In the remote village of Pongalgaon, there was great merriment. The villagers were celebrating their abundant harvest. Among the revellers were young Punit, his parents, Gopal and Gauri, and his Dadima.
The story began three years ago when Punit’s family was penniless. Their fields had stopped yielding any crops. Year after year, they had cultivated maize and sugarcane, but the land had ultimately lost all its nutrients. The other villagers too were suffering the same fate. Many of them, like Tukaram Mamu, migrated to big cities in the hope of getting a job.
Ultimately, when the last grain of rice and the last fistful of flour in their kitchen had been consumed, Gopal made up his mind to sell off Rani, their goat, and Ballu, Rani’s young kid, in the market. Punit had felt his heart being wrenched. The goats were like family to him. But they had to be sold. How else would they feed his family’s hungry mouths? Besides Dadima was ailing and bedridden. She needed medicines.
A surprising find
With a lump in his throat, Punit took the goats to graze for the last time. He walked listlessly, as tears streamed down his cheeks. But the goats, blissfully unaware of their fate, bounded friskily ahead. Suddenly, they seemed to have vanished. “Rani! Ballu!” he yelled. There was an answering bleat from Rani from somewhere in the distance. The boy ran in that direction. He found the two goats happily munching on some leaves that had sprouted from the wooden fence around Tukaram’s field.
Punit’s hunger pangs drove him to pluck a few leaves and chew them. He felt refreshed and rejuvenated. An idea struck him. He stuffed a handful of leaves into each of his pockets. Back home, he asked his mother to make a bhaji out of the leaves. The bhaji turned out so good, it was the nicest meal they had eaten in quite a while. Even Dadima relished it.
The next morning, Punit got the surprise of his life. Dadima had got up from bed and was actually feeling strong enough to walk about. His parents’ faces were lit up with smiles. What was the magic that had driven away Dadima’s sickness? Just then, he heard Ballu’s bleating. That is when the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
“Rani and Ballu led me to where those leaves were growing from one of those sticks used to fence Tukaram Mamu’s field,” he explained to his parents. “Those leaves have cured Dadima, I am sure. I can get more of them again today.”
Suddenly, it struck Punit like a dagger in his heart. The goats were to be sold that very morning! “Please, Baba, don’t sell the goats. We won’t go hungry anymore. I can keep getting those leaves home for us to eat!”
Gopal relented. “Let us give your magic leaves a try for some days,” he said.
When Punit returned with a bagful of the leaves, Dadima, who was now alert as ever, said, “These are moringa leaves. They are known to be very nutritious and have great healing power too.”
“Why don’t we plant moringa trees here on our barren land? Maybe they will grow and we can have our own moringa farm.” So, Punit cut some of the sticks from Tukaram Mamu’s fencing and pushed them into their hard, dry soil. To their great joy, all those sticks soon sprouted leaves and began to grow into moringa trees.
“It surprises me to see these sticks grow so readily on our land which had stopped supporting the growth of any other crops. Perhaps, the roots of these moringa trees are fertilising our fields once again,” Gauri wondered.
Planting the sticks
Punit’s parents advised the other villagers to also plant the moringa sticks in their barren fields. Gauri was right. The moringa trees were in fact, providing precious nitrogen to the soil through their roots. That year, to their great joy, the skies blessed them with abundant rains.
Gopal planted seeds of millets and even vegetables around his moringa trees. And miracle of miracles! They all grew pretty quickly. No one in Pongalgaon now went hungry. In fact, they all grew so much food that they sold the excess in the markets nearby and earned extra money. They could all afford to buy things that were beyond their means at one time.
On that evening in October, as the entire village got together to celebrate, Punit looked at his goats and reminisced. If his father had sold Rani and Balu one day too early two years ago, they would never have known about the miraculous moringa trees and the happiness they could bring.
