Let the land rest

The old woman. Her skin was wrinkled, but her eyes sparkled when she smiled. Velu was in no mood: 'Without the rains, there's nothing to smile about.' She agreed, and her smile faded.

Then he poured out his heart: 'I have worked hard and honestly. Yet I am being punished… How shall I feed my family?'

Her reply turns the story around: 'Perhaps you have worked too hard.'

Velu was angry. 'Can anyone work too hard? I have only done what any hard-working farmer would do… This is the first season in five, no, six years that I have not sown, nor ploughed.' He does not understand her at first.

What she explains: 'You have strength now. You can work without a break. But have you thought about the land? The earth works, too, when you plough, and sow, and plant. The earth has worked for years, centuries, in fact, thousands of years… shouldn't someone let the land rest a bit?'

'Rest? Let the land rest? I don't understand.' — 'Yes, my son, that is the difficulty. You don't realise that the earth is old.'

Velu had seen the land as a tool for his work. She asks him to see it as a worker too, and an old one, whose work had been ignored.

'But Nature is a mother to all of us. To you and to me. And to the trees, the water and the soil. She takes care to give her children the rest they need.'

So the drought is not a punishment: 'When the rains don't come, you are dejected. But in that way the land is left alone… resting. And when the rains come, it will spring back into activity, fresh and ready for your crop. Go home, my son, Nature knows a thing or two.'

The rain. Velu walked home thinking of his land, 'perhaps breathing peacefully, taking a break from the constant, ceaseless year-round cultivation'.

As he neared the village in the evening, he felt a cool breeze, then a tiny drop on his shoulder. Clouds were gathering. Soon there would be lightning, thunder and sweet, fragrant rain. 'Velu ran home, laughing and happy.'