Sanjhi on the Highway

My uncle dropped his iron trowel onto the damp grass behind the cattle shed. The October river silt was grey and cool. For four generations, the women of our neighbourhood had gathered this mud in wide brass platters, carrying it inside the high-threshold brick courtyards of the village to shape Sanjhi—the clay deity of the twilight fortnight before Dussehra.

The making had always belonged to quiet, walled domestic spaces. The women pressed parched paddy husks and dried marigolds into wet mud, singing verse couplets that were never recited before male elders. It was an intimate, seasonal pact between unbaked earth and domestic hope.

Then came the white utility vehicle from the district headquarters.

Last October, three officers from the state cultural board stepped out near the primary school. They brought cameras, clipboards, and folders stamped with official grant numbers. They wanted to rescue the traditional art from domestic obscurity.

"Why restrict such heritage to interior courtyards?" the senior officer, Verma-ji, explained as he spread blueprints across the headmaster's table. He wiped the dust from his metal-rimmed spectacles with a folded handkerchief. He was neither haughty nor cynical; he was an administrative servant governed by project milestones. "Under the Rural Folk Documentation Scheme, every sanctioned mural requires an audited five-year preservation window. If we use raw river clay on exterior masonry, the first unseasonal downpour from the highway washes the relief into mud soup. The audit in Lucknow disallows the grant, and the village primary school loses its allocation for the overhead drinking-water tank."

They brought synthetic acrylic pigments—ultramarine, lemon yellow, and neon green—and sealed the perimeter wall facing the state highway with exterior cement primer. They invited the village girls outside and handed them nylon brushes.

I scribbled two lines in my pocket diary that evening, though neither was traditional folklore:

भीतर की जो बात थी, चौबारे पर आई।
मेला तो आबाद है, पर पूजा मुरझाई॥

(What belonged to the inner sanctuary has moved to the public square. The spectacle thrives, but the prayer has withered.)

The girls stood on wooden benches along the highway, laughing as they applied thick acrylics over the primed brick. Long-haul truck drivers slowed down to watch. A local politician arrived in a convoy, cut a red ribbon tied between two bamboo poles, and praised grassroots female artistry. Each girl received a stamped certificate and a stainless steel lunchbox.

This season, the inner courtyards remained bare.

I stopped by our neighbor's house two days ago. No brass platter had been brought down from the attic. I found nineteen-year-old Preeti sitting on the veranda steps, checking her bus timetable. She was preparing for her nursing entrance examination in Mathura, leaving at daybreak every morning.

"Aren't you shaping Sanjhi for the courtyard this year, Preeti?" I asked.

Preeti looked up from her notebook. There was no defiance in her face, only the plain clarity of someone whose days were tightly accounted for. "Ma had the inner courtyard paved with vitrified ceramic tiles two summers ago, Uncle. Wet river mud and cow dung wash leave grey stains in the white grouting that won't come out with detergent. Besides, when we made Sanjhi inside behind locked doors for ten years, none of the men in the house ever looked at the wall unless they wanted their evening tea. Why do you suddenly mourn the goddess only now that outsiders took photographs?"

I had no answer for her.

The clay had disappeared every autumn precisely because it was fragile; because it washed away in the winter rains, the women had to knead the river mud anew every year. The acrylic mural on the school boundary survived the rain entirely, and because it survived, nobody needed to make it again.

Outside along the state highway, the neon blue arms of the painted goddess peeled under the afternoon glare. A speeding fertilizer lorry threw a spray of dry grit across the school wall, settling into the cracks of her brush-stroked eyes. Beside the culvert, a stray goat nibbled at a faded marigold garland hanging from a cement milestone.

​#writon​