ANUPAM Mishra is back from Barmer in Rajasthan full of news. There has been a downpour in the desert. Towns are under water. Railway stations have been decimated. An Air Force strip has been submerged. These are the headlines all over, but they are not Anupam's news. He has found three forgotten rivers, a subterranean bed of gypsum that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has confirmed and data which show that Barmer does get such downpours – even if the last one was in 1917.

Eighty-nine years is a long, long time. Everyone has forgotten Barmer's 1917 deluge. Everyone has also forgotten that at one time three rivers would serve as drainage channels and carry all that excess water into the Loni basin. When it did not rain for long, the rivers shrivelled up and people finally gave them up for dead. What used to be the courses of the rivers were built over. Now as the water looks for those old routes out of Barmer it runs into schools and homes and gobbles up fields. The rivers are back to life and they show no mercy on people who come in their way.