India Impressions, Second Installment

I am writing this in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, about as far away from India as possible, in every sense.
On February 16, I wrote in my notebook:
Today is our seventh day in India. The previous six days have been so full that my feeling for time is faulty. It feels more like a month than a mere week. I'm a bit used to being here, less out of whack, almost used to the heavily spiced food. We're at a kind of bungalow colony not far from the city of Bhuj, in Gujurat, in a rural, almost wild landscape, quiet for a change.
We were fortunate to be traveling with three Indian women, who could hardly have been more different from one another. Durga, our guide, is a tall, dignified Tamil; Natasha, originally from Manipur, now from Delhi, is vivacious, informal, and self-confident, an entrepreneur in the clothing business; Aliya, who celebrated her 24th birthday with us, is a lovely, quiet Ismaili Muslim from Mumbai who writes for a jewelry trade magazine. All three of them have been helpful in making India a bit more understandable for us.
For me, the best part of this tour has been meeting the craftspeople and others, being in people's homes, seeing where and how they work. The cleanliness and order of their homes is unexpected in the garbage-strewn, unpaved villages where they live. We were given two or three meals in the homes of these textile craftspeople, and we had no hesitation in eating the food - correctly, because it didn't make any of us sick.
We've met Muslim fabric printers, Hindu silk weavers, and Harijan quilters. We've seen the most beautiful, elaborate crafts produced in dusty courtyards, brilliant colors in monochrome surroundings, fantastic creativity in traditional surroundings. It reminded us of the fantastic weaving we saw in Peru, and, astonishingly, in one village, with unpaved streets, etc., we met a weaver who had been sent to Peru to meet the weavers there! With my patronizing attitudes (as much as I try to dismiss them), I would have thought that the man hadn't been more than a few miles from his native village.
Others have been to the huge craft fair in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
"Kada Ber" is the name of the traditional weaver's costume that one of our hosts was wearing, a thick, white cotton set of garments. He man wearing it told me he had made it himself. Mainly the Indian men wear Western clothes, crisply pressed shirts, as opposed to the colorful drapery of the women, but here and there you see someone dressed in an old-fashioned way.
I've been playing the Indian flute that I bought, usually not for more than a quarter of an hour a day. It's an adjustment. The bore is wider than a European flute, so the low notes are full and solid, if you can play them. The finger holes are big and far apart, hard to cover. It's tuned like a Western flute, in that it sounds a concert G when I finger it like a G, but you can only get accidentals by covering the holes partially. So meanwhile I'm playing things in the key of D major.
The following day was mainly spent driving from Bhuj to the Rann of Kutch, a large salt flat.
The drive was long and boring, though, because it was a Hindu holiday connected with Shiva (Durga told us that no one sleeps the night before the festival), the roads were full of people on the move: ten people in a jeep that seats five at most, legs dangling out the back and the rear door swinging; whole families on motor scooters; tiny auto-rickshaws, designed for a driver and at most three passengers, packed with more people than you could count when you passed them. The disregard for personal safety is appalling, but you know these people can't afford to travel more safely.
That night we stayed in a better maintained bungalow colony (each room was a small round building with a thatched roof, similar to the peasant houses), and the next day we were driven in jeeps through impoverished villages to a bird and wild ass sanctuary. At the end of the day we went out on the salt flat, close to the border with Pakistan, and saw the sun set on hundreds of local tourists.
The next day we parted company with Durga, Natasha, and Aliya and flew to Mumbai.
The rest of our trip to India was much more standard tourism: guided tours in Mumbai and excursions to the caves near Aurangabad to see the art. So this is a good place to pause.
How odd it is to think that we have recently been to a place so exotic, for us, that we couldn't imagine what we would encounter next, and now we are in the landscape we grew up in, the Northeast United States, where almost nothing is surprising to us.