**pics/vids added as of 6/1; post complete**
Khuri is located in the Indian State of Rajasthan, which itself is probably the most popular area for tourists, as it has Agra (the Taj Mahal is there), and other large cities like Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udiapur, and Jaisalmer, along with some religious cities like Pushkar, and some remote areas like Khuri and Bikaner. The colors of the saris, and scarves for the women are amazing. Rajasthan is also known for its spice market which predates much of recorded history.
Khuri (pronounced Khoo-dhi) is a small village southwest of Jaisalmer by about 25 miles or so, as best I can reckon. In this little village is a man named Badal Singh and in his house, and with his family, I am staying.
I originally found this opportunity on an India-related online forum that I frequent called IndiaMike.com, and the title of the thread was something like, “A Taste of Simple Village Life” and it couldn’t have been more apt.
Badalji (the suffix -ji is added to names as a measure of respect) has lived in Khuri his whole life, which means since 1962. He was born here in this “house” when his parents only had one “room.” He used the word room for the stone portions of the compound. There are several huts in the compound also, and the whole thing is situated around an interior courtyard around 400 sq/ft. My room has two doors, one to the courtyard and one to the front terrace area, and two windows that face the dirt lane out front which is the Khuri main drag.
I have walked down the lane to the left, and there are two little tiny markets about 2 minutes, kind of like what we would call a convenience store, and I guess it really is a convenience here. You can’t walk in, there is no place for a person inside, beside the person selling you something. Instead, you are on the outside, next to the street, and you order as if from an ice cream counter. I asked the man if he had some cookies, and he pointed to some snack bags of Indian potato chips. “No, like a cookie, sweet.” That was the best way I could describe it, horrible I know, since I was trying to describe a cookie in the first place!
The man says “biscuits?” and I ask him to show me. They look like they will do the trick, so I buy a couple liters of water and two things of biscuits. Biscuits are in fact, cookies, though not in an Oreo or Toll-House cookie kind of way. More like a biscotti type sweetness, which isn’t as much as you’d expect for a cookie. Regardless, I had several and they were good.
When Badalji told me how to get to the markets, I asked him if he would like a water. He declined. Since then, I have offered him (and his son) some biscuits, but they declined them also. I’m not sure if it’s a cultural (possibly caste) thing, or if he’s just being polite. And Badalji is polite. He is one of the most gentle men I’ve ever come across, and reminds me of my Grandfather on my dad’s side. The life here is simple, and Badalji is content with what he has, which from the Western perspective is not much.
He has 4 children (as far as I can tell) and a wife, and they have some goats and some cows that roam around, up and down the street and into the desert around here, eating the scrub bushes which are quite green for being in the desert. The cows stop by in the morning for water from his “well” which is a big underground water storage area with a wooden hatch as a lid, and then go about their business during the day, and come back again in the evening for food and more water. The goats seem to mainly overnight somewhere else, and come during the afternoon. Except for the stragglers who walk from the street to the courtyard, regardless of time, right into the main portion of the house, pausing only briefly as they pass my room, to look in, and wonder, “What’s the white guy doing here?”
Badalji gets water for all the animals that come around, though if they are not his they can seem to overstay their welcome, and get “chased” off with the gentlest clucking sound I’ve ever heard come out of a person. It’s like St. Francis of Assisi here in Khuri. There is a stray dog and two stray cats that pop by, and he gives them some milk from his cows.
He has his son serve my simple meals on metal trays and in metal dishes, and he is nearly as gentle as his father. Yesterday when I arrived, Badalji had his wife make me some chapattis (though these were much harder and hardier than the ones I’ve had so far; he said made with “millet” which unfortunately doesn’t help me), along with some rice and a simple dish of potato/garlic/onion that was a bright yellow. From what I understand, Badal farms after the monsoon for a few months and grows lentils and the millet and watermelons.
Last night’s dinner was chapattis, rice, and potato/lentils. Breakfast this morning was a stack of about 7 chapattis that were fried in ghee (which is clarified butter, which itself is hand churned from the cow 15 feet away) and they seemed to have a bit of sugar in them. I took some black tea also with sugar. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but the sugar in India is really something. It is white, though not as white as the table sugar in the US. But it’s not the color that makes it so different. It’s the taste. I don’t know if you’ve ever had natural sugar before, like Turbinado sugar, but it has more of the molasses left in it, which gives it a brownish color, a slower sweetness, and a fuller flavor. The “white” sugar here tastes about halfway between American table sugar and Turbinado sugar. I would export it if I could, I think Americans would go for it. I would use it exclusively.
Anyway, the food is very simple and it is served about 30 minutes to an hour after he asks me if I’d like some food, and I say yes. I am the only guest, and the only non-Indian in the village, except for a Southeast Asian man of some sort I saw with a camera a bit ago.
Yesterday, Badalji tells me, it reached 45 degrees here, which in Fahrenheit means damn hot. Because of this (45 equals 113, couldn’t leave you hanging), it will be too hot in the room, so he suggests I sleep on the roof. He has his son carry a spring bed-frame up to the top of the building and make a bed up for me. I fell asleep listening to celebrations for a wedding in a nearby village, and the wind. It was quite an experience. I woke up feeling (though not being, mom) naked as the sun had bathed the village in light, and the cows were mooing, and the baby goats that stayed the night were bleating for some milk from their mother. Some dogs were barking in the distance, and I could hear the cling-clang of the women fetching water in the heavy metal containers that they carry on their shoulders or their heads. I felt a little bit like the last one up and a bit exposed seeing the whole village from the roof.
To say this place has a “chill vibe” is probably the understatement of the century. This places seems like time has just plain stopped. Like many places and situations in India, the sacred and the profane are mixed right in together. Like in Varanasi, when I was enjoying the surreal peacefulness of the return boat ride on the Ganges, the boat-wallah’s cell phone starts going off with this over-the-top-kind-of-typically-Indian-overdone-loud-busy-and-did-I-mention-loud ringtone. Or walking through the real slums in Delhi near the Lotus temple and seeing satellite dishes on top of the “roof” made from sticks and mud and plastic bags. And so, in the same vain, I heard noise from what sounded like a television from a few houses down last night, and some of the kids here wear jeans instead of the more traditional, free-flowing cotton, or even lightweight slacks (which so many people seem to wear here). All in all though, this seems like as close to a time-capsule as I can imagine at this point.
When I came down stairs from the roof this morning, Badalji’s wife was making butter from the milk using a type of wooden bow-string, a rickety wooden framework with a wooden paddle, and some handmade rope. It was operated very similarly to the way in which “primitive” cultures start fire, the same way you see it made on survival shows like Dual Survival or Survivorman or Bear Grylls’ show.
Men are walking their camels down the main drag, neck bells clanging, huge leather saddlebags straddling the tall beast, filled with water.
When a camel or a cow drops a pie in the street out front, a girl will run out to it, collect the pieces (they tend to defecate while walking, possibly for sport), lump them into a pile and draw a circle in the sand around the pile with her fingers. I think this means she claims it, in case anyone else wanders by and decides to take a “5-finger discount” on the pile. She comes back a minute later with a big round tub made of heavy and hard plastic, like a supersized oil pan for changing the engine oil in your car. She picks up the lump and drops it in the pan, slings the pan on her hip, somehow without getting the beautiful colors dirty, and walks away to find another pile.
This collection is pressed onto hot slabs of stone to dry, and the lightweight half-inch dung plate when done, is used as fuel to cook the food I’m eating.
This type of recycling is hard-core and makes sense in an environment with so few resources and so ancient. You can actually feel how old this place is, you can get a sense of the generations and generations and generations that have lived here and made their living without much Western ambition or aspiration.
Back in time, but some things never change. Here or in other parts of India or in America. Kids play chase and giggle. They wave and smile and sing songs to themselves. When the children aren’t minding mom, they hear about it. When there’s an argument going on and dad comes in, things get quiet. Even in a place like Khuri, which is so far removed from anything I’ve experienced so far, so much of the underlying Thing remains unchanged and really is in itself, essentially unchangeable.
This afternoon, I go into the desert proper on a camel. I think I will be the only one. I have forgotten a hat, but Badalji says he has one that someone has left here before. I’m looking forward to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment