Pachewar, India
Staying in a 300 year old Rajput fort. A Rajput family is running this guest house as a means of keeping up the fort. It’s a beautiful building, with dark dungeonous stairways full of bats. In the early evening, our host walked us through the village, which is full of tiny homes made of mud and straw, each bordered and connected by a dung covered fence. It was quite midieval feeling.
We stopped at one of the homes, where a family demonstrated some cooking techniques. They adjust the heat of the fire by adding or removing dehydrated dung paddies. The wife did most of the work, while remaining veiled (I don’t know how you can do anything with one of those sarees hanging precariously over your head). The daughter, also veiled, stayed back in the shadows of the house, coming out only briefly to bring out ingredients or utensils. The man, who spoke pretty good English, explained step by step what they were doing, and passed around samples of the millet chapati and fried chickpea dough balls.
From what I’ve seen so far, this seems to be quite typical of rural India. The women are not prominently visible, and you rarely even find them in the service industry, at least not interfacing much with customers (except when they’re begging). This is very different from Bali, where women were working the shops and standing outside them smiling and beckoning you in. In India, it’s mostly men that you find working the shops.
In the evening, we were treated to some traditional entertainment. First, a couple of local girls performed a belly-dance type dance for us, and then encouraged us all to embarrass ourselves by trying to dance along. Next we were treated to puppet show. One man played the drums, while another piped away on a harmonica-like whistle thing in synch with his intricate dance movements of some very heavy, ornately decorated puppets.
Unfortunately, by this evening the flu like symptoms that Grant started developing in Tholpetty finally developed into a full blown fever. Time to start taking the antibiotics.
