It looked like the kind of comfortably oily rag that makes a mechanic's job easier — the sort you find scrunched up in the corner of a garage soaked with tales of its long career, how it protected all manner of tools from rust, greased jamming gears ... and helped fix Mrs. Jones' "unfixable" carburettor back in '83.
Being a more agrarian kind of rag, though, this one was fresh from polishing hundreds of mikan mandarin oranges.
Slightly folded then scrunched and tossed, it was delicately positioned on the corner of a box taking a break not from mechanical toils but from volcanic ash. Meanwhile, our host made the only thing he said he could — coffee. Though he was only looking after the guesthouse (called Garamasala) while its owners were away, he certainly knew his way around the cosy kitchen.