Friday 2nd February 2007: Delwara and Udaipur

Delwara days drag on. I seem to have fine-tuned the art of spinning out my activities to fill the alloted time, and as long as I look hard enough there is always something to do: drumming up further interest in the village for the DSK course, tinkering with arrangements to my careers event, crafting a report for Chandrika on opportunities for Delwaran youths, and a sparse programme of ad hoc English lessons for anyone who happens to fancy it. I have even been running singing classes for a trio of pretty Muslim boys, although we have not yet mastered the major scale, and I fear that Chandrika’s dream of us writing and performing a song on local radio is unlikely to be realised. None of this is what I dreamt of but it is not unfulfilling, and given the limited available scope to carve out a heroic career, I think it is the most I can hope to achieve.
    This equanimity can easily be perturbed. On Monday I bumped into Javed while on an errand.
   “Hey man, what are you doing?”
   “Oh, I’m off to talk to a lady in Devigarh about a speech she’s going to give.”
He smiled sadly. “So much talking - never doing.” I couldn’t think of an answer, and had the uncomfortable feeling that my private frustration had become a public shame.
   The few times I’ve stayed the night in Delwara have been slightly uncomfortable occasions. Other than Mohan and Kit, nobody speaks much English and my attempts to initiate a Hindi conversation with anybody usually result in the assembled company falling silent and listening intently. This silence is a far cry from the amused wonderment that we Hindi-speaking firangis naively consider our due, and feels slightly exasperated, even suspicious, as if my stilted conversation is an imposition. Of course I’m over-reacting, but I’ve been on the other side enough in England to know that it is all too easy to let impatience intrude on the respect we ought to feel for anybody attempting to speak a language that is not their own.
   Although I never feel entirely at ease in his company, Kit impresses me. He has evidently thought deeply about his role in the Manch and he really seems to have a clear idea of what he is doing here. His Hindi is close to fluent, and I watch him presiding over meetings with envious admiration. He has a great mixture of passion and intelligence, and I hope he will go far with whatever he ends up doing. His having devoted years to Vikas Samiti and carved out a life for himself here makes me acutely conscious of my relative failure in that regard, but it is also a reality check - I don’t honestly think it is a life I would want for myself.
   That said, I am no clearer in my mind about what will happen after I leave Vikas Samiti and go home. I suppose I’ll have to get some filler job in Exeter while I try to find something - anything - in London that could act as a foothold for the climate change work I’m envisaging.

*

Priya left Vikas Samiti on Tuesday, which is very sad. After a shaky beginning, our friendship developed into something much valued by us both. We struck just the right balance between mutual respect and mutual piss-taking, and I’ll miss that. She recently made a romantic trip to Bombay to meet her “Maharana”, as she and I have taken to referring to her internet heart-throb, the man that ruined her New Year’s Eve. He sounds like a winner - handsome, wealthy, kind and well-connected - everything that Priya the arch-romantic could want. She is now off to Orissa to work in an NGO called Gram Vikas, which means “village development”.
    Meanwhile, Anna left this morning. For the same reasons I never wrote much about Melissa – a snobbish need to write exclusively about Indian things in this reflection of my life in India, but nothing outside it – I haven’t written much about Anna. It would seem churlish and inappropriate to suddenly write a lot now, so I will simply say she has been a good friend. She is pleasant, whimsical, intelligent rather than intellectual, funny and kind. Last night, in her honour, we  had a pre-departure evening of luxury at Udaivilas, the seven-star hotel on the far shores of Lake Pichola. Until now I had only seen it as a cluster of distant, salmon-coloured domes and even Devigarh couldn’t prepare me for the magnificence of its interior, with black-and-white marble floors and ornamented water pools. It would be impossible to imagine anything like it in Europe. The food was exceptionally good, but hardly worth the extortionate price – Rs 2,000 in my case (only about £25, but an unheard of extravagance in Udaipur) including a glass of wine, half a bottle of Kingfisher and an amaretto – equivalent in cost to a hundred Jain lunches in Delwara. I had quail in a nutty sauce, with a saffron naan (oh, the elegance, the luxury!) and a cucumber raita. We sat outside next to a brazier, with views over Lake Pichola and live Rajasthani music and dancing in the background. The waiters were appropriately supercilious and formal, but I wasn’t taken in, having met so many IHM students, most of whom go on to Udaivilas and its equivalents.
    Overall we had a hilarious and slightly magical evening and paid through the nose for it. We all agreed that we were so glad to be able to see this world as a one-off and then come back (in an Udaivilas taxi at Rs 100 per person) to the India we knew and loved. Some people can’t, and don’t wish to, escape a place like that.
   I realise with horror that it is only a week and a half until I leave Udaipur myself. The careers fair is set for Friday 9th February and I aim to leave on the Sunday. This gives me five weeks to travel before returning to England on March 16th, and I plan to spend much of this time exploring Gujarat. I am currently arranging a date to go and visit the IRMAns on campus in Anand, which sits in the wedge-shaped eastern portion of Gujarat.