Shashi

"Pay the full amount," Anwar says, "start the deductions from Friday." Dharmendra and Harish laugh. "How shall we explain that to the malik?"

The plants will lift up, and they will bloom white all at once across the plantation, making these tropical tracts look like they're snowed upon.

"But why must you be close to nature? The wild must live undisturbed in the wild, and the human must stay put in the city."

Kenyan coffee planters, who took to multi-stem farming and returned to the single system, hold empirical proof that multi-stem doesn't work.

The crew is doing damage control now, drawing back the Yara from the base of the pepper and pushing it toward the mulch around the cardamom.

Birds, peafowl, hare, fox, boar. Trees, plants, and vines. Every rich shade of green. Who in his senses will argue you have caused damage here?

The gods decide if a bean will make it to somebody’s gut or if it will merely rot in the soil that sprouted it.

"Why this particular fear of the mandala"? I asked him. "The cobra is poisonous, and they're here in greater numbers. You never mention a cobra sighting."

It's a blue-topped bright-green world now during June, and more avians than ever in the twelve years I've known the place have flown into the plantation.