Sunday 28th January 2007: Udaipur

I’m starting to feel the nine-to-fiver’s Sunday evening dread, no matter that my day job is in a sleepy Indian market town. Luckily I’ve had a fairly full weekend. Last night, all of us from the guest house went out to Shilpgram, Udaipur’s craft village, for a concert given by Pandit Jasraj, one of the great legends of Indian vocal music. He is a frail-looking 77-year old, treading a tightrope between being mature and experienced, and being simply past it. Either way, his performance was engrossing, and fittingly Udaipur came out in force - the Khandelwals, Prakash, Vishal (and disciples), Sumita and even the Maharana. I particularly enjoyed his first piece, in a raag based on the otherworldly Thaat Marwa, although it was his last piece, in an Arabic-sounding raag, that most clearly struck a chord with the audience.
   Madhu, alas, was not so impressed. The first part of my lesson this morning was spent dissecting the performance, and she wrote Jasraj off as a sensation well past his prime. She claimed that she had spent most of the concert texting her friend, although she gleefully described a contretemps she had had with an English woman in the row in front her.
   “Please be quiet,” quoted Madhu in an eccentrically haughty English accent. “I am trying to listen to the music.”
   “Actually [back in her own voice at its most steely], I was discussing the name of the raag.”
  “Oh... [face puckered to its fullest degree]... I see.”
  Banter notwithstanding, I don’t feel I talk to the Khandelwals as much as I used to. I think this is more because of time constraints on my part and theirs than anything else. I still hope for a dinner invitation before I leave. A while ago, Madhu and I had an animated argument over post-lesson chai about whether music is the hardest of all the arts, and if so whether singing is the hardest form of music. She argued that this was the case, whereas I challenged her premise that music is harder than the other arts. 
   “Why should it be?” I asked.
   “It is written in books that…”
   “That doesn’t impress me at all.”
  “It may not impress you, Jon, but we can read in books that music is truly the toughest of all the arts because [I cannot now remember the reasons she gave, but I wasn’t especially convinced by any of them].”
   In the end I changed my tack to: “Well even if singing is harder than anything else, does it really matter?”
   Madhu’s response was something along the lines of, well, yes, we need to acknowledge that our best singers are truly our most accomplished and hard-working artists. Mrs Khandelwal clearly enjoyed listening to the whole thing.

*

I met Abbas, my Bohra friend, and some of his friends this evening. We sat outside a stall off Sukhadia circle, eating pav bhaji [20] which, after considerable opposition I was allowed to pay for. We talked about travel. Abbas’ brother is currently working in Sharjah (UAE) and Abbas is debating whether to join him.
   “Which country world-wide would you most like to travel to?” asked one of the friends, Akheel.
   “Iran,” I answered firmly. “Or maybe Mali, in West Africa.”
   “Interesting choice, yaar?”
   We talked a little about Persian and Malian culture before I bounced back the question.
   “Namibia,” he said with equal firmness. I burst out laughing.
  “Why Namibia?”
  “Why? Because the sexiest women are there!”
  “Have you seen many Namibian women?”
  “Just one actually,” said Abbas. “We saw pictures of Miss Namibia 2006. She ranked 17th in the Miss World contest. She was 100% hot, man!”
  “So you want to go out to Namibia to seduce her?!”
  “OK, yaar, this is a crazy plan, but it is our dream.”
 There didn’t seem to be an answer to this and we veered off onto a new issue: Muslims in India. Feeling that we had bonded enough over Miss Namibia I asked them bluntly how they, young Indian Muslims, regarded Pakistan.

Abbas

   Now there’s a topic - Indian Muslim attitudes towards Pakistan! There is a hoary cliche of a grouchy old Hindu man damning his Muslim compatriots with a Tebbitish “Well they all support Pakistan in cricket matches anyway,” but the reality is naturally more complex. Most of the Muslims I have met have been quick to assert themselves as Indians, but there is something uncomfortable in their relationship with Pakistan. A charming man I once waylaid outside a mosque in South India told me that Indian Muslims should take on board Pakistan’s “good points” - mosques, piety, Urdu (none of which, of course, are indigenous to Pakistan) - while rejecting its “bad habits” - fundamentalism, terrorism, human rights abuses (all of which can be found in India!). This seems to be the view of Abbas and his friends, who are sympathetic towards Pakistan, but firmly condemn the Taliban and its misinterpretation of the concept of jihad. Akheel, in fact, believes that India and Pakistan would be better of re-uniting, both for reasons of political stability and because Pakistan is rich in natural resources.

*

Meanwhile, I have not been neglecting my tourist-ville friends entirely. After changing some money this afternoon I paid a visit of state to Hari’s shop. He was full of news as always, including a story of bribery and corruption from a recent trip to Delhi. He was accompanying his Irish lady friend, and this apparently alerted the attentions of the Tourist Police. They told him that they had been tipped off by an old woman running a stall nearby that the Irish girl was being hassled, and as a result they threatened Hari until he paid them Rs 600 (about £8, but a reasonably big deal for him) to leave him alone.
   While we were talking, a friend came in with the latest bit of gossip from the tourist scene (news travels like wildfire around Lal Ghat). Apparently a guide took a single lady to a textiles emporium out of town and, because they were getting on so well, told the shop owner that he (the guide) would personally attend to her – this is acceptable here, it seems. He proceeded to sell her a mock-Pashmina shawl for Rs 75,000 (c. £940). The next day, the lady went to Jaipur and saw the same kind of shawl going at around Rs 500 (c. £6)! She promptly called her country’s embassy, who managed to find the guide and get him to come to Jaipur and pay the lady Rs 50,000 in compensation. He was then arrested, although the emporium owner (who was presumably in cahoots with the guide and must have received a good share of the original spoils) was not. What possessed somebody to pay Rs 75,000 for any kind of shawl is beyond my imagination!

Footnotes

[20] A delicious street snack originally from Bombay, consisting of a fluffy bread roll and a plate of rich potato curry with onions and plenty of refreshing coriander. Pav is the Marathi word for bread and may have been a loan from Portuguese, whose word for bread, pão, is related to the French pain and Italian pane.

Friday 26th January 2007: Delwara and Udaipur

This week has probably been the most interesting in Delwara so far, in that I have been able to take all the strands of my work into my own hands and respond to genuinely perceived needs. I realised that unless somebody did something, we wouldn’t be able to send many people on the Dalit Shakti Kendra courses in Ahmedabad, simply because nobody was coming to the Nagrik Vikas Manch. So, Haider being away on a family visit to Lucknow, I decided to go on a “tour of the school dropouts”, identifying young people without education or employment and explaining to them the nature of the DSK courses and how they could get involved. For those who expressed an interest, I took down some personal details and I now have several pages full of mini-profiles of youths. This means that when Haider comes back, it will be much easier to go round and confirm prospective attendance. It was also an interesting way of meeting people and seeing other parts of Delwara. One snapshot remains with me vividly: Akram Khan Pathan, a personable young garbage collector, standing in his tiny house in the Muslim mohalla, surrounded by rooms filled with five-star trash from Devigarh, ready to sell in Udaipur.
  On Tuesday I spent an interesting morning meeting the Principals of the Institute of Hotel Management (IHM) and the Food Craft Institute in Udaipur. I have quite a number of friends who study in the IHM, including crazy Sanjay and his cronies, as well as some of the extras in the Hollywood film. The Principal, Mr Sehgal, was very friendly and charming and interested in my idea of getting Devigarh to sponsor some Delwaran youths to study hotel management. He gave me lots of information about the courses on offer which I shall incorporate into a report I am going to prepare for Chandrika on all my work here. His deputy, Mayank, was in his mid-to-late twenties and had just returned from working in the Thistles Hotel in Brighton, speaking with ease about pints and Fatboy Slim beach parties. His English was trendy and sophisticated and he had the characteristically upper class Indian trait of suave, uninterested restraint. He gave me a lift some of the way to the Food Craft Institute, right out east in Sector 14, where I met the Principal, Mrs Sehgal. The Sehgals apparently met at the IHM in Dehra Dun in the 1980s and have presumably been going strong professionally and personally ever since. Mr Seghal worked for a long time in Taj Group hotels, meaning he is right in the upper echelons of India’s vast service industry. Before I came to India I would not have imagined in my wildest dreams that I might end up campaigning to help people join this industry.
   Back in Delwara I am focusing on organising the careers event, for February 9th, next Friday. It seems to be shaping up well – I have the blessings of Mohan and Chandrika, I have squared everything with the school Principal and have secured a Devigarh worker and a policeman to come and talk about their professions. Haider, I hope, will do a talk about social work, currently all the rage in Delwara, and I will run a workshop in Hindi (or at least Hinglish) on writing CVs and job applications.
   I enjoy the networking aspect of my work here. There is a chai stall in the square just outside the team entrance to Devigarh, which I visit every day as I can be guaranteed to meet most of the people I need to talk to, plus a few interesting extras, such as the lighting engineer from Bombay, working on a sari advert being shot in Devigarh, or the student of hotel management from Meerut, on a placement in Devigarh.

*

Fearing that that time is slipping past and I may never get round to it otherwise, I feel the need for  a brief description of the route I take to Delwara every day. The bus leaves from Fatehpura Circle and travels east, away from Vikas Samiti, past Kailash’s phone shop, through some unremarkable town outskirts before hitting Sukher, the land of marble. Seen from the bus, Sukher is a two-mile stretch of road flanked by endless shops selling marble in bulk – Taleswar Marbles, Arjun Marbles, Laxmi Marbles, Siddarth Marbles, Mishra Marbles… I make up the names, but the pattern is clear. I like to imagine all sorts of scurrilous but glamorous business deals being conducted behind these shop fronts by agents from across India, but I think the real evil of this place is that of exploitation and poor health. Migrant workers come in from all round Udaipur and Rajsamand districts, pushed by desperation and lured by the prospect of money, and most are overworked and underpaid. This is one of the reasons why Vikas Samiti is working to try and find alternatives to migration, and promoting training courses that enable migrants to choose work that leaves them less vulnerable to exploitation.
   Moving on from Sukher, I call the next winding stretch of road the “Amalfi Drive” of Udaipur, even though there is no sea in sight. Over a hill the road slopes down, eventually passing a lake on the left. On the far side of the lake are the temples of Nagda, the ancient Mewari capital, that I visited with my parents at Christmas. Then on to Kailashpuri (which for a fleeting second could be Positano, before one moves into the busy temple street) and with it Eklingji, the family temple of the Maharanas. For me, the area around Kailashpuri is the Holy Land, as many of the hills have little temples on them. These hills are the Aravallis, at their most triangular and child-like, especially round Delwara, which is only ten minutes of green fields, trees and chai stalls beyond Kailashpuri.

Between Udaipur and Delwara

   I got another chance to explore some of this area on Tuesday evening when I visited a village called Jhalla ka Gudha, just before Kailashpuri as you come from Udaipur, for a wedding. This came about in a typically haphazard Delwaran fashion. On one of my first forays near Devigarh, when I approached some of the security guards, I met a boy called Ajay Singh Jhalla, who was thinking of applying for a job in the hotel. I chatted to him over some chai, with a view to finding out more about hotel jobs, and later that day bumped into him again as I was about to go home. He gave me a lift on his motorbike as far as his village, Jhalla ka Gudha, showed me his family’s house and invited me to his cousin’s wedding – a fast pace of friendship by Exeter standards, but pretty normal for Rajasthan!
   A few weeks on, Ajay now having landed a job at one of the five star hotels in the City Palace, I came back to Jhalla ka Gudha for the wedding. The Jhallas are a Rajput clan, so the wedding was an all-Rajput affair, full of turbans, veiled ladies and swords. I arrived far too early and so spent some time exploring the area, climbing up a hill to the local Mataji temple, a mellow building with fantastic views of the Aravallis and Delwara in the distance. I also saw four impressive Egyptian vultures, sitting on rocks close by before taking flight.
   Dancing and singing started in the late afternoon, and the women were dazzling in their colourful saris. Food had to wait until the bridegroom’s party arrived from Rajsamand at 8.30. Etiquette demanded they eat first, and I pleaded to be allowed to help serve them, but this was vetoed after much discussion on the grounds that I was a guest, and it would therefore not be appropriate – oh, the simultaneously elevating and isolating effect of a culture that holds that “Guest is like God”. Once they had finished we were allowed to sit down and stuff ourselves with tasty puris, rice, vegetables, dal and sweets. Rajputs are fond of their bottle, so there was plenty of beer, whisky and home-brewed liquor on offer. I drank too much and too quickly and felt alarmingly drunk for some time afterwards.

In their dazzling saris

   Very little then happened until 1.30am, when the bridegroom’s party arrived all over again, this time with the bridegroom himself on a horse. He looked awkward and nervous, understandable given that he had only seen his imminent life partner in a photograph before. The wedding band gave a sketchy rendition of “Dum Maro Dum”, a famous film song about disaffected pot smokers. At the time this struck me as a strange equivalent to Mendelsohnn’s Wedding March, until it was explained to me that bridegroom’s party is supposed to be having constant maasti (fun) right up to the ceremony. A number of curious customs had to be gone through before the bridegroom was allowed in. To begin with, he had to sit on a throne outside, while his forehead was anointed with a red tikka mark. He then mounted his horse, only to dismount again to allow his future mother-in-law to wash his feet. Before coming into the wedding precinct he had to pay the bride’s party a nominal entrance fee. Embarrassingly he seemed to have come out without cash, and members of both parties had to help him out.
   While this was happening, a minor fight broke out. I couldn’t work out whether it was an inter-party or intra-party dispute, but it started because one of the very drunk, over-excited young men insisted on spraying foam over everybody, and after the umpteenth go a number of people, feeling no doubt that, while they liked a joke as much as the next Singh Jhalla, enough was enough, started expressing their feelings physically.
   Inside the courtyard, the actual wedding ceremony took place at the auspicious time decided on by the astrologers (about 2.30am). I was exhausted by this stage, and watching became quite an effort. The pandit, in dhoti, jumper and woolly hat, recited endless Sanksrit slokas at breakneck speed, pausing only to check details about the name of the village and the protagonists (he clearly hadn’t done his homework!) while overseeing all sorts of intricate rituals involving ghee, rice, turmeric and other appropriate ingredients set out in the Vedas. Finally, a fire was lit and, slowly, the bride and groom, who had their hands tied together, were led round three times. This was the bit I had read about in countless Indian novels and, thus satisfied, I took myself off to bed.

  

*

Away from the ritual and invocations, I’m still far from understanding the complexities of love and marriage in India. In 2003, I arrived in South India with a simplistic vision of a chaste society where love and sex were confined to marriage, and marriage was always arranged by the parents. I was therefore surprised, even disconcerted, by the breadth of pre-marital intimacies proudly recounted by the friends I met, and over five months built up a general impression that arranged marriage was slowly on its way out. Here in Rajasthan I have been struck the other way - there seems to be a surprising lack of appetite for love marriages after all. Maybe this contrast is a symptom of Rajasthani conservatism (compared to the more liberal-thinking south) or of my selective memory (bolstered by my 18-year old eagerness to draw conclusions on my previous visit) but nonetheless a majority of the people I have spoken to - old and young - have insisted that, outside the cosmopolitan elite of the big cities, Indian marriages ares exclusively arranged. “Love marriages don’t work in India” is a common refrain.
   I probed Dinesh on the subject of his own marriage on a recent visit to his shop. He told me that the marriage was arranged by his parents, but he was given the final say in whom to accept. After the engagement he was allowed to meet his bride-to-be every few weeks so that they could get to know each other better and discuss their future married life.
   “Did you ever feel nervous before meeting her?” I asked. He blushed, but said no, he was not nervous.
   “And while you were talking was there ever any... physical contact?” I smiled in apology for my bluntness and mimed a kissing action with my hand next to my mouth. Poor Dinesh blushed even deeper and, smiling, hinted that something of the kind may have taken place.
   “Arranged marriages are really better in India,” he argued. “Lovers promise so much to each other and after the marriage they can’t act on all their promises. So, they become dissatisfied with each other and end up unhappy. In an arranged marriage there is less to promise, so happiness can really grow after the marriage.”
  Of course, many Udaipuri boys have girlfriends, but there is something of the love that dare not speak its name in all this. Usually the relationships are rather secretive, and form a separate strand in the couple’s lives, isolated from their social and family lives. Shiv has a girlfriend, for example, but none of his friends (let alone his family) have met her, and he is under no illusion that the two of them would be allowed to marry. On the other hand, some of my friends have very clearly expressed their intentions to find lifelong love of their own choosing. It is probably no coincidence that these people tend to come from middle-class, urban backgrounds - Amir, Yogesh, Deepak and probably other IRMAns. Many members of this love-match camp seem to scorn the the European practice of having a series of relationships before (or instead of) marriage. Priya, indeed, has indicated that she finds this idea immoral.
   Sometimes the liberal approach can actually hinder young people’s prospects. Girish, the slightly bumbling 30-year old IRMAn complained to me that his parents will not arrange a marriage for him and he does not know what to do. “How can I find a girl myself?” he said rather pathetically, with a gesture that took in the entirety of his kindly but unremarkable figure. Priya’s friend Mithun, Ellen informs me, complains of the same problem. This seems a rather poignant contrast to the more familiar story of a young couple desperately in love but unable marry due to parental opposition, and perhaps the Girishes and Mithuns are the unsung tragic heroes of modern romantic India.
   Yet another phenomenon is the transient Indian boy-European girl fling that seems to spring up constantly in Lal Ghat and tourist areas all over India. Normally the boys in question, however superficially “Westernised”, come from poor, conservative families and would not contemplate anything outside an arranged marriage. Even Hari’s family, according to his brother, are apparently considering his prospects with some nice girl of the same caste, although he flatly denies this and currently seems to be attached to a charismatic Irish girl with striking ginger hair. I am sure one could unearth hundreds of tales of heartbreak and star-crossed, trans-continental despair in Udaipur alone.

Sunday 21st January 2007: Udaipur

What do people really believe? The question has bothered me all day since a conversation I had in the morning. Given the ubiquitous intensity of religion in this country, I have given surprisingly little thought to the issue (and that fact has been bothering me today as well), although on my earlier visit I probed people obsessively, if never very successfully. The external signs of piety themselves are fascinating and sometimes puzzling. Passengers on the bus to Delwara are a good example: when we pass Eklingji, the family temple of the Maharanas, many of the old men do namaste and often pilgrims board the bus and distribute prasad, consecrated food, in the form of sweets or fruits. On one occasion the driver nipped into a stall to buy a garland of flowers for the front of his bus and indeed, all buses, taxis and rickshaws tend to have religious paraphernalia, often involving green chillies, at the front. I found it surprising when I saw that Mohan – admittedly a Joshi, a Brahmin, but always rather secular in manner – always stops to namaste the little shrine just down the road from the Nagrik Vikas Manch. And Madhu’s mother, the Bengali Brahmin, always does a puja after my lesson (to purify the house?!) which involves blowing a conch shell twice or thrice, during which Nirmal and Madhu will immediately break off their conversation and put their hands together in a namaste.
  The conversation I alluded to earlier was with Dinesh, the Baluchi bookseller, who I have come to like and respect a lot. He told me some interesting things about Udaipur’s growth and tourism, but he also told me about his personal faith. He has his own creation story involving a lotus, which he appears to accept as literal truth. He believes that gods and goddesses are real and has no truck with the notion that Hinduism is a convoluted form of monotheism. This viewpoint is somehow reconciled with the idea of an all-pervading god that is in everything. Everything, therefore, is a god - he used the example of the half-empty bottle of water on his desk: “Even this is a god.” He also told me that if you concentrate hard enough on someone, you will be able to see their “glow”, which I suppose corresponds to an aura or halo. Now, I’ve made him out to be a total basket case, but he really has a great air of common sense and a charming frankness in everything he says. In any case, when people reveal such alien views, especially when they seem to be the product of faith rather than reason, it seems inappropriate to argue with them in the way one might with somebody who claimed that globalisation was entirely a force for good or that climate change was simply a political money-making exercise.
   External piety, albeit at a frenetic level of fervour, was all I could grasp from this evening’s Mohurram celebrations that I came across in an unfamiliar part of the old town. Although Mohurram is strictly the name of a month in the Islamic calendar, in India it is often used to refer specifically to the tenth day of that month. Elsewhere in the Islamic world this day is known as Ashura and, while for the Sunnis it is a day of fasting associated with Moses and the liberation of the Jews from Egypt, for the Shia it is an important day of mourning for the martyrdom of Mohammad’s grandson, Hussain, at Karbala. The mood in the streets was frenzied - somewhere a group of drummers were pounding out a startlingly powerful beat, while a group of men in white kurtas and prayer hats danced and chanted “Hussain! Hussain! Hussain! Hussain!” in a way that reminded me of BBC news bulletins from Palestine and Iraq.
   These people were Daewoodi Bohras, a subset of the Ismailis, who are in turn a subset of the Shia, who have divided and subdivided throughout history due to disputes over who should be the next in a succession of imams, the spiritual and political successors to Mohammad. The Bohras believe the twenty-first imam went into hiding, and has ever since governed through is vice-regent, or dai. The community is largely restricted to India and Yemen and, in India at least, Bohras are  notorious for their business acumen. My only friend from this community is called Abbas, a rather puckish character in his early twenties with curly hair and a very self-assured sense of style. He works in a tiny ready-made clothes shop down the road from Vikas Samiti, and is often trying to lure me in with the promise of “branded goods”. I get the impression that as well as being one of the cool kids he is also deeply religious, and in his Mohurram togs he cut an unexpectedly serious figure.

Next Post - Friday 26th January 2007: Delwara and Udaipur (will be posted Thursday 26th January 2012)

Saturday 20th January 2007: Udaipur

The friendship has soured already. This evening I went out with Shiv and Prakash to Rani Vilas, the lakeside restaurant where we had celebrated Prakash’s birthday. I recounted my meeting with Vishal (leaving out the emotional undercurrent) and Shiv scolded me for mixing with such idiots. Prakash, on the other hand, told me very seriously that “This Vishal is the most intelligent fellow I’ve ever met. If you make friends with him you will forget us, but be careful, he might...” he said something in Hindi that I didn’t understand.
  “What does that mean?”
   He looked mischievously at me. “It means ‘to befool’!”
  “Arre, yaar,” said Shiv warmly, “these are very superfictious people!” He spitted out the malapropism as he might an unripe fruit. I quickly steered the conversation to a topic guaranteed to defuse the tension: the controversy over Shilpa Shetty. She is a Bollywood heroine who joined Celebrity Big Brother and has been, so we are led to believe, subjected to racist remarks. England, by all accounts, is gripped by the situation, especially in light of the ongoing immigration debate, and the fact that the person most strongly implicated in the accusations of racism is none other than Jade Goody. She is a halfwit who was on standard Big Brother several years ago (apparently sufficient grounds for her to qualify as a celebrity this time round) and is supposed to have thought that Cambridge was part of London [19]. India has responded with collective indignation. Shiv’s parents are now saying that they think England is “less” than America, which sounds characteristically Shaivite in its logic, and even Prakash thinks this reflects very poorly on the British opinion of Indians, although they both agreed when I pointed out that even if Jade Goody can be viewed as representing her country (and I would dispute this strongly on the grounds that Big Brother is Reality TV, not an international competition) this does not necessarily mean she is a reflection of it. This brought us on to racism, Islamophobia, and so the evening wore on.
   We later drove round to the other side of Fateh Sagar on their motorbikes and had coffee on the usual wall. I spotted Vishal and his friend Dharmendra, and joined Prakash in calling them over, ignoring Shiv’s protestations. After some small talk we moved onto heavier topics - globalisation, farmers’ suicides, British immigration policy and, on a brief diversion into the physical sciences, the Big Bang.
   Slowly we slipped into yesterday’s routine, and Prakash, Shiv and Dharmendra became more and more peripheral as Vishal and I focused intensely on each other. But what had been magical yesterday night became irritating and humiliating this evening. The scales fell from my eyes to reveal Vishal in a new (and perhaps equally inaccurate) light - arrogant, insecure and a manipulative conversationalist. He would defend his position adamantly and, while listening to my views, impose his own on me before veering off course with a bewildering change of subject.
    “Do you think the British colonisation of India was a good thing?”
  “Gosh,” I said, “That’s such a complicated question, it’s impossible to answer in a sentence! I don’t think one country can ever be justified in conquering another – necessarily – but on the other hand…”
  “You’re so moderate, why can’t you commit to having an opinion? You’re just giving a political answer.”
    Political, it seems, is his label for anything that can't be boiled down to a yes or a no.
   “No, this is my opinion – that the question is really complicated. I mean think of all the things that the British gave India, like the railways, judicial system…”
   “Yes or no! Are you afraid of your own ideas? Was British rule a force for good?”
   “There isn’t a yes or no answer!”
   “Oh, you’re just political… How could it have been a good thing for our country? What is your opinion on trade liberalisation?”
The discussion ended unsatisfactorily and Prakash and I left rather abruptly. On the way back to Vikas Samiti, Prakash, maybe sensing I needed a confidence boost, turned round and told me “Shiv is right, actually. That man is an idiot! I’ve lost my respect for him.”
   “Me too!” I said. I didn’t tell him from what height Vishal had sunk.

Footnotes

[19] Since this was written, of course, Jade hit the headlines for much sadder reasons - her death from cervical cancer in 2009.

Next Post - Sunday 21st January 2007: Udaipur (will be posted Saturday 21st January 2012)

Friday 19th January 2007: Udaipur

Two substantial news bulletins today. Firstly, I’ve made it to Hollywood! Unless expunged by a cruel editorial cut, three seconds of the forthcoming blockbuster The Darjeeling Ltd will witness me wheeling a trolley across a corridor in Udaipur Airport.
   A talent scout, Vikas, came to Vikas Samiti to find some white extras and selected me, Anna and Ellen. A car picked us up 5.15am yesterday and took us to the airport, and we proceeded to spend the rest of the day waiting. We had a brief experiment with a scene in a chai shop that was quickly scrapped, so that on the whole of the first day we earned Rs1000 for contributing nothing to Hollywood’s cause, except eating its rather good meals and getting 60km of free transport! We met plenty of interesting people – some Israeli extras, some other English extras, plenty of Udaipuri families and friends, most of whom were interconnected in some way – and caught substantial glimpses of Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson (Natalie Portman and Anjelica Huston, also starring in the film, were not in any of the scenes being shot that day).
  My triumph came today when I had to spend approximately three hours wheeling a trolley back and forth for a glorious 2-3 second shot. On take twenty-seven (or thereabouts) one of my colleagues, a portly middle-aged shopkeeper with a red cravat, presumably donned for the occasion, leant over to me and said, “Well, Jon, this is an adventure. Really an adventure.” What was genuinely fascinating was to see the meticulous detail of it all – every moment planned, every aspect of the set accounted for, including a mock temple and a fake toilet which we had to wait in for hours during the red herring chai shop scene. It was also interesting to meet some of the people involved in the technical crew, most of whom were from Bombay, Delhi or Calcutta and belonged to an apparently small circuit of Indians who work with foreign shootings and avoid the chaos of Bollywood like the plague. A couple of them spoke such fluent American English, and had such un-Indian mannerisms that I took them to be from America until they said otherwise. All in all a curious and lucrative experience. [18]

 The Darjeeling Ltd

The second newsworthy item occurred this evening. I have fallen into a routine of strolling most evenings along the raised promenade that flanks Fateh Sagar. This is not the geriatric passeggiata it may seem, as most of Udaipur shares my habit: bulky old men power-walking in unflattering shorts, gossiping pairs of women in elegant salwar kameez, gangs of boys looking for a place to slurp cheap whisky and talk smut. And the solitaries - mainly young men - searching for something that daily life has perhaps denied them.
   This evening, I had reached the end of the esplanade and was about to turn back when I realised with shocking clarity that the man sitting on the wall to my right was Vishal, the cream-skinned beloved. Before I could make any cowardly retreat, he spotted me and we greeted each other warmly. He introduced me to his three companions and I treated them to a theatrical account of my day in film. I was showing off shamelessly and that continued as the conversation developed into a romp through a galaxy of topics - Vikas Samiti, life in Udaipur, the millionaires at Devigarh, Rajasthani tourism. Initially, the three friends contributed to the conversation, but as we cast our net wider - capitalism, evolution, the nature of reality - it turned into a battle of wits between Vishal and me. The difference between us is vast: he is an ardent communist, an unyielding creationist and he describes himself as a parapsychologist, fascinated with dreams and their meaning.
   At some point we walked further along the road that curves round past more chai stalls and snack bars, and turned off up some steps to an unprepossessing strip of municipal garden. By this stage the sticky night had closed in and it added a strange magic to the conversations that followed. He drew an elaborate diagram in my notebook, representing reality and consciousness and their relationship to dreams, but his explanation was confusing and his smile, with its sensuous blend of wit and scorn, unsettled me.
   Some time later, I was in the middle of an impassioned explanation of Darwinian Natural Selection when he cut me short with “How should we live our lives?”. The question was so unexpected and so brutally concise that I told him instantly what I really believe: that we should strive for a balance between contentment and yearning; that in the short term we should always try to be happy with what we have, or else we face misery, but that we should never be ashamed to dream and yearn, because turning these dreams into reality can be one of the ultimately satisfying experiences of our lives.
   “Are you sad? Does anything make you sad?”
   “Vishal! You jump from topic to topic - I feel really breathless!”
  “This is my way, Jon. I like to stimulate people. And, by the way, you’re not answering my question. What makes you sad?”
   “Well, of course there are some things,” I said slowly and hesitated. I was on the cusp of laying bare my soul when sense prevailed and I thought better of putting my inner life into the hands of a virtual stranger, whatever my desires towards him. I obfuscated light-heartedly and he smiled and shook his head. “I think you are hiding things. You’re obviously not telling everything.” I corkscrewed round the subject and, while clearly dissatisfied, he seemed resigned to moving on to a less penetrating question about the nature of friendship.
   Eventually the night-garden symposium finished and we all walked back to where the boys had parked their motorbikes, laughing and joking as if nothing had happened. “That was heavy!” laughed Vishal as he started his bike and I hopped on. “Time to take mental rest now!”
   Ever the shot-caller, he steered the conversation to something trivial which occupied us until he dropped me off at Vikas Samiti. I don’t know what to make of him. He is certainly more difficult than my imaginary version of him, but he is also more real and more interesting. True to his intentions he has certainly stimulated me, and I paced up and down for half an hour on the roof before coming down to write this.


Footnotes

[18] In December 2007, Ellen and Anna and I went to see The Darjeeling Ltd in a cinema near Piccadilly Circus. Sadly, of my trolley-wheeling triumph there was no evidence, although we recognised some of our extras.

Next Post - Saturday 20th January 2007: Udaipur (will be posted Friday 20th January 2012)

Monday 15th January 2007: Delwara and Udaipur

Today’s highlight was unquestionably my visit to Devigarh, the five star hotel that lords it over Delwara. Mohan had arranged this ostensibly so that I could fix up a representative to come and talk about hotel work at the careers event. The ulterior motive, conveniently boxed up under the heading “Discussing other opportunities”, was to talk about my fantasy agenda: getting more Delwarans to work in the hotel.
   Akshay Chhugani, the hotel manager, has the self-possession and unyielding amiability of the powerful and wealthy, but his good will seems like a temporary blessing, liable to be converted at the snap of a finger to a rampaging fury. I can’t imagine Mr Chhugani ever being silly or making a joke at his own expense, but who knows how the company of close friends might transform him. He offered us tea and coffee, and while he went to arrange it Haider nervously asked me whether I  thought we would have to pay for this, and, if so, how much it would cost. I told him it would be very expensive, but on seeing his panic-stricken expression assured him that it was almost certainly on the house.
   When Mr Chhugani returned, I outlined my vision for a scholarship scheme whereby Devigarh could sponsor a few Delwarans every year on a hotel management course and then take them on, as and when required.
   “In principle,” he said in impeccably clipped English, “I am open to any suggestions but I’ll need to be presented a workable strategy before I can consider it.” Meaning, I suppose: I’m a busy man and don’t see anything in this for me, so you go away and do the maths and then I’ll give it my time.
   Before my visit, Javed and Shaheen had begged me to plead their cause of becoming officially recognised tour guides. Mr Chhugani, in the course of outlining his vision for Delwara, quashed this idea before I could raise it.
   “Of course I would be very happy to consider ways of involving the village more. Potentially we could set up an official tour guiding process and train some of the local boys. I am not against some kind of arrangement like this, it’s just that there are currently a couple of... surplus elements who are taking advantage of my residents and giving the local people a bad name.”
   Abandoning my surplus elements to their own fight, I accepted Mr Chhugani’s offer of a guided tour round the hotel. He called out to one of the staff loitering on the grass. “Rakesh, why don’t you show these gentlemen round the hotel?”. Framed as a friendly question, the easy authority was obvious in his voice, and Rakesh sprang gracefully into action.
   I suppose I’d never given much thought to luxury hotels before coming to Delwara, but I have come to realise more and more that, not only in character, but in the purpose they serve, they are a world apart from the bottom-end bedding-down places that budget travellers like myself tend to frequent. Visitors to these five-star and seven-star hotels don’t simply want a bed and a meal, they want an experience, a home from home, a whole world from which they can make forays into the hotel’s hinterland, usually still very much cocooned in their five stars. Or, even better, the hinterland can be brought into the hotel – a troupe of “local” dancers perhaps, or maybe a luxuriously authentic meal eaten while seated on cushions above a straw mat, with a harmonium player and vocalist singing in a vernacular language in a corner.
   Devigarh fulfils these criteria with elegance and panache, involving much marble, countless rose petals in bowls and lots of enormous windows, through which Delwara and its environs seem heart-breakingly picturesque and not too obtrusively real. The budget rooms cost a trifling $400 per night, while the “Presidential Suite” replete with an open-plan, white marble “bedroom-and-bathroom concept”  (in a luxury hotel “concepts” are to be found at every turn – I mean, they’re so much more “in” than things, darling) and a black marble swimming pool, weighs in at a staggering $1300 per night. Admittedly, shock at how the other hundred-and-twentieth live has reduced my writing style to something out of a guidebook!

Inside Devigarh

  I could bang on forever to the tune of “Don’t these people realise they’re not seeing the ‘real India’?” but I’m rather tired of all that inverse snobbery, and trying to defend a notion of what the ‘real India’ is in the first place would get me into dangerously deep water. Much more interesting is the meeting of worlds personified by our guide Rakesh Ameta. Born and bred in a small village near Udaipur, he is now a blandly sophisticated high flyer in the Front Office department. I can hardly begin to imagine what it must feel like for him, servicing crorepatis (billionaires) all month and then going home to a life of rural deprivation to see his family. Needless to say I know nothing about his village background, but life in an Indian village usually entails what we would consider deprivation. Perhaps the contrast doesn’t affect him at all, and I am wrong to be amazed and to assume, as I have always done, that the fact that I can stay in affluent style in South Bombay and BPL discomfort in Northeast Maal within weeks of each other and remain unfazed is an effect of a balanced middle-class upbringing (whatever that means). In reality this may simply be the symptom of a very human capacity to adapt. Haider was clearly rather taken with Rakesh and asked me again and again afterwards whether he really hadn’t spoken any English before coming to Devigargh, which is what he told us. Even if the slightly prissy do-gooding idealist in me thinks Rakesh should respond to his experience by devoting the rest of his life to rural upliftment, I cannot but feel an admiration for his having come so far from such presumably unpromising origins.

*

Back at Vikas Samiti, the unthinkable has arrived: a new volunteer. A new male volunteer. I was so used to our cosy group, and so relishing being alone in the dormitory that I was slightly apprehensive when I heard he was coming. First impressions, however, have been positive. Reuben is 22 and is in the middle of a philosophy degree in a university in Washington DC. He looks the part, although is on the grungier end of Bohemian in his personal appearance! He seems quite young for his age and is passionate about getting involved in the practical aspects of development work - “I want to be out there digging these wells myself, dude!” as he puts it. Apparently this world view has already been derided by Sumita as “simplistic and American” and Reuben is debating whether to quit Vikas Samiti and join an organic farm.


Next Post - Friday 19th January 2007: Udaipur (will be posted Thursday 19th January 2012)

Sunday 14th January 2007: Jodhpur

Ellen, Anna and I spent the weekend in the Blue City: Jodhpur - indirectly a household name on account of the riding trousers that originated there. We took a night bus on Friday, arriving at 4.30am, after no sleep in my case, and got a rickshaw to as close to our hotel as a rickshaw was able to get. The last stretch had to be taken on foot, as the aptly named Cosy Guest House is in the oldest, bluest part of the city, a labyrinth of narrow, winding streets and steps. We were not in the mood to sleep, so we took a walk round the relatively well-lit neighbourhood, taking passageways at random and coming across little squares, or rather triangles, bounded by houses with balconies full of plant pots, reminiscent of the Mediterranean.
   We got back to the hotel at 5.15, and the kind proprietress gave us blankets so we could kip on the mattresses in the rooftop restaurant, from where we could see the outline of the fort above us and the night-lit contours of the town, resounding with barking dogs. I felt filled with the sense of utter euphoria of arrival in an exotic place at night.
  After a highly talkative breakfast, we spent the morning wandering round the old city, falling in love with the higgledy-pigglediness of the alleyways, the archaic-seeming street-life and, most of all, the extraordinary colours of the houses. Blue was traditionally the colour chosen by the Brahmins, who lived in the part of town called Brahmpur, to paint their houses. There are numerous Brahmin castes living round here – Oza, Joshi, Bora (I don’t know how this last is spelt, but I presume not “Bohra” which is the name of an Ismaili sect, and emphatically not a Brahmin caste) – and obvious visual cues of skin colour and face structure indicate that the Brahmpuris are mostly high caste. The Lonely Planet suggests that painting the houses blue was a good way of keeping them cool, and also repelling insects. I was told by one family that the first houses were painted blue in 1932, but I had no way of qualifying this information. More recently, non-Brahmin houses in other mohallas have also been painted blue, so that the whole of the city is rather blue nowadays.

Ellen and Anna in Brahmpur

   Meherangarh, the city fort, is magnificent, surrounded on three sides by the old city. After a slow-to-arrive lunch in a deserted tourist restaurant near the clock tower, Anna and I visited the fort without Ellen, who had visited on an earlier trip. It is an interesting place, although only the palace is open to the public. A foreigner’s entry ticket includes a free audio-guide narrated by an Indian with an unbelievably plummy Oxford accent, in which he relates a rich tapestry of the fort’s history, graced with some interesting titbits, such as the fact that three of Shah Jahan’s grandparents were of Rajput ancestry. Interesting as all this was, the undisputed highlight of the visit was the breathtaking view of the blue below. The vividness of Brahmpur is best appreciated from above. Anna and I did our fair share of appreciating, and enjoyed the voyeuristic nature of looking over a city of houses that, as Anna put it, looked like their tops had been sliced off, allowing a viewer to look inside rather than on top of the
house.

Views from Meherangarh 

In the evening, the three of us returned to the fort and splashed out on an expensive, but profoundly satisfying meal in the Mehran Terrace restaurant. We sat inside, but made forays onto the terrace outside, now to appreciate a townscape lit with orange. We had a delicious thali, washed down with Kingfisher and lots of mirth – I think we made a good travelling party!
   I had a solitary ramble the next morning and got invited into a few poky Brahmin-blue houses, which was interesting. I also climbed up to a little temple at the end of the rock that the fort is built on, a peninsula jutting out into the old town. A local boy showed me the way up, and once there pointed out all his friends on their rooftops, calling down to some of them. More rooftop voyeurism: one of them was in the middle of shaving. We had to make an inglorious descent after being chased off by a troop of monkeys.
  Our route back to Udaipur took us through an apparently never-ending sequence of remote villages. At one level crossing we had to wait for about twenty minutes for a train to pass, during which the whole coach-load descended on a strategically placed chaiwallah who sold us tea in clay cups, which, when empty, we flung as far as we could into the sandy, clay-strewn nether-distance.

Next Post - Monday 15th January 2007: Delwara Udaipur (will be posted Sunday 14th January 2012)

Thursday 11th January 2007: Delwara and Udaipur

Today the boys’ school in Delwara had its own careers day, which was vastly more successful and interesting that I had allowed myself to expect. In fact, if my own event next month is to assume its rightful place in local history as a milestone in educational development then I have to get my act pretty seriously together. The thing that struck me the most was the display of charts designed by the kids in one of the classrooms. Each chart was dedicated to a different career, detailing qualifications required and listing some nearby educational institutions that provided these. Many of these were quite impressive and should be a useful resource for the kids providing they are made available for reference, which I repeatedly urged the teacher in charge to ensure.
   The only down side was Chandrika’s hoped-for coup, a careers adviser brought over from Udaipur, who bored the children at length with what appeared to be a rather generalised homily about careers, not really tailored towards Delwara at all. The biscuit was taken well and truly by a rather earnest moment when she appeared to be advocating a career in tomato sales.
   At the entrance to Vikas Samiti this evening I bumped into Prakash and my fair-skinned idol from the library. I greeted Prakash over-cheerily in an attempt to cover my nerves and he introduced me to his friend Vishal. My heart leapt when Prakash suggested that “You will take some tea now, Jon?” and the three of us went round the corner for chai and gossip. I had never once imagined that Prakash and this boy might be friends and was a little overwhelmed by the situation. The conversation inevitably hovered around me at first - my background, my work with Vikas Samiti, my impressions of India - but Vishal, who it turns out is studying for an MBA, soon started telling me about an NGO that he was in the process of establishing with his friends. The organisation’s unique selling point appears to be its eclectic offering of bringing succour to the oppressed and the interpretation of dreams. The whole thing was over too quickly for me to form any detailed impressions of Vishal except that he is serious as I imagined, but also has a capacity for fun and has a pretty, quizzical smile.
   In the evening a few of us went to a performance of kathak. This is a wonderfully energetic dance form of Hindu origins, but subsequently the darling of the Mughal court, full of stamping, ankle-bells and intricate gestures accompanied by a strangely pleasing repetitive musical accompaniment. The lead dancer was highly accomplished and beautiful, although she had a streaming cold and had to dive into the corner and sniff vigorously from time to time! The tabla player and singer were both excellent and the sarangi player rather less so. The music was based on the kinds of raags that sound most alien to our ears, due to the combination of flattened seconds (komal-Re) and raised fourths (tivra-Ma) and, in the case of raags derived from Thaat Purvi, a flattened sixth (komal-Dha) as well. This combination of notes, especially in the endlessly repeated formulae found in kathak, generates a sound world of awful tension.

Kathak 

(credit: http://pondicherrycity.olx.in)

   After the concert, the English among us felt a strong craving to go to a good old-fashioned pub and drink pints of real ale. In the reality of Udaipur, Ellen and I went back with Zelda to Love Nest to sink a couple of Kingfishers…


Next Post - Sunday 14th January 2007: Jodhpur (will be posted Saturday 14th January 2012)

Wednesday 10th January 2007: Delwara

I had a relatively successful day in Delwara today, getting Mohan to agree to a date in early February for the careers fair, and also to arrange an appointment for me with a member of the Devigarh team on Monday. This is so I can try and persuade them to provide somebody to speak about hotel work at the careers fair, for which I envisage a series of different “professionals” – policeman, social worker, hotel worker – coming to give short speeches.
   Getting more Delwarans to work in the hotel has become something of a hobbyhorse of mine. A luxury hotel plonked in the middle of a poor village with chronic unemployment problems seems like a cruel joke if it employs people from Udaipur, Jaipur, Bombay and Calcutta in preference to local people. Mohan insists that there are some people from Delwara working in the lower rung jobs such as cleaning and gardening, but that the skilled jobs, like front office, housekeeping, food and beverages, are filled by outsiders. I would like to encourage at least a few people to go on Hotel Management Diplomas, get some experience and then come back to work in Devigarh, establishing better links between the hotel and the town. The biggest barrier that I can currently see is that of cost. I will take the opportunity at the meeting to propose that the Devigarh management sets up a scheme whereby the hotel sponsors a few youths from Delwara each year to study at the Udaipur Institute of Hotel Management (or similar), on the condition that after qualifying they come to work in Devigarh. Mohan suspects the management might worry that a large Delwara contingent among the hotel staff would have too much potential power and hence provide a constant threat of trouble. Maybe, due to the feeling of alienation that Devigarh has unwittingly forced on Delwara, this will be the case. In the interests of honesty, I should acknowledge the fact that Devigarh is providing some sort of impetus – possibly financial, but I don’t know the details – to the Nagrik Vikas Manch, and should not, therefore be totally demonised.
   As well as Javed and Shaheen there is a third unofficial guide in Delwara called Imtiaz, who I have met in a number of circumstances. His origins are humble enough, but according to the life story he gave me, he trained in hotel work off his own bat and has worked in Udaipur’s Trident (Hilton), the Lake Palace, a five-star in Surat, and most recently as a driver for Devigarh until he was sacked for crashing into two cows! He now acts as a freelance driver and guide and claims to have driven Paul McCartney and Liz Hurley. Indeed, he has a rakish air of being very well-connected in all levels of society. He is also a snob, and told me how difficult it was in the Lake Palace having to work with backward castes who were so lazy and had to be forced to work and even then were a constant source of worry.
   He recently told me a story about seducing the Japanese widow of millionaire in the back of his car. He picked her up from the airport, and noticed that she was crying. When he asked her why she was crying she told him that he reminded her of her Brazilian husband who had died less than a year ago. He pulled the car to one side, and offered her privacy while he waited outside. In the end, he joined her in the back seat where they made love. Hilariously, Javed later told me an almost identical story, even down to the Brazilian husband, differing only in the detail that his girl was Korean! Imtiaz has Javed’s chutzpah but with it a maturity and man-of-the-world air, and I am prepared to believe his story, even including the sequel that he spent nine months with his lover in Japan.


Next Post - Thursday 11th January 2007: Delwara and Udaipur (will be posted Wednesday 11th January 2012)

Tuesday 9th January 2007: Udaipur

Work is looking up! We had a Youth Resource Centre group meeting yesterday here in the guesthouse meeting room presided over by Chandrika. Attending were representatives from all six YRCs [Youth Resource Centres] including Haider from Delwara.
   It was interesting to hear about all the YRC programmes – community radio training, self-defence training, endless sport and debating programmes, as well as the things I have been more involved with, such as livelihoods and skills training courses. It would be easy to write this off as superficial and cosmetic, not quite “real” development work, but taking this view fails to recognise that so many steps of a development mission (in this case empowering youth to face a rapidly changing world) do seem like so much dross until you take a step back and look at the overall tapestry of benefit derived from these steps combined. In this particular case I feel that the tapestry may not have been considered very deeply, although I may be guilty of gross injustice here. And maybe the YRCs do need a trial period where different ideas and programmes are experimented with, paving the way to piecing together a vision by gauging the problems and aspirations and – oh I don’t know what exactly… I’m not simply struggling for words but also for concepts, although writing this helps to clarify what I think and what I don’t yet know how to think.
   In more personal terms, yesterday’s meeting was a success because it allowed me to voice a few ideas. The principle one was that it is all very well to send these kids on training courses (the Dalit Shakti Kendra in Ahmedabad included, but also a whole bevy of other courses which are being considered) but we really need to keep tabs on what happens to them afterwards. Do they find jobs in the field in which they are trained? Does it help them? Does it, put simply, work to send them on these courses?
   To that end, I have spent today setting up a database and accompanying survey sheet, which take into account certain characteristics of the individual before training (age, education, economic status, employment history) and details of the course they went on and, importantly, employment details three months and also one year after training.
   This leads to another question I have been considering a lot recently: what, if anything, is the right approach to this issue of livelihoods? Should we be promoting skills training, or indeed higher-level education that is going to (almost inevitably) lead people away from the centre of intervention (Delwara in this case)? Or should we be doing our best to develop livelihood opportunities within the centre of intervention? The latter, if feasible, would have the effect of curbing further migration, but I wonder how feasible it really could be. There seems to be an innate distrust amongst the Delwarans of home-grown skilled labour, and people have told me that if they wished to get a piece of hardware repaired they would take it to Udaipur, even if it could be done in Delwara, as they had greater faith in the Udaipur market. The former, meanwhile, would promote a new breed of skilled or educated migrant who will be far less vulnerable to the kind of exploitation generally cited as one of the principle evils of migration. I suppose we are dealing with a case of prevention versus cure. Or not really cure – that would be remedial work with migrants who have already suffered health problems or human rights abuses after going to work in a city – not a cure but a different method of prevention. In any case, this higher level of migration should also have the effect of sending money back into Delwara, if at the cost of family life (for a while at least).
   Family life was the subject of an interesting conversation I had with Shiv’s family, whom I met for the first time this evening. His brother Piyush seems nice, with a slightly harder edge than Shiv. His father is moody and surprisingly shabbily dressed, while his mother is a wonderful, extrovert character, with a hysterical guffaw like Shiv’s, slightly grubby and full of strong views about all sorts of things, including the superiority of arranged marriages over love marriages. We all sat in the parents’ bedroom and compared family matters across cultures. I pointed out, not at all provocatively, that while in India it is perfectly normal that Piyush, thirty years old and married with a child, lives with his parents, that would be seen as very unusual in England, where children are encouraged to leave home in their late teens and early twenties. “Do you think this is a good thing?” asked Shiv’s mother, and I said that yes, I thought it was great thing for us to gain our independence and live our lives away from parental constraints while still maintaining a close relationship with our parents.
   “But what happens when the parents become old?” asked Piyush. “Who looks after them?”
   “We do – we go and visit them –”
   “Even if they live far away and need somebody with them all the time?”
And I felt horribly ashamed. How could I look him in the face and tell him that there were always nursing homes and residential homes and ask (even though I might have no intention of banishing my own parents to one of these homes) if people can really be expected to sacrifice their jobs, their lives, for their parents? In India the right thing, the expected thing, is so obvious that it leaves no room for doubt. Parents devote their lives to bringing up a child, and when the parents become old, the child, now maybe a parent himself, looks after the parent. Jobs, loves, lives fit round this fiercely strong parent-child bond.
   “In London,” said Shiv’s mother, “a mother and son’s relationship is only something-something. In India it is from the soil.”
   I don’t think they were right to argue (as effectively they were) that family is stronger in India than in England, because the way family is treated is so different between the cultures. In India it feels like some solid, immovable mass that one could not contemplate questioning, even if one’s experience of family is actually pretty miserable, or at least full of fear, repression and lies, which the peculiar forces of Indian expectations and social mores sometimes engender. In England we take family for granted in different ways and even if, to borrow from Larkin, parents can fuck their children up as much as they can in India (or in Russia, or Haiti, or East Timor!) I think there is sometimes more willingness to acknowledge and discuss problems, and perhaps more genuine desire to engage with fellow family members and indulge in “quality time” that is not just an artifact of ritual and proximity. But these are crass generalisations that any sociologist would demolish in minutes!


Next Post - Wednesday 10th January 2007: Delwara (will be posted Tuesday 10th January 2012)

Monday 8th January 2007: Udaipur

Prakash’s birthday. Shiv and I persuaded him to come out and celebrate with us, so we whizzed round on motorbikes to Rani Vilas, a garden restaurant on the far side of Fateh Sagar. Dimly-lit, and male-dominated, it buzzes with disrepute. The food was cheap and cheerful, and we ordered a banquet of meat dishes, veg dishes, eggs, rice and naan, washed down with Kingfishers. Shiv, ever the dutiful Brahmin, stuck to the veg and drank Fanta.
   Prakash gave me a lift back to Vikas Samiti and we stopped at a juice bar en route, where he proposed that we take it in turn to list each other’s faults. I am beginning to see this character-flagellation in the name of self-improvement as a typical Indian pastime as my services have already been enlisted several times in this direction.
   “Well,” I said, rather embarrassed after two attempts at demurral, “I think you’re great - intelligent, really interesting, but also very kind. And good fun, as well. Maybe... I don’t know how to put this. I think you can be quite shy, particularly with girls. I think this might be a problem in your romantic life?”
   “Yes, you’re right, “ he said, as if he had been expecting this. “This is a problem for me. What about my other faults?”
   “I can’t think of any right now. I’m sure you’ve got some more! What about me?”
   “Actually, Jon, I think you’re a very great person.”
   “Oh come on, tell me!”
   “Well, I can say one thing. It is a small thing, but...”
   “Arre! Sach bolo!”
   “Well, this is it: when you come into the library at Vikas Samiti, you wander around like you’re totally lost. You’re looking like an idiot, actually.”
   So he’d noticed. With unnerving precision he had located the symptom of my vice without, I trust, discerning its meaning. The truth is that I fancy someone in there. I choose my words deliberately, and “fancy”, with its connotations of teenage awkwardness and shy glances across a crowded classroom, is the right one in these circumstances. The object of my fancies is tall and slender with absurdly pale skin. It is the skin, far paler than mine, that marks him out and makes him the unlikely protagonist in my private melodrama. My natural inclination is towards the olive-, caramel- or chocolate-complexioned, but somehow this cream-faced enigma has defied these odds on his way into my daydreams. How exactly he has done this I am not quite sure, but I think I am responsible for most of the legwork. From the scant evidence presented by his attractive and unusual face, I have inferred that he is clever, charming, sophisticated and kind. Above all, I imagine him to be a little lonely and troubled - not enough to be a head case, but enough to make him a deeply sensitive and poetic soul.
   I have never seen him outside the library - I imagine he must be a student of some kind, although he looks a little older than me - and every time I go in there, I involuntarily scan the tables for him. This, in Prakash’s eyes, is my lost idiot act and my major fault. I would love to approach him, but I have absolutely no idea what I would say. In the sepulchral quiet of the library the whole thing could be horribly embarrassing. So, for the time being, silent worship is the only thing on the cards.
 
Next Post - Tuesday 9th January 2007: Udaipur (will be posted Monday 9th January 2012)

Saturday 6th January 2007: Udaipur

A relaxing Saturday. I had a singing lesson this morning, sharing it again with the twenty-year-old Priyanka and a little brother and sister who both have bright eyes, engaging manners and raucous, inaccurate voices. They are all very deferent to Madhu, while I tend to be more informal and answer back a lot, although I have made an effort to curb this so as to gel into expected procedure.
   We are working on a chhota khayal, a small song. Khayal is one of the main styles of North Indian classical music and contains a short lyric that is sung over and over again, interwoven with alap and tan (slower and faster moving passages of swaras). Our khayal is called Laadli lal, about a little girl blossoming like a flower, and is in Raag Alahiya Bilawal. This raag is based on Thaat Bilawal, and sounds similar to a European major key, although contains a flattened seventh (komal-Ni) in its descending section which imparts a peculiar flavour, almost like a slight feeling of strain.
   Although I find Madhu’s teaching style far easier to understand and appreciate than that of Saraswati-Miss (my elderly singing teacher in Kovilpatti four years ago) there are still some peculiar differences between her method and the British approach I have been brought up with, most obviously the focus on endless repetition. There is also a sort of tacit assumption that if you sing the name of the swara right, you will pitch the note right, so that while Madhu does try to point out to the kids if they are wildly off-pitch, she doesn’t pounce on poor tuning in the same way that any European teacher would. For this reason, it is considered more advanced to sing akar (singing to “ah”) than singing the names of the swaras, which I actually find far more difficult!
   Madhu even discouraged us from practising at first, saying that we would just get things wrong, or confuse ourselves. After some serious pleading on my part - the irony of the pupil begging the teacher to allow him to practice was not lost on either of us - she eventually yielded and let us practice a limited amount of what we had been studying. Once I joked that I would go home and practise Raag Marwa – a far more complicated raag – which horrified her until she realised, with relief, that it had been a joke. I think she trusts me more than she did at first. I am certainly less rebellious than I was initially, and socially we get along well.

 The Khandelwal family: L-R Mrs Khandelwal, Dr Nirmal Khandelwal, Madhu

   I had a brief chat with Dr Khandelwal after the lesson. In the comfort of his own home is he is relaxed, benevolent and a little shy. He confirmed something I have suspected for a while: in Indian classical music, it is the performer, not the composer, who goes down in history and has a name. The composer is often not known, which is perhaps not surprising in a culture where music tends to be passed down, rather than written down, and improvisation forms the mainstay of any performance. Possibly composers are more highly regarded in the south, where there is a famous trilogy of Thyagaraaja, Dikshitar and Shyama Shastri, who are sometimes called the Bach, Mozart and Beethoven of Carnatic (southern) music.
   In the afternoon I visited Dinesh, a friend who runs a bookshop on my least favourite road in Udaipur, leading away from the Jagdish temple towards Gulab Bagh. The last time I met him he had told me about his daughter, Rani, who is mentally retarded and cannot speak. She goes to a “special school” and Dinesh is very dissatisfied with the way it is run. The teachers don’t seem to teach anything, and often strap pupils to chairs to prevent them running around. He asked me whether Vikas Samiti might be able to help solve the school’s problems, and I promised him I’d at least look into the matter. He said he knew he was being selfish trying to solve this problem rather than any other social problem in Udaipur, and that impressed me.
   Well, this time round I didn’t have much for him, except to tell him that I had sent an e-mail to the Vidya Bhavan Society, the educational establishment set up by Vikas Samiti’s founder and that Chandrika had also given me a child helpline number that he could ring. Apart from that, I could only give the common sense advice that if he wanted to change anything, he would have to enlist the support of other parents. I will keep going back to see what progress he has made and whether there is anything I can do.
  Interestingly, he is of Baluchi origins – Baluchistan being a region that straddles southwest Pakistan and the neighbouring portions of Iran and Afghanistan – as are the owners of the bookshop next to Hari’s shop, who are actually related to Dinesh. There are apparently a number of Baluchi families in Udaipur, and they are closely associated with the Sindhis, Hindus who would have come over after Partition from Sindh in what is now Pakistan.
   I took a long walk back through my favourite part of old Udaipur between tourist-ville and Delhi Gate. There is a wonderful warren of streets off Bara Bazaar, mostly narrow and dank with a cool, quiet, almost southern Italian feel to them. A whole street is devoted to selling handis (metal cooking pots), while a portion of Bara Bazaar itself sells nothing but shoes and others specialise in gaudy sari material and wedding turbans. Closer to Delhi Gate is a colourful gem of a fruit and vegetable market with a group of beautiful basket-makers in one corner, and a spice market that Carol first discovered.
   Moving away, at the northern end of Lake Pichola is a tapering extension called Swaroop Sagar (after Maharana Swaroop Singh), onto which Lal Ghat abuts. It baffles me, as it protrudes in various directions and crops up in unexpected places. Much of the area round here has the feeling of a rather respectable and quite old planned town. It must be one of the oldest parts of the modern town and presents a totally different face of Udaipur from the narrow streets and markets of the old town. Kids playing in the street prevent it from seeming at all soulless.

Swaroop Sagar

   Nearer to home, Fateh Sagar was in top form in today’s slightly cloudy evening light. The blue-grey hills on the other side, with the island Nehru Park in the foreground, all cupolas, fountains and bougainvilleas, is a beautiful sight in all weather conditions. This view, combined with fast-food stalls and coffee stalls and walls packed with pretty girls and boys “roaming” on the near side, make it one of my favourite spots in Udaipur. This opinion is shared by all my disparate local friends – Shiv, Prakash, Dilip, Madhu, Hari – indicating that the lake has a universal appeal.
   I went out again in the early evening in a group to a concert of ghazals in the Town Hall by Sunil Mehta, a pupil of Dr Khandelwal. He has a pleasant, slightly fuzzy voice, and he warmed up throughout the evening with evident enjoyment. The guest of honour, sitting on a throne just a few metres away from me was the Maharana himself! He is portly and rather bear-like and does not conform in the smallest degree to my romantic image of an Indian Prince. He didn’t stay long, and I think Sunil relaxed and opened up more after he left. However, the whole evening was permeated with that atmosphere of disorganised formality and haphazard deference that India excels in. Lots of local bigwigs were in attendance and there was consequently lots of touching-of-feet, lots of “No, no – you first, please, I absolutely insist”-ing and constant rushing in and out on the part of officialdom who would confer anxiously amongst itself about things, pre-eminently the Maharana’s comfort. The big M himself excelled at the little displays of humility that are probably expected of a modern Maharana, including a degree of physical force required to ensure that the other guest of honour – Rajasthan’s High Court Judge – be garlanded before him. He didn’t, however, turn down the tea that was brought round for him and his chums (the rest of us had to be content with individual glasses of water, no mean feat considering there were about 500 of us!). Nor did he bat an eyelid when Priya’s friend Mithun ran round in front of him and took a photo of him as if he were some kind of attraction or amusement. Priya and Mithun didn’t understand why us Brits found this so hilarious.

Next Post - Monday 8th January 2007: Udaipur (will be posted Sunday 8th January 2012)

Friday 5th January 2007: Delwara

Delwara and I have entered into a cautious truce, and the last two days have been quite enjoyable. Wednesday was the turning point, when after two days of the old frustration I went in desperation to Chandrika back in Vikas Samiti and asked if there was anything else I could do besides the Delwara project. She suggested that rather than trying to do something outside Delwara I could try to do more within Delwara. In particular, I could organise a careers fair. Having been to a few of these myself, I find it hard to imagine replicating even the most basic ingredients in Delwara, let alone the bustling stalls, glossy brochures and powerpoint presentations typical of such events. In the spirit of a good challenge and a good joke I have taken it on.
   Meanwhile, there are still frustrations, mainly the product of having to depend on other people’s availability and working with a language barrier. Mohan, the boss, although fundamentally decent, is hard to work with. Unless you have his full attention, usually only obtainable through a specially arranged meeting time, it is entirely useless trying to communicate with him because he simply doesn’t concentrate. With Haider, I have long discussions about our various projects – the DSK youth training, and now the careers fair – and although he generally agrees with me and respects my ideas without being unhelpfully subservient, he never gives me the impression of having fully grasped and retained everything and it sometimes feels like we have to start from scratch each time. We generally speak in a sort of Hinglish – me skipping between the languages with an unmerited air of ease, and Haider sticking doggedly to English (where so many sentences seem to start: “But Jon!”) and occasionally reverting to Hindi to explain something difficult, which is usually beyond the limits of my understanding anyway.
   Still, there are rewards. I feel that somehow in all this tangle I am contributing something - in ideas, in organisation and a determination to get things done. Since yesterday, as a preliminary to thinking about the careers event, I have been traipsing round the town and talking to young people in an attempt to get an idea of their career objectives inasmuch as they have any. These range from the obvious, if unlikely, paths of teaching and medicine to the more unexpected but very understandable aspiration towards hotel work (Devigarh looms large in every sense) and samajik (social work), the seemingly cushy option of a largely office-based job at the Nagrik Vikas Manch. One boy even told me of his ambition to make films about the life of the surrounding village, while a number of others expressed an interest in working with mobile phones, in some unspecified way.
   My trips around the town have also allowed me to meet new people and strengthen existing alliances. I can’t walk five paces without encountering Javed and Shaheen, a pair of charmingly raffish self-appointed tour guides who are Delwara’s answer to Hari and his colleagues. They hang about near the entrance to Devigarh and ingratiate themselves with the millionaires who venture out to explore the town (“So many gay people from Denmark” as Javed put it) and usually end up pocketing a handsome tip. They are regulars at the Nagrik Vikas Manch and make it a point of honour to know exactly what I have been doing and what I am about to do, and even seem to have acquired that indefinable tourist-ville knack of appearing just a little above everything. 

Next Post - Saturday 6th January 2007: Delwara (will be posted Friday 6th January 2012)

Monday 1st January 2007: Udaipur

Look at the date! We’re edging further and further into the interior of the 21st century and beginning to find out what it’s really like. I reached Udaipur at nine yesterday morning and came straight to Vikas Samiti for a leisurely shower and breakfast. I spent a long time checking and writing e-mails and Facebook messages which, combined with lack of family, left me with a feeling of disconnectedness that was dispelled throughout the day. I spent the evening itself with Rachel and her boyfriend Steve, who are midway through a grand tour of Rajasthan and staying in Dream Heaven hotel rather than Vikas Samiti. We first went to Shilpgram, the craft village outside Udaipur, which was holding a tribal dance festival. We stayed long enough to see a troupe of South African dancers who threw coconuts in the air and let them drop and crack on their heads, and a group of sword dancers from Manipur in northeast India, who were impressive, if not terribly interesting. We ended up at the opening of a new restaurant in Udaipur, just above the bookshop next door to Hari’s shop. There was a good buffet, a bar and a crowd of Europeans and some Lal Ghat boys. The atmosphere was festive, perhaps self-consciously so, and the evening was a perfectly adequate way to see in the New Year given that our usual family celebration was out of reach.

*

Today has been a day of relaxation, of sorting out and of people. I had tea with Prakash and Shiv in the middle of the day which, unpuctuated with square meals to demarcate its various sections, lacked a morning or an afternoon. It was lovely to see them again. Prakash told me in private that he is currently studying for Indian Administrative Service (IAS) exams. These are the hugely prestigious first step in a long drawn out yearly selection procedure for outstanding individuals to fill the role of collector (a district administrator) in whichever districts have vacant posts that year. Once you become a collector it is a lifelong post that only retirement, death or deposition by the president himself can interrupt. What exactly they do, I am less clear about, but they are apparently viewed as demi-gods in their district, and Prakash is full of burning ambition and a worrying lack of backup plans. Still, I wish him the best of luck for the first round of exams in May and will try and find out more from him about the collectorate system.
  Shiv is Shiv – full of life, honesty and a sometimes embarrassing admiration for the “sharpness” of my mind. I worry that he may be rather lonely. When I asked him how he spent New Years’ Eve he said “I came home and I put my bag down”, setting great store by the action of putting his bag down (perhaps a sort of “collapsing in front of the TV”-type gesture, shutting oneself out from the world) in contrast to Prakash who had been out drinking with friends. Perhaps because Shiv doesn’t drink or smoke and seems to have a fundamental mistrust of people, he finds the Fateh Sagar camaraderie difficult. He doesn’t lack friends to go “roaming” with, but his attitude towards them is difficult to gauge.
   “Have you seen Vinod recently?” I asked. Vinod is a friend of his whom I have met twice.
  “Vinod is very irrelevant person,” said Shiv with a look of mild disgust. “What is this meaning, irrelevant?”
   “It’s when something isn’t relevant,” I said unhelpfully, yawning with tiredness as Prakash bailed me out.
   “Irrelevant is something with no bearing on the case.”
   “Achcha, thik hai. Can I say this ‘he is irrelevant person’?”
  “Well it might seem a little odd, unless he specifically wasn’t relevant to what you were talking about. Maybe irreverent? Meaning that he doesn’t respect sacred things or figures of authority?”
   I had a feeling that Shiv was more concerned with the adjective’s syllable count than its aptitude.
  “Yes, yes, irreverenced. He is very irreverenced man. Actually, Sam, I’m like... Sorry, yaar! Jon! Actually, Jon, I am like a businessman.”
   “A businessman?” I queried “I’ve never imagined you as a businessman!”
   He guffawed, and Prakash, who evidently knew what was coming, rolled his eyes.
   “I will make you understand,” Shiv continued. “In front of people’s faces I am a very friendly person, but when they are not here I feel nothing about them. Only I am saying they are fools, or they are irreverenced. Are you getting it now?”
   “But Shiv, yaar,” said Prakash with a note of exasperation, “This does not make you a businessman but an anti-social idiot! Businessmen can form genuine friendships also!”
  “Arre! He is not getting it actually,” said Shiv, giggling.
   Both are infected with the excitement of the growing India, and it is little wonder that Prakash is unburdened with cares about the environment and global warming – from his point of view why should his country’s new lease of life be curbed to mitigate the damage done by its former oppressors? – and that Shiv looks to America with a mixture of unexamined admiration and scorn.
   I also spent some time in tourist-ville today, particularly in Hari’s shop, which was full of rather dubious characters, all boasting about their “hunting” prowess with European female tourists. All of them had the same unsavoury dandiness and emaciated good looks as Hari, and all were doing their best to impress a visitor called Mario, a stylish Bangalorean sculptor of Goan origins who was visiting from his home of several years in Paris. He had a friend, possibly lover, in tow called Phillippe, a peculiar but quite likeable Frenchman who seemed disgruntled by the company and latched on to me as a fellow European. There was also a former college-mate of Mario’s from Baroda who had an unnervingly gravelly voice that would have suited an escaped convict.
   Later on, I met Hari for supper at a little place near Delhi gate. He seemed ashamed of his friends’ crude behaviour of earlier and did his best to distance himself from them by telling me something about the politics of Lal Ghat. There seems to be a lot of infighting and jealousy, especially involving money and girls, and Hari claims that he is the object of a lot of jealousy because he has lived in Lal Ghat all his life. He told me that this jealousy also stems from the fact that “in the past” he had a constant string of European girls on the go. I don’t know whether this past means a long time ago, or recently, or whether it is merely the “past” when he wishes to distance himself from it and its associations. He certainly seems rather fed up with the lifestyle running a boutique in the tourist nerve-centre of a popular city, and loves being able to get out. However, he is probably too rooted to the place to be able to leave, much as he toys with the idea. I remember him coming back from a few days at a family wedding in a distant village and complaining that after an hour he had been fed up and desperately bored and couldn’t wait to come back to Udaipur! On the other hand, I suspect he would find Delhi or Bombay far too difficult and impersonal – even he if set up shop in Paharganj or Colaba (the “tourist-ville” parts) he would not have the same clout that he has in Udaipur and it would take an extremely long time (if ever) for him to integrate into the community to a sufficient degree to be able to live the happy-go-lucky life he lives here. He is also concerned about his father, a friendly, kind old man who always stops me for a chat when I pass, even though we have little to say to each other. He is completely out of touch with the real world, Hari says, and people take advantage of him.

Hari

*

And Priya. She seems to have found love on the internet – a young professional from Bombay who she has met twice now, including last night, when he ruined her New Year’s Eve by being miserable. Somehow she seems to have resolved never to talk to him again and also to marry him. I shall watch events with interest.

*

Saddam Hussein was executed yesterday and, judging by the newspapers, India is up in arms, seeing it as yet another disgraceful crime against humanity by the Bush administration. I am very confused about what I feel myself.


Next Post - Friday 5th January 2007: Delwara (will be posted Thursday 5th January 2012)