kaveri noon

the stream meandered away downhill, to where the farmers and fishermen and regional politicians were squabbling about whose it was, and then down and out to the sea.

Brown, and God alone knows how deep, reflecting the elephants bathing on the far bank for relief from the beating sun, and the mahouts calling, and the little ones splashing and the mothers keeping a wary eye out, flickering through the dancing shade and unwavering sunlight..

Little tadpoles excitedly darting just below the surface of the lazy river while, deeper in, the great black fish wove serpentlike and vanished into the cool, the dark brown of the riverbed, deep below, away from the world, away from the angry, piercing light...

Up the hill on this side were the plantations- the sounds of the workers picking coffee, arabica, robusta, drifted down, the rustle of leaves as they pushed through them, the sound and smell of work to do on a hot summer afternoon, while the earth feels like sleep, while it curls up under the light shade of the silk-cotton trees as the boy with dirty shorts and a dog are doing, back there, out of everyone's way...

A mahout lifts his eyes to peer across the riverbank, because he could have sworn that in the shade near the bend of the river, a girl with her sandalled legs hugged tightly to her chest was sitting, watching.. but there is noone. It must have been a trick of the sharp light glancing off the ripples in the water there, as the water eddies around that brown rock in a gurgle of flowing away... A girl with large eyes, silently watching...

A drift of wind travels down the river, balancing on a current.. As it wafts down the still afternoon land, it looks around, searching through the trees for a little girl whose face he can touch and see her smile softly, sadly, at his already retreating back, but there is no little girl. So he touches the little boy in shorts, who turns over on his back, and the little dog stretches and murmurs a bark in his sleep, and the silk-cotton, freed from the bursting pods, falls...