The halat, the Persian wheel, lifted water from a well with a chain of earthen pots on an endless rope, turned by a horizontal gear driven by a bullock walking a circle.
It could lift water from around ten metres and delivered continuously as long as the animal walked. It was the technology that made Punjab's pre-canal agriculture possible and it was in use here for at least six hundred years.
It has a sound, a creaking of wood on wood at the gear, and that sound is in the poetry. It also has a vocabulary: the tind is the pot, the mahl is the gear, the gaddi is the drum.
The tubewell replaced it. Diesel from the 1950s, electric from the 1960s, free power from 1997. Within about twenty years the halat went from universal to absent.
Complete working examples are now museum pieces. Broken gears and the odd stack of tinds sit beside abandoned wells in fields across the state, and most people under forty have never seen one turning.
It is not Persian and it is older than its name. Water wheels of the kind are described around the Mediterranean in antiquity, and the version with the pot chain and the right angle gearing is in India by the time of the Delhi Sultanate. Babur describes one working in the Punjab and thought it worth explaining to readers who had never seen the thing.
The gears were cut by the village carpenter, replaced as they wore, and the whole assembly could be maintained without any manufactured part.
Punjabi has words for the man who drove it, the ledge the water fell onto, the channel it ran into and each part of the gearing, and not one of those words has anything left to attach to. Vocabulary is the last part of a technology to go and it leaves nothing behind when it does.