Village Days

In Dad’s ancestral village, these days, in the Doab in Jullundar district in the Punjab. Here’s a picture.

I took a long walk today, out west for some miles to the next village, then cut back and south toward another, closer to home. I’d looked on Google maps satellite images for a route, and it looked like there was one, but a half mile out of Phalpota I was lost in fields. I met some labourers and they pointed me toward home, and I could see the other one too, some distance away. I spent the next hour walking back to the village across the fields and then found a track which led back to the road I’d originally taken. On the way out, a man riding a bullock cart stopped and started shouting at me, I couldn’t understand what he was saying and so eventually walked on, but a schoolgirl came by right after. She was maybe nine or ten. He needed help moving his bullock. It wanted to go the other way from where he was going and he needed someone to pull him round. The girl tried, and her, the bullock, and the cart, all toppled into a field. They got out after some amusing antics, and the cart passed me by and the man offered me a lift, but I declined, which I regretted. It would have been nice to sit up there and watch the fields go by, even for a short distance, but he was loud and he his only form of communication seemed to be shouting in my face, so maybe I was better off. The road was beautiful and much of the way, all I could hear were the birds and the sound of my own footsteps. I met the man again a way down the road. The bullock had pulled the cart into another ditch and the thing had half toppled over, dropped its load of one very large bag of what looked like cement. As I walked up, the man pulled his pants down facing me and pulled his penis out and started pissing, and as he did this called to me to come over. He talked for a while like that, his hands around his dick, then he pulled up his pants and together we lifted the cement bag back onto the cart.

And some more pictures.