Always wearing an orhni, Ramrajee Ramsawak is a familiar face at the Debe market.
Hundreds of customers would have walked past her stall or bought food items from her over the past 40 years.
However, she has a big secret.
Ramsawak is 103 years old, making her one of, if not the eldest, market vendor in the country. Her birthday is on November 29.
What makes this great-great-grandmother even more remarkable is that she still tends to her garden with the assistance of one workman. Sometimes, she performs the task all on her own.
The day before she goes to sell in the market, which is usually on Thursdays and/or Sundays, she prepares her produce.
Ramsawak’s morning begins around 3 or 4 am. She cooks and eats. Then, she walks barefoot to the back of her house into her garden, where she wades through thick black mud to pick her dasheen, spinach and cholai plants. It’s a messy task, as her legs and clothes are usually covered in mud. When she cleans off the mud, she then washes, cuts and packages her produce.
Sitting in her hammock at her Penal home on Wednesday after returning from the garden, Ramsawak explained, “If you go in there (garden) you can’t come out. You have to creep, hold the dasheen tree, pull out one foot, pull out the next foot, you sinking.”
She said she enjoys tending to her garden and meeting people in the market.
While she is often encouraged to stay home, Ramsawak said, “They say don’t go to the market, sit down in the house, check how much motorcar passing in this hammock. No, me go market, me talk to people, ah laugh and talk people.”
Ramsawak, however, is no stranger to hard work and poverty.
Recalling that her mother died when she was a child, she said she never went to school.
Married to her husband Ramsawak Mahase at the age of 15, she moved from Barrackpore to Penal and began working in the cane fields. They had ten children together.
Showing her rice mill and old-fashioned milk canister, Ramsawak said she worked other jobs, including in the rice fields, walking from house to house selling cow milk and selling food, just to put food on the table for her children.
She recalled that she sold a cup of milk and a slice of roti, each for 25 cents. Noting that cent by cent she was able to pull herself out of poverty, Ramsawak eventually travelled to India twice and met Sai Baba.
Her husband and eight of her children have since passed on.
A devout Hindu, Ramsawak does not eat meat. She gives charity and tries to help others facing difficult times.
But she also encouraged people to try to help themselves.
“If you want a lil betterment plant ah lil bhagi, plant ah lil bhaigan, don’t saga and go in the bar and drink daru and dance whole night,” she advised.