And when I’d been in the village some three months, Rukhmabai and the people of Sunder gave me a fragment of that certainty: a part of them and their lives that changed my life forever. On the day the monsoon began, I was swimming in the river with a dozen other young men and about twenty children. The dark clouds, which had painted their sombre moods on the sky for weeks, gathered from horizon to horizon, and seemed to press upon the tops of the tallest trees. The air, after eight dry months, was so lavishly perfumed with rain that we were almost drunk with excitement.
‘
The first drops of rain fell as we ran. In seconds, the drops were a heavy fall. In minutes, the fall was a cascade. Within an hour, the monsoon was a ceaseless torrent, so thick that it was difficult to breathe in the open without cupping my hands to my mouth to make a little cave of air.
At first, the villagers danced in the rain and played pranks on one another. Some took soap, and washed in the heaven-sent shower. Some went to the local temple, where they knelt in the rain to pray. Others busied themselves with repairs to the roofs of their houses and the drainage trenches dug around every mud-brick wall.
Eventually, everyone stopped to simply stare at the drifting, flapping, curling sheets of rain. Every doorway of every house was crowded with faces, and each flash of lightning showed the frozen tableaux of wonder.
That downpour of several hours was followed by a lull just as long. The sun shone intermittently, and rainwater steamed from the warming earth. The first ten days of the season proceeded in the same way, with violent storms and tranquil lulls, as if the monsoon was probing the village for its weaknesses before mounting a final assault.
Then, when the great rain came, it was a lake of water in the air, and it rained almost without pause for seven days and nights. On the seventh day, I was at the river’s edge, washing my few clothes as the drenching torrents fell. At one point I reached for my soap, and realised that the rock I’d placed it on was submerged. The water, which had merely caressed my bare feet, rose from my ankles to my knees in seconds. As I looked upstream at the tumbling crash of the river, the water reached to my thighs, and was still rising.
Awed and uneasy, I waded from the water with my wet clothes, and began the walk to the village. On the way I stopped twice to watch the progress of the river. The steep banks were quickly swamped, and then the wide sloping plain began to subside beneath the all-immersing flood. The advance was so rapid that the inevasible creep of the swollen, landconsuming river moved toward the village at a slow walking pace. Alarmed, I ran to warn the villagers.
‘The river! The river is coming!’ I shouted, in broken Marathi.
Sensing my distress but not really understanding me, the villagers gathered around and then called Prabaker, plying him with questions.
‘What is your matter, Lin? The people are very upset for you.’
‘The river! It’s coming up fast. It’ll wipe the village out!’
Prabaker smiled.
‘Oh, no, Lin. That will not be happening.’
‘I’m telling you! I’ve seen it. I’m not joking, Prabu. The fucking river’s in flood!’
Prabaker translated my words for the others. Everyone laughed.
‘Are you all crazy?’ I shouted, in exasperation. ‘It’s not funny!’
They laughed all the harder and crowded around me, reaching out to calm my fear by patting and stroking me, their laughing voices full of soothing words and sighs. Then, with Prabaker leading the way, the crowd of villagers goaded, dragged, and pushed me toward the river.
The river, only a few hundred metres away, was a deluge: a vast muddy concrescence that tore through the valley in heaving waves and boiling eddies. The rain redoubled its intensity as we stood there, our clothes as drenched as the yielding soil. And still the tumid river grew, consuming new land with every thumping heartbeat.
‘You see those sticks, Lin,’ Prabaker said, in his most irritating attempt at a soothing tone. ‘Those sticks are the flood-game sticks. Do you remember, when the people put them in the ground? Satish and Pandey Narayan and Bharat… do you remember?’
I did remember. Days before, there’d been a lottery of some kind. One hundred and twelve numbers-one for every man in the village-were written on small pieces of paper, and mixed together in an empty clay water-pot, called a
