Into the Desert

My friends dragged me, kicking and screaming, out of Delhi this weekend. Mike: "Brian, you need to <>-ing leave this city. You're coming with us." So I went to Jaipur. We took the bus at 2:30 on Saturday from Rajasthan House in New Delhi, right near India gate. We could have taken the 1:45, but Nisha admitted to me that she just wanted the nice AC Volvo bus. By the time Mike and Chrissy arrived, around 2:00, she had thought of a better excuse: "We didn't know if you guys would have made the 1:45." Clever girl. It's hard to describe the difference between Delhi and its surrounding regions. Perhaps it's like what I imagine leaving the dirtiest possible version of Phoenix, Arizona, to head out into the wilds of the Southwestern Desert would be like. The lush greenery for which Dilliwallas are so rightfully proud gives way to desert, where rough, low shrubbery dominates the ever more hilly, rocky terrain. The exception to this comparison, of course, is that no one has the audacity to try and really farm anything in the middle of the Southwestern desert. Here, on all sides of the highway, and for as far as the eye can see, intrepid Indians have small plots of land, most growing wheat of some kind. Their fierce attacks on the shrubbery landscape are admirable.

Sidenote: Up in the mountains, we visited this place called SIDH: The Society for the Integrated Development of the Himalayas. It's an NGO that does much for education and social progress in the most hard-pressed areas of the lower Himalayas. There were many interesting things discussed up there, but one that stayed with me was about food. The woman who is co-director of SIDH with her husband talked about a woman in one of the villages in which SIDH works who laid bare her problem with the modern world. She said, "You call yourself educated. You call yourself advanced, elite. I know every aspect of every ingredient that goes into the food I feed my family. I have taken care of and grown every single thing. There is a direct relationship between me and that which sustains me. What price, this education, this advancement, if I lose that?" Now, I my capitalist, progressive instincts immediately jump to concepts like increased urbanization and the human benefits thereof, the specialization of the workforce and the higher yield of the contemporary agrarian economy, etc. in defense against this onslaught. These are all good and defensible concepts. But none strike home like that simple woman's argument because I hide a simple shame: I have no idea how to take a wheat crop and make bread out of it. It's a total mystery to me. I consider myself relatively educated, relatively advanced, and I have a ludicrously indirect and tenuous connection to that which sustains me. So when we were passing mile after mile of rugged, defiant wheat fields, I could help but think that, for all their visible hardships and disadvantages, I was looking out on people who, on perhaps a central existential question, were more advanced than I.

The farms gave way after a while, wholly giving up the battle against the harsh looking shrubbery and sandy soil. It was near this point that the sun started to set in the west. (How odd that the sun sets at about 6:30 or 7 now, where it was plenty light till 9:30 when we first got to India!) You all know how much I love it when God paints in pastels. Lazy light blues and hazy oranges, a rainbow sherbet sunset. When we arrived into the Jaipur bus station, a group of 30 or so men ran alongside our bus, vying to be the first to exploit the newly arrived tourists. We waited on the bus for our ride to the hotel. Maybe 20 or so guys asked us, in unison and some querying in German, French and Spanish, whether we needed a ride. When we got to the hotel, we had a stupid argument over a price difference of Rs60 between hotels. Keerthi, Chrissy and I had a nice dinner together at a place called the Copper Chimney, while Mike, Nancy, Nisha and Cat food from a roadside dhaba. Back at the hotel, we met and chilled with some other backpackers slowly making their way through India: Jesse, from Toronto, and two charming Aussie girls from Melbourne, Prudence and Sienna. Then we went to bed. We got up at 6ish the next morning, showered, had breakfast, and just messed around for a while, waiting for our tour guide to arrive at 9. Our guide, Jawan, was just this side of shady. Nice guy, but with just too much of a penchant to try and fleece money out of foreigners to be a truly standup guy. Jaipur is called the Pink City. Despite all the San Francisco jokes you might be formulating in your head (Dad, I'm looking at you), there's quite a good reason for this: the whole of the Old City is painted pink. The Maharaja first painted it sometime in the 18th Century to honor the visit of the Prince of Wales to Rajasthan. Pink is historically considered the most welcoming color to people in this region (do what you like with your feminist theories). We started off at the base of one of the Maharaja's many hillside palaces. The palace wasn't all that notable, and wasn't even open to the public, but the massive Lakshmi temple at the base of the hill certainly was. About the size of a mid-range cathedral, and in a shimmering pure white marble in the early sun, it was particularly striking. What I noted here was that, unlike at cathedrals, all the figures of notables and holy men and the generally honored around the periphery of the temple and coming off its walls were bowing inwards towards the temple. Even the holy men face in to God, here. If I knew more about Hinduism, and more about symbology in Christian architecture, perhaps I could make some brilliant synthetic argument here about how representative this was, or unrepresentative, of the two religions, but sadly those are some missing arrows in the quiver. We left the temple after doing the whole tourist thing and made our way to Amber Fort through the labor-intensive cleanup process that followed some festival they had at the temple the night before. Amber Fort, our memorization-heavy guide told us, was built by the founder of Jaipur, the Maharaja Jai Singh I. It is located at the top of one of the mountains that surround Jaipur, this one to the Northwest. We stopped at the base where there's a rather impressive man-made lake. There were elephants bathing and playing around, and down the beach a bit there were people dunking statues in the water in a religious rite with which I'm totally unfamiliar. (This is Hinduism, after all, the best result yet of the Acme Make Your Own Religion Kit.) There was also an honest to god snake charmer. I couldn't believe it, and in fact I thought the snakes were fake, until one tried to kill his "charmer" a few times.

Perhaps this is a good time to talk about military brilliance and Jaipur. You have to imagine it in its medieval (or mediaeval, as the British say) state, where the city was entirely contained within its walls, not anything like its contemporary, expansive, 2.3 million strong sprawl. There were no cruise missiles, no bunker-busters, no daisy-cutters, no satellite battle feeds, just what you normally imagine to be the classic weapons of medieval armies. The walls start on the plains in the old city, to the south of the fort and the northern mountains. They spread out on the plains and arch back until they hit the mountains. These they rise up, and spread north along their respective ridges, meeting again in the one small gap between the northern mountains, forming a nice loop. They're interrupted only by the two northwestern ridge forts, Taigur (like the animal) and Jaigur, and on the eastern side by the damn/fort across the main lake to the north of the old city. So, as a prospective commander of even the most formidable medieval army, your options are: A) go up the side of a mountain and try and get over one of the huge, easily re-inforcable, Great Wall of China-like walls, B) Attack the big, northern front gates in the narrow pass from the plains, where there's no place to assemble and less to maneuver, C) Go to the east... it's only 50 kilometers or so, and see if you can attack the dam cum fort which can release a river at you at will, D) Go west and try the wall/mountain thing again, if you can even get up the steep mountainsides, E) Go ALL the way west, around the mountains, and attack from the south. Historically, most people chose option E. All right, so you attack from the south. Say you take one of the 7 impressive gates to the Old City. Say you even take the Old City. You still need to take the retreating army, now feeling to the northern hills along with, in all likelihood, the highly charismatic maharaja. Now you need to take the hills. No problem, you think, you're the man. You just overran Jaipur, this'll be no sweat. You just have to take both the Amber Fort and Jaigar Fort above it. Good luck, mate. The Amber Fort, the Maharaja's mountainside enclave, is nigh impregnable, to my eye. There's nowhere to assemble, as there's that popular-with-the-elephants artificial lake down at the base of the mountain. There's only one road up, and it's rather steep, very narrow, very exposed, and has a series of well-defended checkpoints with excellent sniping positions. All right, Alexander Grant, you're brilliant. You're tough. You don't miss. Somehow, under withering fire from above, you're inspired your (now definitely much depleted) army and somehow manage get up the hill and break the thick main gate to the fort. You're in! Or so you think. That Maharaja's army is toast and so is he, you say to yourself... but where are they? Wouldn't you know it, they've all gone out, up the hill, through underground, now fully sealed tunnels, to Jaigur Fort. As you idle about, admiring the gorgeous inlaid carving on nearly every surface of every public and private space of the fort, perhaps strolling through the Maharaja's wives' apartments, then the separate ones for his concubines, you take a deep breath and look up. Jaigur fort runs a good way across the higher ridge to the northwest of your most recent conquest. It is long and low and thickly built, arrow slits and other insidious devices to exterminate your men adorn every side of the fortress. The side facing you is nearly vertical sandstone for parts, and others very loose gravel and boulders. The one small path that lazily circles up the mountain on the way up is easily protectable with a small number of men. That's gonna hurt more than taking Amber, you realize, as you look around at your weary, arrow-punctured men. The walls are too high to hit with anything but epithets. Even if you managed another miracle and made a start on the pass, you'd lose the rest of your men in the process. You, the logical commander, decide to turn the forces of attrition to your advantage. You'll just starve them out. Brilliant! Well, in a word, no, commander. You won't. Jaigur fort was built on top of water tanks calculated to be able to sustain a healthy army for 4 years. It has stores of what enough to feed a city for nearly as long. Furthermore, only the maharaja himself truly knows all the different ways out of it, so skillful were his architects, so who knows who might slip out of the fort and send you off in the middle of the night. Normally a calm, reasonable man, you presently throw a tantrum, then recover your composure and site back in awe. Four years, you say to yourself. Do I really want to waste that much of my brilliant young career to take one fort, however potentially potent it could become? No, you decide, it's just not worth it. You go back down the mountain, and you ride off into the beautiful Rajasthani sunset, a more docile, less clever conquest on your mind.

So it's an impressive place. Even more impressive when you think about how naturally beautiful and elegant the whole defense plan is. Essentially, it's a small-scale Switzerland model: "Enough mountains already! You can have your damned funky, cheese-mongering neutral republic!" Anyway... This Maharaja character apparently wasn't just a great ruler and an insatiable super-pimp. He was also a man of art and science. After a touristy, expensive lunch (for which Nisha tore our tour guide a new one), we went back to the Old City to see this part of the Maharaja's accomplishments. At lunch, we were sitting in our little air-conditioned tourist haven, and I was the only one facing the window. It struck me that the hillsides off in the distance over the lake weren't all that different from many other places in the world, but nearly everything beneath them was. As if pre-ordained to illustrate the point, here's what traffic passed by my narrow viewpoint outside in the seconds that followed: :: The tops of two cars. Quite normal. :: A big truck. Entirely normal, except that it was carrying 15+ people in the back of it. :: Then a train of camels, 6 or so strong, ungainly lumbering under the strain of the carts they were hauling. Not normal. :: Another truck. Normal. :: Going the opposite direction, I could see just up to the shoulders of two huge elephants slowly passing into and out of view, the feet of their masters just visible near the top of my view. Welcome to India. The elephant-wallas are really rather unkind to their elephants. The conditions are really sad. The elephants are just so nice-seeming, though, despite it all. They're obviously quite smart, despite their lethargic gate and motion. They also seem to have a sense of humor. One huge bull elephant in the courtyard at Amber Fort kept messing with his driver's turban. The driver would turn around and yell, and the elephant would stop, his trunk drooping like a scolded child's hands, as his huge body swayed with idle boredom. A few minutes would pass and then he'd go smacking the red turban again. His driver was much nicer to him than most of the drivers at Amber Fort. While he was waiting around, the driver would pat his elephant's trunk affectionately and lean against his huge legs, appreciating the considerable shade the elephant offered. Most of the drivers were just cruel, using these little metal hooks to cajole the big animals to do their bidding. Perhaps this one driver had come to internalize and respect the fact that this massive animal could destroy him if he wanted to, but never had. Who knows. The way the elephant drivers mount their elephants is quite cool. At a command, the elephant lowers its head and ears. The driver grabs the big, leathery ears and put his foot at the base of the elephant's trunk. Then the elephant raises his head again and literally throws the driver onto his back. It's a cool little maneuver. The city palace and its museum were rather unimpressive. We saw some beautiful fabrics, and some impressive weaponry, but it was overall a bit boring. (Not to mention HOT. I got dehydrated like crazy.) There were two notable exceptions: :: The Maharaja's clothes were beyond gigantic. He was apparently well over 7 feet tall, and this is clearly not legend because I saw his clothes. Later in life he also became enormously fat, weighing in at a truly impressive 255kg (which my computer tells me works out to 562.1788650000001 pounds). They had a progression of his stature from early to late, and his later pant size had to have been maybe 300 or something. They were so big that I couldn't figure out what I was looking at for a while. :: The weapons of war museum (weapons & war? I don't remember the title, exactly) was sort of blah, but there was one set of items in particular that caught my interest. There were whole racks of these particular kinds of blades that I'd never seen before. The actual blades themselves were maybe 10-inch long isosceles triangles, with a base that was just a little bigger than fist width. From the base, down the sides of the wearers arm, ran two support beams. Between the beams were two horizontal bars, meant to fit into the palm of the wearer of this blade. The blade itself, I realized after a while, was bifurcated. It took me a bit longer to realize the function of all these parts. The blade was meant to be punched with, once it had penetrated the victim, the two horizontal bars squeezed together to active a spring-loaded mechanism that split the blade apart inside the victim. This thing was made first to skewer someone, then slice his or her internal organs to shreds. Truly nothing motivates the creative juices of humanity like a little warfare, eh? Some of these weapons (I have no idea what they were called, by the way, due to a notable lack of labeling in any part of this museum) were of truly gorgeous designs, though. Inlaid gold wire patterns, handles of etched steel frame and lapis lazuli core. Artfully designed, brilliantly imagined... bringers of extraordinarily painful death... So it goes. After the mostly underwhelming city palace, where I did not get to meet the current Maharaja, though I saw his current house, we went to the Jantar Mantar Observatory to see some of the first Maharaja Jai Singh's accomplishments. I should note that Indian tourist places in general give everyone an inordinate amount of crap about bringing your camera into them. At the observatory, you had to pay an extra Rs75 for each camera. We were at the "minimize expenses/annoyances" stage of the day, so we didn't bother with it. We just locked our stuff up in these lockers that weren't exactly faith inspiring. Mike, the brilliant artist overall, was our dedicated photographer both at the observatory and at Amber fort. Mike also had his gorgeous Canon Digital Camera with a new 512MB CF card. He could take a crapload of very well constructed, high-resolution pictures, and did. Remember that. The observatory was one of my favorite parts of the day. As I said, the Maharajas weren't just libidinous warmongers, they were also gentlemen of education and culture. The Maharaja Jai Singh was totally enamored of astronomy, and, after reading all east and west had to say about it, dispensed with small-scale brass and glass instruments in favor of precisely built, massive stone structures, designed and calibrated for to capture different measurements. One was for computing local time (accuracy of down to about 5 seconds), a whole set for knowing peculiarities of the different sun signs, and the world's biggest sundial. The sundial was maybe 60 feet high (there wasn't any literature at this place and our guide didn't know), with stairs going up to the top of the "dial." Sweeping out from either side in nice gentle curves were the measures that calculated the time down to within 2 seconds. When the sun stopped flirting with us from behind the clouds, it made a clear line that fell right on the exact time marked on the stone. I prefer my Tag Heuer, but if you're a Maharaja I guess you have to be a bit more large-scale in everything. After the observatory, we went back up the high western mountains at Taigur fort (again, pronounced like the big cat). The guards at the fort gave us more crap about our cameras, but we all individually decided just to pay the ludicrous entrance fee for cameras and move on. Taigur fort is the highest point above Jaipur. One tower inside the fort was so high that, back in the days before air pollution, apparently if you lit a fire at the top the small flame could be seen from the Red Fort in Delhi. That is cool. Who else is thinking Return of the King right now? Good. The views from the ramparts of Taigur Fort were amazing. Even with the pollution, you can see forever. There would be quite a warning if an intrepid army was shaking itself out of the desert and coming over the plains. It's truly a shame that we had to leave at 5 when the fort closed. I could have sat up on those high ramparts for hours, just watching the sun go down, listening to the city below. The sky was a strong blue, tapped by a pointillist with high white clouds, fading to the pre-pink of a desert sunset. The city roared below, as I floated my legs over the cliff. The drum band and explosions of a big wedding fought with the stunted chorus of honking cars and dogs barking, all laid over the raspy throated roar of Old and New Jaipur. It was India, aurally defined. On the way out, I followed Mike to a semi-restricted part of the roof to take pictures. On the way back to the public part, a bunch of broadly smiling Indian kids were waiting for us. When they saw us they broke out in a yell. I have no idea why they thought we were so cool. They started yelling "Picture! Photo! Photo!" Mike looked at me and motioned for me to go over with them. I ran over to get in the photo with them. So there's this brilliant picture of me being swarmed by smiling Indian kids, all holding on to my arms and hands and squeezing my shoulders. "Blue eyes! Yeah! Yeah!" I was dying laughing. I thought the whole thing was so cool. When Mike showed them each their faces on his digital display, they made tons of noise again. They wanted a copy of the photo "for memory!" so I gave one kid my notebook and he scrawled his name and address. Remember how good this picture must be, the sun starting to set behind us, me a white (though tanned) face in a sea of brown skin and extremely white smiling teeth. Remember that. After the fort we were nearly at the end of our day. We decided to go back to the Old City so the girls could do some shopping. I got more some chai nearby and called home. It was amazingly good for the soul just to talk to Mom and Amy. I wrote in my journal for a while, occasionally looking up to watch part of the India v. Pakistan cricket match. India ended up losing, later, 201-200. We had dinner before our bus and waded out through a sea of handicraft wallahs, who really were waiting just for us, as they dispersed after we left. I said to Cat, in our code language, French, that we should really go. One of the handicraft-wallahs exploded in arms and crappy puppets and French. He was badassly fluent. we talked to him for a bit in French. Apparently he has friends in Marseille, Bordeaux, and Paris. Cat made the astute observation that he was probably friends with those guys that try to sell you the crap plastic key chains in front of the Eiffel Tour: "Mr., I think I've met your friends." She talked to him more than she should have after I went off to find an auto and I think ended up buying a puppet from him. She's a sucker like that. We took a supremely ghetto, rickety, non-AC bus back to Delhi simply because it was the first one. Non-AC buses mean seating like steerage, and open windows spitting dust and god knows what else at you all night as you drive through the desert. It leaves you feeling dirty in literally every part of your body. I tried to write as much as possible in my journal, but they turned off the lights about 15 minutes into the ride, and my overhead light didn't work, of course. Alas. I finished my last thoughts on one subject via the flashlight on the end of my cell phone. I talked to the guy next to me for a long while. I forgot the guy's name just as soon as he said it, but he worked for the McKenzie consulting group and was an IIT Grad. IIT grads are like Princeton grads: they can't go five goddam minutes without telling you where they went to school. People from Harvard are much cooler. They're almost embarrassed about having gone to Harvard: "Hey, where'd you go to school?" "Boston." "Boston College? Boston University?" "No." "Well, where then?" "Harvard." With Princeton/IIT people, the progression is: "Hey, did I tell you that I went to Princeton/IIT?" "No." "Oh, well I did." [silence as the expected adoration and kissing doesn't happen.] "Right." The bus stopped all the time. First it was police, for some unknown reason. Then we had our scheduled 15-minute break in the middle of the trip that got extended to around a half-hour. Then we switched drivers (shady bastard driver slept on the dirty floor in the aisle, right near Keerthi and Chrissy's feet). At about 2:45 (we left at 9 for a supposed 5 hour drive, mind you) there was a loud crack and the front windshield shattered. It didn't come apart and fall off and fly all over us, thank God, but it was cracked like hell. I have no idea what the hell hit us, but there was a big, roughly rectangular shaped hole in the middle of the window with all the cracks spreading out like vessels in a bloodshot eye. We stopped for another half hour to examine and try to explain this. Then we stopped for another 15 minutes just down the road, apparently to tell a cop what had happened. I'm sure that was extremely effective, what with Indian police being the most diligent in the world and all... We finally got in around 4am at the InterState Bus Terminal (ISBT), which is right near our house. Being so late, we just wanted to get home. We thought it'd be cheap, given the distance. During the day, there's no chance I'd pay more than Rs20 for a ride there. When we got off the bus and tried to get an auto in front of the station the auto-wallah mafia told us, assuming we were new tourists to Delhi, that Civil Lines was very far away and we'd need to pay at least Rs120 to get there! Keep in mind the fact that we're literally looking at the south side of Civil Lines while he's saying this. So we laughed at this jerkoff and asked some other people: "80!" "90!" They were all in this cartel together and wouldn't budge to anything approaching a reasonable rate. We flagged a guy down who was passing by. We said "20" and he said "Ok." We were trying to work out one more auto for the rest of our group, when the lead auto-wallah mafia guy came out with this big bamboo stick and started whacking the crap out of our reasonable auto-wallah's auto. He was seriously denting the side panels and the metal roofing. Our autowallah freaked out and sped off. After literally having driven away the competition, the autowallah mafioso had this big smirk on his face: "70. Best offer." We were so pissed that we just started walking. Two autos followed and agreed to Rs40, and we were all too tired to bother with it anymore. I fell into bed at 4:25, totally exhausted. I woke up the next morning to what I thought was an odd sight. All my clothes and things from my bag were on the floor. Rob came in and saw me waking up and told me I should talk to Mike. Mike came in as if on cue a second later and apologized for strewing my stuff on the ground. He said someone had stolen his camera and he was really upset and had wanted to make sure it didn't get packed in someone else's bag. So Mike's US$600 camera, with his new US$80 512 MB CF card, as well as all those fantastic pictures I was telling you to remember, are all gone. Poor bastard. I felt and still do feel terrible. we still have no idea where it got snagged. Mike thinks it might have been while he was dozing on the bus. So that was the trip, all in all. Sort of an exhaustive concordance of my weekend, really. It was a damn good time. And I finally got the hell out of Delhi.