I thought this was a really sweet little recent travelogue.ODD.

Joining us for a breakfast of those lovely little rice dumplings called idlee, our host Saijan exhibited a profound limp we hadn’t noticed on our arrival.

But that had been after dark. We had been rescued after our taxi transport had broken down in the Rajasthan desert some 30km short of our destination, Jodhpur.

This city in the north west corner of India, famed for its blue-painted houses and riding breeches, offered us the third family lodging of our Indian visit as guests of Mahindra Homestays.

Family sums up Surya Kunj (it means Garden Of The Sun). Saijan and his wife share it with his father and mother and two sons (both absent when we were there). Oh, and Sabre the labrador. The boisterous hound was responsible for Saijan’s injury, sustained on an over-enthusiastic early morning ‘walkies’.

The family, descended from generations of Rajput warriors, occupy the ground floor while the first floor is a dark, characterful long room that serves as sitting and dining room for guests, several bedrooms opening onto it. We were the only visitors staying at the time, so it’s difficult to tell how it would feel if fully booked.

We felt a bit guilty as a hobbling Saijan escorted us around the sights of Jodhpur, including the vertiginous Meheranghar fort on its sandstone outcrop. This is fairytale India, inevitable warts and all (a lot of hustling goes on and poverty sits cheek by jowl with affluence) and we were blown away by its vibrancy.

Doors do open for Homestay visitors. Saijan’s family are important in the town and he used his ‘ins’ to get us a peek at the strictly private section of the sumptuous Umaid Bhawan Palace, built in 1929 as a previous Maharaja’s 1929 famine relief project and now a Taj Group hotel.

Glamour lurked in the unlikeliest of places. The spice bazaar by the Sardar Market landmark clock tower where we purchased Kashmir saffron, vanilla and black cardamom, boasted pictures of a recent shopper, Owen Wilson, from when he was filming Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Express.

Truth be told, we were initially underwhelmed by Saijan’s invitation to a country drive ‘a camel camp where we could swim’. How wrong we were. OK, his mum chided him for not showing us the eighth century temple complex at Osian, but instead we ended up in the surrounding desert worshipping at the shrine of Madonna. She found refuge at the Camel Camp (camelcamp.osian.com) during her break-up from Guy Ritchie. Mick Jagger and Goldie Hawn’s stays are also commemorated.

Behind extensive walls the Camp offered discreet luxury with fine food and a pool with vast vistas. We trekked on camels across the dunes, me wondering whether I was straddling Madonna’s camel – but she probably adopted the one she rode.

Our real taste of rural Rajasthan, its tribesmen in their distinctive headdresses, the women carrying loads on their heads through lush crop fields, came with the car journey through the idyllic Aravalli Hills from Udaipur to Jodhpur – the joy barely dented by the breakdown!

From the mighty leopard-haunted fortress of Kumbalgarh to the elaborate stone carvery of the Jain temple at Ranakpur it was a sunlit dream.

Quite a contrast to the sudden onslaught of the Monsoon in picture postcard capital Udaipur. We knew in advance that drought had reduced picturesque Lake Pichola to a tenth of its normal size with the famous Lake Palace Hotel having to discount to keep visitors. Monsoon seasons have been erratic in recent years and this year’s was a month adrift.

It came with a thrilling vengeance when we there. After shopping for pashminas in the maze of Sacred-Cow ridden streets and taking tiffin from turbaned flunkeys in the spectacular City Palace, the largest royal complex in Rasjasthan, we went for a boat ride on the lake. The service had only resumed that day after an overnight downpour swelled the waters.

A rainbow should have alerted us, as the sky turned black and we were caught napping in the middle of the lake by a stupendous downpour.

A tuk-tuk (autorickshaw) ride back to our outskirts Homestay, Balundra House was a splashing rollercoaster ride through streets turned into swirling torrents. Novices in the Indian ways we hadn’t agreed a fare in advance with our Lewis Hamilton wannabe driver and our canny host Narendra Singh had to renegotiate on our behalf. Later, as the rain cleared we dined al fresco by the lakeside, Lake and City Palaces lit up bewitchingly as the bats and dreaded mosquitos flitted through the night.

On paper Homestays had seemed the perfect way to get to the heart of modern India, in a way denied to those whisked from luxury hotel to luxury hotel or, at the other end of the scale, mingling with other backpackers on the hostel trail.

It was a risk. We’ve all got bad B&B nightmares etched on our psyche – trapped in small talk over the smell of fry-ups while the rain (drizzle not romantic Monsoon) teemed down a moorland bungalow’s patio doors.

The reality in India was quite delightful because of the nature of our hosts, well-informed ambassadors for their nation, keen to share their encyclopaedic knowledge of the sub-continent, past and present. So alongside intensive tuition in the myriad Indian gods, we also got a crash course in the rapidly evolving Inida of today, on crash course to become the world’s biggest economy.

This was particularly evident in the Delhi leg of our homestay holiday. I knew nothing of Gurgaon before our journey. Checking it out, I was perturbed it was on the periphery of Delhi, a futuristic satellite city of call centres and shopping malls, the end of the line for the new metro system being extended in time for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. To jump from a state of the art metro station to board a cycle rickshaw pedalled by a gaunt old man is quite surreal. So is Gurgaon. When our host there, Capt. Baldev Singh moved into his lovely house, Haree Shankar, a couple of decades ago it was surrounded by fields full of partridges.

Now the area’s a bizarre mix of flashy developments and ramshackle semi-rural pockets with gypsies practising metal crafts by the roadside. We also found marijuana bushes growing wild, too – pointed out by Capt. Baldev’s old army friend and fellow Homestay host Major Chandra Kant Singh . He stepped in to welcome us when Baldev was delayed getting back from Mumbai where his family are in Bollywood television production.

Chandra Kant was not just a mine of information on flora and fauna; his tour of major Delhi Islamic monuments such as the Qutb Minar complex and Humayun’s Tomb (a kind of Taj mahal rehearsal) was vastly enlightening – despite his own spiritual home being Hinduism.

He also led us through intimidating alleys to show us an ancient and joyous Sufi shrine that would be way off most tourists’ path. Similarly, back in Gurgaon Baldev introduced to us a millionaire developer/cinema owner with internatonal repute as an astrologer.

Up on a terrace, we sipped the ubiquitous Kingfisher lager, while from his laptop he spun the web of our fortunes, including advice for our spiritual and physical well-being. Down below in the bustling streets worshippers revelled outside a colourful Indian temple. Such moments are what makes Homestays unique.

Back in Raj-haunted New Delhi on the way home, after an atmospheric overnight rail journey from Jodphur on the Mandoor Express, we enjoyed the supreme comfort of the Shangri-la- Eros hotel, one of the best in town. The previous day the city, now the world’s largest, had come to a standstill when stormclouds vented their fury

This was a time for shopping (my wife is a born haggler, books are particularly cheap, for trinkets try the Tibetan market on Janpath) and more obvious tourist delights. But even for the hardened India hand the teeming ginnels around Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi are exhausting, but that’s where Karim’s is.

We had had fine home-cooked food at the Homestays, another plus, but we wanted to eat at the shrine of Moghul Cuisine, situated appropriately close to the stupendous red and white Jama Masjid mosque.

Karim’s is a series of very basic dining rooms round a courtyard and the curries are artery-hardening ghee-soaked concoctions. For pennies we lunched on the best tandoori chicken known to man, toasted India with the yogurt drink Lassi, then hailed a bicycle rickshaw. The Monsoon had cleared.