It is a balmy spring evening when I turn off the Gurgaon-Faridabad road and into Baliawas village. As I bump along the dusty tracks, the air glows with the golden light that characterizes the short, exquisite spring in Delhi. It is Gowdhuli hour and driving past the mud huts and paddy fields, I feel I have slipped back in time a couple of hundred years or else possibly fallen into a Merchant-Ivory film. I step through the gates of Adagio Riding Stables and the village atmosphere increases: there is a peacock on the wall, its ostentatious tail trailing the top of the trees, and there is a Charpoy in the middle of the field on which a dark haired woman is stretched out.

As I walk up to the Charpoy, the woman sits up suddenly and in an astonishing mixture of French, English and Hindi, mystifyingly tells a child on horseback to stop transforming her reins into spaghetti, orders a groom to jolly well hop to it and shouts at a mongrel to stay out of the paddocks. This is Caroline Juneja, Frenchwoman, promoter and senior instructor at Adagio Riding Stables, temporarily brought low by an old back problem. 

It has been a long and unlikely  journey for Caroline from the sylvan beauty of the Parisian suburb of Fontainbleau to the more rural delights of Haryana. An unorthodox childhood spent in the pony club run by her father nurtured a deep love of horses which has at last been transformed three months ago into the wonderful reality of Adagio Riding Stables, a first of its kind riding school in India - where children can learn to ride horses of their own size. Starting off on very small ponies, which they can control without difficulty, the children are quickly able to gain in confidence and in due course are able to effortlessly graduate to bigger horses. In a one-hour session, there are 15 minutes for grooming the ponies, 35 minutes for riding and 10 minutes for untacking.

At Adagio, Caroline’s aim is to impart to the students (children and adults), a complete and thorough knowledge of all things equestrian including the grooming and care of horses as well as equestrian terminology.  Her obvious passion for horses is infectious and her students quickly become walking repositories of all kinds of horsy facts: I have been told by a smug seven year old that there is, in fact, no such thing as the colour brown when referring to a horse’s coat (the correct terms include bay, chestnut, roan) and that contrary to a firmly held belief, a prone horse is not necessarily dying, just sleeping.

The students also quickly get familiar with the temperament of ponies and horses. I am quickly disabused of my presumption that a pony is a pony is a horse. Caroline looks at me pityingly and explains that thorough bred horses are much more aloof and reserved and it is the ponies who are playful and quirky. One of the ponies, Mystic, has learnt how to take the halter off his companion’s head, thereby enabling him to run off while Raincloud will jump the fences to switch paddocks and join another group of ponies whose company he prefers.

Caroline also aims to introduce a system of aptitude tests, known as Galops in French, so that the students are able to assess their skill in riding, knowledge of horse anatomy and grooming. Caroline is ably assisted in the pony club by young horse-woman and junior instructor Rudrika Singh, who has trained at Rodolphe Scherer’s Pony Club in France.

Just as Time, in India, is not linear but circular, so too has Caroline journeyed back to her personal beginning. For in the quaint, horsy paradise she has created, Caroline has reclaimed the ideal and eternally golden landscape of her own childhood to the great joy of Delhi’s children.