landscapes for weeks. As farms go, it was as ordi-
nary as Yadav was extraordinary.
“We run things here. It is a necessity,” said
Yadav, the stern matriarch of her all-woman
smallholding. “All the men are away working
in the city.”
I asked about harvests. (Not good.) About
fickle weather. (The monsoons now gave out
too soon.) Yadav was among the 600 million
people— nearly half the Indian population—
enduring the worst water crisis in the world. I
saw stabs at sustainability at the ant level. Villag-
ers hoed tens of thousands of small check dams
to try to capture each drop of rainwater. Some
were adopting older, less profitable but drought-
adapted crops such as millet. But these efforts
overlooked worse bottlenecks.
When lost in a wilderness, goes the adage, fol-
low rivers. Water flows to civilization. I always had
taken this advice. And civilization looked like this:
Saroj Devi Yadav, forced into marriage at 13,
tilled the fields with her granddaughters. Such
women make up the bulk of the agricultural
workforce across much of India. But like other
women, she didn’t own the actual soil. Her
absent husband did. India still lies squarely
under the feet of men.I BROKE MY WALK
IN YANGON.
The military was shooting hundreds of citizens.
A prolonged civil war was ramping up. The trail
ahead was too dangerous. Violating the protocol
of my journey, such as it is, I left Myanmar and
flew to China.
In Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history Chernobyl
Prayer, a child recalls a grandmother taking
leave of her poisoned, radioactive farm, emp-
tying her millet in the garden “for God’s birds,”
and then scattering hen’s eggs for the abandoned
cat and dog. “Then she bowed to the house. She138 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC