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Pleasures of farming


The hump of his back rose up like the desert wanderer’s as he leaned forward to scuttle the earth with a tiller. The rusted plate of his shovel wheeled about in the mud throughout the day and the old man, holding the lapping metallic tongue by the neck of its wooden throat, dug furrows in his fields. Through these shallow furrows, water ran to meet the tilled land. There it gurgled at the mouth of the rectangular piece of land, and left foam and bubbles on its wake. Water gradually swept, half seeping into the ground, the whole surface of the rectangular piece. Each square inch of the ten acres farming land had to be watered that day. With his feet sinking into the mud as he stood in the furrows made for runnign water, the old man scopped mud out of the mouth of one rectangular piece of land to cover the mouth of another. This way, from dawn till dusk, he laboured assiduously. 

Dry seeds popped in a fitful nervousness, with the slightest touch of water. In the afternoon, the old man found it pleasurable to follow the running water as it snaked through the furrows he so arduously dug that morning. It was as though he found the company of water most enjoyable of all, for this, he told himself, he would trade the others. 

He heard the water snarl in the bends near the source. Also he heard the somnolent gush, half a mile away from the pneumatic pump. He wondered if thus the course of life would too, as water did, lose valour and pensively stroll along, father it went up the path away and away in time. He observed, placing his hand against the mouth of the darg green pipe that emitted water ‘the diamonds that leave in a froth out of the green mouth turn opaque and fizzle into water as soon as they touch the ground beneath them’. They collapse in the free fall, he rubbed his chin to make sense out of it. The meek and sorrowful water shifted between adjacent rectangular pieces of land wetting one after another. It took the shape of furrows and rectangular blocks, took also the dull solemn colour of the mud it wetted.

In the evenings, as the sun drowned in a sea of engulfing flames, the pieces of land, ones among the last to be watered, reflected a yellow blaze. Now he waited for the birds to leave their nests and alight one after another in a swoop, to drink up the water on his land. Whistling and crooning, in ebullient mood, the old man surveyed his land from end to end. 

As the sun druggedly slipped into the horizon, a watchful moon swept the sky with its ambivalent atmosphere. Over the oldman’s head, a cosmic drama unfolded into an extravaganza unimpeded; tiny pin pricks in the thick dark canopy overhead let the sparkling light through. As the old man reached to one end of his land, he could hear the distant soft sound of water pouring out of a sharp bend. The night becalmed him, there was no sound anymore, save the occassional thud of water slapping into the walls of the furrows.

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