Jodhpur Gam Road on a very quiet Sunday morning.







Tulsi Row.










Tulsi Flats....ours is the lowest level.










The entrance to C block.

Non-veg

Last night we headed across the river for dinner for the first time, an auto taking us across the wide black space of the Sabarmarti at night and into the bustle and noise of the old city. We were dropped on Relief Road and headed right at the cinema, onto a narrower street lined with shops. The smells of the old city are familiar to me from when I was last in India: feet, effluent, moped fumes and incense. At the end of the street was an open space filled with stalls. Many of these were kitchens on wheels selling what passes for Chinese food in India, their clientele sat in the open on plastic chairs, the smoke from the brightly painted stalls rising in thin clouds above them. On one side of the square stood a low-rise, white-painted mosque, on our left as we stepped up into Nishat Restaurant ready to revel in non-veg curry. I had mutton, Dani had chicken and we washed down both with thick, sweet lassis.

Today we started with a cooked breakfast. Jains don’t eat eggs and this makes them hard to find. Although a minority in Ahmedabad, adherents to this branch of Hinduism are a major influence on social mores. They also own many of the flats and frown on other people flouting their rules. The bright new supermarkets launched by India’s leading corporate houses don’t infringe on this sensibility and the small retailers keep such controversial wares well hidden. But I have managed to establish a supplier, the owner of a bakery on Jodhpur Gam Road (I daren’t reveal his name) who will sneak out to the back of his shop to bag up some of the perfectly white ovals and allow us to cook up scrambled eggs to accompany our buttered toast. We sat on our bedroom balcony and enjoyed the warmth with breakfast. I have been able to have tea at home since I bought a small kettle and sieve, and am having sweet, milky chai in the mornings. In the afternoon we picked up two cookery books from the bookshop, Crossword, and ate cake and ice cream in the air conditioned coffee shop there. After a big shop at the Star Bazaar supermarket I washed some clothes and cooked dinner: parsley mash with sweet potato and carrots, and hot chocolate for dessert.

Law Garden

We woke up late this morning and it took us a while to make it out of the flat and into the sun. Once out of the building and at the entrance to our ‘society’, where there is a sentry post and old men in off-white clothes sit during the day and ruminate, we headed right onto Jodhpur Gam road towards Anandnagar road. Having got out some cash from the ATM there we headed back and picked up a teenage girl who was begging. She was dressed in a dirty sari and repeatedly made a feeding motion with her hand to her mouth and stomach. She stayed with us for about five minutes, showing us the money she had already and occasionally bending down to show supplication or, oddly, grasp the back of my calf. We said ‘bus’ repeatedly, which means ‘stop’ or ‘enough’ in Hindi but she persisted until we ignored her, at which point she delivered an unintelligible but unmistakable curse on us for our refusal to cave into her demands.

After a trip to D-Mart for cleaning supplies and a Mars bar, we caught an auto to Law Garden and got out at Swati for lunch. This is one of our favorite restaurants. We sat outside and enjoyed our food with a delicious Kesar lassi and an equally good sugarcane juice. Having paid the bill, cheap at a little over ₤3, we wondered over to Law Garden itself. The park reminded me of those in Valencia in Spain: landscaped and hot, with dusty paths and shaded seating. There were several canoodling couples in amongst the trees and on stone benches, so obviously public shows of affection between the sexes are ok in certain circumstances. As well as being pestered by another beggar and befriended by two sets of eager-to-introduce-themselves boys (the first older than the second and less annoying), we saw a variety of wildlife. The local stripy-backed squirrels were in abundance and joined in the trees by green lorikeets with yellow beaks. I was reading the botanical information about one tree when above me appeared the head of one of these parrot-like birds. In a hole in the hollow trunk of the tree the bird could be hidden and would occasionally pop its head out as if shy. Elsewhere the birds were high up in the branches of trees. Passing a bird poo spattered area I looked up and saw the underside of one of Ahmedabad’s kites. I’d seen a pair of these birds of prey from the rooftop of Pratham’s office the week before: they had wheeled and swooped over the rooftops, heads regularly down looking for prey and their shadows frightening the pigeons.