India 2019-21

07 Nov 2019

We stayed at the home of Kiran and his family in New Hampi. In 2012, the government demolished part of Hampi Bazaar where he was living, to allow further archaeological excavation work, and former residents were given a piece of land in what was to be known as New Hampi, 3 kms away. Some, like Kiran, borrowed the £10000 needed to build a new two storey home, big enough to house two families, whilst others built rough breeze block shacks.
Every day we cycled through the village past waving children, women pounding laundry against stone and school children dressed immaculately in their uniform with plaited hair tied in blue ribbons and all in bare feet.
Kiran knew that riding a Royal Enfield was
on my bucket list, so one morning kindly swapped his bike for my bicycle ( it was Fab!), and we followed the mud track meandering through the banana plantations to his grandfather's old home that he and his brother are renovating to make an eco hostel. He took us climbing on the boulders surrounding their land where the views were magnificent and asked us to write the advertisement for the accommodation.
On the way back we came across women crowding into a truck at the end of their day working in the field, but still waving and smiling in their colourful saris. They looked lovely but cant have been easy to work in.
Kiran had an arranged marriage and says it's ok for him because he's a man, but he wants more for his children. He wants his daughters to go to university, to chose their own husbands and to emigrate to the UK of US. In the rural area of Hampi, he says there are too many women in abusive relatonships with drunken husbands. He introduced us to two women, who worked with him. One, now in her 30s, was married at 12 to an abusive man. She won't leave because "people will talk", and the other was getting married, a few days later at the age of 18, to a man she had only recently been introduced to...Read more