PERIYARMUDALIARCHAVADI (try saying that quickly when a bus is about to depart and you need to check if it stops at your village!!)

Roof-top New Years Eve gathering...

For a month, we swap our forest life for a local street two minutes walk from the beach, and rent a house amidst the village. From our balcony we become voyeurs on the life of Indian village street life, whilst we often find ourselves the subject of another's voyeuristic imaginings...how do we dress, what do we eat, how do we behave...all are sources of endless wonderings.

Many Indian houses have their own room for Puja's (prayers)....Christmas Day lunch

Frequeting the local Thali pitstop cafe. Thali is a pile of rice on a banana leaf with a selection of hot sauces, all to be eaten with the hands. You can ask for more as many times as your belly can handle, all for the bargain price of 15p.

And although our thick walls often provided a sense of much needed privacy, sadly it is not a boundary the local temple respects. At 4.30am each morning we are kindly greeted with the blaring sounds of temple music-a mixture of Bollywood sounding pop and traditional Indian music. It is the call for life to begin, for the roosters to crow, the engines to start revving and tooting on the roads, the women to call to their children in the streets and the men to begin the great mysterious act of looking like they never do any work...

Each morning, our little street was a riot of colourful patterns and designs with the morning ritual of 'Kolums'-intricate patterns drawn on the ground. On Christmas Day and New Years Day we were greeted with festive wishes written in English along the streets. It is the job of the women to create this auspicious art work whilst later children, wheels, feet and wind of every day slowly rub them away...apparently a sign of the fragility of life.
Some say it was traditionally started to invite birds and small insects into the home (as rice flour was used) and thus served as a reminder of the co-existence of all beings. Other say it is to intice Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, across the house threshold whilst others maintain it is to ward off evil spirits...Either way, it is interesting reminder of the auspiciousness of the home's threshold-the symbol of one's relationship with the outer world....

Throughout the month, we bike back and forth to Auroville and Pondicherry, cycling through the life of the surrounding villages. I pass a funeral one day where crowds of women weep and wail outside the house. I pass the next day as the men wheel the flower bedecked corpse on a platform whilst eunochs dance to music and drums. Behind, the street is strewn with flowers...even in death, India is alive with colour, fragrance and life.

The Monkey god Hanuman popped round on Christmas Day to sing a song for a ruppee...

One morning, I wash my clothes outside- scrub, rinse and beat it on the ground to better absorb the soap bubbles. Below me I hear a similar echoe of rhythmic beats and look down to see a local woman, sari tucked up around her waist, washing her clothes too. For a moment we just stand staring at each other, each projecting ourselves into the other in idle contemplation of all the selves that could have been. And, for a moment, we each smile, life isn't really that different sometimes, a sea of cultural difference sailed over with soapy washing water. For a moment, two women washing are nothing more than that....just two women washing.