Most years at Meherabad pilgrim season arrives with a flush of green. For just about the time that the Pilgrim Centre opens on June 15th, the monsoon winds blow in from the Arabian Sea, carrying with them the first few heavy rainfalls. In no time the bare brown earth is fringed with grass and weed, and hardy desert frogs are hopping around after nightfall under the neem and banyan trees. But by the closing of pilgrim season in March, it hasn’t rained in five months, and the ground is utterly parched. And as the last lingering pilgrims head for Mumbai and their flights home, Meherabad and Meherazad residents settle in for the long, hot summer.

While April-May in Ahmednagar are something of an endurance trial in the best of circumstances, this season, on top of the usual discomfort, we are facing the added hardship of a severe water shortage. Indeed, the situation this year is genuinely critical. For more than a month now most of the Meherabad wells have been dry. Even the most productive wells have been reduced in their output from a gush to a trickle; each morning the percolation of the nighttime hours is pumped out in a half-hour or so. And at the same time the municipal supply has become erratic. For even though the Trust has supposedly been allotted 100,000 liters every two days, heavy demand from the drought-stricken district has resulted in our being able to draw only a fraction of this total.

In view of the emergency, Meherabad residents have adopted austerity measures. All non-essential water uses have been cut out. Bathing is infrequent, and Spartan in style; “grey water” is being saved and used for flower pots and toilet cleaning. Meanwhile, Bhau and his team of “water workers” are trying to find some new source of water from the municipality. Much hinges on the success of their efforts! For indeed, with the second Young Adults Sahavas and the annual Silence Day gathering only two months off, the up-coming pilgrim season will bring with it some real challenges, should the 2002 monsoon fail to arrive on time.

Yet while dogs loll about on the verandas with their tongues hanging out, while thirsty fields bake and the Meherabad volleyball court transforms itself into a dust bowl, ironically, the trees of the district, veterans of many harsh summers, are celebrating in a riot of color. This effect is particularly dazzling at Meherazad, where you would almost think that the trees and bushes these days are competing with each other in a beauty pageant. Mandarin orange blossoms on the high branches of gulmor trees flame against an azure sky; brilliant yellow flowers of laburnum hang like grapes in large clusters; Indian frangipanis shoot out white and pink blossoms from the ends of their odd, stunted stems; vines of bougainvillaea wrap fences and lattices with their petals of fuchsia or white or raspberry; and the few lingering whitish-yellow jasmine flowers suffuse the morning air with their exquisite fragrance. And when the afternoon or early-evening simooms blow in across adjoining fields, their rushing sound in the leaves of the tall pipal trees is like the roaring of the sea.

To one like myself not born and bred to this environment, it is strange to witness such a garden of paradise showing off its finery in the middle of such infernal heat! Perhaps the good example of these trees sporting flowers will help inspire some of us humans to keep smiles on our faces, as we gasp our way through a torrid and bone-dry Maharashtrian high summer in the direction of a new pilgrim season and the hope of rain.