The village idiot

I can hear Babuli talking to himself long before he shows up at my door with the morning milk. After he's delivered the milk he looks at me hopefully, wrinkles his nose and says with a wheedling smile: Got two rupees on you?

Babuli is what you'd call the village idiot.

The first time I saw him I was secretly delighted. I had never thought to meet an authentic village idiot and I was full of curiosity about the state of his mind. Was he retarded? Was he mad? He shuffled up to the door in dirty baggy shorts and shirt, his thin body so hunched that his eyes remained fixed on his bare, mud-encrusted feet. Silently he poured the milk into the vessel I held out, but every now and then he snatched a quick look at me so that his hand shook and the milk spilt. His smiling glance was at once lustful and shy and confused and creepy, and I realised later this is because he has no front teeth, while the yellow canines on either side of this dark wide gap protrude like Dracula's. He gave me the creeps for a long time till I understood that his weirdness is only a form of extreme shyness with strangers. And that Babuli is actually quite vulnerable and sweet.

Because his brothers ill-treat him, Babuli lives with another family in the village where the woman of the house is kind to him.He dotes on her: helping out in the fields, taking her buffaloes to graze, delivering the milk. He doesn't receive a salary but they feed him, take care of him and occasionally give him some money for cha-beedi.

Money, therefore, is something he doesn't have, and so I offered him some work: to dig a pit and plant a mango sapling. By the end of the exercise he had trampled down two other plants, thrown mud all over the place and practically buried himself alive in the pit while the mango sapling remained forgotten. My neighbours gathered one by one to shake their heads pityingly and tell me how crazy he was and how incapable of doing any real work. I've since learnt to give him work he can do, and he seems to walk a little more upright for the money he earns.

What I've found over the last two years is that Babuli is neither stupid nor incapable nor mad. He's a little slow in the head, he has problems with his speech, he has some problems coordinating his limbs, he has problems working hard.

But his biggest problem is that he's the village idiot. And being condemned to be the traditional village idiot is a lonely job. I had expected Babuli to be a source of amusement to villagers, but no one laughs at him, not even the children when he talks to himself. In fact no one pays much attention to him. And that's his tragedy. Because what Babuli wants is to have people talk to him, to be included in some warm closed circle. Perhaps he even dreams of being loved. But 'who'll marry him'? - as the villagers say.

Instead the village idiot smiles his funny smile at anyone who will smile back. And he talks a lot, mostly to himself. Sometime he sings softly. He's invariably cheerful. He reminds me of the clown with the smiling face who's crying inside.