Phone-savvy workers

What I learned from the tribals while they renovated my ancestral home

In Santiniketan, the house I inherited from my mother (and she from her father) is 70 years old. Needless to say, the maintenance of the house needs a lot of attention and money. However, soon after I arrived in Santiniketan, I had decided to renovate my ancestral home with all things natural and avoid industrial products.

We have managed to hold on to this philosophy despite the fact that people who can do lime wash on the walls, who can polish cement floors, who can work with wood and bamboo, are becoming difficult to find. 

Recently, after extensive repairs to the outside walls, we finished painting them. After a few days, we decided to start on the interior walls. Our interior walls (much to the horror of my father who worked all his life for a paint company) have first been covered in cow dung and then covered in clay tinted through available colour strainers. This I have been lucky enough to get done by the tribal women who live in and around Santiniketan. They apply first the dung and then, after it dries, with their hands on the clay create a pattern on the wall. Most people who visit us comment on the walls because the patterns give our cement wall tranquility of a mud construction.

So first, I had to get in touch with the four women who have been doing this for us at intervals over the last decade. They gave me a date a fortnight away. This was because they had to finish harvesting the potatoes that they had sown. I then got in touch with the men who could assist the women in tying up the bamboo platforms that would enable them to reach our high ceilings. After they too confirmed the dates, I started organising the cow dung and the clay. Compared to the 1,000s, I would spend on an industrial paint, the bill for the dung and clay totaled a modest Rs 2,000.

The work started. First, the two men and the women painstakingly removed all the small furniture and covered all the large ones with plastic. After they were done with a room, it would be thoroughly cleaned with no traces of the mess created by the gobar and the clay. The order of the rooms being taken up for painting was planned such that when the kitchen and the dining room are done, we could escape to our home in Kolkata.

We left on the appointed day with the women assuring us that the progress would be as planned and the whole house would be freshly painted by the time we got back. We left feeling truly blessed for having such dependable people work for us and there was no need to pay handsome fees to paint companies for do-your-house contracts.

The house was indeed ready by the time we returned. The walls freshly painted, all the furniture put back and even the paintings put back on the walls. We were impressed to say the least but were also much amazed at how they had managed to remember the position of not only the furniture but the placement of each painting on the wall. When I asked the men how they managed the feat, they looked at us like any youngster today looks at their technologically-challenged parents. “We had photographed all the rooms on the phone before we started,” he said.