Two Weeks in Nani's Village

Zara composed the review on day two, lying under a mosquito net at 5:04 a.m. while an entirely unreasonable rooster went off like a car alarm:

Nani’s village. One star. Wi-Fi appears for ten minutes a day on the roof, near the water tank, if you hold your phone toward Delhi. Baths are from a bucket. The toilet requires technique. Everyone stares at me. There is nothing — genuinely nothing — to do. Two weeks.

She was eleven, she was from London, and she had been shipped here — her word — for the summer, because Mum said Nani wasn’t getting younger and you will thank me one day, Zara, a sentence parents deploy precisely when no thanks are conceivable.

The village was four hours from the airport, then forty minutes off the highway, then a final stretch of road that was mostly a suggestion. Nani’s house had thick cool walls, a courtyard with a neem tree, and a smell Zara couldn’t name yet — something like woodsmoke and wet clay and cooking, all braided together. Mum had grown up here. This fact refused to fit: Mum, of the Tube map and the office lanyard, barefoot on this exact swept-earth courtyard.

The first days, Zara moved through the village like a reviewer — cataloguing what was missing. No shower. No screens. No point. The neighbour kids gathered at the gate to look at her, whispering, and she performed being examined, headphones on, one star, two stars, wishing the days away.

The flip began — she could locate it precisely, afterward — on day four, with the water.

She’d complained (again) about the bucket baths, and Nani, instead of apologising, handed her two empty steel pots and said, “Come. See where your bath walks from.”

They went with the neighbour women in the early cool — a kilometre to the well, laughing and talking the whole way, Zara sweating and silent. The pot, filled, weighed roughly as much as her guilt. She made it halfway home before her arms gave out, and a girl her own age — Sana, one of the gate-whisperers — took the pot from her without a word, swung it up onto her own hip, and grinned.

“You hold your phone at the water tank,” Sana said, in Hindi Zara half-followed, “I hold this. Both need practice.”

Something in Zara’s review deleted itself.

She started, that afternoon, doing the thing she hadn’t thought to do: asking instead of assessing. And the village, which had been a list of missing conveniences, turned inside out and became a system — an old, deep, deliberate one. The thick walls she’d found gloomy kept the rooms cool through afternoons that would have melted London. The 5 a.m. rooster wasn’t rudeness; five to nine were the golden hours, the whole village up and working and joking before the heat came to preside. The staring kids became Sana’s whole gang, and being their exotic specimen became being taught — kabaddi in the threshed field, mango-theft routes, which pump water tasted sweet, the courtyard game with tamarind seeds whose rules changed hourly. Boredom, it emerged, had never been the village’s problem. Boredom had been hers — the withdrawal symptom of a girl whose fun had always arrived through a charger.

The evenings undid her completely. After dinner, charpais came out into the courtyard, neighbours drifted in without invitation because no invitation had ever been needed, and the talking simply went on — stories, arguments, songs, Nani holding court with tales of Zara’s mum aged nine, including one involving a buffalo and a school uniform that Zara made her tell twice. Above them, actual stars, in actual thousands. Nobody checked anything. Nobody was elsewhere. In London, Zara realised, lying on a charpai with Sana asleep against her shoulder, she had never once in her life been in a gathering where every single person was entirely there.

“Everything here answers a different question,” she tried to explain to Mum on the crackly day-ten phone call, from the roof, by the water tank, no longer caring about the Wi-Fi. “London answers how do I get more time? Here it’s like… what is the time actually for?” She heard Mum go quiet, the way you do when your eleven-year-old walks unknowingly into the exact sentence you left home carrying.

On the last morning, Sana walked her to the car and gave her a knotted cloth with a handful of tamarind seeds in it — the game, to teach London.

Zara cried from the village to the highway, which surprised her most of all.

Somewhere over Europe, she opened her phone and found the one-star review still sitting in her notes from day two — written by a girl she could still remember being but could no longer quite explain. She read it the way you’d read a stranger’s rude comments about someone you love.

She didn’t delete it. She kept it, and underneath, wrote the correction — the truer review, the one that had taken two weeks and a walked kilometre of water to earn:

Nani’s village. Everything I thought was missing was just something I hadn’t learned to see yet. The Wi-Fi is terrible. The connection is the best I’ve ever had.

Going back every summer. — Z.