The Village Stay: Kalulal

Upon reaching Dhala, I am relieved to discover that my arrival has, in fact, been anticipated by at least some of the village’s inhabitants. More importantly, Seva Mandir has made arrangements for my room and board in advance; it has also identified someone to assist with my work. In fact, my accommodation and assistance will flow from the same source: Kalulal (above at rear, reclining on the porch of the balwadi). Kalulal is familiar with and to everyone in Dhala. His knowledge of the village—its people, resources, history, and fortunes—is substantial. He is active in the community: he sits on committees, maintains records, and speaks freely and authoritatively at gatherings. He is well regarded in the village, and though he can be imperious with children and others beneath him in age and standing, he is seldom defied. He commands respect. He is, all things considered, likely my best medium for learning Dhala. During my stay, he will serve variously as guide, intermediary, protector, sidekick, lackey, procurement agent, host, roommate, and mother hen. And as with any person with whom one spends enormous amounts of time, he will inspire within me equal measures of fondness and exasperation.

Kalulal, I learn, trims his fingernails with a scythe. His voice, which begins at stentorian decibels, can reach an astonishing, bowel-shaking plangency, as when calling up to a distant household while trudging through Dhala’s bottomland. Even his yawns, though plainly exaggerated, can stop the heart for a moment if not anticipated. He is very tall for the village, six feet or slightly over, and his feet are enormous, larger than mine, their bottoms cracked by decades of sandaled locomotion. He’s likely in his early-to-mid-forties—his black hair, so fussed over in the mornings, is tinged with gray, and his face is etched with the shallow lines of early middle-age (age, however, is difficult to estimate in the village; everyone looks older than they are). He is the voluble sort, given to a declamatory style of speech in groups and a rapid, garrulous mixture of Hindi and Mewari (the local tribal language) in normal conversation. His knowledge of English, however, doesn’t extend much beyond the curiously inopportune employment of “thank you,” and a basic knowledge of numbers.


I am fond of Kalulal because he makes my work simple as no one else has in India. Dhala is a loose clustering of around 300 (give or take fifty) households sprinkled without pattern over hill and vale; it is bounded to the east and west by hills too rugged and steep to permit expansion, and thus has a sprawling (if indeed such a word can be applied to a settlement so dominated by agriculture and natural space), north-south orientation. In two days we span the entire village on foot, visiting its every well, handpump, and waterhole—sixty-six in all—and traversing many dusty miles in our rambling (forgetting, too, the vertical distance covered in its rolling terrain). We do this during the hottest part of the day, in the pitiless sun of southern Rajasthan, beginning each morning between 10:30 and 11 and returning between 4:30 and 5:30 in the evening. Except for chai stops in the afternoon, we consume nothing but water and pilfered sugar cane while we work (and Kalulal much less water than me; the man, I determine, is half-camel). It is hot, filthy, wearying toil—and the tedium is perhaps the greatest hardship. My routine is practically invariant: I note the type of water source, whether it’s being used for household use (“Drink?” I ask Kalulal) and, if so, the approximate number of households utilizing it for that purpose; I record its longitude, latitude, and elevation; if it is being used for drinking, I test its water for dissolved salts; and if it’s a major source for the village (i.e. being used by more than ten households), I take a sample for further testing of dissolved metals.

Kalulal leads me with solicitude, without complaint, and with a sort of tireless grace, traversing the paths, ridges, fields, and streams of the village with both vigor and ease. What may have taken a week to orchestrate and complete in Udaipur, we finish in two days. In the afternoon of the first day, we pause to rest in a small copse of saplings, and Kalulal removes a sandal, places it on the ground behind him, nestles his head on it, and falls asleep. It is a rest well-earned, and, truth be told, I feel I am more in need of it than him.


I am fond of Kalulal because he provides for my comfort, ensures that my needs are met, because he feeds me (though it’s his wife who does the cooking). I don’t say he shelters me, because I don’t sleep under his roof; as I have already revealed, during my time in the village I sleep on the porch of the balwadi, and he sleeps next to me. I admit this arrangement irks me—it’s enough an affront to privacy that I must sleep outside of one of the most prominent buildings in the village (as I would well learn over the next few days, the balwadi serves not only as Dhala’s preschool, but also, given its central location on the village’s only road, as general community way station, de facto town hall, playground, and social club), but must someone also sleep beside me every night? I remember what Trushna Patel, an American-born Indian, told me, before I left Washington D.C., of her experience of life as a visitor in an Indian village: “People will watch you sleep.” I thought that she must be exaggerating, but here in Dhala, in fact, Kalulal looms, if not to watch me sleep, at least to guard my sleep. It is this stifling paternalism that will prove most exasperating during my stay; although I know that it arises from a laudable sense of duty, propriety, and concern for my wellbeing, I can’t help but chafe at Kalulal’s domineering behavior—it finds its way into virtually every aspect of our relationship.

Kalulal furnishes my bed, sheets, and blankets—more of the last than I can possibly use—and I sleep more comfortably than in Udaipur. The first night, as we prepare to turn in (it’s just past nine o’clock), I lie in bed and hold a superfluous blanket with a quizzical look (pantomime and facial expression being essential forms of communication in Dhala), unsure of where to stow it. Kalulal rises from his bed, takes the blanket in one hand, throws off my heavy comforter with the other, covers my bare legs with the blanket, and throws the comforter back over me, patting it down snugly. I think, at twenty-eight years old, I have just been tucked in. Sleeping on the porch proves much like open-air camping, only with more comfortable bedding, a less generous view of the stars, and the chirping crickets interposed with bleating goats. (Also, I can’t remember the last time, if indeed ever, I’ve encountered the world utterly devoid of artificial light, of whatever origin—it is something to be experienced.)

My first morning in Dhala, Kalulal takes me to bathe at his well. He fills a rusty bucket with water from a handpump; I strip to my underwear before several onlookers (I count one other man, three boys, and two women at some remove—I don’t know whether the women are watching), crouch down and begin to splash myself from the bucket in a manner that I think expresses a proper appreciation for the scarcity and preciousness of the resource in a water-deprived region. Kalulal stops my splashing, hoists the bucket, and unceremoniously dumps its contents on my head. I am temporarily blinded and sputter (and am reminded of bath-time as a child, when my mom or dad would gently hold me beneath the faucet to rinse my hair after shampooing; sometimes my head would be too close to the front of the tub, and part of the faucet’s stream would run unimpeded over my face, inducing a temporary suffocation); I hear chuckles. Later in my stay, while we bathe in a stream, Kalulal interrupts my mild splashing with a heavy dousing from the practiced flinging of his cupped hands—“thank you,” he tells me when the torrent is finished.

Kalulal’s family feeds me well and to excess. Kalulal refills my dishes ad nauseam, despite my exclamations of “enough!” in Hindi; without first offering, he sprinkles liberal amounts of salt on my food, too. One night he seizes my bati (incredibly dense balls of wholemeal flour) and crushes them in his left hand, so that I might dip them in dhal. I consider this a strange and double trespass: I can’t imagine another Indian, much less an American doing such a thing. Perhaps, I reflect, by the end of my stay he will push food directly into my mouth, completing my infantilization.

So it is in Dhala that I am obliged to trade independence and privacy for the opportunity to do useful, if not vital, work. Ultimately, it is a trade I am glad to make, and besides, my simple presence in the village is of far more interest and importance to its inhabitants than the fact that I sleep where anyone might see, or that I bathe half-naked before an audience, or that I am not permitted the freedom of an eight-year-old boy (in fact, they might think it strange if this were not the case). My very presence in India, of course, is likewise a trade-off, though one much grander in scale than that made in Dhala. It’s also a bargain whose ultimate value is less certain, as is true of many of life’s decisions. One must learn to deal with uncertainty, I think, or how else can one get on? I only wish acknowledging this truth regarding the unknown made it easier to grapple with. The battle rages on.