Life with the Hydes in India

 Hi folks,

Well it’s been three months since the last blog and it doesn’t feel like three weeks! We have good news bad news, with all its ups and downs, the adventure continues.

I know the English just love to talk about the weather so I will do that first. Summer has been very weird this year. Normally we get rain showers as the weather warms then a steady rise in temperature to around 45/50°C, then it drops gradually as we approach monsoon but only really drops to 8/10° C in the winter. It may look as though it’s a fixed routine but it is highly variable. This year we have had rain at odd intervals throughout the summer, and lower than typical temperatures, apparently it’s been the wettest June for 123 years, for the last week thunder and rain. Floods in summer! We must bear in mind that we just had a cyclone visit us. Only the second Chris and I have experienced and probably the worst. The score so far is two cyclones one earthquake and one massive dust storm that confine everybody to her home for 24 hours because you couldn’t breathe outside. We do after all live in a desert state. On a side note Christine has given up years ago worrying about there being dust on the furniture, 15 minutes after dusting it is back. This cyclone produced huge damage throughout the state with massive flooding and crops destroyed, thousands made homeless and of course sadly some deaths. The villagers fared the worst the buildings mostly being constructed of packed earth and stones or single brick walls with no reinforcement especially those on low lying land. It feels as though the monsoon has already arrived, all very strange. I have just checked the weather forecast it is for thunderstorms and rain for the next 10 days!

We also took some damage, nothing to the house except a broken window on the top floor that blew out. The solar panels for the hot water also survived I think in part due to the steel monkey Cage we have around it.

The garden however is a different story. Generally the plants survived and we only lost a few peppers and our cacti took a battering. Most of the fruit trees in the area were stripped by the wind. Our mango managed to hold on to most of its fruit but our Jamon (Indian plum) was almost stripped. Luckily we had rigged a net under it as each season it drops hundreds of small plums on the driveway if we don’t. Many friends turn up with bags! We only had one tree in fruit this year the other two had been heavily pruned to get them under control so they did not fruit this year. We had our first orange growing on our two year old tree, deep sadness the wind got it. The garden pool is now back to being full from overfull! The fish don’t seem to have been bothered at all by the debris and extra water arriving in their home, if you’re a fish it seems life goes on as normal despite cyclones! The amount of rubbish and debris that has arrived in our garden is quite impressive and will take a day or two clearing. So all in all nothing too dramatic… So far.

We have several trellis fences destroyed but by far the worst damage is to our chicken coup. A wooden frame of 4 inch posts in the ground supporting a chicken wire covering. It’s the third we have built so we know what we’re doing and we build strong, or so we thought!

Devastated

Massive wind and rain for at least 10 hours left the chicken run flat as a pancake by morning. Our first worry when we saw it was obviously the welfare of our chickens. Luckily although the coop had collapsed the wire had remained joined together making something similar to a huge net. As a matter of fact the chickens seemed interested in the new layout and not fazed at all by their home collapsing around them it seems. We had just introduced perhaps a week before 19 new young hens perhaps they thought this was normal at the moment that gives us 25 in total but a proportion of these will be cockerels and will have to be separated and sold, they bring a surprisingly good price in the market especially if we spend a little time fattening them up, believe it or not the sale of cockerels the last time we did this covered the entire cost of buying the replacement chickens, so good deal. Until that time we don’t know how many hens we have. ‘If they crow they go’ Christine and Gita had to catch them one by one, it wasn’t easy! They are now living in our downstairs bathroom! Friends calling in at discovered the bathroom is now out of bounds. Luckily each bedroom has a separate bathroom which does mean however running up two flights of stairs which can be difficult if you’re desperate. They have enough room and in fact they seem to be enjoying themselves discovering a new environment. Several have been found sat in the sink or resting on top of the toilet tank. Sadly we have lost one that wasn’t thriving so it really wasn’t a surprise. Any dead chickens we dispose of quite faraway in the area of the jungle so that at least it contributes to the welfare of some of the wild dogs or Panthers

.

In the meantime rebuilding has started. The posts we had such faith in have been completely eaten by worm up to the level of the surface. We didn’t realize it but the whole structure had been standing on the ground rather than embedded within it and of course as soon as you have winds like we suffered its going to tear anything not substantially anchored down. This time the posts and roof frame consist of 2” x 2” angle iron. 1” x 1” Angle iron makes up the door fitted with steel mesh. Each post is 12 inches into the ground and concreted. The whole frame is welded together in place and is super strong. In the event of nuclear war that’s where I’m going to shelter. As we had to clear all the old posts wire and rubbish to rebuild we decided that it would be a good moment to rip out a hedge we had between the chickens and the front garden. It was a horrible thing with lots of dead stuff and mosquitoes in it. Anyway out it came and we discovered that we had actually gained nearly a full mtr in chicken pen width so they are getting a bigger home. The frame is up and a corrugated roof now covers one third of the structure. This will give them protection in the monsoon. As soon as the structure has been wired we intend to move a few more plants that chickens won’t eat in and create a sort of jungle patch they can play in. We both thought of the same tree, a curry leaf tree. It produces leaves that taste like curry, very useful for us and we already know the chickens won’t go near it. They already have a large heap of logs and rotting tree trunk to hunt bugs in. Because of our brick floor the rain did not damage the surface at all. Obviously now we have added a metre we will have to extend that. Believe it or not their lighting survived. We use lighting to extend the day length by giving them an early dawn; this gives them the equivalent of a summer’s day which is important if we want to keep them in lay through the shorter days of the winter. They are on a timer which is backed up by a small battery so that even if we have power failures the timer stays accurate. We estimate that it will take us about two weeks to get the structure up and wired perhaps 10 days but the weather isn’t being very friendly to us.

We have had rain and thunderstorms in the afternoons for about two weeks now, and judging from the forecast much more to come.

Staying on the weather theme (very loosely) it used to take us about an hour and ½ to water the gardens. That doesn’t seem very long when you consider that it sometimes twice a day it adds up. We can’t afford to allow the soil to go bone dry with young plants in it. In the weather we have here the sun is so strong just missing watering one evening can lose us a whole crop of young plants.

It has taken us months to complete but we now have a system of pipes, sprinklers and small bore feeds to every bed in the garden. All fed from our bore well and controlled by various valves. It is far more efficient than using the hose pipe and uses less water as it is only delivered to the plant not the whole area in general. We fitted an extension to a watering line that runs to the chicken coop water bowl which saves Kris the job of topping up the water with watering cans every day. She just opens the water valve waits until the bowl has been washed out and filled and closes the valve again. We have raised beds at the back on sprinklers and multiple containers of herbs fed by individual small pipes. The same system is employed to the beds along the side of our main drive and very front garden. The main garden flower bed has just joined the water club by having a long perforated hose run through it. We have several planters of potatoes being fed from small pipes. This summer we are going to try and grow melon and different squashes some along the side of our house that has no garden just a narrow path (facing the sun) in containers fed by this system. It seems that the general opinion of people on the colony who know us (which is just about everybody) things we are doing is ‘interesting’ I think this is a polite way of saying they think we are slightly eccentric!

On a side note this year for the first time we grew pumpkins; to be honest we grew two pumpkins are little on the small size for pumpkins but definitely delicious. Kris made an authentic American pumpkin pie, I had tried one in the USA years earlier but this one blew that away. Absolutely yummy. We will definitely be growing pumpkins next season.  

.

Now I am afraid I have some really bad news, we have lost two of our dogs’ one to age the other illness.

Last month Chile lost her long battle with brain damage and epilepsy.

She has suffered since a very small puppy because of a head injury. She has been on medication to control it all her life. It seemed to get worse very quickly. Over a couple of weeks she just lost interest in everything and began to have changes in her personality she also began to have more frequent fits. We had the vet out several times but there was nothing he could do to help her. He advised us that the situation could only get worse. We struggled with the decision to have her put to sleep, she is only a young dog, but then the next evening after a particularly bad fit she passed away. We all miss her very much; we still say her ambition in life was to lick every single person she met on the nose. Friendly loving dog, strangely she and blue never really goes on and towards the end Chile would try and attack her. She had a longer life with us with more happiness in it than she would have had if we had left her on the street. She would probably have died within weeks of the head injury. She was five years old. The indentation on her head is clearly visible.

We have buried her in our garden in a bed that runs parallel to the drive. She is buried deep in our garden so there is no chance of her ever being disturbed. Geeta put chili's play toy and a bone in with her as well as some flowers. Chili had always been a close companion to Geeta sleeping in her room at night. Geeta knew that she was very ill and that it was getting much worse, she has known that Chile would never get completely better but that we would love her and look after for as long as possible. She fully understands that to save an animal suffering a vet will sometimes put the animal to sleep so that it has a peaceful death. She very much wants to be a vet when she gets older so although we shielded and helped her overcome her grief we did not censor any of the details of Chile’s death. She has taken it very well accepting that Chile is now at peace and not having any more fits.

Then just Last week we lost Moti, the three legged street dog. Those of you who read our blogs who know him well as he has popped up many times.

He loved sand.....soft to lay in
no builders sand was safe!

He has always lived in our road, when he was first injured the people in one of the end houses, a doctor, amputated his leg and cared for him. They have since moved away but Moti never moved from his road. He was the boss. Because he was a street dog some people, delivery drivers or strangers tried to kick him or throw stones at him. Everybody in the street and colony loved him and did something to care for him. He used to visit different houses for meals and was wormed and de flead regularly. He had as I have said only three legs which you may think made him vulnerable however that is far from the truth. If anybody tried to kick him he had a very good defense, he would nip round behind the person as they kicked out and bite them on the other leg. Getting no sympathy from anyone in the street usually ensured that it didn’t happen twice. He adopted whoever moved into the street as a friend and guarded all our properties diligently. Nobody messed with Moti. As the years passed winters and monsoon became more difficult for him. He had cataracts that limited his vision and rheumatism that used to trouble him a lot in damp and cold weather. His last few years he spent more or less living with us, coming and going as the mood took him. Very wet days he would appear and get toweled dry then lay on his bed in his corner of our sitting room. Gradually the frequency of him staying out reduced until towards the end he was not going out very often at all. The last few months he has gradually got slower and less sure of his footing, falling over quite frequently. The vet has treated Moti for years, longer than we have known him and knows him well. Finally in his last week he couldn’t stand and had lost control of his bowels which he was so ashamed of as he had always been a clean dog who only in the entire time we knew him had one or two accidents in the house. The look on his face said it all.

On the vets advice he was put to sleep with some of those  who loved him around him. Geeta talked to him and stroked him as he passed. He just drifted off to sleep, very peaceful.

He is also buried in the same part of the garden as Chile, again he is buried deep. Lots of people from the street have called in to say blessings over his grave. He was a very special dog and lived a long and happy life among people who loved him and cared for him. Moti was 19 years old when he passed.

Bleu’ has been all over the house and gardens not so much looking for them because she knows they have gone (dogs know when one of them dies) but maybe just remembering. She has wined and howled some evenings since they passed but we do our best to comfort her. She has known him all her life, they got on really well and she misses him so much.

We were concerned how Geeta would handle all this but she seems to be quite pragmatic about it. To soften the blow a little we have bought her an albino rabbit, (hinting about having a rabbit for months… The school has one) she completely adores it and has named it ‘bunny’. 

It has a nice big cage that is undercover and has a fan above it and needless to say is getting spoiled rotten. We have also bought some clip together fence panels, about 2 ft² that we will use on the lawn so she can have a good play about and get plenty of fresh grass. We will have to put a chicken wire top on it….We have Hawks! 

White Rabbit on green grass….

                              Our logs arrived today second pile. Now all stacked ready for winter.

We have just about finished preparing the gardens for sowing later this year. We have three tomato plants about 6 feet tall that we are leaving as an experiment. Will they survive the winter? If they do we wonder if they will fruit as well as tomatoes we will plant at the end of monsoon. The next thing into the garden will be capsicum seeds and in several containers we will sow our brassicas. it will all get very silly as we try and keep up with weeding and sowing as the monsoon ends….A crazy time of the year. Monsoon 35° C and 80% humidity rising to 90% when it is stormy, the sweat just doesn’t evaporate and at this time of the year everybody goes around damp. Even the bedding doesn’t feel dry and Kris fights a constant battle to dry any washing. Every now and again we light the stove and heat the house which helps dry it a lot. This year I fully intend to set up Geeta’s pool which has seen good service this summer. Not counting the dozens and dozens of times she and her cousins and friends have been in it Kris and I have also spent several happy hours floating in the cool water in the evening occasionally with a glass in hand.

Well I guess it is time I talked about Kris, Geeta and me. Where to start?

A brief summary; this list is in addition to the normal bruises cuts and scrapes we suffer because of our lifestyle. Kris broke two ribs, I went through a full allergic reaction and a broken toe, Geeta seems to have got away with everything except the odd graze and bruise that all kids get.

Kris being a hero on her own fell off our stepladder and landed on the edge of the raised garden beds (brick and concrete) using it as a ricochet point before hitting the floor. I wasn’t there but Geeta was. She behaved brilliantly Christine was lying on the floor and she asked ‘shall I get grandpa?’ Kris told her to wait a moment, and to grab her inhaler which she did at record speed. Then she came and got me (I was working in the workshop). The rest is pretty straight forward, x-ray showed two broken ribs, one longitudinally and the other a simple break. As anyone who has broken ribs knows it hurts! And there is very little that can be done to help other than painkillers. Strapping up ribs would cause more harm than good with Kris because of her breathing difficulty it would almost inevitably lead to a lung infection. It has taken 4+ weeks for her to be able to move properly again. It was a full two weeks of rest before she could ride her bike again. I should mention that when the school heard about what she had done they immediately arranged for Geeta to be collected and driven back home during Kris’s convalescence. It is a very good private school that Geeta got into on her own abilities despite having missed nearly 3 years of formal schooling she is doing well in most subjects but spelling is not her forte so we will have to work on that as it impinges on every other subject she does. She loves school and hates it if she has to have a day off to see the doctor or a hospital appointment. Kris is writing Geeta part two of the blog with more details and should be published soon.

Now, on to me. It all started innocently enough when we decided as a treat we would have a sandwich each from Subway. Normally Kris would pick them up herself on her way home from town, but on this occasion we ordered by phone. First stupid mistake, never trust anyone else with your sandwich ingredients if they can affect your health! No mayonnaise was stipulated. The sandwiches were delivered and all seemed well. A little later we sat down for lunchtime munches. Normally we cut the subways in half. I had ordered roast chicken with a light coating of spicy sauce. Chomping away it occurred to me that the sauce was really quite spicy but very enjoyable. My tongue was tingling furiously. Second mistake, never assume tingling that feels like an allergic reaction is due to spice in the source…. I did. A couple of hours later it was well under way with severe stomach pains sweating and shivering vomiting and diarrhea. It wasn’t until Geeta said there is mayonnaise in Grandpa’s sandwich (she was eating my other half) that the penny dropped. Until then we had both assumed it was another case of a bug my stomach couldn’t handle. Antihistamine helped but frankly not very much because I had waited so long before using it, mistake number three, use antihistamine if in doubt. Well anyway four days later I’m still on soup and toast and lots of water. My system is coming back to normal, stomach pains and muscle pains from vomiting are just about gone. Just to add insult to injury this has triggered an IBS reaction so anything I eat tends to pass through me very quickly, hence the soup and toast diet. It has now been a week and I am still not 100% .Looking on the bright side, I wanted to lose some weight! The broken toe came from using it to detect furniture in the dark; this is not the first time this toe has been used for this purpose.

Geeta has always been an incredibly brave little girl undergoing operations that gave her a great deal of pain. (The latest operation to straighten her wrist this is four now, possibly two more to go (Kris will elaborate on this) means that she now can reach out palm down. We promised her that when she could do that and rest both hands on the handlebars we would buy her a bike, well I think she thoroughly deserves it and has earned it.

So that’s been our life for the last three months, I have only been able to touch on some of the major events, lots of small things have come and gone and happened that are really of no interest to anybody but us.

Oh Kris saw a mongoose run across the road in front of her!

On a personal note my second book is almost ready for publishing. Mostly for my own amusement I write science fiction. This book is a collection of 25 stories some long some short, imaginatively entitled ‘a collection short and not so short science fiction stories’ by C R Hyde. My first book, ‘the time traveler is already available on Amazon. For those who know me I hope to publish ‘a long and winding road’ my autobiography on Amazon soon to make it more available for anybody who wants to read it? It’s my story, from drugs bike gangs and violence to who I am now. I wrote it some years ago and have been repeatedly asked for copies I don’t have and it is no longer available from the publisher, hence Amazon.

Well I really do think that’s everything, although it is quite certain that the moment I press publish I will remember three of the things I should have mentioned.

The adventure continues.

Chris, Kris and Geeta

Udaipur, Rajasthan, India.

May God bless you and keep you safe in these troubled times.