A terribly sad event......

It is the last week of March...the earth looks drier than it ever has at this time of the year. The news about the drought situation across the country is dismal.  Our own water situation looks grim.

We were discussing the situation with our farm hand Manjunath and he mentioned that the water in his well had almost completely dried up and he had initiated the work of digging it still deeper. This year he planned on putting in rings (large concrete rings that prevent the walls of the well from caving in).

The next morning at 7 am, the phone rang. It was Manjunath’s son-in-law. He had called to inform us that Manjunath had a fall.  He had fallen into his well while he was working around it!  This was terrible news!  How badly was he injured? His son-in-law could not say for sure. They were already on the way to the hospital and all we could do was pray and hope that he wasn’t badly injured.

Later on in the day his son-in-law informed us that he was admitted to a hospital in Mangalore and he had a fracture of a Lumbar vertebrae –L1. 

A  surgery, a prolonged stay in the hospital, and now a slow arduous path to recovery...

As I write this, he has recovered to a point of being able to walk around in his house, but is still pain. We hope and pray that he has a smooth recovery and we will be able to hear the calves announce his arrival as he crosses the little gate at the end of our rice fields every morning.