<b>Keya Sarkar:</b> Summer sojourn and a great lesson

Like every year, this year too, we fled - from the summer heat of Santiniketan, to return with the monsoons. It is not easy. Every year, our search begins by end-March or early April - the search for a quiet place to shift our home in summer. Not being fond of home stays or resorts and even less of tourists short on trousers and long on conversations on phones, we have been - for the last few years - renting houses and apartments. Now, thanks to many aggregators on the internet, there is plenty of choice. But till you actually arrive at the destination you have seen only in pictures, you don't know whether you have made the right choice.

This year, we got exceedingly lucky. We found a little cottage in a village called Digoti, about 12 km from Ranikhet. On a turn-off from the Ranikhet-Almora road, the cottage and the village met more than our expectations. The cottage we rented was part of a small cluster owned primarily by people from Delhi - it seemed more like an investment rather than their personal getaway. So, of the 10-odd cottages in the cluster not more than four were inhabited. Since it was at the foot of a steep downhill road ending at Digoti village, not many swish SUVs were making their presence felt.

So, besides the birds and, of course, the rather noisy cicadas, the only noises were that of the villagers going about their daily life. In the near one month we spent there, we became familiar with when the children made their steep climb to the bus stop where the school bus picked them up, when the young girls from the village herded the cows up the hills to graze; when the housewives finished their work and walked the goats up to find food amid the harsh pine forests or when in the middle of the afternoon, the children noisily came back from school and the sweet melody of bells when the cows came home well before dusk.

Of all the things we saw, perched on our giant window sill (which was the best feature of the cottage we rented), what truly amazed us was the amount of load people easily carried up and down those steep slopes. And in what put gender generalisation on its head was that the women carried far more, even if they were accompanied by men. Watching women carting full gas cylinders on their heads was truly humbling.

One day, we saw women coming down the road in front of our cottage with around 20 bricks piled neatly on their heads. As we saw more and more women from the village do this routine, we realised a truck had dumped the bricks at a place where the tar road ended and the women were carrying them down to the village. Since the women did not seem to be from one family we thought they were going to build a mandir for which this was shramdan. But when we shared our conjecture with the caretaker of our cottage, he had a good laugh and said the bricks were being carried to build a house - it was the tradition for the whole village to help.

Even as we were trying to understand the implications of this community endeavour, completely different from what we see in cities, there was more in store. Soon, we saw schoolchildren carrying bricks on their way home. The little boys were pulling behind them steel rods used to reinforce concrete. We couldn't help ourselves. We went all the way down to the village to see where the house was being built. A great lesson was learnt on our summer sojourn.