Natungram III

PT II: There is no cold drinking water in this village unless you hire a Toto to drive you in towards the train station. Here I also purchased bananas and small packaged cakes to eat between meals (lunch is served around 1:30 and no food will arrive again until 10 pm). Actually, this area includes several villages scattered about, but it all feels like one place with a busy hub near the depot. We stayed a mile or more across the tracks which curved around the lodge we were staying in. Through the day you would see a nine-car train in the distance towards your right and then shortly after disappearing behind some trees, it would reappear in front of you.

When I travel through India, the most important thing to pack is a roll of toilet paper. Here, people are accustomed to washing up with a water hose mounted near the toilet, but it’s something I only tried once and swore I would never do again. I also am sure to always keep at least one tissue in my wallet, which I’ve learned can be pulled apart into two separate plys and “fluffed” for greater absorbency.

Unfortunately, I became quite ill on this trip. What felt like an ear infection moved into my throat and transformed into a full-blown head cold, and my precious toilet paper worked double-duty for clearing my sinuses. I napped at least six hours in a day and hadn’t felt so ill since suffering from both food poisoning and smoke inhalation on the bus in the Taos mesa earlier this year. I ran out of toilet paper on the third day and sent my fiancé into the hub to purchase some more. He wasn’t sure if he would be able to find any, which seemed surprising considering the street shops we had seen on the way in.

When he finally returned, he handed me a package of pink and white table napkins. Sure enough, there was no toilet paper and no packages of tissues– only these napkins someone had to dig and search for. He thought it was quite likely that they had never actually sold any before, as the shop owner seemed confused as to how much to charge, and asked for only 20-30 rupees (about 30-40 cents). Sanjoy offered the higher rate. Now holding them in my hand, it took only a moment to see the 47 rupee price printed on the package and I was curious if the shop owner had learned how to read.

One morning, when I was weak, yet craving for fresh air, we walked down winding dirt roads to visit a family of artisans, one of which is considered a master in the community. We discovered that his wife was not being sent to the development workshops taking place. He said she had to stay home and take care of the children. This was sad to hear, because her work was so fine and elegant. Her weavings used fibers not much thicker than a horsehair and were far more refined than the blocky designs of her husband.

Equally disheartening, we visited during what should have been school hours, yet the children were at home watching television (I was surprised to see how many TVs were present in this community which lacked basic elements such as indoor plumbing). The wife was told she could not pursue her creative work so that she could care for the family, yet the educational resources provided for the children were not being used which could have freed her up a few hours a day to take advantage of even more free resources for herself. Her husband was kind, but the cultural expectations of a woman’s place within the home are still buried fifty years into the past.

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Come back again for the third and final installation of this journey to Natungram.