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Village Visit, Haryana from 2013

Previous photo story from the drive to Bahadurgarh from Gurgaon : Village Visit, Haryana #Drive

Cows, buffaloes, one doggo and what used to be my maternal grandmother’s home. In Sankhol, Haryana. After she passed away, there was, obviously, some “confusion” between two of the sons and one of them was very upset and wanted his share clearly cut out. This led to the Sankhol house being divided neatly down the middle – and the home I’d survived my worst feverish hallucination in, was no more. The kitchen where Naani used to sit on her haunches and blow through the metal pipe into the dung fire to cook the most delicious “choorma”, was no more.

She was no more, so it’s only fair.

The son who was upset has done nothing with his half of the space and the walls have crumbled. A neighbor leaves his cow and its calf there, tried to a couple of trees.

The other house, which is where the widow of the third son lives, has been taken care of by the woman of the house. The well and the small pond don’t exist anymore – they were hazards anyway – I’ve heard stories of Mom and one of her brothers falling into it when they were young children, and staying there, quiet, because they were worried they’d get scolded for falling in!

There used to be a canal opposite the main road and I’ve bathed with the buffaloes when I was a child, visiting from the city. I haven’t seen what the canal looks like any more but it doesn’t look like much from the main road. There’s a public park and when we visited this time, there was a long, snaking queue of people waiting to withdraw money from their bank accounts at the bank branch that’s a new fixture as far as I can recall.

My maternal aunt’s courtyard always had a buffalo or two. This time there was a small calf ( a “katiya” ) and a buffalo. A stray dog slept just outside the main gate.

I even snapped up an old man in white pagdi, kurta and dhoti, urinating on the garbage dump of the village! There used to be marijuana plants that grew on this dump, but they aren’t happy with pollution and have all died out.

It was a lazy afternoon. Four aloo paranthas and about 500 grams of fresh white butter later, we were more ready to sleep than drive back. Even the onions taste different here.

The little kiddo was more fearless than I ever will be when faced with buffaloes. She gave me some lovely portraits too.

The yellow brick house you see at the beginning used to belong to Brigadier Hoshiar Singh. ( There are two Wikipedia entries about the same officer, both with very different details about him. ) The house seems to be all boarded up and in disrepair.

Above, the old kitchen where my Naani used to cook.

We got some crisp, new Rs. 100 notes! We were all joking that I must not tweet about this on social media otherwise we’d get robbed on our way. Ridiculous how this #Demonetization has played out for most people. We’ve barely been affected because “privilege”, but it’s ridiculous based on all the news reports coming in from across the country.