Sunday 8th October 2006: Kojawara

Today I am reporting from hospital. Nothing, I hasten to add, is wrong. On the contrary, I feel more than usually healthy and alive, although were I to fall ill I can think of few more delightfully bucolic spots to do so. Five whitewashed wings radiate out from an open air corridor, all with roof terraces affording picturesque views of the Aravalli hills. The grounds while not extensive, feature a small patch of lovingly manicured lawn that could have been lifted straight out the Home Counties. If, in a radical departure from form, P. G. Wodehouse were to have set one of his novels in a North Indian country hospital, this is undoubtedly the sort of place he would have chosen.

 "Lovingly manicured lawn"

But some explanation is in order. The hospital is in fact a Vikas Samiti endeavour, and is located in a village called Kojawara. Dilip has arranged that while I carry out my Joint Forest Microplan research in the nearby village of Maal, I shall stay in the hospital guesthouse. Compared to the remote mountain-top setting of tribal Maal, this hospital definitely qualifies as "civilisation" and Kojawara is a thriving metropolis. By most other yardsticks, however, it is a rural idyll. We are several hours from Udaipur, electricity is intermittent and the one car I have seen looked almost as out of place as a bullock cart would do in Central London. My journey here, two days back, was made in a crowded Vikas Samiti jeep, for by a lucky coincidence a general meeting had been called in the hospital and a number of officers from Udaipur were attending it. From now on I shall make my journeys by local buses and jeeps, a prospect that does not daunt me anything like as much as would that of trying to navigate rural England by Stagecoach. I suppose this is mostly because India has always filled me, like Hari, with a feeling that things will work out in the end, and being a foreigner gives you a carte blanche to make a prat of yourself whenever necessary.
   By rights I should now launch into an edifying description of the work I have done to date in Maal, but I am going to indulge myself for a bit longer in Kojawara and the hospital. Currently there are no patients staying in the tiny ward, although there are apparently lots of outpatients who come in the day to visit the old and gently unassuming Dr Kishan. He has been working here for two years, despite technically having retired, while his wife and family remain in Udaipur. He visits them every weekend. I’ve noticed that in India there seems to be a high tolerance, presumably born out of necessity, of living and working away from your spouse. He speaks good English so we’ve talked about various things, ranging from the obvious swapping of family details to more abstruse topics such as “What happens in your country if an unmarried girl gets pregnant?”
   Another unmissable feature of the hospital is a peculiarity called Rupchand, who must be in his thirties. He seems extremely anxious for my well-being and always turns a simple Hindi conversation into an elaborate and often entertaining charade. His wife is virtually non-evident, although his baby son Ramesh, who has long hair like a girl, is often with him. An elegant young man called Aditya Jain is in charge of the medicines and his good English makes him a useful interpreter, giving me the feeling that he may end up becoming my best friend of the lot. Most important of all are the brothers Devji and Dalji, one small and wiry, the other beefy and strong, who produce wonderful dishes in the tiny hospital kitchen: roti and sabji (vegetables) and dal (lentils) or dal bati, wondrously filling flourballs crumbled up with ghee, onions, dal and a squeeze of lemon.
   Kojawara itself is enchanting in the late afternoons when I have strolled through the rice paddies and maize fields, watching the men plough the fields with pairs of bullocks. Their wives and sons herd groups of hefty buffalo home, occasionally beating them or uttering monosyllables of encouragement, or perhaps admonishment. Many people carry large bundles of grass on their head, for animal fodder, turning them into spooky creatures from science fiction. Others sit outside their houses or shops, which have walls of brown clay and generally large open spaces at the front, sometimes covered with a roof supported by wooden pillars. All kinds of birds, such as house crows, cattle egrets, bee-eaters and rose-ringed parakeets, flit overhead. Trees include mango, neem and the inevitable acacia, as well as cactus-like plants [4] that are often used for fencing. Many of the families in the village belong the Patel community and some have members working in Kuwait, which in a naïve way I find hard to imagine – what should these simple folk do in an Arab oil economy? [5]

Kojawara

   In moonlight, Kojawara becomes a paradise. Last night, while staring across the valley at the extraordinary spectrum of different greys – far-off hills, nearby fields, midrange tree silhouettes and close outlines of cactus-like fencing – I was struck by two things: one, that this was surely one of those special moments in life that should be treasured long after the event; and two, that the whole scene, expansive moonlit panorama with an orchestra of crickets and cicadas in the background, had something oddly familiar about it. It reminded me of a film. Not a particular film, but the sort of scene you might see in a film set in the tropics, or southern USA or even the Mediterranean!
  Well, I have lingered longer than planned in Kojawara and I cannot quite summon the energy to do  justice to Maal and my work there. I promise to remedy the defect as soon as I can!


Next Post - Thursday 12th October 2006: Maal (will be posted Wednesday 12th October 2011) 

Footnotes:
[4] My father later pointed out that these were probably not cactuses at all, but members of the Euphorbia family.

[5] I subsequently learnt that local links had been established with Kuwait back in the seventies, initially by local members of the Bohra community, a sect of Shiite Muslims (specifically Ismaili) with a huge population in India.