Thanks to Diagonal Crossing

Almost all of my friends I went to school with are now far away from me. Some are gone forever. Others (who were never in my immediate circle) stay in touch, as do the ones I went fishing, swimming, biking, cashew-nut-gathering and foraging-for-wild-berries with. A chance meeting would make the latter group reconnect inseparably almost instantaneously - an instant anti-aging medication. Nothing seems to bond people as strongly as good times shared with one another.

We went around wading through run-off rain water during the monsoon, and diagonally crossing the tilled paddy fields, trampling solid dry-as-dust lumps of soils into a single-file walking trail. Roads were dusty in the summer, and muddy during the monsoon. That was a time when our village was not fully free from open defecation. It reminds me of a line from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “The excrement dried in the sun, turned to dust, and was inhaled by everyone along with the joys of Christmas in the cool, gentle breezes of December”.

 Experiencing the bliss of ignorance, people did just this as a bus or lorry passed by on sunny days, and they must have got infected by fecal worms and germs when wading through run-off water. We survived somehow, though, thanks (in part) to modern medicine and (in part) to better immunity those days.

We had numerous shortcuts to go to places, crossing rivers and canals, climbing hills, trespassing farmland, exploring courtyards of houses in the neighborhoods, and even cutting across swathes of emerald green paddy fields. These fields would turn golden as harvesting season drew near. My eyes feasted on the lush greenery as I made my way to my mother’s home. Walking on muddy boundary walls raised knee-high forming squares or rectangles wasn’t short way though. As a tradeoff, the dewdrops in the blades of grass washed our feet in the morning.

Harvesting season brought happiness to all. But for us kids, it did so for different reasons. It goes without saying that our long list of demands – whose fulfillment had been put off until “after the harvest” - would mostly be met at this time. The golden grains were reaped by the elders, and the grains that fell to the ground from the ears and stalks were for us kids to glean. Note that these were not left behind for cosmetic reasons, as in present-day commercial farming. We kids would enjoy a rice flake party with homegrown finger bananas. Interestingly, harvest time coincided with the summer vacation, so the kids would have a free playground until it started raining. And we were free to cross the fields diagonally, saving time and steps to go places and reach home earlier.

We didn’t know about Pythagoras’s theorem - about the three sides of a right triangle - then. This theorem states that the square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. It is wonderful to realize that natural laws, as they find their expression in geometry, apply even if we don’t know about them.