The story of a farm

Lord William^[1] was the British Col­lec­tor of Salem some­time in the nine­teenth cen­tury, and he didn’t par­tic­u­larly care for the job. He gov­erned with cal­lous arbi­trari­ness, car­ing and kind one day, cold and heart­less the next; mix­ing up bizarre admin­is­tra­tive deci­sions with incred­i­bly smart ones.

He was in a par­tic­u­larly foul mood that Octo­ber after­noon — he had already walked a cou­ple of miles, and had 3 more miles to go to get to his car. There were no roads in this god­for­saken clus­ter of vil­lages west of Salem, and it is not clear why Lord William was there in the first place. But he was there, and he was tired and hun­gry. The smell of food com­ing from a house nearby was not helping.

And then, in a typ­i­cally brash ges­ture, Lord William decided to step into the house. The peo­ple that lived in the house were cooks, and on that day the fam­ily was mak­ing Adhi­rasams. There must have been a hun­dred of them in the enor­mous drum-like con­tainer: Lit­tle brown discs; a glossy, satiny brown, glow­ing from the ghee. The fat man was mak­ing more, paus­ing only to wipe the sweat off his face with his veshti. His son, no less cor­pu­lent, no less sweaty, was nap­ping at the front door.

Lord William nudged the son gen­tly with the roll of paper in his hand. When he didn’t respond, the Lord walked into the kitchen, shoes still on, and after a friendly glance at the dad, picked up an adhi­rasam from the con­tainer and bit into it. Oh, the plea­sure! Later, he would tell his wife, the Doraisani, that as the thing melted in his mouth, he could feel his tired­ness melt­ing away. She would think he was nuts.

But now, he was eat­ing his third adhi­rasam, obliv­i­ous to the anger of the fat man. The poor fel­low was mak­ing these for someone’s dhevasam^[2] and he wasn’t at all sure the dead guy would appre­ci­ate this hea­then man eat­ing stuff meant for him. Espe­cially if the hea­then had licked his fin­gers after fin­ish­ing one adhi­rasam, and used the exact same fin­gers to pick up another one from the drum. This batch of adhi­rasams was doomed.

After three, Lord William stopped eat­ing. He was stuffed. He took a few more and put them into his pock­ets. He then told the dad he didn’t have any cash on him at the moment, but he was the col­lec­tor and all, and that he should come meet him tomor­row at Salem and col­lect money for the Adhi­rasams. He added as an after­thought, “And bring a few of these with you when you come meet me tomorrow.”

The next day, the fat man woke his son up early in the morn­ing and asked him to go to the city with the (defiled) drum full of sweets and get some dough from the col­lec­tor. After a sump­tu­ous break­fast, the son started for Salem, drum on his head, a thirty mile walk.

He walked and walked and walked, and in about an hour, he was very tired. Another hour, and the sump­tu­ous break­fast had worn off. He decided that he needed some seri­ous R&R, so he sat under a tree and ate a few adhi­rasams. And then he walked and walked, and took another break.

If his progress were to be plot­ted against time, one would have noticed that for higher val­ues of t, the dis­tance cov­ered had decreased con­sid­er­ably. If one were to look for rea­sons for this alarm­ing decline, one would have to look no fur­ther than another graph of time vs breaks. It might also be per­ti­nent to note that with each break he took, the con­sump­tion of adhi­rasams increased at an alarm­ing rate.

By the time the fat son arrived at the Collector’s office that evening, he had eaten all the adhi­rasams. Not one left. After some lay­ers of low level bureau­crats, he is ush­ered into the room of Lord William. Lord William pays the guy a few rupees, and looks cov­etously at the drum.

“Got more?”

The fat son grins sheep­ishly and tells the Col­lec­tor that he did bring a few, but he ate them all, long walk sir, sorry. Dis­ap­pointed, Lord William asks, “Why not bring more man? Your dad had a lot in there yes­ter­day.” The fat son grins even more sheep­ishly and tells the good Lord that he brought the whole lot, and ate the whole lot.

“Get out of here man,” the Lord says and as the son starts walk­ing away, he tells him that the phrase is an expres­sion of dis­be­lief and that he shouldn’t really get out of here. The Lord is sure the son is mess­ing with him, given that he only ate three the other day and had to skip din­ner. About an hour of intense ques­tion­ing fol­lows, and the son keeps insist­ing that he did indeed eat the entire batch of adhi­rasams. Finally, the exas­per­ated Lord William sends the son home, with an omi­nous warn­ing: “I’ll find out sometime.”

A few months passed, and the good Lord William has to take a trip to Mamundi again. The rea­sons for his trip are unclear, but it has been sug­gested he was con­sumed by the thought that some­one could eat so much food, and wanted to go back and find out. The evi­dence for this the­ory is strength­ened by the fact that he headed straight for the house of the fat cooks. And in an inter­est­ing stroke of luck, it was lunchtime and the fam­ily was get­ting ready to eat.

“You,” Lord William says, pulling up a stool in front of the fat son, “I want to see you eat.” Then he gets up and walks to a char­coal stove, a pot of rice sim­mer­ing on top of it. “How much rice in here?” he asks the fat dad. “Six kilo­grams, Durai,” is the reply. Six kilo­grams of rice, in case you are won­der­ing, could feed a large fam­ily for a large num­ber of days. The Lord takes the entire pot, places it in front of the son and tells him, “If you eat all of this, I’ll make you a rich man.”

Over the next hour, the fat son ate all of it.

Lord William couldn’t believe his eyes. It is his turn to be a lit­tle sheep­ish, for hav­ing ques­tioned the integrity of this remark­ably tal­ented young man. “Come with me,” he says, and takes the fat son on his horse drawn car­riage to a secluded spot near the village.

“Run, young man. Start here and run as far as you can. Stop only when you tire. Run.”

“But why sir?”

“I wronged you. I ques­tioned your integrity. So run now.”

“I am not sure that makes it any clearer, sir.”

“Run as far as you can, and I will give you all the land you cover. That’s my way of mak­ing up things to you.”

The fat son believes this is rea­son­able evi­dence that the Lord is slightly off his rocker. He stays put. Then the Lord bran­dishes an off­i­cal let­ter­head, and writes down what he just said and hands it to the son. The young man can­not believe his luck. A lot of land would mean a lot of food for the rest of his life.

So he runs and runs and runs, and in a few min­utes he is tired. But he won’t stop to rest. He runs some more, and gets tired some more. No stop­ping now. He thinks he could use an Adhi­rasam though. That thought pro­pels him for a few min­utes more, and then he stops to rest under a tree. He then pro­ceeds to die right there.

The good Lord is apalled, and his sheep­ish­ness is now replaced by remorse. But true to his word, he draws an imag­i­nary cir­cle using an imag­i­nary com­pass and gives all the land that the young man cov­ered to his family.

If you ever go to a vil­lage called Mamundi, and see a big piece of farm­land called the “Six Kilo­gram Brah­min Farm,^[3]” do tell the peo­ple around you that you know the his­tory of the land. If they ask you how you know the story, tell them you read it on the blog of the great nephew of the fat son. Cluck your tongue in sym­pa­thy when they tell you that most of the land is now res­i­den­tial. And get some­one to make you an Adhirasam.

[1] My dad, who nar­rates sto­ries much bet­ter, wasn’t sure what the Lord was called. He kept call­ing him Dorai, but I told him it was very unlikely a British fam­ily would name their son that.

[2] A Dhevasam is an yearly rit­ual to honor dead peo­ple. The food is usu­ally very good.

[3] Aaru Padi Pap­pan Kadu is the name of the farm. It passed through a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions, and today, the orig­i­nal own­ers have sold most of it.

[4] The son may not have been fat. Or even the dad. But some­how, that’s always the way I think of them.