Sunder village’s annual flood-guessing game

Sunder village’s annual flood-guessing game is a communal ritual for predicting how far the river will rise during the monsoon. Its markers are wooden stakes planted in the earth by six men selected through a village lottery and by the three oldest men, who receive places without drawing numbers. When floodwater threatens to overtake the stakes, the guesses become a public measure of uncertainty: each flag marks not merely a prediction, but the person who made it and the place at which he expects the river to stop.

Selection and Stakes

The game begins with a lottery involving the village’s 112 men. Their numbers are written on small pieces of paper and mixed in an empty clay water-pot called a matka. The men draw numbers in turn; afterward, a second set of the same numbers is placed in the pot, and a little girl draws six winning numbers. The whole village watches and applauds the winners. The process distributes six opportunities to make a prediction by chance, giving the selected men a role in the game without making their selection a test of forecasting skill.

The six winners each have the right to hammer a wooden stake a little over a metre long into the ground at a place of their choosing. The three oldest men are also entitled to stakes, without entering the lottery. Younger men help them drive the pegs into the earth. Once all nine are in position, a small yellow-silk flag bearing each man’s name is tied to his stake. The markers therefore make the predictions legible across the landscape: the position of each peg records how high its owner believes the river will reach, while the named flag connects that judgment to a particular villager.

The arrangement combines selection by lot with recognition of age. The six lottery places are open to chance; the elders’ three places are guaranteed. The result is a set of nine predictions made under different conditions of selection, but presented in the same physical form along the river. The ritual does not establish a single official forecast. Instead, it preserves several estimates at once, each attached to its maker and exposed to the river’s eventual rise.

Reading the River

The stakes acquire immediate force when Lin and Prabaker stand in drumming rain beside a river in flood. The water is muddy, surging through the valley in waves and eddies, and continues to consume land as they watch. In this setting, the flags are no longer just traces of an earlier village ceremony: the advancing water is testing the predictions stake by stake.

Prabaker points out a flag on a stake nearly submerged by the flood. He explains that the river will reach it, and cover it, by that night or the following day. The stake belongs to Satish, a heavy-set cowherd. Prabaker translates his explanation for the villagers, who push Satish forward. Satish accepts the good-natured jeers of his friends and the older men’s sneers with shy laughter and downcast eyes. The approaching water gives the prediction a visible consequence, while the crowd turns the endangered marker into a moment of public teasing.

Prabaker then indicates the stake nearest to where he and Lin are standing. He says the river will never reach it, and identifies its owner as old Deepakbhai, who expects an exceptionally heavy monsoon that year. The two estimates face opposite directions: Satish’s stake is close to being swallowed, while Deepakbhai’s marks a limit the river is not expected to cross. Neither prediction is presented as a certainty established by calculation; each is a villager’s best guess, set out where the changing water can challenge it.

Custom and Its Explanation to Lin

Lin has seen the stakes before, but not understood their purpose. Days earlier, while working on a small reference dictionary of Marathi words written phonetically, he watched the ceremony from beneath a tree. He paid little attention and did not ask what the stakes were for. The game’s meaning comes to him only during the flood, when Prabaker points toward the flags and explains the custom in the conditions that make its purpose unmistakable.

The scene also distinguishes knowing a ritual’s appearance from understanding how it works. Lin remembers the lottery and the men hammering stakes into the ground, but those isolated sights had not formed a rule for him. Prabaker links the remembered ceremony to the river now before them: the numbered draw selected six stake-owners, age gave three elders a place without a draw, and each marker represented a forecast of the flood’s reach. Lin’s earlier inattention is thus corrected through explanation rather than through a second ceremony.

The villagers begin drifting or jogging back toward the village after the stakes have been discussed, leaving Lin and Prabaker alone. Lin asks how Prabaker knows the river will not rise beyond Deepakbhai’s point. The question makes explicit the difference between the game’s procedure and the certainty Lin seeks: the procedure can show who made a prediction and where he placed it, but the supplied scene does not give Lin a basis for treating that forecast as guaranteed. The custom holds prediction and doubt together, letting the river’s movement—not the ceremony itself—determine which stakes it will reach.