sarpanch had none). In one corner of the courtyard was the water container, a clay jar set in a solid square of masonry, an arrangement that recalled the tavern counters of Pompeii. Every necessary thing had its place.
A side passage led to a smaller, paved courtyard. This was at the back of the shop, which, according to a notice painted in English on the inside wall, was mortgaged – ‘hypothecated’ was the word used,and it seemed very fierce in the setting – to a bank. And then we were back in the lane.
A man of property, then, a man used to dealing with banks, and, as chairman of the village council, a politician and a kind of official: I thought the sarpanch must be the most important man in the village. But there was a grander: the Patel. The sarpanch was a shopkeeper, a money man; the Patel was a landowner, the biggest landowner in the village. He owned fifty good acres; and though he didn’t own people, the fate of whole families depended on the Patel. And to these people he was, literally, the Master.
To the house of the Patel, then, we went, by sudden public demand, as it seemed, and in equally sudden procession. The engineer was with us again, and there was a crowd, swamping the group around the sarpanch, who now, as we walked, appeared to hang back. Perhaps the Patel was in the crowd. It was hard to say. In the rush there had been no introductions, and among the elderly turbaned men, all looking like peasants, men connected with the work of the land, no one particularly stood out.
The house was indeed the grandest in the village. It was on two floors, and painted. Bright paint coloured the two peacocks carved over the doorway. The blank front wall was thick. Within that wall (as in some of the houses in Pompeii) stone steps led to the upper storey, a gallery repeating the raised veranda around the courtyard at ground level. The floor was of beaten earth, plastered with a mixture of mud and cow dung. To the left as we entered, on the raised veranda, almost a platform, were two pieces of furniture: a bed with an old striped bedspread embroidered with the name of the village in
nagari
characters, and a new sofa of ‘contemporary’ design with naked wooden legs and a covering in a shiny blue synthetic fabric: the Western-style sofa, sitting in the traditional house just like that and making its intended effect, a symbol of wealth and modernity, like the fluorescent light tube above the entrance.
That part of the veranda with the bed and sofa was for receivingvisitors. Visitors did not go beyond this to the courtyard unless they were invited to do so. On the raised veranda to the right of the entrance there was no furniture, only four full sacks of grain, an older and truer symbol of wealth in this land of rock and drought. It was a house of plenty, a house of grain. Grain was spread out to dry in the sunlit courtyard; and in the open rooms on either side were wickerwork silos of grain, silos that looked like enormous baskets, as tall as a man, the wickerwork plastered to keep out rats, and plastered, like the floor, with mud and cow dung.
Invited to look around, received now as guests rather than official visitors, we walked past the grain drying in the courtyard to the kitchen at the back. The roof sloped low; after the sunlight of the courtyard it was dark. To the left a woman was making curds, standing over the high clay jar and using one of the earliest tools made by civilized man: a cord double-wound around a pole and pulled on each end in turn: the carpenter’s drill of ancient Egypt, and also the very churning tool depicted in those eighteenth-century miniatures from the far north of India that deal with the frolics of the dark god Krishna among the pale milkmaids. In the kitchen gloom to the right a
chulha
or earthen fireplace glowed: to me romantic, but the engineer said that a simple hinged opening in the roof would get rid of the smoke and spare the women’s eyes.
Our visit wasn’t
A side passage led to a smaller, paved courtyard. This was at the back of the shop, which, according to a notice painted in English on the inside wall, was mortgaged – ‘hypothecated’ was the word used,and it seemed very fierce in the setting – to a bank. And then we were back in the lane.
A man of property, then, a man used to dealing with banks, and, as chairman of the village council, a politician and a kind of official: I thought the sarpanch must be the most important man in the village. But there was a grander: the Patel. The sarpanch was a shopkeeper, a money man; the Patel was a landowner, the biggest landowner in the village. He owned fifty good acres; and though he didn’t own people, the fate of whole families depended on the Patel. And to these people he was, literally, the Master.
To the house of the Patel, then, we went, by sudden public demand, as it seemed, and in equally sudden procession. The engineer was with us again, and there was a crowd, swamping the group around the sarpanch, who now, as we walked, appeared to hang back. Perhaps the Patel was in the crowd. It was hard to say. In the rush there had been no introductions, and among the elderly turbaned men, all looking like peasants, men connected with the work of the land, no one particularly stood out.
The house was indeed the grandest in the village. It was on two floors, and painted. Bright paint coloured the two peacocks carved over the doorway. The blank front wall was thick. Within that wall (as in some of the houses in Pompeii) stone steps led to the upper storey, a gallery repeating the raised veranda around the courtyard at ground level. The floor was of beaten earth, plastered with a mixture of mud and cow dung. To the left as we entered, on the raised veranda, almost a platform, were two pieces of furniture: a bed with an old striped bedspread embroidered with the name of the village in
nagari
characters, and a new sofa of ‘contemporary’ design with naked wooden legs and a covering in a shiny blue synthetic fabric: the Western-style sofa, sitting in the traditional house just like that and making its intended effect, a symbol of wealth and modernity, like the fluorescent light tube above the entrance.
That part of the veranda with the bed and sofa was for receivingvisitors. Visitors did not go beyond this to the courtyard unless they were invited to do so. On the raised veranda to the right of the entrance there was no furniture, only four full sacks of grain, an older and truer symbol of wealth in this land of rock and drought. It was a house of plenty, a house of grain. Grain was spread out to dry in the sunlit courtyard; and in the open rooms on either side were wickerwork silos of grain, silos that looked like enormous baskets, as tall as a man, the wickerwork plastered to keep out rats, and plastered, like the floor, with mud and cow dung.
Invited to look around, received now as guests rather than official visitors, we walked past the grain drying in the courtyard to the kitchen at the back. The roof sloped low; after the sunlight of the courtyard it was dark. To the left a woman was making curds, standing over the high clay jar and using one of the earliest tools made by civilized man: a cord double-wound around a pole and pulled on each end in turn: the carpenter’s drill of ancient Egypt, and also the very churning tool depicted in those eighteenth-century miniatures from the far north of India that deal with the frolics of the dark god Krishna among the pale milkmaids. In the kitchen gloom to the right a
chulha
or earthen fireplace glowed: to me romantic, but the engineer said that a simple hinged opening in the roof would get rid of the smoke and spare the women’s eyes.
Our visit wasn’t
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