The snow came late again

Ghulam Hussain has kept the same planting calendar for forty years. This March it failed him for the third time running, and he described it to me the way you’d describe a friend who’d started lying to you. Not angry, exactly. More like someone recalculating what they thought they knew.

The apricot flowers in the second week of March in Turtuk. That’s not a guess. It’s a schedule, one that governs when water gets released into the upper channels, when labour gets called in, when the buckwheat goes down. Snow before the flower is a gift. Snow after it is closer to a funeral. This year the snow came on the nineteenth.

What interests me isn’t the loss itself, which is measurable enough. It’s the argument that follows it. In the village council, the older men read the failure as a moral event: something owed, something slipping. The younger men read it as a climate event and want a different apricot varietal from the horticulture department. Both readings are correct, as far as I can tell. Only one of them is fundable.