A walk to where our water begins

We call them the ghadera and the naula — the stream and the spring. The water gathers at the source, runs down through a simple pipeline to the village tanki, and from there reaches every kitchen and washroom, ours included. We don't filter it. We believe the hill has already done that, better than any machine could, and we're in no position to argue with it. (For your peace of mind, sealed bottles are kept too — just in case.)

And it is all the same water, for everything. The glass you drink from, the kitchen, the washroom, the kitchen-garden, the terraces of mandua and rajma below the house — every drop comes from this one natural source: drinking, washing and irrigation, all of it. There is no second supply, and not a tap that wastes it. That is the honest reason the washrooms aren't fancy and the showers aren't long — water is a real scarcity here, and the whole house is built to honour it.

And if you would follow the water all the way to its most sacred beginning in these hills, the walk carries on to the Jata Ganga — 'the Ganga from Shiva's jata', his matted locks. Thirty or forty minutes up through the deodar, the stream seeps from the roots of an old tree, exactly as the great river is said to spill from Shiva's hair: the place where, for these hills, water itself begins.