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. 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!

The first quarter of 2021 bore a Pinwheel Day promise. Friends had started to meet in small groups outdoors, there was a buzz in the air, and people were venturing out for vacations. Then the second wave of COVID hit the country badly, bringing with it more devastation and anxiety. Many of my close friends struggled to find oxygen cylinders and hospital beds for their loved ones. Many lost parents, aunts, uncles, colleagues, and neighbors to this horrible virus. Vaccines were in short supply, and things kept getting worse.

In the face of this devastation, we took another road. For many people in the pandemic, their homes became their workplaces. We decided to make our “workplace” — Hide and Teak—our home. We gave up the tiny apartment that we rented in the city, which was clearly designed for working couples who went to offices and children who went to school. Those apartments were not designed as “homes” where you could spend time with and nurture your family. So many years after college, I found that a lot of the readings I did as a Growth and Structure of Cities major were again resonating with me—especially accounts of the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the growth of suburbia in the United States in the 1960s.

This past year has completely changed our perspective on what “home,” “work,” “leisure,” “entertainment,” and “education” mean. The pandemic, for many of us, has altered our relationships with time. We went from planning entire months at a stretch (work meetings, family vacations, product launches) to being forced to live in the present. It has been a year of pivots and a year of clearly seeing our priorities. We got lucky, and we are blessed to be surrounded by open skies and majestic mountains. I have a tiny circle of friends from whom I draw sustenance. I continue to struggle daily with the financial uncertainty of our future, but I am grateful for my family. Right now, the continued safety of our loved ones is the most important thing. We hold on to our inner tenacity to brave all that this pandemic could bring.

Please do feel free to get in touch with me via email at pankhuri.agrawal@gmail.com. I would love to hear from other Haverford alums about their food memories from childhood and their experiences with the pandemic.