Waiting for the Rain

Before you study any text closely, it helps to be sure what kind of writing you are actually holding. This chapter is prose — a short story. It is not a poem and it is not a play. There are no stanzas to count, no rhyme scheme to trace, and no stage directions telling actors where to stand. What you have is plain storytelling: a person, a problem, a journey, a conversation and an ending, all set out in ordinary sentences with a few stretches of dialogue.

The story is written by Kamakshi Balasubramanian. Spell the name carefully whenever you write about this story, because a misspelt writer's name is an easy mistake and an easy one to avoid.

The story is told in the third person. A narrator who is not part of the events describes the farmer from outside, following him through his day, telling us what he sees and quite often what he is thinking. This matters more than it sounds. Because the narrator stays close to one man, his worry becomes our worry, and when a stranger says something that unsettles him, we feel unsettled too. If the story had been told by a distant, all‑knowing voice that explained everything in advance, the ending would lose its quietness.

The setting is rural India during a failed monsoon. Fields that should be green are bare. The sky that should be heavy with cloud stays clear and hard. There is one short journey away from the village into a city, where a weather office is supposed to have answers, and one long, unplanned pause under a tree on the way back. That is the whole geography of the story, and it is enough.

Finally, notice the company this story keeps in the book. It sits among readings about the environment — about how people and the natural world act on each other. That placement is a hint about how to read it. The story is not only about one man having a bad year. It is about the relationship between human work and the land that work depends on, and about what happens to a person when that relationship stops behaving the way he expects.

The story opens with a farmer named Velu doing what he does every day: getting up early and looking at his land and his sky. He is a hardworking man and he has reason to feel confident. For nearly six years, ever since the field became his own, it has never failed him. He has cultivated it season after season, taking a harvest of jowar in one season and dhal in the next, working right through the year and never thinking of rest or of taking a holiday. Hold on to that last detail. The narrator gives it to us right at the start, and the whole conversation later in the story turns on it.

This year the pattern breaks. Summer ends, and the rains that should follow simply do not come. Days pass, then weeks, then months. The sky stays empty. The ground hardens and cracks. Land that should be carrying a standing crop lies bare. For a farmer this is not a mild inconvenience — it is a whole year's income gone, and Velu's worry is a very practical one: how he is going to feed the people who depend on him.

Around him, people begin looking for explanations and remedies. Someone says they ought to talk to astrologers, because astrologers could tell them what would please the heavens, and then the heavens would send down rain. Velu does not go along with this. His reasoning is his own and it is a farmer's reasoning: the rains had come in all the earlier years without any such consultations, so he cannot see how talking to astrologers will bring rain now.

What he does instead is travel to the city, to the weather office — the place whose entire job is to watch the sky and say what it will do. He wants a date. He wants somebody with instruments and training to tell him when the clouds will finally come. The people there cannot give him that. They tell him plainly that they cannot really say when the sky will gather clouds and bring rain, and they admit that they are at a loss themselves: by their own reading so many conditions are favourable, and still no rain comes, which they find very odd. Velu walks back to the village with nothing — tired, dejected, thirsty, coughing and sneezing in the dust — having tried the one door he genuinely believed in.

On the way back he stops to rest under a large tree, and there he finds an old woman sitting in the shade, out of the sun. She is smiling — which, in a season when nobody has anything at all to smile about, is exactly the detail that makes him speak to her. He asks her what she is smiling at, addressing her as “Amma”, the ordinary respectful way of speaking to an older woman. What follows is the heart of the story: a short conversation in which she suggests that the land, like a person, may simply be tired and taking its rest.

Velu does not accept this at once. The idea baffles him. The old woman does not stay to argue either — she tells him to go home, gets up and walks away, and after a while he gets up too and walks homeward, turning her words over. On the road he finds himself thinking of his own beloved piece of land as something that may be breathing peacefully, taking a break from constant, year‑round cultivation. By the time he nears the village it is evening, the sun is low, and he has got as far as thinking that perhaps she is right. Then he feels a cool breeze on his back, and a tiny drop on his shoulder. Only when he looks up does he see clouds gathering in the distance and the light beginning to go, with lightning, thunder and rain still to come. Velu runs home, laughing and happy, and the story closes there.

Velu is the only character the story stays with, and almost everything we learn about him comes from what he does rather than from the narrator pausing to describe his personality. That is worth noticing in itself, because it means every answer you write about him should point at an action.

The first thing we learn is that he is hardworking. Rain or no rain, he is up early. His piece of land has never failed him in nearly six years, and that is not luck — it is the result of steady labour, season after season, jowar in one season and dhal in the next. The narrator adds one more phrase that you should not skip over: he worked throughout the year, never thinking of rest or of taking a holiday. That is offered as praise, but it is also the exact habit the old woman will question later.

The second thing we learn is that his fear is practical, not vague. He is not frightened of the sky in some general, poetic way. He is worried about a specific problem: feeding his family when there will be no harvest. Keeping this in mind stops you from writing a soft, sentimental answer about a farmer who simply loves nature. Velu's relationship with the land is a working relationship, and the story respects that.

The third thing, and the most interesting, is how he handles not knowing. Two options are offered to him by the world around him. Someone in the village offers the first: talk to astrologers, find out what would please the heavens, and the heavens will send rain. He turns this down, and his reason is worth noticing — it comes from his own experience rather than from an argument about belief. In all the good years the rains came without any such consultations, so he cannot see how talking to astrologers will bring rain now. That is a farmer reading the evidence in front of him.

Then he takes the second option, which is the modern one: he goes to the weather office. This is the detail that really defines him. He is neither superstitious nor lazy; he makes a journey to the people who study the sky professionally, because he trusts observation and measurement. The story does not mock him for going, and it does not mock the weather office either. It simply shows that on this occasion the answer he wanted did not exist to be given.

What is left, then, is a man who has done everything sensible and still has nothing. That is exactly why the meeting under the tree lands the way it does — Velu has reached the end of his own methods. His final quality is the one that changes the story: he is willing to listen to a stranger who says something he does not immediately understand, and willing to keep turning it over after the conversation ends. His change is not that he stops caring about his crop. It is that he stops fighting the wait.

The old woman is a stranger. Velu has not gone looking for her, and she is not introduced as a respected elder of his village whose advice he is bound to take. She is simply sitting out of the sun under the same tree, and she is smiling. He addresses her as “Amma”, which is the everyday courteous way of speaking to an older woman and tells you at once that the exchange is warm rather than formal.

Her argument is short, and it is made in homely language rather than in scientific terms. She turns the situation around. Where Velu sees land that has been denied its rain, she sees land that is finally being allowed to stop. The earth is old, she points out, and it has been working for a very long time — thousands of years of growing things for people. People rest when they are tired. Why should the ground not rest? While there is no rain, the land is not being ploughed or sown or harvested; it is lying still under the sky. And when the rain does return, she suggests, that rested land will come back to work “fresh and ready for your crop”.

Velu's first reaction is honest confusion. Rest the land? To a man whose entire working life is about keeping his field busy and productive, the idea that stillness could be doing something useful sounds like nonsense. That confusion is important, and you should keep it in your answers: the story does not pretend that a good idea is instantly convincing.

Now here is a point you must handle carefully. This is a character's view. It is not a statement made by the narrator, and it is not the story's scientific explanation of why the monsoon failed. Nowhere does the story tell us that the earth deliberately held back the rain in order to take a holiday. What the old woman offers Velu is a different way of seeing the same facts. Nothing about the weather changes because of her words; what changes is the state of mind of the man listening to them.

At the same time, her homely image is standing on something real, and saying so will strengthen an answer. Farmers do deliberately leave land unsown for a season so that the soil can recover, and that practice has a name: leaving land fallow. Neither she nor the story ever uses that word, so do not put it in her mouth — but the idea she hands Velu is a recognised part of careful farming, not an invention. So the old woman is not offering pure comfort. She is putting a piece of practical farming wisdom into the shape of a small story about a tired old earth — and that shape is precisely what lets it reach a man who is far too worried to sit through a lecture.

Dependence on the monsoon. The plainest theme is how completely a farming life rests on rain that nobody owns or controls. Velu is good at his job. He works hard, he never takes a holiday, he has nearly six good years behind him on land that has never failed him. None of it helps him this year. The story makes you feel that vulnerability from the inside rather than describing it from outside, which is why it stays with a reader far longer than a statistic would.

Three ways of facing the unknown. Look at how neatly the story lays out the human responses to a problem nobody can solve. A voice in the village reaches for the astrologers. Velu reaches for measurement and expert knowledge. The old woman reaches for acceptance and a change of view. The story does not stage a contest between these three and hand out a prize. It simply sets all three before one man — the first he sets aside, the second gives him nothing — and lets you notice which one finally brings him peace.

Rest is part of work, not the opposite of it. This is the idea the old woman plants. Most of us think of resting as time subtracted from working. She suggests the reverse: that the pause is what makes the next stretch of work possible at all. Applied to soil, that is ordinary farming sense. Applied to people, it is worth thinking about too, and the story is quiet enough to let you make that jump yourself instead of spelling it out.

Patience and hope. The title says waiting, and waiting is what the story is really about. For most of its length Velu's problem is not only the drought; it is that he cannot bear the not‑knowing. Nothing he does shortens the wait by a single day. What changes is that he learns how to wait without being destroyed by it — and only after the waiting has stopped being unbearable does the rain arrive.

People as part of nature, not managers of it. This is why the story belongs among readings about the environment. Velu begins by treating the land as something he uses and the weather as something to be predicted and worked around. He ends with a different picture, in which the land is more like a partner that has its own condition and its own needs. That shift — from using nature to living alongside it — is the environmental idea sitting at the centre of the chapter, and it is delivered without a single lecture.

The title does real work. “Waiting for the Rain” names an action, and it is an action with no drama in it whatsoever. Nothing in that title promises a hero or an adventure. It promises exactly what the story delivers: a man waiting badly, for a long time, for something he cannot hurry. And because the title has already told you what everybody in the story wants, every scene is quietly measured against it.

The shape of the story. It moves in four clear steps: the wait, the search, the encounter, the release. First comes the situation — a good farmer, a failed monsoon. Then comes the search for an answer, in which Velu rejects one route and tries another and returns empty‑handed. Then comes the unplanned meeting under the tree, which is the turning point. Then comes the rain. If you are ever asked to trace the plot, those four movements are your skeleton.

Contrast is the main tool. Notice how much of the story is built on pairs pulled against each other: cracked dry ground against the rain at the end; a working man who says he will never rest until he is too old against an old woman sitting perfectly still; a city weather office with instruments and training against one stranger resting under a tree with neither; and the whole idea of working set against the idea of resting. The old woman is not just a character in the plot, she is Velu's opposite, and that is why one short conversation is able to move him so far.

The ending is deliberately small. The writer could have finished with a thunderstorm and a whole village dancing in the mud. Instead the rain begins with tiny physical things — the air turning cool, a single drop landing on him as he walks home. That restraint matters. A huge dramatic downpour would have made the rain the point of the story. A single drop keeps the point where it belongs: on the man who had already changed his mind before a single cloud appeared.

Argument delivered through dialogue. The most important idea in this story is never announced by the narrator. It is spoken by a character, in a short conversation, in simple words, and it is met with confusion before it is accepted. That is far more convincing than a paragraph of explanation would have been, and it is well worth saying so if you are asked about how the writer builds the story.

Monsoon. The seasonal wind system that brings India its main rains. Because so much farming here is timed around it, the phrase the rains in this story means something far more specific than good or bad weather. It means a whole year's plan either working or failing.

Drought. A long spell with far less rain than normal — long enough to damage crops and dry up water sources. The story shows you a drought rather than defining one: bare fields, hard cracked ground, an empty sky morning after morning.

Fallow. Land deliberately left unsown for a season or more so that the soil can recover. This is the real farming practice sitting underneath the old woman's image of a tired earth taking its rest, and it is worth naming in an answer, because it shows you understood that her words are not only a comforting thought.

Crop rotation. Growing different crops in the same field in turn instead of the same one repeatedly. Velu's pattern — jowar in one season, dhal in the next — is an alternation of this kind. Be careful how you use it in an answer, though. The story reports the pattern; it never tells us that he chose it to look after his soil, and in fact it stresses the opposite point, that he worked right through the year without ever thinking of rest. Describe the pattern, and leave his reasons out of it.

Jowar and dhal. Jowar is sorghum, a hardy millet grown widely across the drier parts of India. Dhal here means a pulse crop such as a lentil or a gram. Pulses are useful in a rotation because they help put nitrogen back into the soil, so an alternation of that kind does something for the land as well as for a farmer's income — though the story itself never tells us why Velu farms the way he does.

Weather office. A meteorological office: the place where trained people study the atmosphere and forecast what the weather will do. Velu's journey there is the story's way of showing that he trusts evidence and expertise.

Astrologer. Someone who claims to read events from the positions of stars and planets. In this story astrologers are offered as the way to learn what would please the heavens — the route Velu chooses not to take.

Forlorn, dejected, ceaseless. Three words the story leans on, and three worth borrowing. Barren land that nobody can work looks forlorn — sad and neglected. Velu comes back from the weather office dejected — sad and disappointed. And the cultivation his land has had year after year is called ceaseless — continuous, with no break in it. Learn these three and you can describe both the field and the man in the story's own register.

Crusted. Formed a hard outer layer. It is used of ground that has hardened and cracked in the heat, and it quietly explains why no work is possible: a plough cannot open earth in that state.