have been placed on this page. Here is the village in photos with some captions.
These goats go everywhere together and happily share the stoop in front of their owner’s home. If their owner does come into a time of desperation, they can each be sold for between 600-800 rupees a piece.
The villagers knew I was somewhat obsessed with random animals, so they pointed this guy out in the paddy field — which was sadly too dry to grow any rice. There’s no way to properly emphasize how devastatingly poor this year’s crop will be. I read a statistic today that more than half of the world’s underweight children live in South Asia, and two-thirds of the world’s hungry people live in Asia although only half the world’s population lives there. It is mind-boggling when you consider that the people on this planet who are capable of growing their own food have the most difficult time feeding themselves. I mean, if someone handed you a spade, a fertile acre of land, some seeds, and irrigation, do you think you could feed yourself for the year? Food for thought at the very least.
I have much greater appreciation for these footprints than for Warhol’s Dance Diagrams. Each print is the impression of a woman bearing 50 kg of cement mix on her head. Top that, Pollock.
This might slightly explain the wage disparity — women under umbrellas and men standing in the rain. I lived in the village for two weeks, when the heaviest monsoon rains were supposed to come. This was one of two days of rain.
On average, each family had five children. My hosts had six. But even if you’re the rare only child, it’s not hard to adopt a sibling. Nowhere else have I seen five year-olds take such an active role in caring for their one year-old neighbor. You’d see a small boy with a small unrelated toddler on his back, even bringing the younger child over to the water pump to wash her face. It seems that from a very young age, you have to learn not only how to play well with others but take care of and collaborate with them. You don’t really have any other way to settle disputes when mom and dad are working 8-hour days in the field.
Without a local Toys R Us or the means to buy toys, you’re constantly making them out of things you find. The boy to the right has constructed a dumbbell from a couple bamboo ends from breakfast and a stick in the middle. Other kids have collaborated to build a crude chariot out of wood that can seat a small toddler. Also, their version of a jungle gym is a goods carrier driven by one of the fathers to transport goods to far off cities. There, of course, are no safety regulations. At one point I confiscated a battery from one of the kids, who was beating it against the ground to crack it open. His mother told me, “Just a battery,” in Hindi. I explained to her that the ‘water’ inside was bad. I doubt my explanation of its dangers was adequate.
This wheat is being dried in the sun. The sun not only removes moisture but disinfects it and encourages insects to flee.
I doubt this family dressed itself with the intention of matching the color of the doorway. Beautiful image though, and it’s unsettling to think that they will suffer a food shortage this year. I may have passed along the mistaken message that whatever shortages in food they encounter can be made up by foraging. This is completely untrue — all the plants they encounter rely on heavy rains. Mushrooms and large bamboo shoots spring up overnight after a healthy rain. Tubers are only accessible if the ground is moist, and the saag (vegetables) populations dwindle in drought. So it’s false to think that inadequate farmed food can be compensated by wild foods. When there is no rain, there is quite literally no food.
Anyway, more soon. I’m currently writing from Los Angeles and will be in Boston early next week. There’s quite a bit I’ve left out of this blog, so I’ve been struggling to push it all together into a single coherent piece.
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