The Kota tonga trail was a real highlight - a bit like a 19th Century treasure hunt. It’s full of little nuggets of unusual information and fascinating glimpses into the unsolved mysteries of Kota.
Harriet and Will, London. UK
The memorial to Major Burton and his sons was much more moving than the Taj Mahal or the lake at Udaipur, marvellous as they are.
Henry Vane, Cumbria, UK
...the most comfortable bed I’ve slept in for 2 months....
Charlotte Adam, Winchester UK
Two days out of the noise and the people in a beautiful place. We felt totally
at home
- To be recommended to every person who wishes to experience the Indian country life. We also liked the way the food was prepared...
Patrick & Marie-Christine Lemaigre, Nil-St Vincent, Belgium
We’re only here for the porridge and home made bread! Thank you for a most wonderful time the memories of which we shall carry always. You have given us a wonderful & fascinating introduction to India.
Sue Turner, Lancashire, UK
So ...Rajasthan is not all desert! Thank you for sharing everything with us....
The Read family, London, UK
What a wonderful time we’ve had at the school in the village, at the weavers’, on the river, atop a tonga! Thank you for all your help and contacts throughout India
Anne Gerbner, Philadelphia, USA
It was a wonderful stay and thank you for giving us such a positive look at India and Rajasthan.
Salma Goldstein, New Jersey, USA
Sue Millar, London, UK
After travelling around Rajasthan for two weeks, reaching a real house with books on the shelves, photos on the walls and four happy dogs was simply wonderful.
Camille Savinien, Paris, France
This isn’t tourism. I know of nowhere else where you can experience the real India as well as on your traditional working Rajasthani farm.
Sam Milward, Wellington, New Zealand
Thank you so very much for such a wonderful stay - what a fantastic introduction to India. I don’t think we’ll find such tranquillity elsewhere.
Lizzie Fortune, Hampshire. UK
Fabulous - I’ve been spoilt. It’s hard to leave and face the real world.
Elisabeth Simson, Isle of Wight, UK
After travelling around Rajasthan for two weeks, reaching a real house with books on the shelves, photos on the walls and four happy dogs was simply wonderful.
Camille Savinien, Paris, France
This isn’t tourism. I know of nowhere else where you can experience the real India as well as on your traditional working Rajasthani farm.
Sam Milward, Wellington, New Zealand
Thank you so very much for such a wonderful stay - what a fantastic introduction to India. I don’t think we’ll find such tranquillity elsewhere.
Lizzie Fortune, Hampshire. UK
Our visit at the farm was truly wonderful, off the beaten track it is a slice of India a visitor does not normally experience. Victoria is very knowledgeable about Indian culture and the people - an added perspective for us. The food here was very delicious: organically home grown ingredients, vegetables, fruits, grains prepared simply homestyle. A nice change from curries. Enjoyed the early morning boat ride and walk to the weavers. Many thanks.
Johanna Janssens, Washington, USA
I loved staying with you and the dogs and playing with the toys.
Jonas aged 8, Switzerland
A very welcome break from the crazy world of India – wonderful house, food and hospitality. Thank you so much.
Katie Buxton, Bath, UK
I loved seeing the crocodiles, and I learned a lot about deticking the puppies. Coming to the farm was a great experience.
Stella Bartholet, Washington, USA
A wonderful eye opening visit in every sense. We will be back! Thank you!
Christopher & Joanna Hobson, Northamptonshire, UK
A blissfully peaceful stay. We enjoyed everything – even the power cut. Thank you for lovely food, good company and very interesting trips.
Vicky Stark, London, UK
Exactly what we hoped for and more, bits of India off the tourist track, life as it actually is in villages, teeming life and livestock and the magic of the river.
Sir Hilary Miller, Worcester, UK
Thank you for the introduction to miniature painters, wall paintings, stories, great food, good company, walk through the fields. I loved the paintings in the City Palace and go back full of inspiration and memories.
Nan Mulder, Edinburgh, UK
December was another toally dry month with pleasant sunny days and temperatures in the twenties.
The electricity supply meters had blown in the transformer thanks to a gecko that had managed to get into the MCB box located in the brick cabin some 10 metres away which had somehow caused a fire in the transformer on 30th November, so it was theorised. We were without electricity for one night but a man from the company came within 24 hours to reconnect the supply bypassing the meters. A round of written reports, applications, visits to distant offices for signatures and sanctions began. The little gecko had lost its life and caused Rs. 12468 worth of expense and a lot of time and energy. Here the electrician is preparing the two new meters to go up on the poles now to be situated outside the transformer and by December 17th all damage had been rectified.
The main headache at the beginning of December was selling the rice. So many trucks and trollies were trying to get into the mandi from other states including Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, that all surrounding roads were jammed. Trollies had to queue all day and were allowed in to the mandi from 11.00pm to 3.00am only. Trucks were allowed in after 3.00am to lift and remove the sacked goods from the mandi. We sent two trolley loads at 10.00pm on 1st December. The first trolley sold at Rs. 34.10/kg. and our rice that had been flattened by nilgai and pigs went for Rs. 26.50/kg. - a significant loss. Rs. 36.31/kg. was our our top price for the next trolley, a record, but the yield was low.
While winnowing the rice and loading it into a trolley (See November photo) the sari of one of the women got caught in the machine and jammed it. Luckily it stopped and the electricity supply was disconnected immediately and she came to no harm physically but was in shock.
After the fields have been cleared of rice the watering can begin and birds are attracted from far and wide including white-necked storks. In the close up you can see that the stork has captured a small snake.
Once the field has dried out the right amount it can be sown with wheat. Urea and DAP were hard to come by. We got 16 bags of urea on Vijay's Aadhar card and ten on mine. The seed is mixed with DAP before sowing. Some fields had zinc added at this stage and some will get zinc just before the first watering next month as an experiment. The last field was sown on 21st December.
It was a mild December but we cut logs on the 18th and had our first log fire of the season on Christmas Eve. The painters painted the outside of the old part of the house, the white gate was painted and we decorated the inside of the house with paper streamers and stars for Christmas.
The early mornings were misty, particularly over the fields being watered. The date palm in this photo has had its fronds cut to make jharoos. They soon grow back. Raju, from a broom making community, has been coming for a number of years to collect the fronds gratis and in return gives us half-a-dozen jharoos. Sustainable rural living.
Crop protection went on every night with 16 nilgai gathering to see in the New Year at 11.45pm on 31st December.
And now an update on Bardhi Bai's story (see November). By 10th December she had a new passbook for her bank account, a PAN card and an Aadhar card all in the same correctly spelled version. The images were sent by WhatsApp to H.R. The pass book had not been stamped by the bank was an instant response from H.R. So on the 12th I took her personally to the bank and oversaw the stamping and signing. The images were submitted again and on the 18th we were told that her application would be processed "In the New Year...".
We had no rain in November and generally clear sunny days with temperatures still in the 30’s. Last month’s heavy rain is thought to have affected the rice yield. The rice that had been combine harvested was spread out thinly to dry out for a week or more and then moved to near the house out of the fields so the fields could be cleared and ready for sowing wheat.
The rice straw called pral is spread around the fields in the course of combine harvesting. You can sell it for fodder and a large family team came for several days, gathered the pral and left with two trolley loads a day.
Here a trolley is trundling past the end of the house. The windows are in urgent need of restoration and repainting. The plinth is flaky and fungus ridden.
From 28th November the painters arrived and transformed the appearance of the windows and cement sections. The mustard started to flower around the middle of the month and one painter wore a matching mustard yellow tee shirt unconsciously.
After the rice was dried, it was cleaned by machine and loaded straight into trollies by this team of women.
Some ten bighas of rice was hand cut which results in pral being in neat piles near the threshing site in the fields. These have to be loaded into a trolley and brought to the cow shed. There is no stubble left in the field to burn.
On 9th November a male calf was born to Meera - the first birth in a year due to the death of the last two bulls and the immaturity of their replacement. This was the first calf he had fathered and is called Dhola meaning white. After five days we started drinking Meera’s milk. Dhola was given two teats and we had the other two. Dhola is sturdy but very shy. Meera is very aggressive unlike her mother Mun-Mun, who would let you come close and handle her calves.
The house wheat has been eaten by the nilgais and we may have to resow it. The subzee enclosure was finally ploughed on the 19th and sowing of potato started on the 23rd. We have planted a traditional variety of wheat called 'Gaavraan Bansi' which was sourced from a tribal seed fair in Madhya Pradesh. We are growing it for seed in this nilgai proof enclosed space which leaves less room for vegetables.
Once the crops have been removed from a field and the ground tilled, many birds come to forage for dropped grain. One evening a flock of parrots was enjoying this rice. Almost invisible on the ground, the sun caught their wings as they wheeled and soared before settling down again.
And to end with an insight into how hard it is coping with the corporate digital world as an illiterate widow. Bardhi Bai is a widow in her seventies who worked for a company with its H.Q. in Delhi that had the contract to run our nearby sewage treatment plant. She was on daily wages but qualified for contributions to a Provident Fund. After five years J.M. Enviro Technologies Pvt. Ltd. ended their contract and paid their workers their provident fund - except for Bardhi Bai!
Her name in English has been spelled various ways by data inputers and the spelling of her ID did not match the company’s records. She had been running pillar to post trying to get momey for over a year and in desperation appealed to me. Anjali, our daughter, happened to be staying in Delhi and went to the H.R. department at the company headquarters personally and has been able to Whatsapp the documents to the HR contact as she has got the spelling changed; she had to produce a bank passbook, her Aadhar ID card and a PAN card (income tax) all with identical spelling of her name. We started the process on 17th November and hope for a successful closure to the saga for Bardhi Bai soon.
We have had a good monsoon but there are often trees that die from termites and/or flooding and this year’s casualty has been our unique bitter orange tree the fruit of which won the Commonwealth Prize in 2018 at the World Marmalade Awards held at Dalemain in Cumbria, U.K. My Bitter Orange and Ginger marmalade can no longer be made but there are green shoots coming from the roots so maybe one can be nurtured.
The mustard was sown on 28th September and the concern was that it might not germinate before forecast heavy rain on 5th-10th October. We had 4 cms. spread over a week and luckily the mustard germination was not affected.
Rice was the key crop in October and it gradually developed feathery sprays of grain which ripened towards the end of the month. We had two varieties as we had run short of seedings of Pusa-1 and so brought in Pusa-4 from another farmer to be planted in about 3 bighas of land. The stem of the latter variety is longer and the plant seems to fall over when ripe. We are not sure if the extensive damage to this variety was from pigs and nilgai, over watering, or heavy grain causing the plant to fall.
The wildlife comes to the farm at night and we have no way of knowing. If the dogs bark we can go with a torch. If they are caught in the light they move away and can be chased off the farm that way. Here you can see a female nilgai in the torchlight in our Pusa-4 field.
On 31st October the first fields of rice were "combined" and the grain left spread out to dry for a few days before being piled up.
Ranjit, who lives on our farm, with his wife and three young boys, acquired a second-hand Bajaj Discovery motorbike for Rs. 21000 with money given by his mother. He can take the whole family on it to visit his in-laws some 40 kms. away. He also takes his wife to work every day and collects her at 12.30pm. She works in a private nursery school about 10 minutes ride away by bike. His hours are adjusted so he can take her. Narayan, our cow man, also takes his wife to work, or their son does. They have two bikes in the family and Ranjit has one. Many of the motorbikes crowding Indian roads are ridden by men transporting their mothers or sisters to work.
Divali is an auspicious time to buy a new vehicle and it is honoured and decorated on the second day of Divali at Govardhan Puja which this year was moved to the next day because of a partial solar eclipse. Divali was 24th October and Govardhan Puja the 26th. Here Sugna Bai and Mohini Bai are preparing gobar figures of Krishna and his brother Balram honoured in farming families in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.
To prepare for Divali Asha put leepna on our paths which will survive intact until spoilt by unseasonal rain.
We had a good crop of pumpkins this year in our vegetable garden and if you have tried to hollow out a pumpkin you will know how hard it is. These small pumpkins were left outside for a few days and the squirrels hollowed them out!
We had rain on ten different days in September giving a total of 10.62 cms. with over 4 cms. falling on 10th September. Queen Elizabeth II had died on the 8th and a thunderstorm overhead sounded like a gun salute marking the end of her reign and the beginning of Charles III's. 11th September was declared a day of mourning but being a Sunday few noticed. Older Indians mourn her passing and all that she stood for but younger Indians are indifferent.
We were able to move into our new kitchen on the 8th as the teak doors had been fitted and varnished. It is wonderful to have plumbing that works and a floor that isn’t sunk, uneven and cracking.
The cows had been grazing freely on monsoon vegetation but the fields were ploughed, again on 8th, and that marked the beginning of their incarceration in the cow shed until the rice harvest when fields would be grazable briefly before the wheat is put in. You can see the tractor ploughing in the background as the cows snatch a last bite.
The lawn got its annual cut. It is only cut once a year during the monsoon and looks distressingly brown for some time but soon recovers.
The rains always leave us with very muddy tracks and this year we had the chance to get a load of broken bricks which we laid into the mud to provide more support for vehicles.
Apart from watering the rice we were ploughing for mustard. The usual DAP fertiliser was not available and an imported APS was bought - ammonia, phosphate, and sulphur. Our usual American Pioneer mustard seed would have cost Rs. 30000 so we decided to try a local variety called Giriraj for Rs. 3600. Here it is being sown. Rice is in the foreground.
And to finish with a very Indian story of two young drunk youths who crashed their borrowed car at sunset a little way down the road from our gate and ran away having broken an electricity pole, caused a couple to fall off their scooter and themselves ending up nose down in a ditch.
The owner must have been very influential. By morning the electricity pole had been replaced, the power restored and the car extricated - all without the involvement of the police.
The main themes of August were kitchen renovation and heavy monsoon rains. There were 34.1 cms. of rain in August which was less than July and less than 56.25 cms. of last August, but because the land was already waterlogged all fields were under water and not just rice ones.
Having planted the rice in July, the women began hand weeding it on 16th August. Whatever the weather the women would keep weeding and take their lunch break on our stone flagged path.
The family living near the cowshed fought valiantly with sandbags to stop the flood water coming into their house. The water round about was deeper than wellies and the children had to wade to get to school. The cows were happy with their new concrete flooring and suffered less from foot infection and none of them as yet has got the dreaded ‘Lumpy Skin Disease’ which has killed thousands of cows in Western Rajasthan.
By the 10th of August the granite floor tiles had been laid, the sink countertop put in place, the wall tiling, grouting, countertop moulding, skirting had all been completed. By the end of August the walls had been painted and then after some reflection repainted from green to grey, and joinery work had started on the under counter storage spaces to take rails for sliding drawers. Simultaneously, the teak wall cupboards and teak fronts to the storage spaces were being prepared in the local joiner’s workshop.
All this time we were cooking in a bathroom. Being August it was very humid and unpleasant. Most of the components of the old kitchen were reused: rubble on the drive, wooden doors given to the mason for reuse and stone counter slabs stored for future placement. Nothing to be taken to the local council ‘tip’ as in Britain. (The old steel sink was sold to a kabari wallah in October for Rs. 28/kg.)
This was the 75th anniversary of India’s independence and private individuals were encouraged to fly the national flag from every house between 13th - 15th during the day and at night. 15th is Independence Day. Vijay made a flag pole, bought a flag via Amazon and ran it up the new flag pole which was on the roof. Previously, the national flag had to be made of handspun and hand woven khadi cloth which limited production. Last year that was amended to include machine made, hence the unlikely introduction of Amazon into a previously very small Indian supply chain.
On 22nd August our iconic gulmohar tree near the well blew over in strong winds. Termites had eaten the roots and it did not stand a chance. The bright red of the gulmohar flowers against the harvested and bleached wheat fields in April will be sadly missed.
Here is a 1997 photograph from our album of this lovely flowering tree.
The main activities in July concern preparing the fields for rice to be transplanted. The seedlings were grown in a nursery on the next door farm and transplanted from 8th July onwards.
Each section of a field has to be flooded and so the more rain that falls the better. In July we had 42.5 cms. which was double last July’s and was spread out throughout the month. The non-rice fields were also under water.
The women worked most days until the end of the month bent over standing ankle-deep in mud, and sometimes in pouring rain. A team of about 10 came.
I was away and so taking advantage of my absence the kitchen was totally redone. The floor had sunk over the course of 25 years and some of the Kota stone tiles had cracked. The plumbing had become a problem and no sink water could be allowed to drain down the pipe. Washing up bowls were tipped straight onto the bananas and other plants outside which was good for the plants.
Mishrilal, who worked with the contractor for building our house back in 1996, and who had just done our cowshed floor, came to talk about it on 14th July. On the 18th the men arrived and ripped out the old wooden units and supports, dug up the old floor and ripped the kitchen sink out. Dry gitti (gravel) was laid for the floor on soil and pounded down before a lattice work of sariyas (rebars) was placed over it and raised by 1.5" spacers to provide the appropriate amount of concrete cover between the gitti and the rebars. Each rebar crossover was tied with thin wire.
By 21st the concrete was mixed and laid 4" deep over the gitti and the rebars. By the 31st all the brick pillars were built to support the three granite countertops. Granite shelves were built in the units as the pillars were being raised. Two slabs of granite were glued together to give the required thickness of the countertops, which were put in place over the brick supports. The usual practice is to put the granite on the top and a less expensive marble slab underneath. Only the countertop for the sink remained to be done by the end of the month.
And while all this was happening, a temporary kitchen was setup in a downstairs bathroom!
By the end of July the rice fields were fully planted. The cows were grazing in the rapidly growing dhainch and the basic infrastructure was ready for our new kitchen. Broken up bits of old kitchen floor had been scattered on the muddy drive and so it was less muddy than usual and there were no deep ruts to be negotiated.
The new cowshed floor worked well and provided a dry are for the cows despite surrounding area being under knee high water. The family in the ground floor house were marooned but they managed and did not complain. At such times snakes can be a problem as their house was flooded. No major incidents though.
Taking advantage of dry weather before the monsoon, Vijay used his new Husqvarna chainsaw to cut down overhanging branches and dangerously leaning trees. Here he is with his team.
The major work was concreting the cowshed half of which still had an earth floor that turned into mud during the rains. Mishrilal, who built our house some twenty-five years ago organised it with Siyaram, the diminutive mason, who would arrive on his motorbike with an assistant - sometimes male and sometimes female. One day a young mother came carrying her three month old baby on the motorbike. The baby, Karthik, slept in a sari jhula or swing between feeds and didn’t seem to mind the 45oC ambient temperature.
Plastic mesh was used as reinforcement inside the concrete floor to strengthen it. The work took three days to complete and then the concrete was covered with plastic sheets and kept wet to cure it. Meanwhile the cows spent the nights in the empty vegetable garden and the days in the bagh or garden, a small tree plantation close to the house which gave shade during the scorching heat. After ten days, and just before the first heavy rain, they moved back to their cowshed.
We had 13.58 cms. rain in June which was good and moistened the ground ready for sowing. Dhaincha was broadcast by hand and then a tractor went over with a tiller and plank to bed the seeds down - used for green manuring.
On the 22nd we spotted a tiny Collared Scops Owl on the pergola frame just outside the kitchen door. We have never seen one before in 25 years. It posed for photos and we could get very close to it, before it flew silently away.
May is always the hottest month and this year it was relentless with a little rain on two occasions but the temperature remaining well over 40oC and topping 46oC on several days. We brought our thermometer in fearing the temperature might damage it as it was near the maximum it could record.
We had a good crop of jackfruit (katail).
We had harvested the wheat last month and were waiting to sell it for a good price as the world wide demand went up with grain shortages forecast and blamed on the Russian-Ukranian situation. We sold our wheat at Rs. 2275/quintal, the top of the market. Last year’s price was Rs. 1931. But alarmed by the inflationary pressure the Government banned export as yield is down due to the high temperatures in March across the Punjab and other wheat growing areas of North India.
Contracts to some African countries and to neighbours such as Bangladesh will be honoured but the Government feels it does not have spare capacity to compensate for shortages in Europe. The next trolley went for Rs. 2211/quintal, indicating the market had peaked.
Before loading a trolley with wheat it is winnowed to sieve out the numerous little weed seeds known as baathli. We stopped these seeds from being fed to the cows, who love it, as they would have distributed them around the farm in their cow pats!
A team of men from one family came to pick up the mustard bhousa and sell it on as bio-fuel for the factory furnaces. These people have their own survival problems and are not interested in Ukraine. The son of the eldest man had had a motorcycle accident and had a broken arm and head injuries. The doctors were asking for Rs. 50,000 to put a plate in this arm. Another day they had a phone call to say a 30-year old nephew, who had greeted them in the morning, had dropped dead with a heart attack. Doctors world wide call these deaths Sudden Adult Death Syndrome or SADS but their families suspect vaccine adverse reactions.
May is the traditional month for spreading the cow gobar/manure on the fields. This team of six loaded four trollies a day for two days in temperatures in the mid-forties and were paid Rs. 500 per trolley. It was then scattered in one of the fields by shovelling out of the back of the trolley as it was moved along with the tractor.
We got a quote for re-concreting the cow shed and that will be June’s story ....
From the beginning of April the temperature was in the 40’s and so some farming activities took place at night. We put green netting around the house desert cooler to keep the direct sun off it and it ran day and night.
The garlic was harvested and plaited into separate plaits for each farm hand. Cherry tomatoes grown from Indian packeted seeds were a great success and a big surprise for Laxman who tended them so carefully and couldn’t understand why they did not grow into ‘proper’ tomatoes. Our own flax seed was harvested and winnowed using a big pedestal fan.
On 7th April the first mustard trolley was sent to the market and received the top price that day having been judged to have the highest oil content. In a world wide shortage of vegetable oil, it sold for Rs. 6751 for 100 kgs. Last year the price was Rs. 4891 and in 2017 it was Rs. 3555. The second trolley was sent on 12th April and was sold for Rs. 6560 which was above the quoted price for the day.
The main harvest in April is of wheat. The women cutters used to get 95 kgs. of wheat for each bigha of land area they cut. This year they negotiated 100 kgs. per bigha which we only agreed to if they hold it for 3 years. This means that 1/6 of the crop goes to the cutters. We require some hand cut as we need the chaff or bhousa for the cows. We had 15 trollies from 20 bighas of it loaded up at night over 3 nights and dumped in the bhousa shed or next to the cows in a big heap. Bhousa has become so expensive that it was probably worth one lakh rupees by some estimates.
Having negotiated the rate they wanted, the women cutters came on the 10th with their sickles, lunch packs and work clothes and started cutting, working through each day in temperatures in the forties. By the 18th they had piled the dry bundles into heaps and were ready to thresh by moonlight. They worked all night for two nights with a night off in the middle.
The rest of the wheat was harvested by this combine harvester. It started at 1330 hrs. and left at 1830 hrs. Last year’s rate of Rs. 500/bigha had increased to Rs. 700 because of a steep rise in diesel prices.
Our C306 heritage wheat grown for the house was hand cut by our women who live on the farm. Some seed from a shorter more modern variety had got in at the time of sowing and enough individual stalks had to be separated at the time of cutting to get a consistent seed for sowing the next season.
Our cows enjoyed being able to roam in the fields after the grain had been cut. One day, Henry, our young bull was reported to be very uncomfortable and rolling around. Over the phone the vet said to give him a pinch of cooking soda in water, so Narayan did just that and he was cured immediately.
On the last day of April the women wheat harvesters came with their men folk to weigh their share of the harvest. It is a joyous occasion for them to finally get their just rewards. The occasion has a lively, bustling atmosphere.
The temperatures in March started in the 30's and ended in the 40's. It was unusual for March to be so hot. There was only 3 mm of rain and so unceasing sunny days.
The main activities were cutting the mustard during the day and protecting the growing wheat from nilgai and pigs at night. The night time rota continued as last month and at one point 20 nilgai were chased off the farm with a powerful torch. Here is a lone male in full day light brazenly defying us.
Feeding cattle became a national problem. We had kept back wheat bhousa from last year but ran out. The green fodder dried-up in the heat and local wheat bhousa was prohibitively expensive.
We finally found a small truck load of 18.5 quintals from Madhya Pradesh that had come all the way to Kota to sell hand cut and threshed bhousa. We had to pay Rs. 1100 for 100 kgs. or a quintal, so Rs. 20350 in total. No cows are producing milk at the moment and so their manure is being very expensively produced! Keeping cows is only economic if you produce all their fodder yourself.
On 6th March the women resumed cutting mustard and it was threshed on 23rd March and loaded into two trollies. The price of vegetable oil is soaring on the world market and it seemed a good idea to wait before selling.
March was the month of the Holi festival. For the last two years strangers have not been welcome. With all covid restrictions lifted we didn’t know if the village women would come back and greet us. They didn’t. Another tradition has died with covid. We had 9 men, 9 women and 5 children all morning as opposed to nearly 100 three years ago.
The early mornings were too cool at 9oC for breakfast outside in the garden until mid-February, which is unusual but the day time temperatures were in the low 30's. By February 24th it was too hot for lunch outside. The main activities were watering the wheat and cutting the mustard from 25th February.
At the beginning of February the mustard crop had dropped its vibrant yellow flowers and the pods were swelling. The young wheat was growing and tempting the wildlife, which could hide in the tall, dense mustard all day and come out at night. A rota was arranged of Ranjeet, Narayan and Vijay to walk around the farm each hour at night and chase away the nilgai deer.
Some nights there were none, but on 17th February twenty-one nilgai were spotted. While jumping out over the gate one of them clipped the top bar breaking the pin.
We had a good range of organic vegetables in February including some delicious peas and a good potato harvest. We shared them out and kept some for ourselves. We also had a good crop of kumquat or Chinese oranges and I made kumquat and ginger marmalade.
Our former cow man, Mewa Lal, who had been coming every day to touch my feet, didn’t turn up on 5th February and we discovered that his wife had died and he had taken her to his village near Hindoli, north of Bundi, for the cremation. She had literally faded away as she had been unable to swallow and digest food for months, but had never been seen by a doctor for this. She was in her sixties. Mewa Lal has recovered from a stroke but has to take care of his middle aged daughter with Downes Syndrome. There is no help from the state. We have heard that there is a tenant doing the cooking in his home. In such circumstances survival is a daily pre-occupation and foreign wars have no relevance.
One of the calves also died in February. Narayan, our current cow man, claims that he was feeding it but we have our doubts....
And to end with, a photo of a flock of little brown birds enjoying insects on the mustard as the pods swell and aphids try to suck the juices.
We had 2 cms. of rain on 28th December and the rice crop was still unsold and covered in black plastic but the dogs scampering after squirrels had left holes and the rain had got in. When the plastic was removed on 1st January it was found that the top layer had sprouted in patches.
The sprouted rice was passed through another sifting machine and dried in the sun before being sold on 15th January for Rs.13.51/kg. or half price. Nearly 900 kgs. had been damaged in this way.
More rain was due on 6th and so the damaged rice was removed and dealt with separately. The women came to winnow and load the trollies and it was sold on 3rd January for Rs. 25.11 per kg. The yield was 20% down on last year perhaps because of the heavy rain in November.
Ranjeet, the father of three boys, had not been giving any of his earnings to his wife and was running up debts at local shops and drinking heavily. On 2nd January a deputation of women and children came at 2100 hrs. to ask me to do something as Ranjeet was being abusive. I called the police, and to help ‘Gypsy Madam’, three burly policemen arrived in a vehicle with flashing lights and removed him in his socks as he was too drunk to put on his shoes.
Next day the police rang Asha, Ranjeet’s wife to ask her to bail him out, but she didn’t have any money and wouldn’t go. In the end Ranjeet had to arrange his own bail and they released him. The situation has been resolved by Ranjeet having to agree, in writing, that his earnings are to be put in his wife’s bank account to which he has no access. So far so good.
The general feeling has been that January was colder than normal. Local firewood is removed by the head load as cooking gas has become so expensive. The minimum temperature was 5oC and on a couple of days the sun didn’t get through and the temperature struggled up to 10oC. One calf succumbed to the cold and the rest were given mustard oil everyday to fortify them.
The elderly find the cold hard to bear and on 29th January, the Maharao of Kotah, Brijraj Singh, died of a heart attack aged 87. Schools and colleges have been closed this month and there has been a night curfew in place and Sunday lockdowns forcing shops, restaurants and shopping malls to be closed on one day a week.
Our dear daughter Anjali was home for a month and was able to continue her teaching online. She got a negative PCR test in Jaipur and was able to travel back to the UK before everyone on the farm caught one fever or another and experienced mild symptoms.
By the end of January the skies were clear and the air crisp after the rain and Asha and Shyam spent a day redoing the leepna while Sugna podded peas. The slow rhythm of a farm day was restored.