for anything else, he’s grateful to his uncle’s household, for teaching him discipline and good behaviour. “Being in that house, ‘nalle buddhi’ is the one thing I learnt. That ‘buddhi’ is the one thing I respect them for.” This means “good brain or sense”; common sense.
As the conversation moves to their children and whether they want them to follow in their footsteps and become farmers, he says that he didn’t get a proper education and that’s why he farms. Though his children do help at the farm every day after school he just wants his children to study well, become fluent in English and Kannada and then decide for themselves what they want to do.
There is a constant smile and playful banter between the couple as they discuss their lives. She filled in the blanks of his narration, from the kitchen as she brewed our sweet, more pink than brown, tea.
