I've postponed writing an entry about my travels to Jaipur and Agra from a couple of weeks ago for about as long as I can. It's got to the point where my mother actually harasses me via Facebook to get off my lazy arse and back to work ("Come on, Jessie!"). The problem is, I just can't face the thought of describing all of the monuments I saw, especially the Taj Mahal, to anyone who has never seen them before. You might be wanting a detailed account of what they all looked like close-up, or how I felt being there, so let me tell you now, you'll probably be disappointed. I'll never be able to even touch on what it's really like. You see, we all have the picture of some of these amazing buildings in our heads or in the pages of geography books. We can wikipedia the Amber Fort and probably learn more information about it that an Indian tour guide can supply (such has been my case, at least). But when it comes to the actual experience of going to such historic sites, there's so much more to it than I feel I can describe. And to be totally honest, I worry that perhaps I didn't experience it myself at all. Was I present enough? Was I taking too many pictures and not just enjoying the moment? Was I worrying too much thinking about whether I was enjoying the moment or not? I've also become so accustomed to budget travelling around the country - my standard of comfort having dropped considerably to the point where I'm just pleased to sleep on a mattress without too many bed bugs - that spending three nights in five star hotels and getting around by an AC bus with the word TOURIST covering most of its front window makes me think that I didn't really see Agra and Jaipur at all. I'm sort of figuring that out, so maybe you can decide for yourself and tell me - am I in the real India anymore?
"Oh my god," my friend Komal spins around from looking out our hotel room window, "we have a POOL."
"Where are we?" I joke, bouncing on a thick, springy mattress. Just then the lights and the AC cut out. Reassurance that we were still in the country, thank god.
Jaipur was the name of the place. It was all part of our EAP organized "Golden Triangle" trip, in which we would travel between the old Mughal empire cities of Delhi, Jaipur, and Agra attempting, it would seem, to break the world record for the number of forts visited in one weekend.
Because we are all late, disorganized and disappointing individuals, we delayed our arrival so much on Friday that we had to postpone seeing Jaipur's City Palace until the next day and Viji Uncle, our saintly director, unleashed us into the Old City for some shopping. The Old City of Jaipur is the area that has existed since the rule of emperor Sawai Jai Singh II about four hundred years ago and was the only planned city in India at the time. It is also referred to as the Pink City, so called because about a hundred and fifty years back the Maharaja decreed that every building and facade should be painted pink, the colour of friendship, in honour of the Prince of Wales' visit.
As we left our bus and walked down the promenade of Johari Bazaar, beside the City Palace, I knew I was going to enjoy Jaipur. The street was a unique but lovely hue - I would call it terra-cotta salmon if I was employed as one of those lucky people who thinks up names of paint colours for a living. The shops themselves all seemed very old, and I could imagine each shopkeeper's ancestors selling precisely the same wares on this street hundreds of years ago, where I encountered infamous Rajasthani handicrafts - shoes, sarees, cholis, angarkhas, little marionettes and huge tapestries. I was in shop-aholics' heaven, hardly even bothered by the pesky shopkeepers who pulled me this way and that, saying, "Excuse me madam, your friend, she is calling for you, you come my shop..."
I saw my first snake charmers. I touched one of the fanned out cobras. I bargained with a sadhu for a turquoise ring, then faced the curses of him and his posse for changing my mind and walking off without buying it. I held a little street girl's hand as I walked and played tickle monster with her friends, and then I left it all, climbed back onto the bus with its magical powers of transporting us worlds away, to a five star hotel room, and a hot bath, and a pile of very large, very soft pillows, and BBC on the telly.
By the next morning that upset stomach I'd been pushing through had become a full on gastrointestinal disaster. Maybe the sadhu's curses really did work. But I refused to let crippling stomach pains stand in my way. That day we'd be doing the one thing I'd been dreaming of ever since I applied to study in India. We'd be riding elephants. Amber Fort, or rather the heavily fortified and beautiful Amber Palace, was where we'd be. The elephants were just lovely, with brightly painted trunks and long-lashed, sweet eyes. They carried us two-a-piece up the steep path to the palace courtyard, high up enough for us to see Jaipur in all its antique pink splendour below. We were tossed from side to side in the basket type seat on the elephant's back. It had us laughing all the way. I took rude pictures of elephant excrement to satisfy my toilet humour. We giggled at the surprising amount of soft hairs all over the top of their heads. I saw a picture of some tourists looking quite the same in the paper the next morning, posted above a story that followed the recent protests in Jaipur calling for better treatment of the overworked Amber Fort elephants. I had no idea. How much I missed, I thought, how much I got wrong when I looked into that elephant's sweet eyes.
But the palace itself was not something I would take back. It was beautiful. In one hall the walls were inlaid with mosaic mirror tiles, and I overheard someone nearby remark that it had been perfectly designed so that one candle was all it took to light up the whole, huge room. I got lost in a series of dark staircases that interconnected each little apartment of the palace, all of them without doors or signs telling me not to cross a certain point, so that I had the complete liberty to roam freely and imagine what it would have been like to live in the court when Amber was alive and bustling, maybe looking out of one of the latticed windows and seeing the gardens or listening for the distant sounds of elephants in happier times.
On the way down to the bus, just as on the ride up with the elephants we all had to fight off the hordes of peddlers trying to make us buy anything and everything; puppets, miniature marble elephants, turbans, chess boards, memory cards, batteries. A man took my photo and insisted that I buy the copy he had already printed out. So I took his picture and offered him a special price myself, "50 rupees only, 10% discount just for you!" Cue laugh track from friends. Isn't desperation just hilarious? An old woman put a marigold garland round my neck. "Inam," gift, she says. I gave her ten rupees and got back on my magic bus.
In the afternoon we toured the City Palace. Just outside it, on the street opposite Johari Bazaar and the Bada Chaupar (Big Square), was the Hawa Mahal, or Palace of Winds. Looking at it face on it seems like nothing more than a very tall building front almost entirely made up of windows. Except that they were designed Mughal style - one can see out but not in. One of the emperors of Jaipur had it built so that his wives and consorts could still feel like a part of the city life even though, like all other women at that time, they were not allowed outside. Could window shopping be any more literal than that? As the courtiers sat anonymously, gazing across at the rows and rows of brightly-coloured bangle and juttai stores they could not enter. It's worse than torture!
The current royal family of Jaipur, though they retain no power, still lives in the City Palace. Most of it, though, has been converted into museum galleries. We walked past two enormous, gilded doors. Two flags flying means the maharaja is home. But I remember finding it amazing how bleak the outer courtyard to the palace was. Beggar families had set up shacks. The little children I had played with the day before were hanging about, as well as some new faces too, all walking towards the people stepping off the TOURIST bus with hands outstretched. Everybody looks old, no matter what age. Cows and monkeys, starved looking horses and dogs all claimed the courtyard too. The flags may have been up but the presence of royalty so near to so much poverty seemed pretty ludicrous to me at the time.
I toured the textile gallery. Saw pictures of the emperor from some time around the twenties in full polo regalia, hair oiled back and holding up a trophy. Saw the clothes of one of his more lascivious ancestors, the enormous angarkha of Ram Singh who had three wives, three hundred and one consorts, and weighed about five hundred pounds. Toured the armoury. Saw a 12ft rifle. Saw a "knife gun." Saw so many guns that the curator must have run out of ideas what to do with them all and had taken to rearranging them in the letters of the alphabet around the gallery walls. On my way out about a hundred more little pistols wished me farewell from where they hung above the doorway spelling, "GOODBYE."
The rains caught us outside the armoury. A nearby troupe began to bang on their tablas and harmonium, so we danced in the puddles, much to their amusement. I walked off to another courtyard and stood in front of the palace's famous Peacock Gates - one peacock for every season. I faced the Monsoon Gate, Varsha in Hindi, which was a rich green and gold and was the only passageway without a door. The monsoon in real life was still chucking it down around me, making Jaipur rich and green too.
I know at some points in this entry my writing has rung out with bitterness, but as I wrote in the beginning, I'm still figuring some of this stuff out. So many people in my group have mentioned their desire to see the real India, and I always thought at those times, "but we are. We're here, this is it." I am not an idealistic hippy who came to the East for tranquil meditation sessions. I do not mind putting up in a large, polluted metropolis instead of a secluded mountain village or a remote ashraam. But I just cannot help but feel embittered now even when I do see people in real need asking me for alms. This weekend was just the worst for that - so many making me feel so guilty for passing up on kitsch souvenirs I neither need nor want. So you see, a little cynicism is necessary just to protect me from my own judgmental self, from my own guiltiness. "You can give more," I think sometimes, when I see little children carrying babies. But it would never end, enough will never be enough.
I'm reaching the point where I almost feel I've given India all I can give.
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