Parboiled Rice

We were walking early one morning along a narrow path past fields of rice just outside Calcutta in Bengal, in India. It was early November, dry season in Bengal, and the sun was already bright and warm. The rice was golden, it was harvesttime, and in every field out across a large flat plain as far as we could see, there were groups of villagers working hard cutting and threshing rice. Their voices, together with the songs of birds and the occasional bump of a bicycle riding along the dirt path, were the only sounds to be heard. The landscape was entirely human in scale, people perspiring in the sun while harvesting their food, food that they—and their children—would eat for the next six months.