ABSTRACT
The village we arrived at — after a long bumpy journey over a dirt track, in a crowded Ford transit van still displaying a U.K. tax disc — was visible as a collection of sandy-brown walls, with the occasional painted roof. There was no village name-board, no street signs. A narrow lane with open drains on both sides and high brick walls seemed to be the way into the village. Children appeared as if from no-where to stare at us. We were escorted along a maze of winding lanes to a doorway and then shown into a small room, which appeared to open onto an expanse of mud where a buffalo was standing…It took a while to work out whose house we had come to, for there were in fact two houses in this courtyard, which, it emerged, belonged to two brothers; or rather, one brother and his family lived in one house, and the other brother's widow and her children lived in the other. The families shared a small separate guest room — the room into which we were first shown — and a water pump, but they used different sides of the courtyard and had their own buffaloes (adapted from my diary, 1980).
