The bear and my potato farm
At the foot of a mountain, in a far away land, I had a potato farm. On top of the mountain, in a cave, lived a bear. It is not of much use to debate which one of us came to the mountain first, I think I did and the bear thinks he did.
Once in a while, the bear would come down the mountain, smash up part of my plantation and eat some of my potatoes. The monotonic increase in the frequency of bear attacks made me live in constant fear. What do I do?
My little daughter said she had a solution. She collected a handful of little stones and was going to throw them at the bear. “That will teach him a lesson”, she said, “He will then leave us alone”.
“No darling”, I protested, “An angry bear is even more dangerous”; “He is big and powerful”, “He could kill us all and wipe out our potato farm”.
“Do you have a better idea dad”, she shouted at me, “If you don’t have a solution, you have no right to criticize mine”.
Did I not have that right?
Over the years, she threw many stones. Her siblings encouraged her. My neighbors urged her on; they gave her stones; they taught her how to aim better. When she ran out of stones, she threw bricks pulled off the garden wall. She even threw my seed-potatoes at the bear.
When she scored strikes on the bear, she celebrated; “my solution is working”, she gloated. “Soon the bear will go away”. Her arrogance grew exponentially with every hit. When the bear struck back, she hid behind the potato plants. At her extreme of arrogance, she even threw a stone at the neighbor once; the very neighbor who taught her to throw stones.
I tried to protest. “Better we compromise with the bear dear”, I said. “There are enough potatoes for the bear and us”, I reasoned. “Bears are beautiful, too”.
It all fell on deaf ears. She wanted me to shut up. I argued with her. When she threatened to throw stones at me, I shut up. When she did cruel things to the bear cubs, killed many little bear cubs that had nothing to do with the damage to my farm, I didn’t interfere. When she badly hurt her own siblings, too, I kept quiet. Mostly out of fear, and partly, I confess, out of my utilitarian calculations – after all, promised ends may well justify the means. Pathetic! Shame on me!
Now, several years on, my predictions have come true. The bear woke up. It was angry and determined. In its charge against my daughter, it has fully destroyed my farm. It has attacked and hurt my daughter. It has destroyed all my potatoes – even the seed-potatoes I had so much treasured and saved to plant when rains next came.
The bear huffed and puffed, as bears do, and our roof is now blown off.
I ran to the neighbors for help. They showed no interest. “It’s not fashionable to throw stones these days, you know”, they said, “particularly at bears”. “You should have brought her up to know better.” “Remember, she even threw a stone at us”.
My daughter is now dead. Her siblings died before her. Potato farm is destroyed. Even my seed-potatoes have been crushed. My loss is enormous. The damage is beyond comprehension. I will never know for sure how much I have lost. I can only use my expertise in statistics to estimate. It is certainly high. Error bars in it, even higher. So I just cry in despair and constantly think of her death.
There she was, lying on my lap, just one breath between this world and the next. I looked straight in her eyes. It was my opportunity to tell her what I most wanted to tell her all these years: “I told you so!” I have been looking forward to this opportunity, just like parents of naughty children often do. But I couldn’t bring myself to telling her that. The shared guilt of not speaking up when it mattered most, put me at a loss for words. Wasn’t my silence partly to blame? Was I actually that helpless not to have articulated my thoughts? Did I really keep quiet out of fear for my daughter throwing stones at me, or was my silence due to just plain selfishness?
Then in her eyes I saw that all the arrogance had gone. Much to my momentary surprise, there was fear instead. It wasn’t clear if she had realized her stupidity, or if she was willing to acknowledge the destruction that her ways had invited. There was panic in her voice, and that could be heard the world over, thanks to the wonders of modern technology.
“I am helpless”, she moaned, her voice cracking, “The whole world is against me”.
“If the whole world is against you”, I thought to myself, “Perhaps stone throwing was rather a bad idea, as I told you”.
And then, in what Physicists call a phase transition, the duration of which I still cannot reliably estimate and the cause I will never know, she just died. My chance to tell her ‘I told you so” suddenly evaporated.
I stare at my ruined potato farm and reflect about my missed opportunity: What good would have come of telling her, “I told you so”?
Would it have eased my pain?
Would it have dried my tears?
Would it have brought back my seed-potatoes?
[Editors note: Read the sequel to this story, The Trial of the Potato Farmer, here.]
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What the father wanted to say was not “I told you so…” Never. He wanted to say “I love you”. “You are right or wrong, you are my daughter and I love you” And also the Bear doesn’t stop at that, YOU CANNOT TWIST THE HISTORY, YOU CANNOT TWIST THE TRUTH how far you tried! Wait and see, Bear will never cease, and the potato farm may not come up again at all… It’s your fate, your price for your cowardness.
tis a good story, and i see what the write is talking about. it does, however only recounts part of the story.
let me fill in the missing part.
“Once in a while, the bear would come down the mountain, smash up part of my plantation and eat some of my potatoes. The monotonic increase in the frequency of bear attacks made me live in constant fear. What do I do?
[insert here #1]
My little daughter said she had a solution. She collected a handful of little stones and was going to throw them at the bear. “That will teach him a lesson”, she said, “He will then leave us alone”.”
[
text to insert #1
I asked the bear to stop attacking me , i pleaded with it, i begged. The bear paid no heed. My people were mauled, many lost lives, limbs and livelihoods. My daughter lost her siblings, i lost my my children. many of us became destitute.
even then i did not attack it, i got together with my neighbors and protested peacefully, beseeching the bear to listen to us. we said, "we are willing to live with you. there is ample land, there are ample crops, don't gang up on us. we worked hard , don't steal the fruits of our hard labor from us" . the bear did not listen, it beat me up,along with those who took part in those peaceful protests.
even then we did not give up, we tried this for THIRTY YEARS. the bear attacks only grew more and more violent as time went by, we lost more and more .The bear was arrogant, it thought that we were cowards for protesting peacefully, for staging non-violent satyagrahas. the more were beseeched it, the more emboldened it became.
my daughter kept on asking "daddy, why are the attacks growing worse and worse, even when we do nothing against it? ". I told her " daughter, violence is the last resort, we should exhaust every other avenue before going down that path, because once we walk down that path we will be no different from that horrible bear". My poor little daughter believed me. as the bear attacks grew more frequent over the years she did raise the same question; again and again. every time i gave the same answer, "lets try a little more..lets try a little more" .
alas, the bear's kith and kin never listened to my pleas, even if they did, they did not do anything about it. they were content to sit back and watch
even as i rocked my daughter's trembling body to sleep every night, wiping away her tears; i kept on making the same excuse to myself...hoping that one day the bears would see reason,that one day we can live without worrying if we would live to see the next day. That day never came.
one day; with our farm burning behind us; thanks to yet another bear attack, my daughter told me. " Daddy, you are wrong. I waited and waited, believing your word for THIRTY Years, to what avail? "
]
^^^ inserting that bracketed text block between those two paragraphs would put this good story in perspective. after all, we should not leave the crucial part of the story out now should we?
I read the story and the comments. As I read the story, I wasn’t sure who was represented by the Bear and who was represented by the narrator. It seems to me that this could be a story told by any party to any conflict and it would have different meanings for each. Everyone has been betrayed in some way and everyone has lost…something, someone.
Whoa…the Bear is thoroughly essentialized; but, shucks darn it, it seems the Bear was acting in self-defense. Give the poor Bear a break, will ya !
Too bad the narrator’s daughter never wanted to give up stripes. I think we can all agree that polka dots suited her much better.
My parents never threw rocks either at potato farmers or at Bears. They told me that the land belonged to us all. They were right !
From the whole story it’s evident who the striped kind is. But the question is whether the ground reality of the actual circumstances of the episode is presented candidly.
Perhaps you should have moved to a place where there are NO bears to disturb your potatoe farm.
Of course, we can not compare Bears and Human conflict to Human vs Human conflict.
I guess in your story Bear = Sinhala-Buddhists
Potatoe Farmer = Tamil Separatists Militia
The fact that you can’t tell who is who….is the point exactly!
Luckily neither party had nuclear weapons.
Wrong animal/human metaphor. What we have in Sri Lanka are not bears or potatoe farmers but frogs who live in one kulam or wewa but think that they are living in little wells of their own.
How about this?
Bear = all conflict/disagreements etc…
Daughter = The future Generations who see nothing but conflict, and tries to do the easiest thing
Narrator = The land and the people who have lost many things…