The six men whose numbers had been drawn had won the chance to hammer a wooden stake, a little over a metre long, into the earth. As well, the three oldest men in the village were accorded the right to a wooden stake without the numbered lottery. They duly chose places for their stakes, and younger men obliged by hammering the wooden pegs into the ground. When all nine stakes were positioned, little flags with the names of the men were tied to each one, and the people drifted back to their homes.
I’d watched the affair from a shady spot beneath the branched dome of a tree. At the time, I was working on my own small reference dictionary of the Marathi language, based on phonetic spellings of the words I heard every day in the village. I gave the ceremony little attention, and I never bothered to ask its purpose.
As we stood in the numbing, drumming rain and watched the prowling advance of the river, Prabaker explained that the wooden stakes were part of a flood-game that was played every year. The oldest men in the village, and six lottery winners, were given the chance to predict the point to which the river would rise. Each wooden stick, with its flag of yellow silk, represented a best guess.
‘You see, this one little flag?’ Prabaker asked, pointing to the stake that was furthest from where we stood. ‘This one is almost gone. The river will reach to him, and cover him, tomorrow or tonight.’
He translated what he’d told me for the crowd, and they pushed Satish, a heavy-set cowherd, to the front of the group. The almost submerged stick was his, and he accepted, with shy laughter and downcast eyes, the good-natured jeers of his friends and the sneers of the older men.
‘And this one here,’ Prabaker went on, pointing to the stake nearest to our position. ‘This one is the river will never be touching. The river never comes more far than this place. Old Deepakbhai has picked for himself this place, for the putting of his stick. He thinks this year will be a very heavy monsoon.’
The villagers had lost interest, and were already drifting or jogging back to the village. Prabaker and I stood alone.
‘But… how do you know that the river won’t rise past this point?’
‘We are here a long time, Lin. Sunder village has been in this place for two thousands of years. The next village, Natinkerra, has been there for much longer, about three thousands of years. In some other places-not near to here-the people do have a bad experiences, with the floods, in monsoon time. But not here. Not in Sunder. Our river has never come to this far. This year, also, I don’t think it will come to this far, even so old Deepakbhai says it will. Everybody knows where the river will stop, Lin.’
He raised his eyes to squint at the unburdening clouds.
‘But usually, we are waiting until the rain it stops, before we come out of the house to look at the flood-game sticks. If you don’t mind, Lin, I’m swimming in my clothes, and I will have to squeeze the water out of my bones before I go in my house.’
I stared straight ahead. He glanced up at the black tumble of cloud once more, and asked a question.
‘In your country, Lin, don’t you know where the river stops?’
I didn’t answer him. Eventually, he reached up to pat me on the back a few times, and then walked off. Alone, I stared at the rain-soaked world for a while, and at last I lifted my face to the drowning sky.
I was thinking about another kind of river, one that runs through every one of us, no matter where we come from, all over the world. It’s the river of the heart, and the heart’s desire. It’s the pure, essential truth of what each one of us is, and can achieve. All my life I’d been a fighter. I was always ready, too ready, to fight for what I loved, and against what I deplored. In the end, I became the expression of that fight, and my real nature was concealed behind a mask of menace and hostility. The message of my face and my body’s movement was, like that of a lot of other hard men,
It didn’t work in the village. No-one could read my body language. They knew no other foreigners, and had no point of reference. If I was grim or even stern, they laughed, and patted my back encouragingly. They took me as a peaceful man, no matter what expression I wore. I was a joker, someone who worked hard, played the fool for the children, sang with them, danced with them, and laughed with an open heart.
