I am in the Girnaj Palace, an insalubrious beer bar on the outskirts of Bharatpur, sitting in a dimly lit mock-Rajput atrium with an artificial flower garden. I have hours to kill before my train back to Udaipur and intend to fill them drinking and writing. Earlier this afternoon I said goodbye to my family - my father Antony (To), my mother Carol and my sister Rosemary - as the “Golden Temple Mail” tugged them back to Delhi, from where they will fly to London tomorrow, aiming to reach Rosemary’s house in time to gulp champagne at midnight.
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Ten days ago, the evening of Wednesday 20th December saw me running down the second floor corridor of the Lake Pichola Hotel into the arms of To and Carol. They had just arrived in Udaipur, from Jodhpur, and I had come back from Delwara to meet them. It was wonderful, and not a little extraordinary, to sit on their balcony overlooking the lake, catching up on the recent events. For the most part they were full of enthusiasm for the India they had seen so far and full of stories of crowded lanes in Delhi, rip-off rickshaw drivers and the wonderful blue of Jodhpur’s old city. We had a brief stroll around the area across the lake from their hotel and came back for supper in the hotel restaurant followed by beer in their room, admiring the night view of the City Palace, Bagore-ki-Haveli, Gangaur Ghat and Jagdish Temple.
We spent the next morning (21/12) in the old city. We visited the Jagdish temple and had fun studying the carvings on the outside for which I now had a heightened post-Chittor appreciation. We also visited a second temple, between Jagdish and the City Palace, which I’d never spotted before. Architecturally and culturally insubstantial beside the Jagdish Temple, this temple was pleasantly un-touristy and was surrounded by a second story later addition which served as a good viewing platform for the lake. We identified To and Carol’s room at the hotel, and I was also able to point out the gaudy, secluded Udaivilas smugly basking in its seven stars. After lunch we headed in a tempo up to Fatehpura, and I showed them my local area, including Vikas Samiti, which was both fun and meaningful, as it was the most personal of all the places we visited together. We ambled up towards Fateh Sagar – “the Udaipuris’ lake” as I billed it, in contrast to the tourists’ Lake Pichola – arriving at just the right time to gawp at and photograph the sunset (rather successfully in To’s case) and then appreciate the beautiful milky quality of the water in the precious half hour after sunset.
I was determined to show them the real Udaipur, although I would be hard-pressed to define exactly what I mean by that. I suppose this was a combination of a natural filial desire to prove myself and a need to separate myself from the chaff of mainstream tourism by demarcating an area that was mine. The former was the fruition of a fantasy I have had for nearly a decade of showing my parents round an adopted homeland - firstly Russia (which I have never visited), then Italy (my longest trip lasted five weeks) and now India - and manifested itself through rather artificial displays of “going native”: dropping a banana skin by the side of the road; drinking “unsafe” water from shopkeepers’ pitchers; speaking unnecessarily loud and jovial Hindi at every opportunity. The latter took us the next day (22/12) into the backstreets of old Udaipur, away from tourist-ville. I think this was partially successful as it showed my parents a little-visited area that was nevertheless brimming with Udaipuri charm and antiquity, but this kind of aimless roaming palls quickly in company as, unlike an individual, a group of people can’t surrender itself utterly to such surroundings.
For contrast, I decided that we should go to Nagda in the afternoon. Tradition has it that this was the capital of Mewar before Chittor, although today it is just a collection of temples by a lake on the Delwara road. We took a jeep-taxi that filled up fast, and got off just before the temple town of Kailashpuri. A path led around the lake, straight into a rural idyll which Carol was particularly taken by. The beauty, even quaintness, of the setting probably explains the presence of an incongruous heritage hotel on a hill overlooking the lake, which in turn explains the persistent calls of “Five rupee! One pen!” from the ragged, tribal-looking village children. I tried hard to imagine the thriving capital of 8th Century Mewar but found it almost impossible, as there were no living props like the village in Chittor and, in any case, 1,200 years ago is inaccessible to most of us. In one of the temples, we were all intrigued by a bell with Cyrillic letters carved on it, including a date in the 1960’s – how did it get here of all places? Did a visiting Soviet official (after all, India was leaning towards to the left at this time, tilting away from America) fall in love with the area and decide to make a lasting gift of friendship? Rather far-fetched, surely. To described it as the “most surprising thing he’d seen in India” – the implication of course being that “that was saying something!”
We hitched a lift to Kailashpuri on a ramshackle truck – Carol sitting inside with the bemused drivers and To and I standing in the empty carrier at the back where we waved joyously to bewildered passers-by. Kailashpuri is chiefly famous for the Eklingji temple, which houses the Maharanas’ family deity, Lord Eklinji. It was a busy place with an obstreperous guard at the entrance, who made a great point of telling us that we weren’t allowed to eat or smoke or wear shoes inside. “Sharab bhi nahi?” (no alcohol?) I asked him, teasingly. For a moment he toyed with an apoplectic fit and then realised it was a joke and chuckled a little. Inside, the temple was equally busy and a little mysterious and everybody was excessively beautiful and well-dressed. We had some difficulty getting back, but I eventually managed to get us a free lift, which assuaged our tempers that were becoming a little frayed at the prospect of calling out a taxi. We had a delicious supper of typical vegetarian dishes at a favourite volunteer joint, Swastik.
We met early the next morning on the platform of Udaipur station where we talked to a woman from the airlines while waiting for for a train from Delhi that eventually arrived two hours late bearing my sister Rosemary! It was lovely to see her, and we went back in a rickshaw to the hotel for a gloriously leisurely breakfast on the roof terrace with fruit juice, coffee, porridge and mountains of toast.
Family Breakfast L-R: Rosemary, To, JG
After plenty of convivial natter, we got ready and headed out to spend the day being real tourists. Despite a delayed flight and delayed train and the nevertheless sudden jerk from Herne Hill to Hindustan, Rosemary was characteristically full of energy and excitement, so we had another packed day. First of all the City Palace, which was a joy to visit in the light of my study of Mewari history. Carol has a cynically plausible theory on the great sacrifice of Panna Dai, the nurse who supposedly swapped her baby for the baby Udai, so Udai could escape assassination at the hands of the dastardly Bunbirs.
“Rubbish!” she said, “She obviously knew exactly what she was doing. She let the murderer kill Udai, and then went around pretending she’d made this great sacrifice so that her own son actually became the Maharana.”
From the City Palace complex we took a boat ride, which curved a wonderful route round the Lake Palace (which I have come to appreciate even more since showing it off to the others!) to Jagmandir Island, which until then had always appeared to me as a mysterious, distant island-palace with an alluringly tropical appearance and an intriguing history. The earliest part of the building on the island was built by Karan Singh and it was completed by Jagat Singh I. It was here that a Prince Khurram was given refuge by one of the Maharanas during a feud with his father, the Mughal Emperor Jehangir, an oft-quoted instance of unstinting Rajput hospitality. Holed up with his favourite wife Mumtaz on this tiny and presumably boring island, the prince apparently found solace in admiring the Mewari architecture. Later, when his beloved wife died (so the story goes) it was the palace at Jagmandir that inspired the mausoleum he built at Agra. Prince Khurram is better known by the epithet he adopted after he killed his father (de rigeur for an up and coming Mughal) and became emperor himself: King of the World, or in Persian, Shah Jahan. The mausoleum at Agra, of course, is named after the Shah’s wife, the Taj Mahal. Having now seen both the palace at Jagmandir and the Taj Mahal at Agra, all I can say of the theory of the former inspiring the latter is… what utter drivel!
We ordered lunch at the beautifully set Jagmandir restaurant and waited at our table right by the lake. And waited – it was already late for heaven’s sake, and after a more-than-one-hour-wait I was painfully hungry. When it eventually came it was small, bland and outrageously overpriced. My fish and chips (how amusing this all sounds now) were alright but the others’ Indian dishes were bad rather than mediocre. I complained – India certainly brings out the bolshiest aspects of my character – and the smugly complacent head waiter, to whom I had already been frosty in exactly the manner I have always despised on the occasions when I have been the one serving, said he would do his “level best” to get us a reduction. In the end he offered us free teas and coffees that would come in five minutes. “Panch minat matlab kya hai?” I cried in Hindi deliberately to make him feel uncomfortable. “Panch shatabdi?” [17]. What angered me so much, fuelled by a bland meal on a desperately empty stomach, is that a place that could be so wonderful could be made so awful by its terrible food and appalling service. Even as I write this I see the apparent ridiculousness of it all – privileged tourists on a boat trip, complaining because their food was a bit late, a bit small, a bit bland and a bit expensive, in a land where much of the population is below the poverty line and eats worse food in smaller quantities and more irregular servings. But that rather misses the point, because it is precisely because the Jagmandir restaurant could afford to get things so right that it is monstrous that they actually produce food and service that is laughable compared to the exquisite lunches cooked promptly for me by a Jain family in Delwara for less than a tenth of the price!
Still… the boat ride was thoroughly enjoyable and we watched a beautiful sunset over the lake when back at the City Palace, before heading over to the Bagore-ki-Haveli to see the same dance programme I have described in a much earlier entry (29/10). We had supper in Savage Garden, a chic restaurant in the old town with striking blue walls and the night air for a ceiling, lit with candles and draped with bougainvilleas. I had chicken livers and red wine! Indian red wine, admittedly, but nonetheless every sip a joy after three months’ painful separation.
Exploring Udaipur
The most successful example of the “real Udaipur” came the next day (24/12) in the form of a visit to the Khandelwals’ for coffee and chitchat. Mrs Khandelwal was mistress of ceremonies and I was as flattered by her continual references to things I had said or done as I was surprised by the extent to which she evidently felt she had got to know me. She appeared uncertain as to the level of knowledge she should expect in educated English adults and, in the course of a conversation about national parks, veered on the side of caution by explaining the meaning of the words “tiger” and “elephant”. To remarked afterwards that educated middle classes the world over share certain traits that make them in some ways less different to each other than to the less educated classes in their respective countries. I think he’s right, although I firmly believe that you can find some way to connect with anybody you meet and, conversely, everybody has areas of themselves that are, to you, alien and unreachable. That’s not a particularly profound thought, just a reflection on shared humanity versus individuality.
We later climbed up the nearby hill to the Neemach Mata temple which offers superb views over the city. The path leading up the hill is lined with signs bearing edifying pieces of lifestyle advice, such as the following imprecation against smoking: “Let your mouth be not the entry gate to your death”; and the more technical but equally sombre “Mouth is becoming bacteriologically more dirty than anus”.
We conformed broadly to this guidance by lunching at the Natraj and expunging any residual anger at yesterday’s disastrous lunch. A pleasantly uneventful afternoon followed, in my case involving packing for the next day’s journey to Jaipur. Priya, who had met the family briefly in the morning told me: “Oh Jon, your sister is beautiful. Really beautiful. Nothing like you.” Flattering, of course. I reconvened with my beautiful family at the station, ready to board a night train to Jaipur.
Footnotes
[17] "What does five minutes mean? Five centuries?"
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