We moved out of Pushkar today to stay with Rachel and her Mum Wendy, (a really splendid person!) who has arrived to stay for 5 months. They lodge with an Indian lady called Anju and her husband and two lovely children in a village called Foy Sagar (pronounced Fay and Sagar like in “Sagger makers bottom knocker” not as in “cigar”). The house is built in a “C” shape around a courtyard with outside bathroom, and toilet and a hand basin and cold tap for washing up in the courtyard. The village is about 4kn from TOLFA so, after the hired Tempo broke down (a sort of motorised rickshaw), we hitched a ride either on a passing trailer or with one of the animal ambulances as several of the staff live in the village and when they have been doing night dog catching, they take the ambulance home. If all else fails then one of the compounders would take us back in his motorbike, two at a time, which was fun!

It was really interesting living in a proper Indian house and seeing how day-to-day life is organised. It’s pretty much like life here in the ‘50’s but with a few mod cons like gas rings and TV.  About 6am the milkman arrives with his brass cans of milk tied either side of his pushbike. He dips a jug into them and fills the stainless steel milk can at each house with buffalo milk and this lasts the family for the day as there is no refrigeration and they rely on round bellied, terracotta pots filled with water to act as a cooling larder.
Each house has a flat roof with steps up to it where families will often sleep in the really hot months but otherwise, the bedrooms are in a separate room with either wooden beds raised off the ground (away from the ants) with really thin foam mattresses that don’t do much to be honest, or frame beds with webbing straps across that are pretty unforgiving too. You do get used to them though and considering my spine is held together with bolts and pulleys, I was pleasantly surprised, if not a little relieved to find that I didn’t wake up stiff.

Each morning after breakfast we walked the few yards to the stall opposite the Chai shop (tea shop) to buy bottled water and once to buy some Indian sweets from the Chai shop to Puja Wendy’s new scooty. Any new building or vehicle ahs to be puja’d for good luck and this involves flowers and sweets. Indian sweets are made from boiled milk and, they, along with sickly sweet Chai, are how the Indians indulge their sweet tooth. The sweets are spiced with cardamom and sprinkled with pistachios or covered in silver leaf and some, called Gulab Jamun are a little like little sponge balls soaked in Rosewater and cardamom syrup but are actually made from powdered milk, formed into a stiff paste with milk and deep friend before soaking in the syrup. They come in various degrees of tooth numbing sweetness but are really, really lovely and something I’m going to try making at home, or possibly a variation of using sponge cake.

Chai

It’s worth talking about Chai as India runs on it.

Chai is a mixture of virtually 50/50 milk and sugar, boiled with a bit of water and some spiced tea and served steaming hot in tiny mugs or stainless steel cups. Nadja who is one of the compounders and the incredibly hard-working TOLFA handy man makes Chai very day on an open fire in the compound. Mary and Brenda aren’t fans and this obviously disgusted Nadja and as I loved the stuff, I got special treatment.  I would hear the call about 10am each morning and mid afternoon of “Hello, tea?!” and if I wasn’t there within a couple of minutes, he would bring mine out to me so I was often seen wandering around with a dog on a lead in one hand and a cup of Chai in the other. I don’t take sugar bug Chai is such a different drink to tea that it can become an addiction and on a really hot, dusty day, there is something uniquely restorative about it. There is another version called Masala Chai that is more heavily spiced. Mary and I had it at a service station on the way from Delhi and both really loved it, even though Mary doesn’t really like milk. It is spiced with Cardamom in winter and Ginger in summer, is absolutely delicious and you have to try it if you are ever there.