ROADS TAKEN and Not Taken
At ‘‘Home’’ in India During the Pandemic By Pankhuri Agrawal ’06 At the beginning of March 2020, I remember drawing up a tidy schedule in my planner. Amay, my older son, was about to begin a two-month summer holiday from school, and I could not imagine being cooped up at home all day with a fidgety toddler and my baby, Vivan. So I promptly enrolled Amay in a gymnastics class and a summer camp run by his Montessori teacher. Then without warning, on March 25, as if the universe had played a cruel joke on all the efficient planners in the world, the Prime Minister of India announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown. Suddenly I was stuck in a tiny apartment in Bangalore, with two kids under three, along with my husband, Sunil, and my mother-in-law. We coped by playing hide-andseek and making Lego towers. Our recently rented office space lay empty, and my plans to launch a travel consultancy I had named Yayavr (“nomad” in Hindi) bit the dust. To maintain my sanity, I began writing a series of essays inspired by spices and memories, and the idea that we can “travel” through food—exploring culinary traditions and experiences, recalling treasured family recipes— though we are grounded globally. Across India, migrant workers were making the treacherous journeys to their villages and homes, on foot. I felt guilty complaining about my situation, when there were millions starving, without daily wages, and no hope in sight. Zadie Smith in her essay “Suffering Like Mel Gibson” articulated how I felt, writing that suffering is not relative, it is absolute. 52
Haverford Magazine
We were and are all suffering, each in our own tiny cosmos. Once the first lockdown was lifted, our main priority was a steady source of income. We had to pivot—and fast. My husband and I started to think laterally (a skill honed at Haverford), and we decided to take the plunge. We had a half-acre of rural land, two hours south of Bangalore, on which we would host overnight guests. In place of a campsite, we decided to build a homestay structure we dubbed “Hide and Teak,” and rent it out as an Airbnb. There was a growing demand in India for vacation homes within driving distance from major metro areas. We were optimistic about our new Hide and Teak project, and hoped that the country would overcome the pandemic, and things would return to a new “normal.”
We began construction at a frantic pace in June 2020, and moved into a tiny cottage to oversee the process. Instead of the city environment I was used to, we were immersed in a rural setting. Frogs jumped out when I brushed my teeth at night, and I had to check my shoes for scorpions before putting them on. I seemed to be living in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, writing about nature and food. A lot of my early “gastro-travel” essays (posted at facebook.com/YayavrIndia) were nostalgic, recalling some of the dishes my mother used to make. Something about not being able to control the present took me back to the familiarity and comfort of childhood. At the farm, we struggled with Internet connectivity. For Amay to attend his online class, I had to carry baby Vivan and a laptop to our neighbor’s porch to catch a connection. We soon gave this up, and instead encouraged our children to make mud pies, throw rocks in a pond, count grasshoppers, watch ants, and collect seeds on our countless walks. I started taking online classes on running a small business. I learned how to cost out a menu for our homestay, to count how many cardamom pods go into 15 cups of masala chai, and how many pods make a 25-gram packet. I learned how to manage a small team of employees. It was a crash course in business management. Slowly Hide and Teak (hide-and-teak.business.site) took shape, and we welcomed our first guests in January 2021. Overnight, I became a new business owner, and we broke even within three months! continued on page 67
