How did Hari Prasad carry water to the trees?

Nobody in the village could remember exactly when Hari Prasad started planting trees along the highway. Some said it was the year his son left for the city; others said it was after the long drought, when the bare road shimmered so fiercely in the heat that the buses would not stop.

What everybody remembered was the watering. Every evening for thirty years, he walked the four kilometres to the last sapling with two buckets on a pole across his shoulders, and walked back in the dark. People laughed at first. Then they stopped laughing and started giving him directions to places where a tree would grow.

The trees grew slowly, as trees do. A tree planted by a man of forty gives its best shade to a man of seventy. By the time Hari Prasad's neem and peepal trees had met over the road, he walked with a stick, and a boy from the school carried the buckets.

Last summer a journalist came from the city to ask him why he had done it. He thought about the question for a long time.

"I was hot," he said at last. "The road was hot. I thought, somebody should do something."

"But why you?"

He looked up at the green roof over the road, where a lorry had stopped in the shade and its driver was asleep in the cab.

"I was the somebody who was there," he said.