Smiling faces, tall glasses of lassi, food rich with butter and ghee—these are vistas associated with Punjab. Escape the hectic urban bustle and experience the pind, with serene surroundings and slow-paced life.
Happy. It is the name of a man I met deep in the countryside of Punjab. It is currently also my state of mind. Punjab is famous (and infamous) for many things but what I had always heard about and now enjoyed first-hand was the classic hospitality, as I sat with Happy Singh (Sukhjinder on his driver’s licence) and my photographer, Behzad, and tore into rotis with a generous dose of desi ghee.
The setting was rural, in a village called Gunopur in Gurdaspur district near the border with Pakistan. The food was basic yet hearty—dal, dahi bhalle, bhindi ki subzi—served by the two women of the house who sat before the chulha (an earthen oven) making phulkas (small, soft rotis). The conversation was limited, the food not. As I rounded off my meal with a tall glass of chaach, I asked my host, “What next?” after the hearty meal. Happy smiled and said, “Now sleep like a baby.”
And so I did, returning to my cottage at the Punjabiyat, a farm stay in the region of Saidowal-Gunopur. There are many unique words in the English language, the meaning you may know of, yet their experience is something else altogether. ‘Petrichor’—a word I was introduced to by a colleague—is the smell of earth when it rains. That was my initial and lasting memory of my stay in the countryside of Punjab. I sat in the balcony of one of the four standalone mud cottages of Punjabiyat and saw the world change—the brown land took on a tone of green and the sky became a pretty blue. I hadn’t seen this sky in the city. I hadn’t seen this shade of green either or tasted phulkas with desi ghee. I was smitten by the Punjab countryside.
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