Village vignettes - A one roomed home.

Our first house. When we moved to harijanwada in 1996, this house was empty, and we moved in there. It was a circular mud house of diameter 12 feet witha thatched roof.

There was a small mud stove built into the wall at one side. A trunk against the wall served as the table for my writing. Some pots stored the rice and dal. The mats were rolled up onto the attic, and unrolled at night. Life went on smoothly for 2 years, till we moved into a bigger mud house. But this is all the space we really needed.

The only constraint was the pit latrine we had dug at the back. During rains - those were happy years when monsoons brought sheets of water down through days on end - it would fill with water and stay unusable for 3 months.