Conducted Tours
An excerpt from the novel “Conducted Tours” by Savia Viegas
Their names were Parvati and Naga. They were from Karnataka. Naga was a bonded labourer who had worked for a Brahmin landowner. The Brahmin’s wife had run away with him unable to bear his tyranny. Naga was in his early twenties while the woman seemed older. For three days the Brahmin landlords searched for him in the hovels where the bonded labourers had lived. They came with torches at night and forced open doors, kicked the women and asked for the dog that had kidnapped the Brahmin’s wife.
But Naga had by then entered the Dandeli forest where he was sheltered by the Siddhi tribals.
A week later he heard that his aged parents and younger sister had all perished in the blaze after the bustee where they had lived had been torched.
They crossed over to Karwar, heard from the travellers on the ferry that Goa was a good place to work and ended up in Carmona ragged and dirty. They had a child and needed a place to stay, so Thette was able to bargain for cheaper wages. They quietly settled in the non-descript and safe environs of Carmona. Who could have imagined, that a landless labourer who had stolen a Brahmin’s wife, a double-dealing ‘promiscuous’ Brahmin woman, in caste-ridden Karnataka, would survive? But in Carmona they did. They both worked as daily wage workers doing odd job. In the course of time they had twelve children who lived with them in a hovel at the end of the village.
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