Mathigatta

Two days after arriving at Sunita’s, she has guests in town and so I’m off to my first homestay.
First, we cross the paddy fields to the bus stop, where we nab a fast-moving private bus headed to Sirsi, the nearest city. Personal transportation is not commonplace here, and the bus is reliable – well, reliable enough – for the daily commute. In Sirsi, we stop by Vanastree’s office. I meet one of the trustees of the organization, a woman named Manorama. Her son, Vivek, is with her and offers to take me to the bus station on his motorbike. Thankful for the opportunity to skip a walk in the muggy weather, I accept. Sunita gives me a piece of paper with my host’s name, phone number, and address, and advises me not to talk to strange men on the bus. Then we’re off.
Dodging cows, street vendors, schoolchildren and auto-rickshaws, Vivek gets us to the bus station in one piece. This place handles busses traveling all over the district, and to say it is a zoo would be a gross understatement.
Inside the walled parking lot, ramshackle, exhaust-belching busses careen in and out without warning and with no regard for who might be in their way. Before they’ve even stopped, crowds of people swarm begin shoving their way through the doors – some getting off, some trying to get on. Once bodies are practically bursting out the windows of the bus, the driver takes off again.
There’s no schedule. Instead, those who aren’t sure which bus to take interrogate every person they bump into until they get some semi-consistent answers. Using this strategy, Vivek and I wander around for a few minutes, him shouting at people in busses and me gathering enough stares to wonder if I should offer to sign autographs (foreigners aren’t a common sighting here). Finally, he finds the right bus, wishes me luck, and disappears into the crowd. As soon as my fellow passengers realize my strange appearance and lack of Kannada doesn’t mean I won’t take up a seat, they’re pushing me out of their way just as if I were one of the gang. It’s great to be accepted.

The ride to Mattigatta, the village where I will be spending the weekend, is actually quite nice, once I get over the bumps and the suffocating crowd of people. As the bus strains up the hills, the air cools off, the traffic dissipates, and the jungle takes over.

The hills the bus is working so hard to overcome are part of the Western Ghats mountain range, which runs down almost the entire Western side of India. The district I’m in (and will stay in for the length of my internship) is known as Uttara Kannada, and it is almost entirely composed of these foothills, right up to the Arabian Sea to the West. This area is known locally as the “Malnad”, and it’s part of a biodiversity “hotspot” comprising the Western Ghats and Sri Lanka. This designation means two things – that the region has a high number of species found nowhere else in the world, and that many of those species are endangered.
The Western Ghats are volcanic mountains, created back when India was still part of Pangea. That means the range is older than the geologically young Himalayas. In the Malnad region, the combination of warm temperatures and high annual rainfall (13 feet at the coast and 8 inland at Sirsi) means that most of the area is forested. But those forests are threatened in several ways – just a few decades ago, the settlers were trying hard to convert the whole area into plantations. Still today, the growing human population and huge land-eating government projects are splitting up the forest into biologically useless chunks, where invasive species can easily take over.
Now, I’m on my way to meet a man who hopes to improve that dynamic, a horticulturalist who maintains his plantation using traditional agroforestry methods, which produce crops for humans using an intercropping structure that mimics native habitats. His name is P.P. Hegde, and he and his wife, Savitri, are part of Vanastree’s seed collective (more on that in a future post). Their house in the village of Mattigatta is where I’m headed.

Mattigatta is the last stop on the bus route and the literal end of the road, which winds 40 km west of Sirsi. Feeling guilty for my earlier savagery in obtaining a seat, I let the other passengers out before me and get off the bus last.
It’s early evening and a thick fog obscures much beyond the pavement and a few small huts. As I pay the fare collector (76 rupees, or about $1.75), a spry old man hurries out of the fog toward me. After introducing himself, P.P. beckons me to follow him across the road and down a rocky hill.
At the bottom, we come to small river. Here we have two options – climb up a narrow path to a hanging footbridge (which looks like an exact replica of Monty Python’s Bridge of Death), or wade across the stream. My feet are hot and tired from the ride, and the bridge is swinging ever so slightly in the breeze, so I roll up my jeans and follow him across the slippery rocks.
We’re on the other side in no time, where another rocky hillside faces us. Taking a deep breath (estimated vaporized water content – 80%), I begin trudging slowly upwards as my host scampers ahead.
A few minutes later, me panting and soaked in the particularly useless variety of sweat that one attains in the tropics, we’re on the jungle path to P.P.’s cottage. Butterflies and songbirds fill the air, reminding me that I really do love this place.

As my eyes adjust to the darkness inside the house, the first thing I notice is the open fire. Actually, there are three open fires in the large room. Over one, in the center of the upper part of the room, the a woman is cooking chapaathis, a tortilla-like wheat bread.
The other surprising part about the house is the cows. As in much of rural India, the cows hang out under the same roof as the rest of the family. Having them close at hand makes it much more convenient to milk, feed and clean up after the animals. And, not having a separate cowshed maximizes the amount of land available for cultivation.
The cows are tied up to the feeding trough, which separates their area from ours. The trough, the wood-fired stove, and most of the floor and walls are made of hardened mud. The rest of the dwelling is built of wood, thatch and a few bricks, with red roofing tiles to keep the rain out overhead.
P.P. gives me a brief tour, which includes my room near the entrance, the outhouse at the edge of the arecanut orchard behind his house, and the bathroom for washing up.
After the tour, we go into the living quarters, where things are suddenly modern. A TV hooks up to the satellite dish outside, a phone sits on a table by the window, and a few electric bulbs keep things cozily lit.

Over the weekend, P.P. shows me around his plantation. He grows arecanut, bananas, coconuts, vanilla and a variety of fruit and spice trees. All are raised organically, with a liberal contribution of compost, supplemented by the cows, added each growing season.
Savitri had to leave town, so I don’t get a cooking lesson, but I doubt I would have had any luck replicating the superb food anyway. She uses only the spices and vegetables grown in the area, creating authentic South Indian cuisine that probably isn’t duplicated many other places. As in most rural homes, all meals are served on stainless steel plates placed on the floor, and the man of the house and guests eat first. The person or people who prepare the food eat last, a practice that I’m not going to change in this lifetime so I keep my mouth shut except to shove in delicious rice and curry. Instead of using silverware – which, I’m beginning to realize, is a cold, unnecessary intermediary between you and your food – we eat with our hands for the full experience. Right hand only, though. The left hand is for cleaning mud off feet, performing bathroom duties (water replaces toilet paper here) and other unsavory tasks.

Overall, it was a relaxing, informative visit, in more ways than one. While mud construction and outhouses may seem primitive to westerners, P.P. is a plantation owner and is well off compared to others in the village. He gets a fair price for most of his goods at the market. And his presence on the land is legal – he’s not one of the tens of thousands displaced by “development” projects, including a naval base, a dam and a nuclear power plant in this district alone. Those that have been displaced move on to what is supposed to be preserved forest land, and many of them earn cents on the pound for what they produce. Next week, I’ll get to see the implications of this first hand.