Field notes
Going home to the village my father left
Everyone photographs the monuments. This is the other India, the village my father left in 1964, and what it feels like to keep going back.
Everyone who goes to India comes back with the same photographs. The Taj at sunrise, the forts, the painted elephants. I have taken those pictures too. But that is not the India I go back for.
My father left his village in 1964. He grew up there with no electricity, studying at night by an oil lamp while his mother brought him warm milk to keep him going. He was the sixty fourth and last student to get a place at his medical college, which tells you how close it came to never happening at all. He became a doctor, and then he came to England with three pounds in his pocket, which was all the rules of the time would let you carry out of India. He brought us over when I was a baby.
So I grew up here. One of the only brown boys at my school, and they did a fine job of turning me into a British sort of Indian. For years I was happy enough with that.
Then Papaji passed away, and something in me needed to go back. Not for a holiday, and not for the monuments. I needed to stand in the place he came from and understand it properly, while my mum, Mataji, could still walk me round it and tell me who was who.
So that is what I do now. I go back, again and again, with my phone in one hand and Mataji never far behind. We go to the village. The old family house is still there. The well they used before anyone had a tap is still there, very deep, and you do not want to lean too far over it. The mango trees are still there, heavy in the season, dropping fruit onto flooded ground when the monsoon comes.
None of it is grand. A visitor would drive straight past. There is a corner shop that somehow sells ten kinds of aubergine and fresh milk for my coffee, and a lane where the cattle are fed and the cow dung is patted into cakes and dried for the winter. It is ordinary, and it is the most extraordinary thing I own.
What surprises me every time is how much of me is explained by it. The way we save. The way we feed a guest before we feed ourselves. The way my father never wasted a thing in his life. You cannot see any of that in a photograph of the Taj Mahal. You can only see it here, in a village most people have never heard of, that a boy left in 1964 with a medical degree and almost nothing else.
I film it because I do not want it to disappear with the people who remember it. That is the whole point of these diaries. Not the highlights, the roots.
More later.