Monsoon Layout:Monsoon Layout.qxd
12/7/2010
5:42 PM
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28 KANCHI KOHLI t was the last half hour of our trek, or shall I say mine. Those fitter than me had already made it to the Shirui Hill in the Ukhrul district of Manipur. I had anticipated the climb when the 2,570 metre high destination was pointed out from the place where we took our first steps to get a glimpse of rare and endangered Siroy Lily, Manipur’s state flower. The hill is unique, and not just because it was called by many names Siroy, Shiroi, Sirohee, Shirui, but more so because Shirui is the one of only two places in Manipur (in the world they say) where the Siroy Lily is found and that too only for a couple of months following mid May every year. The flowers were clearly visible when it was the last 10 minutes of the climb, and then the place transformed. With a lace of white mist all around me came the first drop of rains that day. Being the end of May in the hills, I guess it was expected. I tried my
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best to be layered with the feeling of monsoon, clothe myself with the white and colour myself with the green that drizzle made the place to be. In all this peered out the little pink and white lilies strewn all around as exquisite ground flora. The feeling was magical, to say the least. The season I was there was a few years back and the monsoons have changed since then. Some say that the climate is changing, but the unpredictable patterns are still visible. For those who live in the hills, the diverse shades of the monsoon mean more than life. A good monsoon can mean a good agricultural crop, with fields full of grain and rice fields full of water. A bad rainy season can either be dry and dreary or cause massive landslides, lending itself to not so happy times to cope with. For instance, it was a scanty, scattered and untamed monsoon for northern India last year (2009). Many of us in cities cribbed by the spurts of compressed showers we got. It brought with it lessons and called out for instilling
faith in farmer’s wisdom. As I sat talking to a small bio-diverse farmer from a village called Jardhar in Garhwal Himalayas, I got to better know the repercussions of a bad monsoon. But before I tell you that, I will have to delve into a bit about Jardhar. It is a small village, which, over decades, revived its forests and retained over 200 varieties of rajma beans in the fields. With no tourism developed there, the trek upto Jardhar is only through word of mouth and that too through those the village leaders trust. Coming back to what happened last year. The bio-diverse farmer I was talking to told me that the water guzzling crops failed in many places. But what had thrived were hardy crops like millets, which many of us today know as health foods. I refer to mandua or jhangora which are today encouraged by nutritionists to curtail diabetes and so on. In Jardhar, it is food to the people, a plate full that