Seasons

Living in a city, you can tell that the seasons are changing in a number of ways. Of course there is the calendar, but there are more subtle changes as well. In the store windows, the clothing displays discreetly morph to showcase the coming season's new styles. Your favorite coffee shop changes the art on their front window from beach balls and ice cream to falling leaves. Leaves fall. School begins, or school lets out. Neighborhood pools open, they close.

Here in Jhiri, the season has changed. The temperature feels the same—it is still 96 degrees right now, in the shade, at 4pm—but the season has definitely changed. I realized this when my not-so-healthy knee began to hurt a little. At home this happens when it gets cold in the winter. Here it happened because the earth that I walk on everyday went from being nice and squishy from the monsoon rains to rock hard and cracked. I looked around and realized that the hills were yellow, like in Marin. The lush hariali, which translates literally to “greenery,” had disappeared, been devoured by all of the water buffalo it seemed and replaced by scratchy twigs. Come to think of it, after a month of super sweet roasted corn every day, I had not eaten a single ear in a week. It had all been harvested, consumed, and stored, along with the peanuts, the sesame, the chawli, and the other monsoon crops. In an Indian farming village, seasons are marked by the food you eat and the number of new mosquito bites you can count at the end of each day.

Along with the subsistence crops that have been harvested, everyone cut down the only cash crop here: soy beans. All the work has meant that many of our kids have been missing school the past week. On the bright side, families here will be paid soon. For their soy beans, they are paid once a year. On average families get 20,000 rupees. That is 465 dollars. Some do business on the side—carpentry, pottery, etc—and some sell small amounts of buffalo milk for extra cash, but most just spend their money very slowly until they are paid again. There will be another few weeks of hard work in the fields and then everyone will take a bit of break as the Indian version of Christmas fever, Diwali, approaches.