Mharo Khet

Mharo Khet means 'my farm' in Marwari, and its forty acres outside Jodhpur were once desert. Its founders, Rajnush Agarwal and Vedika Prasad, run it as a regenerative farm: more than 110 varieties of fruit, vegetable, herb and flower grow here, and the kitchens run almost entirely on them. The ten cottages have private courtyards and decks facing sunrise and sunset, but no bathtubs; in a drought-prone region, the farm chose not to spend its water that way. You arrive from Jodhpur airport, 25 kilometres and about 45 minutes away, to a welcome drawn from the week's harvest. Khejri trees stand among the fields, and spotted owlets roost in them.

Aab is the Persian word for water, carried into Urdu and Hindi, and at Mharo Khet it names the pool, on a farm where the land was once only desert. Your first afternoon here is left empty on purpose. Each cottage has a private courtyard and two decks, one facing sunrise and one facing sunset, and from either you can hear the birds in the fields; spotted owlets roost in the farm's khejri trees. Read, sleep, or walk over to Aab for a slow swim. Nothing is scheduled until the guided walk through the fields at dusk, which ends at dinner under the guava trees.

Paeru is the word for guava in western India, and the restaurant is named for the guava orchard that hosts it. The fruit itself is American by origin: Portuguese traders are believed to have brought it to India in the early 17th century, and India now grows more of it than any other country. The evening starts earlier, with a guided walk through the fields in the last light, past strawberries, pomegranate, fig, oyster mushrooms and herbs, gathering something to carry to the kitchen. At dusk the walk ends in the orchard, open to the sky, for nine plant-forward courses served blind, following the stages of a life from childhood to what the kitchen calls the nightcap of eternity.

English borrowed the word shampoo from champi, the Indian head massage, in the 1760s, and for decades it meant massage rather than washing. In 1814 Sake Dean Mahomed, from Patna, opened a bathhouse in Brighton and went on to be named Shampooing Surgeon to George IV and William IV. Here the champi is given by a local barber, in the shade of a khejri, the state tree of Rajasthan, whose deep roots keep it green in years when little rain falls. You sit in the open air while the barber works the scalp, temples and neck, with oil if you want it. An unhurried breakfast at Samaa follows.

Around 1350 the traveller Ibn Battuta noted that the beds of India were so light a single man could carry one. He was describing the charpoy, from the Persian chahar-pai, 'four feet': a wooden frame on four legs, strung tight with cord. Across rural India it has served as a bed, a daybed, a seat for village meetings and a surface for drying spices. At Mharo Khet the charpoys, bag holders and woven décor around the farm are the work of a father and son, who often teach together. They show you how the frame is strung and the weave pulled taut, and over about an hour and a half you make a miniature one to carry home.

The word punch is usually traced to the Hindi panch, five, after the five parts of a drink that East India Company men carried home to England in the 17th century: spirit, sugar, citrus, water and spice. Balancing those elements is still the core of the craft. At Samaa the in-house mixologist starts you in the fields, harvesting herbs and fruit, then takes you through three cocktails built on what you picked, with stories, technique and bar snacks along the way. The session takes about an hour and a half, is open to guests 18 and over, and you leave with a booklet of the recipes.

'Kashmir to Kanyakumari' is the phrase Indians use for the whole length of their country: some 3,200 kilometres, from the Himalayan valley to the cape where the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean meet. Along the way the cooking fat changes from mustard oil to coconut, the souring agent from dried mango to tamarind, and the wheat of the northern plains gives way to rice. Dinner at Samaa takes that journey at a single table. The name means sky, or the entirety, and the dining room looks out over the whole farm. The chefs send out the regional cuisines of the subcontinent as a run of tasting portions.

The ten cottages at Mharo Khet are named for ragas, and in North Indian music a raga belongs to an hour: Bhairavi to early morning, Sarang to midday, Purvi to dusk, Darbari to the depth of night. In the 13th century the theorist Sarngadeva assigned pure, simple ragas to early morning and passionate ones to evening, a convention northern musicians still follow. This session keeps to the early, simple end of that scale. It happens on your own cottage deck: a private hour and a half of meditation, breath and posture, at a pace set by you rather than by a class. One of the two decks faces the sunrise, and the fields are quiet at that hour.

Clay pots have kept drinking water cool in South Asia for more than four thousand years. A Harappan pot from around 2500 BC sits in the Royal Ontario Museum, and the matka still works the same way: water seeps into the porous clay and evaporates from its surface, drawing heat out as it goes. At Mharo Khet the potter is the fourth generation of his family to make such vessels for Manai, the farm's own village. He sets up his hand-turned wheel in the fields and takes you through centring the clay and throwing a piece of your own. The session runs about an hour. Your pot dries overnight and is ready to collect the next day.

The bowls are sold as Tibetan, but Tibet's musical records are silent about them. Visitors who documented Tibetan ritual music in the early 20th century never mention singing bowls, and the ones sold today come from northern India and Nepal. They reached the West in the early 1970s, and the 1972 album Tibetan Bells did much to tie them to meditation. None of that changes the sound. Ira means earth, and the farm's glass-walled activity centre has a ceiling of inverted clay pots. You lie still on its floor while the bowls are struck and circled, their long overtones building and fading across the room. The session lasts about an hour and a quarter, for two or more guests.

More than 110 varieties of fruit, vegetable, herb and flower grow at Mharo Khet, on land that was once only desert, and the kitchens run almost entirely on them. That is more than any fixed menu can use. On your last night the kitchen serves what it left out: dishes that never made the menu and the team's most inventive experiments, brought to you as a surprise tasting. As at Paeru on your first evening, you find out what each course is when it reaches the table. It is the fourth and final included dinner of the stay, and it is plant-forward like the rest. Afterwards, the Manganiyar musicians are waiting beneath the rohida tree.