THE jeep had disappeared around the bend, and all the villagers who had disembarked with me had shuffled off to their homes. Night was falling, the cicada buzz was rising, and I began to get that panicky feeling that the city-coddled might experience upon finding themselves suddenly alone on the roadside in a remote village in the lower Himalayas of West Bengal with no idea where to go.

Before my panic escalated, a young woman wearing a black jacket over a fluorescent-yellow salwar kameez appeared. She said her name was Pushpa, and told me to follow her on what turned out to be an ankle-jarring trek down the steep, stony tracks that make up the byways of Samthar village. We lurched downwards for 10 minutes or more, passing the occasional blue barnlike house, my apprehensions lulled by the slow pendulum sweep of her plait against the back of her jacket.

We passed through a high corridor of maize and arrived at a stone building with a pitched roof of corrugated aluminum. This simple structure was the reason I had ended up here rather than any of the other 638,364 or so villages in India: Samthar is one of a small but growing number of Indian villages offering homestays to tourists.

Waiting outside in the cooling dusk was Pushpa’s father, Krishna Kumar Bhujel, wearing two button-down shirts, a tweed jacket and a woolly hat with a bobble that wobbled with a short delay after the rest of him. His face was crinkled with old smiles. Pawitra, his wife, came over and daubed a greeting of sticky purple rice to my forehead, beamed and wandered off.

Then, along with a couple of Pushpa’s eight siblings, we creaked up the wooden staircase and sat on the veranda, which overlooked sweeping stairways of golden rice terraces edged with balustrades of bamboo and banana trees. In the distance, should ever the clouds dissolve, was the snow line.

We chatted about our families in a pidgin of English, Hindi and Nepali as Pushpa brought up a tray of biscuits with tea plucked from the nearby Darjeeling hills. Pushpa and her family belong to the tenth of humanity who live in India’s villages. The other nine-tenths hardly ever visit. Good excuses are getting harder to come by, as cheap guestrooms have opened up in dozens of villages, almost all with the help of local charitable agencies or, more recently, the Indian government and the United Nations Development Program.

“The look and feel of these places is very different from a five-star hotel,” Leena Nandan, an official in the tourism ministry, told me after my trip, a delicate way of saying that guests wanting a shower will often find themselves presented with a bucket of hot water. “Once that understanding and appreciation is there, I think visitors like going under and getting to know the people. People are at the heart of this.”

The journey to Samthar from the nearest town is a five-hour drive along winding, jungly mountain tracks packed into a shared jeep in a thighs-kissing squash with your new neighbors. After we had pulled into Samthar, a man remained in the back of the jeep looking dazed and sad as blood gelled his hair in a spreading sticky patch, secreted from a wound punched in by a particularly vicious bump in the road. Another passenger — a local nurse named Mary — made her diagnosis: “He’s drunk,” she said in English, scrunching her face in disapproval. “Chang!” she sighed, which sounded like it could be idiomatic Nepali for “Ah, c’est la vie”.

Chang, it turned out, was actually the region’s homebrewed millet beer: sweet on the tongue, but it sometimes sours village relations.

Krishna and I had a couple of pints amicably enough on my first night, each sucking on a bamboo straw slotted through the lid of a heavy metal tankard, playing cards with a pack so softened with age it was beyond shuffling.

But I learned that things often end badly after a night of chang drinking. One afternoon, I accidentally made an appearance at a meeting of the village council, which was cooling a chang-fired dispute. Moments before I barreled into the council hall, the sarpanch, the village’s elected leader, had ruled on a row between two families who sat sternly facing each other across the room, scythes at their feet.

Pranay, a local government official, filled me in. He explained that this was a routine case: the accused was ordered to hand over 51 rupees, about $1, to the complainant’s family for saying, while drunk, things he should not have said.

“Sometimes there’s a killing out in the fields and the murderer runs away, but this is once in a blue moon,” Pranay said. “How long are you staying in the village for?”

“Just a few days,” I said. “Why, is there a blue moon coming up?”