The paddyfield in all its misty, blurry, newness. This is around 8–8:30 in the morning—people are already on their way to office-jobs, cows are already in their designated field-slots, etcetera. A beautiful (odd) thing about Wayanad is how cool (cold, even) the shades are while the rest of it gets superhot by 9:30–10. The lines on the road (in the first photo) are from tractors/tillers exiting the fields. The ride was uneventful; met a few regular dogs. Not Tiger. Tiger lives at the house next to the three-roads-intersection, down the hill. He’s mastered the art of sitting still outside his gate. We mistook him for a gunny bag once. He’s actively angry. The ones I met today were more shy than suspicious. The three puppies are gone. One of them had whined when Chellam gave him/her a nosing-exam last time. They’d looked well-fed so that is a relief.

The mist veils more cows—grazing between paddy-plots in the distance. You can—kind-of—see a black-and-white one to the right, facing away from the camera. Beyond that coconut-tree-line is where we live, atop a small-ish hill. A new paddy crop has come up in most of the fields, with plantain and spinach and weeds peppered in between.

The mounds of hay look like alien-movie monsters against the haze and the general people-less-ness of the field. Chellam keeps trying to find evidence of something around this particular one whenever she’s around. R thinks it must be rats. Or, less endearingly, snakes. Or both. Things are wild around these parts. (Last month we saw a bear along the road to Muthanga; it was a mostly casual encounter—for the bear. We freaked.)

Today, walking out to the butcher’s after the ride, we met so many (overwhelmingly large enough number; five) neighbours and folks we only sort-of know but everyone spoke to us as if we have been here for longer than a year.