2005 - India

We arrive at the airport and I send Paul away so I don’t start him crying. Ros retaliates by setting off all the alarms at immigration.

Thailand stopover

In Bangkok, at a little past midnight, the streets are awash with the roar of cars and trucks, the hawkers are trading from mats on the ground and we watch as a young mahood leads a baby elephant through moving traffic. Later another elephant, older this time and carrying his driver perched before a stack of newspapers, waits at the crossing for the lights to change. The air is hot and filled with dust and the smell and blaring of cars, and I think of KL, but without the rank durian, without the mould and without the standing drains.

Things I love - the corner restaurant where I ate vegetarian noodles (with pork which I passed on to Roselyne) and the Chinese man with the mole over one eyebrow who identified our ingredients for us and picked his teeth so delicately.

At Erewin Shrine, we make offerings for a disaster-free trip, for a real tour guide and for our families. I could sit out here for hours with the air so full of incense. Whole families come with offerings of grapes, guava, caffeine drinks; and they buy ropes of flowers, sticks of incense, felicitous yellow candles and packages of gold leaf. The leaf is for the elephants. The incense and candles are to be first of all offered to the gods and then lit.














INDIA
Old Delhi

The noise at the Hotel Goodtimes is incessant and night-long. We are close to the kitchens in a room that is small and spotless with a jewel of a bathroom that dates to colonial times. There is a conference of doctors at Goodtimes, and we endear ourselves not at all to them by stealing their places at table. This is not entirely our fault, dining places being scarce and under-resourced, but the affection and forgiveness with which our faux pas is accepted seems just the kind of omen we’re already looking for.


*

The cars drive impossibly close together. Any gaps that may appear between them are filled with rickshaw drivers, motor cycles, pedestrians and furniture vans. With wild disregard, the drivers open their doors to spit out the dust of the city from deep in their lungs.


*

To visit the Jain temple we must take off our shoes and socks, and wash our feet and hands. The women touch the first step of the temple with their fingers, bowing low and touching their fingers to their heads; the men are less observant. Two blue-capped infants in the temple grounds play chasings around old stone ornaments. The bigger of the two picks the little one up by the throat, almost choking it. Once released, the baby giggles delightedly. White turbanned men in white robes pull white cloth from the lines where the laundry is drying.

Roselyne enters the temple and is shown the rites and ceremonies by a young devotee. She is in heaven. In Ghandi Park, I give five rupees to a beggar child who smiles and runs off with such palpable delight that I wish I’d given him more. He doesn’t summon an army of beggars as I’d been warned he would, and I wonder if all the stories are true after all.

Raju has brought us to a very nice restaurant for lunch where we over-order and really enjoy ourselves. I’ll be interested to see how we feel about Indian food in a week or so.

*

“In India,” Raju says with some pride, “you only need, to drive, some brakes and a horn.” He reconsiders for a moment. “With very bad brakes, you can – but without horn, no.”

*

The dirt people of Old Delhi, having no other choice, inhale their city until it is part of them. The beggars sleep on the street in the daytime and build fires of plastic at night. Their blankets, wrapped around them as a garment day and night, are so thick with the dust that the grey seeps through to colour the skin of the people. Exhausted, they managed to sleep on the gutters and roadsides during the day, as the Delhi traffic belches and screams mere inches away from their heads.

They are made of dust, breathing and eating dust, and their eyes show a film of dust between them and humanity.

When the beggar children come to the car, Raju is firm. “Don’t give,” he says, “Don’t see.”

*

A step higher than the dirt people (whom I can't photograph because how can you point a camera at someone who has literally nothing to defend, or defend himself with?) are those with a roof of plastic tied to a fence and held up with a sapling. A step higher still are the tent-dwellers. They still sleep by the side of the road, but have walls at least to keep their bodyheat from being sucked away by the night.




As the colour changes (it does change as we leave the outskirts of Delhi) the colour of the people also changes. This is a yellower dust, thicker and just as pervasive as the Delhi grey – but we see young boys in impossibly gleaming whites on their way to play cricket. Raju has us stop at a sugar mill of sorts where we are greeted with stoney-faced indifference.

The cobra man is very unhappy with the ten rupees I proffer. He takes his revenge by making me practically beg him to take my money.

On the road to Agra, we pass a small industrial area where they make, among other things, leather. Goat, sheep and buffalo hides are used, but the cow is flensed only after it has fallen to a natural death. Then the hide is taken and the body left to the vultures. Once the birds have done their work and the bones have been stripped, the women can gather them. They are used to make buttons.

*

Taj Mahal

Today is the 8th of January, and at the monument of Shah Jahan to his beloved 4th wife, Muntaz, we manage (despite the mandatory baggage checks and searches) to drop our smuggled rose at the steps to the tomb. I cry, of course. Christie, I think, would have loved all of it – the trip out to the slum for the rose which was laced with white florets and a spray of gold tinsel and wrapped in cellophane, the crowd at the stairway and Imran’s quick deal with the guard; the small prettiness of the rose itself, which fell on the step and leaned, exhausted, into the corner. It will be collected tonight, along with the coins and prayers, but the blessing of course is in the remembering.

We sit at the fountain and watch the sun set on Muntaz’s Taj Mahal, and on the magnificent, aggrandising, desperate love of the Shah







Our arrival in the car park as the darkness takes hold is a signal for the rag-shrouded ghosts to move in from the shadows. They approach together, all at once, in complete silence, grey and unfinished, herding around us and pressing us in, and they have tumours half the size of their heads and cleft palates and grotesque and outrageous deformities and at this hour, in the darkness, the carpark is empty. In the instant before I understand this mass of spectres for what it is, I am terrified. These are the beggars who would be chased away in the daylight, being so bad for business. These are the worst of the worst, the ones who should not, could not, would not have survived their infancy without some special intervention, and they are all the more powerful for that. I am not prepared, not at all, and the young man who looks part-animal, his spine so twisted that he walks on his feet and hands, straight-kneed and straight-elbowed terrifies me. I instinctively and uncourageously put Ros between us and am, in the next instant, deeply deeply ashamed. But it takes all of my courage to look him in the face when I hand him some rupees, and I’m weak with relief to see Raju jogging up to the car.

Later, he apologises for being away. And he is pleased that we gave rupees to these people. There is no welfare system here, and charity is all they have to depend on. But he is opposed to us giving money to dalits and beggars whom he classes as work-shy junkies.




Next Day


It is pre-dawn and we are driving through fog so thick it is totally impenetrable. The only time we can see out is when we pass through the old moghul villages. We are on our way back to the Taj Mahal to watch the sunrise.

At the village, even at this ungodly hour, small boys and young men crowd around the car and tap on the glass. When I tap back, the cheekiest of them startles and grins.

*

We are hidden in a thick, cold, drifting cloud, and hidden too is the Taj Mahal just a small way ahead of us. Weirdly Indian music sounds through the greyness, and every now and then turbanned and cloaked men pass and disappear within ten or twelve steps, eaten unprotesting by the mist.

Unearthly in the greyness the Hindu temple bell calls on the sun to rise, as our accidental guide talks to Raju about a cricket game current at the SCG. It is cold, and he is small, smaller than me, and petite under his too big trousers and polyester shirt. His teeth are patchy with betel juice and he has been waiting an hour or more for the mist to rise and the boat to get through to take him east to his work. He will work till sunset – about thirteen hours – after which he will catch the boat back, mist permitting, and sleep in one of the hovels we drove past all day. I want to give him the bread and butter we took from the hotel for breakfast, but Ros says to keep that back for the kids on the street. And he does have a job.

Raju has prayed to Howa, the wind god, and we wait, stamping our feet and shaking our fingers. Every now and then the mist seems to thin, and then rises again and blocks the view completely. Roselyne tells Raju his gods must be teasing him.

There are burrows in the sand the size of a curled human, and Raju tells us they are the sleeping burrows of the unpeople – the people who are lower even than dalits, who don’t have a name or a caste, who burrow into the sand for the few hours of warmth it offers after the sun has gone down. I wonder if these were the people we saw last night who don’t show by day, but Raju says no, for the most part those people would sleep at the doorways of temples.

The sun is beginning to rise. It reflects itself in the water. Around us we see that the ground is covered in human excrement, and a few feet away, the mist outlines the shape of another man squatting, relieving himself. The bells salute him and so do I, for daring to bare his arse in this freezing air.



We have been joined now by Vikram, who wears thongs on his frozen feet and red gloves on his hands. He is aged about 13, and looks nine. His English is restricted almost solely to numbers, but he knows Australia and cricket, and he’s not going to budge from here until we give him some money. If we do that before the sun rises, we will be immediately surrounded by the rest of the village who will eventually get angry with us, and take it out on Raju – this has happened before. And Raju needs to be able to return to the Taj Mahal for his work, so poor little Vikram will have to wait with us until his gods see fit to burn the mist from the sky.

And still the mist drifts in and lies heavily over the tomb. We have been here in this perishing cold since well before six; and now Vikram has offered me his gloves since my hands are freezing. He has the sweetest smile – and look, the mist is lifting!


*

We are blessed by the holy man on leaving. This comes in very handy on the road to Fatipur Sikri when an attack is mounted against us by a bullock, an army truck and an old man on a rickshaw.


Deeg

Deeg is the summer palace of the Maharajah of Bharatpur. Roselyne does not enjoy Deeg, but I rather like it. It is a satisfactory counterpoint to the well-kept magnificence of the palaces.

In the dusk we see, outlined against the slum, the camels and hovels of the gypsy people. Originally they came from Rajastan, to make iron-work for the king. The iron-work – knives and swords – was used for warfare between the kings. Six months in the making, they would be displayed, and a message sent to the king that the time had come for him to purchase his weaponry. After the sale had gone through, the grounds would be used for feeding and celebration. What days they would have been!

*

We pass a Hindu Temple, and not for the first time, I see Raju make a quick obeisance. When he sees me noticing, he says “On the road I pray any god for my safety, for your safety, for my car.” I think that’s a fine idea.

*

At the Hindu school on the way to Abaneri, we are invited in by the Headmaster. It is a well-tended little place, a dirt quadrangle surrounded by a low wall of classrooms. The children sit in rows on the dusty ground, divided into three groups according to age-range. The principal, a hectic and dedicated man, has no English to speak of, but none-the-less translates the childrens’ rote prayer for us – a prayer to the education deity. The children – giggling and cheeky – are diverted to find us there, and I make the mistake of winking at a small girl in the front row. The whole group takes it up, and when I start giggling they are merciless. After prayers, the headmaster takes us to see a classroom – a bare dirt floor and one desk and chair for the teacher, walls empty save for a blackboard about thirty inches square on which is written the alphabet. He brings the visitors book for me to sign – mine is the only signature – and is utterly charming. He returns with us to the car, and we load him up with boxes of coloured pencils we brought from home, the books Ros brought, some koala clips and pencil sharpeners.

We move on to the ruined temple at Abineri and the adjacent baths. Roselyne attracts affection at every holy place we go to by virtue of her knowledge which is exhaustive and her enthusiasm for Indian history and religion; and we are given a long and comprehensive tour of the baori and adjacent buildings. It is towards the end that our guide is alerted by Raju to the armed policemen following our progress from the battlement. Trouble is brewing; as a compliment to Ros we have been allowed into protected areas, and allowed to photograph things which should not be photographed. The guide leads us at a quick pace back to the end gate, but we pause for a second in the shadows of a sacred building out of sight of the police to load him up with tips for himself and bribes to pay off the agents of the law. We have just finished the transaction when the police arrive and escort us (with guns) back to the gates.

From there, in disgrace, we wander away from the eagle eye of the law and into the village at the end of the lane. It is tiny, and very pretty, with women in beautiful shades of purple, gold and green, and poor thatched shacks around a bare dirt common. The village potter – an old man with twig-thin legs and big strong hands, shows us how he makes clay pots, dishes and the cylindrical, handle-less cups for drinking char. He makes us one of everything which takes him perhaps fifteen minutes. Afterwards, we belong to the children who are cheeky and delicious and transfixed with the pictures they see of themselves in our cameras. Like all the children we have met so far,(with the exception of an extraordinarily intelligent and dignified Indian boy at the sordid Pratap Palace at Bharatpur) they sing “hello, hello, tampel? (sample?)” asking for giveaways. We have nothing left, but Raju buys biscuits and we give them half a pack each. They are happy, and Raju is happy because we have listened to him on both counts – unlike, he tells us Mr British Times who ignored him for twenty-three days.

We leave, with the children running behind us - and the elf-child, a feral boy, older than the others, watchful and ready to bite, is smiling for the first time. Because the biscuits he will have,” says Raju “and will not be taken to sell.”


“Don’t look, don’t see” says Raju, except for the disabled, but it is impossible not to see the poverty and hunger. In the towns and cities, the mass of beggars makes them dangerous and threatening – they mob quickly when they see a westerner and are angry and aggressive. But on the roads between little villages, a child will accept a packet of biscuits with great good humour and run back to his parents who look up and smile and wave.



The caste system has so much to answer for. A story in the Hindu Times said that the Dalits are being chased away from the refugee camps and kept from the aid pouring in in the wake of last week’s tsunami. They are beaten away from the feeding centres and refused access to medical help – and this by the second-most-backward caste. In earlier times, Dalits were said to have brought their fate upon themselves by their deeds in a past life: now, in more enlightened times they are accused (by Raju as well) of not wanting to work, of being junkies or alcoholics. But I haven’t seen any drunkenness, and I can’t imagine they would have any money for drugs – and it is always food they beg for, not money.





Jaipur

On our second day at Jaipur, our guide, Maresh, shows off to Raju by coming to sit with us in the restaurant. But he draws the line at sitting alone with me while Ros heads off to the ladies’. Politely excusing himself, he trips over his own feet in his hurry to leave the table. He is usually very urbane and stares in a most unwavering fashion as he tells us the history of his city. His eyes water in their unblinking concentration and later he tells us with some pride that he has been exercising his stare especially for Australians, having learnt that Australians prefer a direct gaze to the downcast Indian eyes as a way of showing trust and respect. Maresh is an excellent mimic, whose English was learned from his teachers at the Catholic School. He repeats everything for us, leaving a raised inflection and a questioning pause before the final word of each repeated question – thus “And this was where the Maharajah would meet with his - ? (pause) Courtiers.” Generations of catholic schoolmasters live on in his inflections. “You will be amazed to learn - ” prefaces many of his sentences, or “I am now telling you - ” Jaipur is for him “a place of marvels and wonders”, and indeed it is for me, too. The Observatory, built in the 1700s and looking, as Ros says, like a precursor to modern art, the Amba Fort, built in 1592, breathtakingly proportioned and scientifically climate-controlled, the crematoria of the Maharajahs, and the artworks, furnishings and fabrics at the Palace complex are all astounding in their inventiveness and intricacy.

I have seen marvellous things.

*

Tonight, for the first time, we get to an internet café, and I have two emails waiting from Paul.


*

Jaipur to Pushkar

Raju wants us to use the time well, so we begin at the zoo where we attract too much attention, particularly from groups of very polite young men who want to shake hands with us. We end up leaving, and head for the Albert Museum, which is dark, dark, dusty, full of mould and decay.

*

The Lakshminaraya Temple was built by Mr Birla. We are fortunate to arrive just in time for the morning prayer. We are blessed with oil and water, and Raju secures for us some carved and blessed sugar which I pack away for emergencies or disasters at home.

Wherever we stop a crowd appears behind us and always, always, there is one singing under his breath. We see a pickpocket boy, quick as a fish, darting through the market crowd chased by his irate victim.

And today, finally, we are allowed to eat at a locals-only roadside restaurant. There are small bungalows upstairs where we could eat privately, but we opt instead for the big tables on the edge of the highway. Raju is very strict with the staff in the matter of hygiene, and has them wash the table again before we sit down. I am reluctant to draw his attention to my glass which is encrusted with something small and dead. He is ordering for us and has agreed to join us at table. Both Ros and I feel this is something of a personal triumph.


*

We drive past a fairly mundane adventure – a car with a flat tyre and smashed windscreen. Raju’s description of the event turns it into a mournful indian haiku:
“burst is the tyre
flies is the stone:
broken the glass”

*

The Pushkar Palace is heaven and the sun is setting over the lake, just as it’s meant to do. A green-eyed girl and her father who plays the rawanhat-tha are providing the music and a turbanned boy with a samovar sells char in the lovely little terracotta cups I’ve been coveting. The lake itself is indescribable. I can’t believe that they wash themselves and their clothes in this stagnant green water. Holy it may be, but with the sewage and human detritus, the ashes of the dead and the filth of the town, it must be crawling with everything known to the microscope.

The light over the sacred lake falls black, and the houses reflect brightly in the black water. Ros and I have returned from the unaccompanied night walk through the town that we promised Raju we would never take. I bought some pretty little pots and matching mirrors for 100/rp for the six, and two little bound books of recycled paper for 50rp each.





Next Morning

Sacred Indian music amplifies over the lake, and Ros is off – unaccompanied again - in the freezing pre-dawn to watch the sunrise. Mist keeps most of the light away, but it is still recognisably India. Outside in the streets and on the stairs where the dancers gathered, the charboy’s disposable teacups, terracotta, flawless, handmade in the village, litter the path like so much debris. I would love to pick some up and take them home to sit on the garden wall that Paul built me.

*

Raju, discussing Indian movies: “In every one movie, three or four singings is necessary. Fightings and dancings and lovings and three or four singings.”


*


Savatri Hilltop Temple

The halfway point of this very steep climb is marked by a small boy playing the zither-like rawanhat-tha. He runs after me up a steep, steep path to alert me to the fact that a business card is falling out of my back pocket. On the return journey I stop to give him some pencils and he is ours for the rest of the long trip down, but it is Ros who wins his soul with a clip-on koala.

*

Lunch is at the Shiva Om, where the full-on buffet costs 50r. Because Raju is eating with us, and Raju is Hindu, we need only go to the buffet once – and after that we are properly served at the table 


*

On the way back from the Mosque of the Sufi Saint, we pass a Hindu funeral – many men carrying the flower-covered corpse on a bamboo and straw bier. They are taking the body to a small funeral bier that we passed on the way in. Women are not allowed to attend, Raju tells us, because they are too weak and are liable to cry.


*

At the end of every day we are covered in dust.

The mosque today was the least-friendly place – we were appropriated by a young guide who had no English , made to part with a few hundred rupee and taken off to be blessed against our will. After the blessing we ought to have done a single full turn around the shrine, but the shoving and pushing was so intense and the dislike of westerners so palpable, we ducked out a side entrance. The guide is probably still waiting for us…. I wonder (having lived for three years in a muslim country, and knowing the gentleness and hospitality that that entails) whether this is purely a local response or is connected with the new hostility hat been built up between us.

There were very many disabled beggars here, and many aggressive touts, but we are learning to cope with the touts. All the same, we don’t stop to take photos.


*


From the deck of the hotel, we marvel at the height of the mountain we climbed today. Raju, it transpires, had climbed up after us for our protection “because the goddess told him to.” As good a reason as any, Ros and I agree…

*

Jodhpur

We leave Pushkar on the holy day of Sakarand for which I am privately grateful. I tip the military doorman the princely sum of 50r (about $1.50) but alas it is the wrong doorman…. On the way to Jodhpur, we stop at a little village of Nimaj, a couple of ks off the main road. Raju has never visited this place, but he has heard that it holds a small castle, and we’re off with him to find it. We bump our way 4ks down a track with “natural” houses gathered around a “natural” village. (“Natural” in India means without plumbing, electricity or even running water.) And we arrive at a hilltop oasis where we are shown to a communal tent and given a tray of cold damp cloths, salt and cold lemonade. We have arrived at Chhatra Sagar, the tent resort that only operates from October to March.

It is exquisite and we are shown that high hospitality that can only exist in India. Raju, being Hindu, is taken for a meal while we are shown inside the tents - and now we must wait for him, for a change. It astounds me that such impeccable manners can thrive and survive in a place of such chaos and extremity.

Sri Niti tells us without rancour that many of the “traditions” of Hinduism are in fact a response to the Moslem invasions. Girls were only veiled and kept in their houses because they were being kidnapped by the Moslem marauders with such frequency. The deference shown to men also came from the same place – before the invasions, women worked, played and warred alongside their men.

I am acutely aware of the spectacle I present after this two hour search for the “castle” – especially, my muddy shoes and the fact that - shame of shames! - my feet were pointed at Sri Niti for at least half of our conversation.


*
Jodhpur

After Jaswant Thada – a monument most remarkable for its pigeons – we visit the utterly bewitching fort of Mehrangah. Very few places touch me as deeply as this one. The current Maharajah ascended to power at age four, and by the time he was adult, his role here had been reduced to the merely ceremonial. None-the-less, he has instigated a restoration and education regime centred around the heritage of Jodhpur, and has made a stunning success of it.

Mundoo Garden, memorial to an earlier Maharajah, is a riot of monkeys, small children who want to shake hands, and stone towers and stairways that look like a model of themselves. It is a remarkable effect of this reddish stone that it appears to be cut to “look like” stone; it looks for all the world as though Disney created it to simulate Indian memorial parks.

*


The little dalit girl in the marketplace watches me with the very persistent barrow boy, and when I finally take his photo to get rid of him, she stands motionless in my path. She is not like the other children, who swarm and call out one picture? one picture?

and pose and preen and delight in all the attention.


She stands with one finger to her mouth, dwarfed by the sack of rubbish on her back that she'll sell to the garbage traders. I smile at her and she smiles back, and I don't know what she wants, whether she thinks I want to photograph her (I dont - she's too fragile) or whether she has just gotten lost in watching the raucus boy demanding his bit of attention. Finally I lift the camera towards her, and she straightens a little and looks at the lens like the boy and though I wouldn't normally, I take a few shots and show them to her. When the shutter closes, she flinches, but when I show her the shot, she smiles the shyest of smiles and points at it without touching the camera and back to her thin little self. I nod and smile and tell her she's very pretty, and she doesn't understand but puts her fingers out bravely - not as a beggar, but as the boy had done, to shake hands. So I shake her hand, this little untouchable, and stroke her cheek, and Ros, who is watching, runs back with a packet of biscuits. The girl takes them, and shows them to her mum who has turned up by now with a begging bowl (a nice, clean one) and we drop a few rupees in and they both smile and wave goodbye and it is SO SAD!!!

Meanwhile, a warmly-dressed child on a bicycle keeps riding around after me demanding pens because she’s seen me buying pens and books at the market.

*

The clever little boy at our guesthouse has a very poor mother, but excels at school despite working hard seven days a week for food only at Dhillon House. We have taken against the Punjabi lady who rules this establishment. We think she is unkind to the boys, and besides the place is under a flight path and meanly equipped. She overcharges for everything and adds charges we haven’t agreed to and makes no attempt to be friendly. But the food – the dinners – are surpassingly good, so we won’t complain after all. Though if we did, we might mention the stink of the rocket fuel which we taste all day, and the plight of the little boy working long hours every night for no wage at all.


*

Jaiselmer



The desert children drift in like sand, appearing from nowhere to stand silent and shy and always watchful and patient. They do not beg, but they are happy to have their photos taken and happy too to take the sweets we offer. The older five boys are given a choice between pens and sweets, and choose pens – so we slip them sweets on the sly. A middle-sized boy asks us for water and is pushed away by the group. At a roadside café, we are put into a kind of purdah, made to eat separately behind a curtain, and I spend lunchtime text-messaging home.



At night in Jaiselmer, we see the most enchanting puppet show I have ever ever seen. “The Boy With The Ball” was exquisite and terribly funny. Afterwards, in an internet café where the computer connections don’t work, we are held against our will till our driver returns, and we realise then that Raju is onto our unaccompanied night-time wanderings. There is a driver to driver semaphore that obviously works overtime in India, like the Amah Telegraph in Malaysia. We have been spotted on one of our illicit walks, and Raju has been informed. The internet boy explains that he has been told to keep us inside until Raju arrives at 8:30 - and our cries that we didn’t know the computers were broken, and that two hours locked in this (filthy) little shop is unfair are met with sorrowful determination. He has given his word to Raju, and Raju is a man. Until 8:30 we are the computer-boy’s guest and may not leave the shop. He gives us warm bottles of lemonade and packets of chips and tries to cheer us up, and we subside with as good grace as we can muster. Without him leaving us, word is somehow sent to Raju, and thankfully we are released into his custody only about twenty minutes later. We cannot raise the matter with Raju without forcing him to discuss our many lapses, our unprotected night-time wanderings – and this would shame us all.

*
Today, after a night in the tiniest bedroom in the world, we go into the vast, empty desert.


*

At Jaiselmer Fort (medieval – the last kingdom to sign the British Treaty which it did in 1818) our guide tells us that the Pakistani Government is much beloved here – because without that government there would be no problem between Pakistan and India, and without these problems there would be no army presence. The army has brought progress which has changed Jaiselmer from a benighted desert outcrop into a popular tourist town. It has roads, electricity, and - most wonderful of all – water, piped from the Himalayas.

The tourists are good and bad, says the guide. They are changing the culture by their presence, but they also teach people not to throw rubbish and except in the villages the baby girls are no longer quietly “put by” to leave room for a son.

We have seen paintings of the gods on grains of rice, and old quilts stained and faded through eons of use, wooden deities and travelling shrines, ancient silver jewellery, beads and brasses and bought none of them.

*

There appear to be four main castes in India – The Brahmin, the Rajput, the merchants and the untouchables. They do not intermarry in Jaiselmer, but mingle freely. In the villages however, the dalits will always be outcast.

*

Here at Jaiselmer we watch the middle class women cleaning and cooking on their rooftops and are startled to be told that they are never allowed outside, except to the rooftops. Some dalit women are allowed to work as labourers, but the Brahmin and Rajput women are disbarred from any employment and the Jain caste are allowed only to conduct approved work (henna painting etc) from their own front rooms.


*

Thar

The desert has taken our voices. Munir meets us and takes us to the camp and at dusk our camel men load us onto the camels. We are at the end of a long camel train and reach the dunes just as the sun begins to slide down under the skyline. The littlest of the camel-boys, Prem, digs a hole in the sand and burrows down, shivering. Prem had been singing along the camel trek, but now the cold – it is quickly very cold indeed – has turned him to silence. An older boy with a drum takes his place and sings heroic songs in admiration of Ros, of me, of our sons and fathers, our husbands and brothers, grandfathers, uncles and eventually, under duress, of Stephanie, too. We are about to slip him a 20 rupee tip when he disgraces himself by asking for 500. Even the camel-boys laugh, and Ros sits and regards him with deep disbelief, and turns to drawing patterns in the sand. To salve the honour of our party, I proffer 25 rupees in a manner that suggests he has three short seconds to accept it. He does and runs off, but is plainly disgruntled. Later we see him being chased away by every pilgrim on the dunes. He is an outrageous young man, but good value for all that.

*

Saway describes his camel: “The palms of his feet are soft unto the touch.”

*

In the morning, we are woken by the camelmen’s news-song, and prepare in the pre-dawn darkness for a second ride. Prem’s father is taking us, and Saway. It is freezing – bone-achingly cold - and my hands are red and shaking within minutes. The sky is bruising deeply and eventually the village detaches itself from the darkness, standing out icily in the cold. The camels halt there for a moment, their bells clanging in the stillness, while Prem’s father sings out to the houses. And in the chill black morning a small shape breaks free and runs towards us. It is Prem, barefoot and sleepy-eyed, who has been sung out of bed because of Ros’s disappointment that he hadn’t appeared with Saway in the pre-dawn. He loses a day’s schooling to ride with us – a great cost to this camel boy whose schooling is intermittent and greatly prized. Roselyne is mortified.

At the end of the ride, when we pay the men off, she peels off her mittens and slips them into his hands. She will pay for this later and not be sorry, in the chill air of Bikanir. Prem remains expressionless.

*

Bikanir

If the desert has silenced us, the Rat Temple appals us. It is the complete illustration of all that has gone wrong, and all that contrives to maintain the despair of India. A temple dedicated to the worship and feeding of rats, where the poorest of the poor women deposit their filthy 5 rupee notes and buy rat food and milk and flowers to lay before the rodents. And worse still, where these women prostrate themselves face down in the filth and droppings and then bring who knows what disease home to their children and families; because the priests are fat and well fed and oblivious to all but their stomachs, but the rats are multitudinous and often diseased, and run over our feet and hide in the shoes that we leave by the gate. And outside, staring, cold little beggar brats ask us for rupees or biscuits or pens, but mostly for food. Inside, pathetic amounts of carefully scrounged savings are given to placate the rat god who has seen fit to punish these tragically innocent people with illness or accident. And when, of course, bubonic plague sweeps through, as it did in the 90s, the beggars, the dalits, the merchants and brahmins will unite – for once - to forbid the eradication of these holy temple deities.




By the time we arrive in Mandawa, we have been cold – very cold – for five days and five nights. It is a tiny taste of the real life, this incessant cold – though of course one that we at least could remedy at a stroke.

Raju, in a discussion. of the seasonal poverty of his village mentions that every 100 metres there is a temple. There are so many gods in India, and each must be fed – but worse, each supports a totally non-productive colony of priests and parasites.

*

In a filthy little workshop in a no-name village, all the young men gather to lift our car and examine the broken chassis. Yes, we have come to grief, at last, on the road; the chassis is currently held together with some of Paul’s gaffer tape. Before anything can be done, however, Ros and I must be shown respect. There is one chair in the workshop, and another is brought from down the road. The little fire in a bucket is appropriated from another workshop, for our comfort.

It has been a harrowing drive for the last few hours, with the broken car limping ever so slowly through the rain on the rutted clay roads. All of Raju’s prayers have bought us nothing. But the men in the village workshop bring us fire and chairs and their good humour and interest and patience and it's surely time for India to side with the people against their terrible, terrible gods!






*


Raju is under the car as I wind down the jack in the cold cold rain on a deserted road to no-where, with the muffler strapped to the car by a torn strip of purple-and-gold-spangled sari:

Me: Raju – you have put the handbrake on, haven’t you?

R: What?

Me: Handbrake – on?

R: Hand - ? What is handbrake?