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)
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