Baby steps

Lawrie Baker said that Gandhi said ' when building a house source all your material from a one kilometre radius. ' And this is what we did at Deogadh. The stone for the house came from a quarry down the road. The principles of arch building were retaught. to local contractors who were now more in tune with RCC and brick. Trips with them to Lonavla to show them the beautiful stone railway bridges and aqueducts.The plan was to build the kitchen first with one bathroom and then expand the house out. A tin trunk held our stove and old monk bottle. Packets of Maggi noodles were cooked on a kerosene primus for the night or my Mothers old box type solar cooker in the day.The door into the kitchen was the one during the room. The opening into the future living room was blocked off with a pile of rubble to secure the room. The roofing sheets were on wooden beams. Beams that the local sarpanch took me to a nearby village to source. The villagers were curious. As to what we were up to. With our stone house. And long evenings by the lakeside. The older ones would tell us that the way we were building Deogadh was the way houses were built in the old days. All the conduiting for our wiring had to be laid into the walls going up. Chasing a conduit into a stone wall is not easy. Its nearly impossible.Hurricane lamps provided us with our light. And when the kerosene ran out the moon did.Local rope woven from old cement sack fibre . Patchwork quilts stitched from old clothes. The villagers wasted nothing. Because in 1999 they had little. Empty bottles were stuck onto their roofs for adornment. Annabelle did a solar cooking session with them. This in the hope that the tree cutting for fire wood would diminish. They learnt little from us. While we learnt a lot from them. Happiness in sitting around at the end of the day enjoying the sunset. The birdsong. The moonrise. Looking up at Orions belt and realising that it wasn't just a belt but a full formed archer with his dog star Sirrius faithfully following him.

Deogadh [ The beginning ]

Welcome to Deogadh! Deogadh the Homestay and Camp Deogadh. 3 acres of pristine hillside on the banks of lake. Deogadh was built as our getaway in 1999. It went from being raw hillside to a wooded acreage with 50 alphonso mango trees in residence. Amidst an assortment of lychee , papaya, cashew, cherry,loveapple, gulmohur and banyan trees. The house was built in phases. these were the days before cell phones and JCB's. To make a call necessitated a drive to Kale Colony aka Pawnanagar. The slope on which the house stands made it very picturesque but difficult to get material too. Most of the material went up on someones head. Water carried from the lake to Deogadh in a barrel. Which used to sit in our trusty old Willys Jeep. Annabelles job was water fetcher. While I [ Clement] busied myself with important activities like checking the depth of the lake at various points and chasing ducks on the water. And this was for the first room only.Which was all that we had the funds for in 1999.