My last encounter with the Indian village was no painful encounter with the invisible past but a comical journey to a hyper-real place, gaudy with colour and sentiment. It began with a highly entertaining train journey. My husband and I boarded a train for Darbhanga, headed for his ancestral village. Surprised to find our AC two-tier near-empty, we then discovered that AC first class was entirely empty. How jolly to have a coupé to ourselves, we thought (and how jolly to smoke illegally in privacy). How jolly for everybody else, it turned out: over the next few hours, a procession of TTs, train attendants, cleaners and passengers opened the door (without knocking, naturally), stared at us and left shaking their heads. On our way to the great village spectacle, we specimens of urban extravagance and shamelessness were ourselves the spectacle. It was a memorable journey into the heart of archness, my unaccustomed sari pallu falling off my head every other minute, as our rickety rickshaw lurched its way in the pre-dawn to the smoky Bihar village where everyone turned up to view us with open mouths.

Future generations aren’t going to have this kind of fun. Already my son thinks the elephants Vettekaran and Kalyanikutty attached to my own ancestral home in Kerala were merely less cute versions of Colonel Hathi and his herd of cartoon characters. My daughter finds it hard to visualise the kitchen water being drawn up from a well outside the window, and that we had to walk fifty metres from the house to use the kakkoos. The forbidden snake grove is fantasy, the mailanji bush an illustration in a book. But they can have other kinds of village fun: and that’s what cover stories are for.