Halfway through my visit I realized how big a chance the Yadevs took when they let me visit them. When I took pictures the neighbors came to watch, which brought in still more people, until poor Bachau was the center of a crowd.
Eventually, a couple of people got mad at him about it--small-town life is the same everywhere--and a few stones sailed over the fence and into the yard. There was no damage, nor were there further incidents, but Bachau was rattled. Here he had agreed to help in an experiment in global cooperation and the people at home would have none of it.
Because the Yadevs have no savings, they live from day to day. In bad times they sometimes go for two weeks without much food. "It's in the hands of God," Bachau told me. "There's nothing we can do about it." His life, he said, is better than his parents' lives, and that is probably enough.
He was good-humored about the inevitable cultural misunderstandings my presence entailed. I kept getting up at the end of a meal to thank his wife, Mashre, for cooking it, as I would do at my home in Germany. Bachau would not accept that. And Mashre herself would hardly speak to me. She would talk to my sister, who came along to help, but not to me. I had to shoot the Big Picture twice, because the first time we had set it up Mashre left to go to the market, assuming that whatever Bachau and I were up to had nothing to do with her.
