fire & ash

one.

Author's Note: Okay, so, Wahaj' new look and character in Mitti De Baway inspired me to go back to this idea I once had. So buckle in, for actual feudal lord Murtasim Iqbal Khan x lawyer Meerab Ahmed set in rural Punjab in the late 90s and early 2000s! 

A NOTE ON WORDS

Some of the words in this book belong to the district it is set in and have no clean English equivalent, most of them learnt from the occasional Punjabi movie I watch. They are explained here.

charpai: the standard bed of rural Punjab: a wooden frame strung with rope or tape. Light enough to be carried outside and used as a sofa, a table, a guard post, or a place to sit and argue.

kacheri: the district court complex: the courtrooms, the lawyers' chambers, the tin-roofed stalls where petitions are typed and stamped.

thana: the local police station, and by extension the local police. In much of rural Punjab in this period, the thana's loyalty followed money and land rather than law.

tehsil: an administrative sub-district.

tehsildar: the revenue officer in charge of the tehsil, with real power over land records.

DPO: District Police Officer. The senior policeman of a district.

patwari: the village land-record keeper. He maintains the registers that record who owns what, who cultivates what, and what changed hands. The single most bribed official in rural Punjab, because he holds the pen.

girdawari: the patwari's seasonal crop inspection record: who actually farmed which field, in which season, and what they grew. Useful evidence, because it shows what happened on the ground rather than what was written on paper.

mutation (intiqal): the formal entry in the land register transferring ownership from one person to another. A sale is not complete until it is mutated. Forging or fixing mutations is how land is stolen legally.

batai: crop-sharing. A tenant farms the land and gives the owner an agreed share of the harvest.

chak: a numbered settlement in a canal-irrigated area, e.g. Chak 47.

basti: a hamlet or small settlement.

munshi: the clerk and steward of a landowning house or a business. He keeps the accounts, the leases, and the correspondence, knows what every tenant owes, and is usually the only man who can contradict the master of the house and survive it.

dewan: the room where the men of a haveli receive people and settle disputes; the business room.

numberdar: the government-recognized village headman, who collects revenue and is the official voice of the village.

wali: a woman's guardian in a marriage: the male relative who formally stands for her. Socially, the man who can speak on her behalf and whom others must deal with.

bibi: a polite, distancing way to address a woman whose name or status you do not know or do not wish to use. Roughly: madam, woman, you there - courteous but not warm.

sarkar: literally government, authority. What the men of a house call the man who owns it. Not sir. Closer to lord.

Baale: from Baala, the name the village has given Murtasim. Only his grandmother uses it to his face.

beti / dhee: daughter (Urdu / Punjabi).

bebe: grandmother; also the title for the senior old woman of a house.