This was a descriptive piece written more than 30 years ago under the heading Drought. It was published a few years later in a newspaper under the headline `The Farmer, Drought and Floods', with the flood part added to give it some length, though excess water is as ruinous as no water to the tiller of the soil. Farmers have always suffered the vagaries of the weather but it's only in recent years that they have started committing suicide. So one cannot help wondering whether `our richest men in the world' really have time to even think of the problem, or the majority of our politicians some of whom remind one of Emperor Nero, in the film Quo Vadis, played by Peter Ustinov, asks for his tear glass to shed a tear while Rome burned during the Great Fire of Rome.
- The Poor Farmer
The blazing sun shone down on the already sun-baked earth, drying and cooking relentlessly the last vestiges of life in the almost dead vegetation, converting the couintry, for as far as the eye could see and further, into a massive stockpile of tinder while a farmer shaded his eyes and squinted across what till recently was his green crops - that Nature - had so mercilessly robbed from him - by witholding the rain.
The farmer's gaze moved slowly in the direction of the sun-bleached huts, the sight that brought a quiver to his lips as a tear welled up in his eye, trickling and drying simultaneously and adding a tell-tale blemish of salt to his brown, leathery face.
The village lay a hundred metres to the east, listless, exhausted and parched - seemingly devoid of life, save for the swarms of flies that covered the carcasses of a once healthy cattle and the vultures that nature had so graciously served.
The well had gone dry the day before and the hoarse cry of the only handpump held little promise, as the weeping and wailing from ehte nearest thatchment made it clear that Nature's injustice knows no bounds - that the sweltering heat had taken the first human life and there was yet the morrow - more deaths or, perhaps, a miracle.
The rains at long last came, but the damage was done, a few innocent lives lost, a number of cattle dead, the crops destroyed and the farmer disheartened and bitter - the loss irreparable. The loss in mental make-up surpassing the rest, yet, there existed the determination to sow another crop - the need to sruvive `come hell or high water'.
Thus, the fields were again cleared, ploughed and a crop sown. But the monsoons had arrived and so came high water which proved hell - to some, the majority.
The rain came in torrents and the rivers swelled, while the low-lying country left dried and thirsty during the hot months, was now saturated, to water began to rise, as if in connivance with the rivers, till eventually all was one sheet of water, dotted by trees, some upright and green, some that had taken more battering than they could stand, had collapsed and lay half submerged. Logs of wood and buoyant huts that were released from their moorings, from numerous villages, that stood like flimsy beleagured fortresses, had started drifting to no-where in particular.
The less poor among the rural folk who had some form of boat wre prepared to sail. But what of the rest? They would chance to luck and climb trees or roof-tops of houses that were less soluble, if there be such a thing in mudden dwellings - while, their city brethern shake their heads in a show of anguish, and the government at this fatal hour send out groups to assess the damage, give succour to those left homeless and a sthey word it - `fight the flood on a war-footing'.
The poor farmer, the villagers, that make up a great nation; the multitudes that suffer for a few - the city dwellers - that have but to glance into the blazing heat and as a mirage see the tiller of the soil or for that matter peer into the turbulent depths of flood waters and once again - it is the farmer.
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