Read the passage and answer the given subquestions.
Women from our village traveled to the market at Ratnagiri to sell various things. They trudged the whole distance with huge, heavy bundles on their heads, filled with firewood or grass, rice or semolina, long pieces of bamboo, baskets of ripe or raw mangoes. Their loads would be heavy enough to break their necks. They would start their journey to Ratnagiri early in the morning. Between our village and Ratnagiri, the road was difficult to negotiate as it wound up and down the hills. It was quite an exhausting trip. When they came to the first hill, the vexed women would utter the choicest abuses, cursing the mool purush (the male ancestor from whom the family is said to have taken root) of our family, who, had he heard them, would have died again. The reason for the abuse was quite simple. It was he who had chosen this particular village, Phansawale, in the back of beyond, for his people to settle. It was an extremely difficult and inconvenient terrain, as it lay in an obscure ditch in a far-off corner of the hills. Two high hills stood between the village and the outside world. The steep climbs, with their narrow winding paths full of jutting sharp stones and pebbles, were extremely slippery. One wrong step and one would straightaway roll down to one’s death somewhere in the bottom of the deep valleys. Then there were two big rivers to cross. These rushed down the hills, looping through thick forests and valleys, their bellies carrying who knows what under the deep water. But that wasn’t all! After crossing the hills and the rivers, the women had to walk quite a distance on a long, dusty, and dirty path till they reached the city. Every time a toe crushed against a jutting stone, a curse rang out, probably making the poor ancestor turn in his grave.
Occasionally, the women heard the bloodcurdling roars of a tiger even in broad daylight and, indeed, incidents of tigers attacking people on their way were not uncommon. Danger lurked everywhere. It crawled across one’s path in the form of venomous snakes such as ghonus (Russel’s viper) and phurse (Saw-scaled viper) who looked as if they wanted to inquire casually after the travelers. The barren open spaces were covered with shrubs as sharp as the teeth of those creatures and resembled some ancient armor. The howling wind, ferocious enough to topple one to one’s death, blew continuously. Then there was a huge, deep well on the way, without any protective walls around, shrouded in the mist of chilling stories of evil spirits lurking there. All of these would strike one’s heart cold with terror. And as if all this were not enough, there would be freaks and perverts, hiding in shrubs and trees, who occasionally assaulted the helpless women. They would be tense not only because of the obvious threat these miscreants posed, but also because of what it would do to their reputations.
Excerpted from: Pawar, Urmila. The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs. Translated by Maya Pandit,
