“This is the village way, hey!”

Those are words from a song by YouTuber Wilbur Sargunaraj, who documented a trip to his ancestral village and wrote a song about it. Inspired by his experience I was ready to take on whatever my ancestral pilgrimage threw my way.

This past July, my family visited India for the first time since 2006. Because most of our extended family lives somewhere in North America, we never really felt the need to make the 20-hour plane ride that many of my Indian-American friends suffer through every summer.

Both my parents were born and raised in the city of Hyderabad in the south central region of the country. However, my father’s parents come from a small village about 150 miles away called Manthani, which has a modest population of 17,000. My mother and I had never visited there before. My father hadn’t been back since 1983.

We started the four-hour ride from the hotel early morning. As soon as we entered the rice paddy outskirts of the village, we saw two men herding water buffalo on the main road, which dispelled every statement I had ever heard about the urbanization of  Indian villages.

After we had made our way out of the buffalo traffic, my parents and I went down to the river, where we were to perform the “Godavari Pushkaralu” ceremony. In this ritual all three of us took a dip in the river to bless future generations and honor the past.

Standing knee-deep in the river water, I noticed the different uses of the river. The villagers used it to bathe, of course, but they also washed their clothes and motorcycles in it and even allowed the buffalo and cows to cool off in it.

It was a textbook South Indian village. If this place had progressed so much, yet I still found it so quaint, I couldn’t help but wonder what it looked like when my grandfather grew up here more than 80 years ago.

We spent the night in my dad’s cousin’s apartment, which was located in a more developed region of Manthani. It was luxurious compared to other village housing with a pleasant absence of wall lizards and an air conditioner offering relief from the tropical heat and humidity.

Heavily jet-lagged and having slept for nearly 20 hours, I dragged myself out of bed at 8 p.m., which felt like early morning, and we began to visit my dad’s cousins, some of whom he had not seen in over 30 years.

Although it had been decades since they had last met, one of them told my dad to take down his number and to call him if we ever needed anything, any time of day.

In every house we were offered homemade rice dishes, chutneys and other traditional snacks.

As we went from home to home, I noticed cows and wild boars casually walking the streets. These animals seemed to have assimilated into village society, as the residents were not trying to avoid them.

We spent almost two days in Manthani, but I gained so much perspective in those 40 hours. People in Manthani can find so much joy just in seeing family, no matter how distant. Their homes may not look like the Buckingham Palace, but they, too, have been passed down and proudly cared for by countless generations.

Although I type this story from the comforts of my comparatively large home in in Saratoga, I will never forget my experiences in my ancestral village, where cows and pigs casually roam the streets, where people drive on roads and wade in the rivers alongside buffalo — and where the people lack big homes but have big hearts.