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do.”

    Sathy’s forest land wasn’t really a forest at all. It was, in fact, quite
barren. Sathy said it had once been covered with mango, neem, and palmyra trees. Now all that remained was a thin line of palmyras, their trunks encased in an ancient carapace of spikes, their leaves rustling in the monsoon wind.
    The forest had been cut down, chopped away one branch at a time by villagers foraging for firewood. It had been reduced to a flat—if wild and beautiful—stretch of shrubs and thornbushes. “We lost control of the land,” Sathy said. “Before, no one dared to cut on our property. But when our status went down, I couldn’t manage things as well as my father. I couldn’t stop the villagers around here from killing our forest.”
    My legs were tired from the walk. I crouched on the ground, on the slippery gray clay, above a stream. The stream flowed fast and strong. The rains had been heavy; it was a successful monsoon. “Quite a downpour,” I said to Sathy, and he agreed, and said it was good for the farmers. But then he shook his head and said it was nothing compared to some of the rains he remembered.
    He remembered standing on this land in the pouring rain, his face flat in the gusting wind, with his father when he was a boy. They had come to inspect a dam. The rains had been ferocious, the strongest Sathy had ever seen. The dam was in danger of breaching. The village could have been flooded. Sathy’s father gathered more than five hundred men. He called, and they came, and they worked in the rain, strengthening the dam with bags of sand and logs from cashew trees. They worked for threedays, under the supervision of Sathy’s father. They saved the village.
    Sathy told me that story, and he told me how proud he had felt of his father. “He had so much control, so much charisma,” he said. “Everyone obeyed him. Sometimes I wish I could imitate him. But I don’t have his looks, and I don’t have his charisma. I never had the same control that he had over the village.”
    “Do you think that the village would have stayed the same if your father was still alive?” I asked him.
    “No, no, I wouldn’t say that,” Sathy said. “That’s going too far. Even my father couldn’t stop modernity. Even he couldn’t block what’s happening in this country now. Sometimes, to tell you the truth, I think it’s good he died. He wouldn’t want to see everything that has happened.”
    Sathy told me a story about a meeting that took place in the village near the end of his father’s life. The meeting was held outdoors, under a banyan tree. His father was late; everyone stood up when he arrived. Everyone, except for one man—a Dalit youth named Raju. Raju had spent some time working in the cities. He had fancy, modern ideas; he was defying the Reddiar.
    Sathy said his father’s face turned to stone when he saw Raju sitting. He didn’t say anything at the meeting, though, and he didn’t say much the rest of the day. He was silent at dinner. Later, when Sathy was massaging his father’s feet in the bedroom he shared with his parents, his father looked straight at him and said: “I don’t know how you will manage. I don’t know how you will cope.”
    Sathy told his father not to worry. He said times were changing, and the family had to change with them. He said he would learn to adjust; they all had to adjust.
    Now, Sathy told me, when he visited places like Bangalore and Chennai, when he saw what was going on in the cities, he wondered if maybe his father was right. “Sometimes I think that maybe I goofed up my life,” he said. “Why did I stay a farmer? It’s silly to be a farmer these days. We landlords missed the industrial revolution, and now we’re missing the technology revolution. Sometimes I ask myself why I’m struggling to keep the farm running while so many kids are making millions. Maybe my father had a point—we didn’t know how to cope.”
    Sathy didn’t say anything for a while