Rain, Ragi and Some Philosophy to Boot

Random Rubble
August 2026

A shroud of ennui - a feeling of weariness and boredom and lethargy, an absence of purpose - is cast over the village and the occasional sound of a tractor revving its engine in a field is reassuring, the aural equivalent of comfort food.  August is simply not meant to be this way.  

On my evening walk, I meet men and women doing the odd job, women bringing home a small load of firewood on their heads, the sombre expression replaced by a hesitant smile of recognition as they pass by.  It is a chore they would not have done if the rains had been on time and, of course, that smile would have been broader if I had walked past a ragi field they were deweeding.  

We, who aren't, and never can be, farmers, knew well in advance that el Nino, the little boy, was on his way.  The memory of the drought of 2023 lingers in my mind and the sight of the lake by Random Rubble, dry to the bone in the summer of 2024 made me wonder if all that I had done to harvest water and restore the biodiversity of the farm would outlive the challenge.  When you are against a Force, the Big Question is inevitable: Do My Effort Matter?  

The tank bed - mid-2024

...and the tank itself that day

Yet things turned for the better in the second half of that year and stayed that way last year as well.  The birds - swamphens, moorhens, storks, egrets, spot-billed ducks and a flock of whistling teal - returned.  Hope did too that season.  

I am an optimist, defiantly so, and have planted ragi in a quarter of an acre this month, my annual ritual of justification for being a farm owner.  Yet optimism is an uneasy guest, making a forced entry into an unquiet mind, and an excuse is all that is needed for it to be asked to leave and it does so this month, with a promise to meet again.  

To a farmer, the land has a right to its rain, to those little puddles, those frivolous channels that wend down, those rushes of an overflow from a thunderstorm.  So, they - these intrepid men and women - speak of the absence of rain with the despair of abandonment, of having been giving the shrift in the dealing.  It is a feeling I have learnt to recognise.

In mid-August, the lake looks as worn as the people, perhaps as forlorn as well, the gorgeous sunset a faint consolation.   

  

August ends in a deficit - as much of rain as of optimism, cheer and purpose - the sky remains clear, those nights of thinking-about-nothing under the moon uninterrupted. 

No, that isn't true: I think of many things, desultory thoughts of the future, what this year would look like when viewed a decade hence, the emotion of creation and loss, and I wonder if a belief in fatalism is an essential human condition.  

Mid-September 

Two weeks of summer sunshine in the time of the monsoon, the ragi is wilting and in serious trouble.  Then one evening, the day before I reach, it rains.  

A quiet breakfast of oats and ragi on the 14th morning.  Two waterhens - this is their day to rule - walk hesitantly past the kitchen, lifting their dainty feet up and carefully stretching them out to the next step, much like you would see in an absurd pantomime.  But they are beautiful!  A few minutes later, two mongooses follow their path, trotting busily away.  

It rains the next day, and the next.  Optimism will cut short its sojourn and return and the puddles will reflect the clouds and the moon will hide its splendour and the nights will be filled with the call of frogs and a swarm of winged termites will crowd around the light.  The brown will turn to green and  blue banded bees will hum around the flowers.

Last night, it is the rain of the year, a ceaseless, steady, filling rain, the one I have dreamt of all year.  I wake up and listen till the sound of the rain and the earth merge into sleep again. 

And somewhere in this unending cycle of weather and belief, of hens and drought, is a lesson worth knowing.  It is a search, yes, that it surely is.

The blue banded bees kept their word

Two months to go, miles before I sleep