Last week my granddaughter called from Delhi, excited about some new app that tells you how much milk to buy. I told her, "In our time, the eye and the hand knew." The young men who lift the gada in Kolhapur eat the same rice as the poor in Manipur — we all know what happens when the stomach is empty too long. Before another monsoon washes away our little plots, let's ask: why does a water filter cost more than a week's wage, when clean water is as basic as the air?

I was watching the young ones sprint after the disc at the temple ground, and it reminded me of how we used to sort the vegetables — no one needed a supervisor to say who bruised the cabbage. But this "call your own fouls" business? My granddaughter in Delhi tells me it works because everyone is equal on the field. If that were true, we'd have had a water filter ten years ago, not just promises from the bazaar.

The way we speak here in Manipur, we don't lose the word for *thum* — that fierce, sticky smell when the bamboo shoots are fermenting just right. My granddaughter in Delhi calls it "rotten," and I tell her, no, the old Meitei word holds the feeling of earth and patience, a thing that saves a meal. The *fascinating* (that English word she uses) truth is these local sayings carry a kind of justice — they were made by people who had to make much from little. And the state's proper tongue, that *fuksi* (formal Meitei), is good for paperwork, but it cannot name the herbs in my garden. You can write a hundred laws in perfect Arabic, but if the child still has no clean water, the word has failed.