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, land-consuming 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 matka. The men lined up to draw their numbers, and then a second set of the same numbers was mixed in the pot. A little girl was given the honour of drawing the six winning numbers from the pot. The whole village watched the ceremony, and applauded the winners happily.
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."
