Land of holy pigeons
Jeremy Clarke
RAJASTHAN
My memories of it seem too farfetched. Perhaps I only dreamed I went to Rajasthan for five days. The fabulous hotel at Jaipur, for example — did I really stay there? Were we really greeted on arrival by dancing warriors and ceremonial elephants? Or was it dancing elephants and ceremonial warriors? (The heat was dizzying.) I must have done. We must have been. I have photographs.
The Oberoi Rajvilas’s lobby, restaurant, library and shop are housed in a replica adobe fort, complete with loopholes and battlements. Behind the fort the guests’ villas and tents lie scattered about the lakes, gardens and temples in hamlets and encampments. The entrance to my villa was like an award-winning arbour at the Chelsea Flower Show. The peacefulness of the place was amplified by a splashing fountain, and some where in the branches above my head, by a dove, gently brooding on the sound of its own voice. It was news to me that temporal perfection was possible. I worried about it at first. It seemed almost blasphemous. Then I got used to it. Lounging beside the pool, I watched an elderly gardener spend a morning replanting individual blades of grass in a threadbare patch of lawn just four inches square. You didn’t have to walk anywhere. Golf buggies dexterously driven by amazingly beautiful, inflexibly polite women ferried us around this exotic paradise. I’d never been chauffeured in a golf buggy before. Sometimes I fancied I was Patrick McGoohan in the Sixties cult series The Prisoner.
After breakfast one day we left the hotel’s cool precincts and made an excursion across town to see the Amber Fort, built by Jaipur’s celebrated warrior prince Jai Singh in the 16th century. We were driven by Vikram, a dead ringer for Errol Flynn complete with pencil moustache, in one of the hotel’s fleet of limousines. Vikram wore the ankle-length gown and the massive warrior-caste turban. The interior of his car was fridge-cold, and for our journey he’d chosen an ‘Asian fusion’ CD — a hallucinatory mixture of Western rock music and traditional Indian sounds that hit the spot.
Vikram edged the car out into a Jaipurbound arterial road. We’d set out at a busy time. It was the middle of the rush hour during an industrial revolution. We surged into town on the crest of a wave of mopeds, horses, rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, elephants, minibuses, city buses, tractors, camels, bicycles, lorries and motor cars of all degrees of decrepitude — with Vikram pressing his horn calmly and without rancour.
Once I’d realised that there was a good chance we might survive the journey, I relaxed a little and looked out of the window. In England I can live for six months without being surprised by anything. In India, for the first time, my mouth was permanently open in astonishment at the variety and beauty and purposefulness and forbearance and gentleness of the people, and at their harmonious co-existence with their animals and their gods, and at the sheer number of them. With a single glance on the way to the Amber Fort I took in a gang of women, in coloured saris and headscarfs, waist-deep in a road trench, swinging pickaxes; a cow wandering into an ironmonger’s shop and a man behind the counter not even glancing up from his newspaper; a man without legs, half-naked, glistening with sweat, marooned in the middle of the road, supplicating with agonised desperation at the passing drivers and passengers, and then with greater intensity at me.
Jacarandas and azaleas bloomed along both sides of the road. Under the jacarandas, market stalls were piled high with mangos, now in season, and after the market stalls came the first of the city shopping arcades. The shop signs were in English: Princess Look, Singh Billiards, Furniture Palace, Band Box Dry Cleaners, Lord’s Footwear, Orient Fans, Ladies Corner Fashions. As we idled at a junction, a cloud of 20,000 holy pigeons, according to Vikram, exploded into the sky beside the car, wheeled in an arc above a triumphal arch, then resettled in a courtyard as though magnetised to it.
We drove through Jaipur and out the other side. Vikram finally stopped the car in a parched valley. The Amber Fort was perched on a cliff above us. I opened the door and stepped out into the heat, nearly putting my sandaled foot in a wicker basket containing a cobra that was being encouraged to dance by a cross-legged man playing a sort of oboe. Painted elephants arrived to take us to the fort. We mounted up and set off up the dusty hillside. My first visit to India and now my first time on an elephant’s back.
Progress up the hill was stately — a bit too stately for the mahout sitting astride my elephant’s neck. He chastised it continually with rough kicks and resounding thwacks on the side of its skull with a thick stick, the latter making it cry out in anguish. The elephant was called Bahadour, said this cruel, ignorant man, and she was 25 years old and would I like to buy a memory card?
We dismounted on a rampart of the Amber Fort, Bahadour raised her trunk to me in farewell and lumbered away to pick up more tourists. I looked around. By the look of it we’d come from a hotel made to look like a fort, to a fort made to look like a hotel. A hotel built on a massive scale, however. The view across the empty, arid hills of Rajasthan from the ramparts was like looking out into an illustration from a children’s fable. Five miles away, a solitary speck of an eagle cruised the thermals. I released a small burp — my perfectly cooked breakfast of bacon and eggs repeating on me after the swaying elephant ride. Not yet 9.30 a.m. on my first full day in India and three firsts already. First time in a golf buggy; first time in a hotel limousine; first time on an elephant. The elephant ride under the fiercest sun I’ve ever experienced. Or was it all a dream? Perhaps it was. It certainly feels like it now, back in Britain, in this rain, and this grey sameness.
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