It's bad news all around whenever I log in, and I've been following events in the rest of the world via The Guardian and BBC's websites. The war started, and India lost the cricket a few days later. Glum faces all round. The response amongst western tourists is a depressed, resigned and somewhat apathetic one. I'm loathe to ask the Israelis, who comprise 90% of Pushkar's tourists, the males all having just finished military service and travelling India in search of the perfect chillum, the perfect bargain, the perfect blonde. Eavesdropped snatches of conversation suggest self-pity mixed with righteousness ("Saddam will bomb us next" etc. etc). Reading the news from here is strange - it all seems a million miles away, for the world here is beautiful in the extreme. And very, very peaceful. Apart from Kashmir, of course. But that's hardly closeby.
Hushed by Heat
It's getting a lot hotter, and around midday it's that kind of weather that you just want to lie in a hammock and zone out completely. So that's what's been keeping me occupied, in addition to two weeks of solid shopping in Jaisalmer, where I bought fabulous things to bring back from a shop in the bazaar, run by three Rajasthani brothers. I was introduced to the eldest (Laxmi, named for the Hindu god of wealth...) by my camel driver, Pabu. I bought some extraordinary paintings - lengths of brown canvas with strange chakra and meridian maps on them, followed by a heap of textiles, a couple of dresses ( I couldn't resist...), bits and pieces, a 12-kilo buddha which took two days and as many trips to the P.O to pack, some fabulously colored and ornate screenprints, some silver ( and some more silver), and a few other accessories. My daily trips to the shop became (naturally) a social event; Jaisalmer is perhaps half the size of Glasgow's West End, and anyone who's been there longer than three days knows everyone. So lengthy sessions in the bedouin-style boutique - sipping supersweet chai, chatting with fellow tourists and haggling over a few or a few hundred rupees - soon led to lunch at home with the family watching Hindi movies (no kissing, mountains and valleys, tears and smiles and much, much cheezy singing and dancing) and being plied with thali, chapattis, chuch (a delicious savory yoghurt drink) and those eye-wateringly sweet sweets made from condensed milk and sugar. And sugar. Needless to say, it's back to the Carol Vordermann cookbook for me!Escape from Jaisalmer
During this time, I was sleepless at Desert Boy's Haveli Guest House, which was expensive and filthy, with a leaky toilet and powerless shower, and staff so lazy that breathing itself seemed too much of an effort for them. Confusion (their re-adjustment on a previously settled amount) over my $90 bill for a three week stay (this is India) chilled my farewell, as the whole transaction took place with the manager and the entire staff lolling around suspiciously. Of course, I should have switched hotel after the first week, but inertia is an all-powerful force that works in favour of bad hotels, bad bosses, bad restaurants, bad airlines etc. ad nauseam. After a few failed attempts at leaving, I took what was billed as a superdeluxe bus and turned out to be a converted and upgraded WWII submarine on wheels, and left town for Pushkar, to top up on some heavy duty peace and quiet. I bought a strip of sleeping pills at the pharmacy - 20p for eleven tablets. India is a junkie's paradise. Everything is available over the counter for less than the price of a packet of fags. My friend Angel, America's bravest woman, endured a surprisingly good appendectomy in Udaipur for $450, probably a tenth of the price she'd pay back in Manhattan. Not that Rajasthan is famed for its hospitals - I visited Shankar in Jaisalmer's public infirmary (which is in fact famous for being India's third-worst hospital) when his scooter was involved in a pile-up, and I can only say that the place resembled the outhouse of a particularly foul Chinese takeaway in an especially bad part of a forgotten town. Pre-war (last century) furniture, unwashed bedding, walls painted from head height up, the lower portion a fresco of filth, the odd nurse in a batwing hat, no doctor in sight.
So, I got on the bus, found my seat, attempted to recline without success, and popped my pill. The crew from the handicrafts shop turned up on their scooters (!) to bid me farewell and scold me for having taken the cheap and nasty bus, and I braced myself for the fourteen hour trip across the desert. The pill was a waste of nearly no money, leaving me drowsy but sleepless, lethargic and lazy. Sleep seemed so unlikely that I broke my journey at Jodhpur where we stopped for a rest, rescued my luggage from the rear of the bus (no lights available, so I climbed into the boot with my cigarette lighter and found it myself), and instantaneously rescheduled for a couple of nights in the blue city.
Jodhpur. Not Pants at all
What a great idea that turned out to be. Jodhpur, famous for those camp pants, for Polo and for the odd maharaja, is a charming, charming place. Its fort, pictures of which will appear here soon, stands immense above the old city, whose houses are painted with indigo for coolness, insect repulsion, and to please the eye. Which they do. Many travellers, the lovely Hector and Francisca included, had raved about the audiotour - an innovation out here in the middle of the desert. I've been accompanied round the Smithsonian by Meryl Streep, the Royal Academy by Tilda Swinton, heard Eartha Kitt's purr and Placido's Italian plum encouraging me to belt up in a New York cab, so the thought of the Maharaja of Jaipur failed to impress. How wrong was I!!!! Brought back from Oxford, and honed at home, the measured, high and slightly nervous sounding young man was upstaged totally by the narration that framed his own - that of an elderly and obviously highly educated Indian who sounded like a mildly curried Michael Hordern. Or, for those of you too young to remember The Wombles an Indian version of that old git who raves about Mr Kipling's exceedingly good (but incomparably tastless) cakes. Curried Horden, however, was a total hoot. My visit to the fort, preceded as it was by a night in an expensive (a tenner) hotel set in the most gorgeous gardens (complete with bright green parakeets to clash against spectacular pink bougainvillea, unexpected Grecian garden ornaments, turbanned waiters in uniform), was spiced up by a visit to one of the living exhibits, an ancient Rajasthani in full regalia and brandishing a hookah, who generously accepted my request to sample his opium. Opium is very popular in Rajasthan, and has been used here for decades, both socially and medicinally. True to the Indian form of wasting not, the opiate-laced water from the hookah is then heated and used for tea. I was given a small dose - about the same form, size, and colour as that of a big sugar-for-coffee crystal, told that it'd work wonders for all sorts of ailments (it does - you simply forget to care), and I gratefully crunched it as I thanked him and keyed the next destination into my audiotour console. The magic crystal was significantly more effective than the purified version supplied by Glaxo the previous evening, its bittersweet taste giving way to a slightly alcoholic warmth, followed by a state so completely relaxed that any kind of movement seems a trivial diversion. This was of course the purpose of opium dens - a place people could go for the sole purpose of lolling. So I spent the day at the fort, found a beautiful little guest house called "Cozy Guest House" - a 500-year-old haveli painted entirely in blue - and took the train the next day. I'd befriended a statuesque Dutch girl, Annemieke, at Cozy, and we were pelted pink that night, as we went to dinner.In Pushkar, where I returned to sit by the lake, watch the pelicans and turtles fight for space to bask on the banks, the geckos stalk mosquitoes on the roof of my guest house, and play an early kind of paintball with the locals (more later) from the safety of Shanti Palace, my hippy pad, (shanti is Hindi for "peace" and "quiet"), news of the war has been filtering through the large western (and Israeli) tourist population here, and is met with faint disgust, apathy, depression, as though someone's Pushkar continues to offer paradise on earth - this week with Holi, the Spring colour festival, an event in which people wear their worst clothes, buy kilos of dyed flour and colour bottles of water, and spend the rest of the day painting each other, violently. The day begins the previous evening with dancing through the streets, men with sticks perform a synchronised dance reminiscent of something you might see at a ceidilh. Pyres of brush, wood and straw are erected throughout the town at strategic points; marketplaces, crossroads etc., and in the morning the dancing finishes and the brahmins arrive to make puja, offering the fire to their gods to mark the end of winter and the coming of spring. The flames rise high and quickly burn down, and locals take chunks of burning wood home to bring good fortune to their households, some carrying wooden wands, others bringing small braziers. After sunrise, people eat and rest before the colour play begins. Children of all ages, some as old as eighty, fill waterbottles and balloons with coloured water, buy dye powder by the kilo, and hurl it at each other. The more sophisticated of us stop at different colours - I wore a white kurta I'd bought for the occasion and by the end of the day was rainbow-coloured, with a fabulous golden band across my forehead and neon-pink war paint on a deep blue face. Of course the dye didn't wash out for a few days and I had pink eyebrows and fingernails, but then so did everyone else. Holi is a mostly male affair - modesty protocols forbid the baring of local female flesh, but western women are fair game, and as the day wears on, men start drinking, and the event turns into something of a gropefest. So white girls tend to stay indoors. At the Shanti Palace, the family's women had their own party in the yard, with much hilarity and good cheer. So we partied there for a while. Pics to follow. Sxx
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