It IS A SWELTERING AFTERNOON in Curtorim, South Goa, and Santano Rodrigues is arguing with his friends over when to eat lunch. He’s spent all morning supervising machinery and inspecting large mounds of grain with farmers, and he is now zipping around the office he shares with the village library. He is looking through maps, making lists, as the others in the room converge around a table with noodles and bottles of lemonade.
“He never eats!” his friend Michaela Pais tells me. “No time for wasting,” he shouts back. “My mother, she eats for me!”
Rodrigues’s restlessness is not misplaced. It is an important day, one that he’s been anticipating for months. Rodrigues is overseeing the inauguration of a new mechanism, a metal rice boiler two agriculture students developed. He hopes the boiler will become a new harvest ritual in the village. In Curtorim, rice grains, especially those of indigenous varieties, need to be plucked, sorted, threshed, and then boiled for the skin to separate from the grain, after which they are stored. This process is usually done in metal pots on wood fire and supervised during the process. The new boiler is designed to ease these tasks, the students tell us onlookers. A large barrel with an inbuilt electrical drainage system, the instrument, which is two hundred liters in size, can boil ninety kilograms of harvested rice at once, requiring less water and labor and keeping farmers from the hazards of wood fire and coal. “Now no one can make excuses!” Rodrigues says.
As the young men set up the boiler in the yellow courtyard, Rodrigues ushers in a group that he introduces as the Curtorim Biodiversity Management Committee. Elderly locals sit down to drink tea and eat samosas, and the room brightens with noise. An English schoolteacher from the village tells me a story about a determined millipede who counts its legs every day. “Santano,” he says to me, “he is our millipede.”
I watch Rodrigues as Pais pours large quantities of rice into the boiler. He looks nervous. “If it spoils, I am to blame,” he frets. The others are optimistic, clapping their hands in anticipation. Rodrigues won’t stop chewing his nails. Pritesh Mayekar, one of the students who set up the boiler, tells me that Rodrigues chased him for months to inaugurate the device. “Uncle really pushed us to finish,” he says with a shrug. “Young people don’t farm that much. It’s still people my parents’ age. He wants to make things easy for them.”
Curtorim is a predominantly rice-farming village, sometimes known as the “Granary of Salcette” due to its history of rice production. Rice is a culture here, not merely a livelihood, grown over several systems of land and irrigation that have been sustained over centuries. In Goa, rice is grown in (or uplands), (midlands), and (low-lying wetlands), the most challenging to farm. As we wait for the rice to boil, Rodrigues rolls down a wall-size map of the village’s various land systems, and Pais points to the khazans: seven in
