Because of better connectivity and communication, there have been few food shortages; the full brunt of famine will not be felt until next year. Zoramthanga sounded upbeat when I last talked to him. He had just made a deal to supply paper mills in Assam and Bangladesh with 420,000 tons of mautak, harvested before it died, and he told me he had personally invented three machines for flattening and peeling the bamboo so it can be made into pressed bamboo board, which is revolutionizing the flooring in Mizoram. “This is an example of how we are using the catastrophe as a stepping-stone, and I think we will end up coming out of it economically better than we were before.”

There is no confirmation of the mautak fruit’s alleged aphrodisiac properties, but some have reported that the juice is an effective agent against dandruff.

As the sazu puang was building to its climax, there was an unrelated outbreak of some two billion rats, unleashed by heavy rain and flooding, in central China. As of July, 6,000 square miles of cropland had been wiped out.

Back in New Delhi, I roam the incredibly congested quarter of Paharganj. The streets are packed with pedestrians, bicycle and auto rickshaws, and the occasional car or cow or emaciated pariah dog. The air, thick with diesel exhaust and other fumes, is scarcely breathable. When the pedestrian flow—about a thousand people per block—hits a major artery, clogged with motor traffic, it swells into a critical mass and then swarms across the road, overwhelming the traffic and forcing the nervous, hyperactive drivers to stop. As hundreds of people scurry among the cars and trucks and motorcycles, I hop into an auto rickshaw driven by an old bearded Sikh in a blue turban who pulls fearlessly into the frantic, helter-skelter traffic, which has now resumed. With his eyes darting quickly in every direction and his masterful steers and last-minute veers, he reminds me of a wily old rat. Indeed, the behavior of this whole human throng is not so different from that of a tide of rats.

I can’t help seeing a parallel with the disaster looming in Mizoram. The parable is obvious: the human race is swarming over the planet and devouring everything in its path. One day, in the not-too-distant future, it will have exhausted the natural resources available to it. Will we then, like Mizoram’s rats, experience a massive Malthusian die-off, or will human ingenuity save the day?

The latest news, from the United Nations’ four-year, $24 million Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, conducted by 1,360 experts worldwide, is that two-thirds of the world’s resources are used up. Everything across the board—wood, water, fish, land—is running out. The continued existence of up to 30 percent of the species on earth is in question. Frogs, honeybees, polar bears, freshwater mussels, and some of our beloved songbirds are experiencing mysterious die-offs or drastic reductions in their numbers. And our population is scheduled to hit nine billion by midcentury. Mathematically, we seem headed for catastrophe.

But whatever happens to us, my hunch is that the bamboos will survive. One of the world’s most ancient and adaptable life-forms, they have been around for more than 60 million years. There are about 1,200 known species in this enormous family of giant woody tropical grasses, and undoubtedly hundreds more to be identified, so its prospects seem promising, although some 600 species are now endangered. And the rats will not be disappearing anytime soon. Like the bamboo, they evolved millions of years before we came on the scene and are likely to remain long after we’ve vanished. They are always waiting in the wings, waiting for their moment, ever vigilant.

Nature will recover from what we are doing to it. The show will go on, and the mautam, I suspect, will continue to come every half-century, regardless of whether people are still around to suffer its consequences. It seems to be in no immediate danger of extinction—unlike so many things in the world.

Alex Shoumatoff is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair and the author of the 1988 book African Madness. His writings can be found online at Dispatches from the Vanishing World.