By the time the new rains had settled into a rhythm — no longer surprise showers but a calculated presence — I had moved from intuition to instrumentation. What began as mere observation of weather had now become a primitive climate model, shaped by my hands, memory, and intention.
The soil had spoken. But now I needed the sky to speak back.
I built a crude anemometer: dried leaves tied to spokes, balanced on a clay axis, mounted on a bamboo shaft. It spun with grace, and I charted wind patterns with Kittu's help.
"Why are you chasing the air, brother?"
"Because it moves everything else. Even destiny."
Wind determined pollen travel, cooling rate, evaporation loss. Each factor amplified or dampened plant behavior. It was like tuning a neural network — sensitive to weight changes.
The first optimization: when to irrigate.
The village had rules — age-old, respected, never questioned. Water at dawn or dusk, not midday. But that rule assumed uniformity of sunlight. It assumed the sun didn't flicker behind shifting clouds. It assumed evaporation was constant.
I measured differently.
One week I irrigated a quadrant at precise solar noon. Another I irrigated before dawn. I watched for weed emergence, leaf curl, ground softness.
The result? Noon irrigation under overcast skies yielded more robust stem thickening. Plants were less leggy. Root penetration deeper.
Conclusion: the rule wasn't wrong — just blind to variables.
Father squinted at the results. "You're growing like the plants. Changing with the sun."
"Or making it change with me."
He laughed. "You dream big."
He did not know I had created a reward function in my mind: every drop saved, every root anchored, every leaf unspoiled was a datapoint pushing me toward optimum yield.
Optimization wasn't always mechanical.
The next system I optimized: labor.
I watched how our elders harvested — bent backs, staggered rows, repetitive motion. They grew tired by noon. Errors increased: broken stalks, missed bundles.
I reconfigured motion — changing their step cadence subtly, rotating responsibilities hourly.
Productivity increased. Fatigue decreased.
I never claimed credit. I let it appear as seasonal blessing.
But in my ledger, I marked the parameters. Precision, frequency, morale.
Another optimization: pest flow.
I noticed grasshoppers followed light patterns at certain times. I redirected them using reflective surfaces: old copper dishes and polished shells.
It worked. Like redirecting network traffic away from a DDoS attack.
My power — my divine reward — did not manifest in golden miracles. It emerged as something better: pattern recognition made invincible.
Kittu whispered to me, "Sometimes I think you are not like us."
"I am exactly like you. Just… slightly more deliberate."
Rain came heavily that week. The new water channels I dug — precisely sloped, mathematically inclined — did not flood. Every other house saw leakage.
I didn't smile. I checked for flaws. It wasn't humility. It was debug mode.
We constructed a new grain store using alternate layers of hay and rock salt — something I read in the Jain scroll. It kept humidity low. Father said it was witchcraft.
I told him, "Just logic in disguise."
He smiled uneasily. Some part of him had begun to fear me. Or maybe revere. I couldn't tell the difference anymore.
But I still failed.
One afternoon, I overcorrected irrigation, trusting my new system too much. It drowned a third of the onion plot. We lost weeks of effort.
I didn't lie to fix it.
I took the pain, the lecture, the silence from father.
That night, I wrote a truth into the clay beside my bed:
"Failure is only noise if unmeasured."
I slept like a monk.
The next week, I tried again. With even more caution. Redefined slope. Accounted for micro-drainage.
We recovered some yield. But more importantly, I rewrote the irrigation policy for our family — in my mind, and soon in everyone's routines.
Change crept in like roots under soil.
The final optimization of that season: myself.
I timed my sleep cycles using star movement and moon phase. I experimented with different food combinations to increase strength without slowing thought.
I cataloged which herbs increased wakefulness, which calmed breath. I built rituals into routine: sharp mornings, silent dusk, review by twilight.
The changes were imperceptible. But I knew.
I had become the most efficient processor in this village.
And not once had I used my power for glory.
I saved it only for understanding. That night, under a sky glazed with vapor, I whispered my next truth: "From now on, every act of effort — even invisible — will reward me a hundredfold." A breeze answered. It smelled of cinnamon, salt, and possibility.
The final trial of this farming experiment wasn't on the field, but inside me.
For all the data I had gathered, all the variables tested and optimized, there remained the uncertainty of life. The monsoon delayed. A nearby field succumbed to rust. A neighbor's ox died of exhaustion. I realized, with sobering humility, that no system—however well-modeled—escaped the chaotic variables of mortality, chance, and entropy.
I sat beneath a neem tree one morning, scribbling a crude flowchart into the mud with a stick. My younger brother Kittu watched in silence. It mapped not crop yield, but the decision tree of my own reactions: If yield fails → Analyze → Improve soil / seed / method. But I stopped midway, drawing a box that said: Do nothing.
Sometimes, a system must simply be—observed without intervention.
I closed my eyes. The earth was warm beneath me. My breathing slowed. The insects hummed in code. I heard the logic of roots, the distributed network of fungal communication beneath soil, a web of cooperation so subtle it would take a supercomputer to simulate.
Nature was not only predictable—it was intelligent in a language we had forgotten to translate.
That evening, I tried something absurd: I let Kittu decide where to plant a few remaining seeds. He scattered them without logic, dancing between rows like a squirrel. My instinct rebelled. My JEE-honed mind screamed for structure. But I silenced it.
Weeks later, to my astonishment, those haphazard seeds germinated just as strongly.
I added a note to my mental model: Random input may increase resilience.
That was the law of nature—not absolute control, but controlled relinquishment. Optimized chaos.
Harvest
By late autumn, the field bloomed. Not uniformly—some corners fared better than others—but in total, our yield doubled. The neighbors noticed. Whispers spread. "The potter's son… his field sings."
I smiled, silent. Let them believe the gods had blessed me.
When I carried the first bundle of golden grain home, Father stared in awe. "You… you did this?"
I nodded. "We all did. You. Ma. The earth. Even Kittu's mischief."
He hugged me then, tightly. I stiffened at first—such gestures were rare—but slowly, I returned it.
This was not just food. This was proof. That learning, that hard work, that quiet observation could bend the arc of fate.
And no divine power had been invoked. Not even once.
Legacy Files
That night I sat under the stars, writing everything I had learned in charcoal on dried palm leaves. My knowledge—algorithms, patterns, ratios, error margins—encoded not just in symbols, but metaphors, stories, rhythms.
I called it: "Krishi-Yantra: The Machine of Living Earth."
It was both textbook and scripture, data and dream.
One day, I would bury it in a clay urn, sealed against time. Someone, someday, would read it and understand that even in an age of gods and heroes, the mind could be its own kind of divinity.
As I folded the final leaf, I whispered:
"This is not farming. This is debugging reality."