By WL Hangshing
While looking for my ball at the 5th fairway, I came upon a mushroom. It was mahogany brown, fleshy looking and the size of about a saucer. It looked delicious and I wondered if it was an edible kind even as I remembered that some mushrooms were poisonous.
But again, by Taotatis! Even the poisonous ones have immense medicinal value and could fetch a high price. Either way, before me was the prospect of some business fortune as mushroom farming was an enterprise that demanded the minimum of investments, the only input requirements being ‘bullshit and darkness’.
The one obstacle in the way of the dark dreamy mushrooming of wealth lay in being able to distinguish the edible mushrooms from the poisonous. One way to do that was to eat it. As they say, the proof of the poison is in the eating! Or was that one about a pudding? A mushroom pudding?
I couldn’t find my ball. It was lost in the tall grass and among the mushrooms.
It began to drizzle a fizzle again and up went the oversized golf umbrellas with the caddies. The intermittent rain and the foreboding dark overcast sky were good for mushrooms but not so for golf.
The retired CMD of the Meghalaya Power Corporation, a top notch bureaucrat, was in our foursome. He grimaced at the falling drops and tasted the rain-bearing wind with his fingers. He expressed his unhappiness, not with the game that was in danger of being drenched out, not with the drizzly rain, but with the scantiness of the rain! He was worried, like nobody else in Meghalaya was.
Just like in 2016, the monsoons this year had till now eluded the Khasi hills. He was very serious as he explained that we were already into July and that the water in the Umiam water reservoir should have reached 80 ft by now, but that it was hardly about 40.2 or something; that the otherwise picturesque lake, commonly known as Barapani, was baring an exposed look of its muddy, ferric-brown banks and that if the regular monsoons didn’t hit us soon, even the bottoms would get an indecent exposure.
Much of the electricity supply of the state came from the hydro-power generated from the dammed lake, the level of which solely depended on the monsoon-fed streams and rivers of the hills that eventually flowed into Umiam.
He looked a worried man, and his worry got infectious with the rest of the foursome. He however birdied the hole with a near-perfect chip and then a putt and took the game away.
Golf is all about strategising the distance, the hazards, and the risks, and most of all it is a mental battle within and without of oneself. It was all about maintaining your equanimity regardless of all distractions. I think he got us there. Our minds did wander off, even if momentarily. Touché’!
’Twas a swish in the tail
Of the Umiam Alligator
Or to put it as you may like
’Twas a twist in the tale
Of the chief managing director
(The author is Chief Commissioner of GST and Customs, NE Region, Shillong)