We seemed to move through a city of the dead. There was hardly a suggestion of life in those still and vacant streets. Even the crows were silent. But everywhere on the ground lay sleeping natives – hundreds and hundreds. They lay stretched at full length and tightly wrapped in blankets, heads and all. Their attitude and rigidity counterfeited death.
That was in 1896. They are more numerous today, and there is another difference. The ones I saw had no blankets. Hunger -pace Pudd'nhead Wilson – is also the handmaid of death.
Chapter Eleven
That's this?' I asked Mr Gopal, the embassy liaison man, pointing to a kind of fortress.
'That's a kind of fortress.'
He had ridiculed the handbook I had been carrying around: 'You have this big book, but I tell you to close it and leave it at hotel because Jaipur is like open book to me.' Unwisely, I had taken his advice. We were now six miles outside Jaipur, wading ankle-deep through sand drifts towards the wrecked settlement of Galta. Earlier we had passed through a jamboree of some two hundred baboons: 'Act normal,' said Mr Gopal, as they hopped and chattered and showed their teeth, clustering on the road with a curiosity that bordered on menace. The landscape was rocky and very dry, and each rugged hill was capped with a cracked fortress.
'Whose is it?'
'The Maharajah's.'
'No, who built it?'
'You would not know his name.'
'Do you?
Mr Gopal walked on. It was dusk, and the buildings crammed into the Galta gorge were darkening. A monkey chattered and leaped to a branch in a banyan tree above Mr Gopal's head, yanking the branch down and making a punkah's whoosh. We entered the gate and crossed a courtyard to some ruined buildings, with coloured frescoes of trees and people on their facades.
Some had been raked with indecipherable graffiti and painted over; whole panels had been chiselled away.
'What's this?' I asked. I hated him for making me leave my handbook behind.
'Ah,' said Mr Gopal. It was a temple enclosure. Some men dozed in the archways, others squatted on their haunches, and just outside the enclosure were some tea and vegetable stalls whose owners leaned against more frescoes, rubbing them away with their backs. I was struck by the solitude of the place – a few people at sundown, no one speaking, and it was so quiet I could hear the hooves of the goats clattering on the cobblestones, the murmuring of the distant monkeys.
'A temple?'
Mr Gopal thought a moment. 'Yes,' he said finally, 'a kind of temple.'
On the ornate temple walls, stuck with posters, defaced with chisels, pissed on, and scrawled over with huge Devanagri script advertising Jaipur businesses, there was a blue enamel sign, warning visitors in Hindi and English that it was 'forbidden to desecrate, deface, mark, or otherwise abuse the walls'. The sign itself had been defaced: the enamel was chipped – it looked partly eaten.
Farther along, the cobblestone road became a narrow path and then a steep staircase cut into the rock walls of the gorge. At the top of this was a temple facing a still, black pool. Insects swimming in circles on the pool's surface made minuscule ripples, and small clouds of vibrant gnats hovered over the water. The temple was an unambitious niche in the rock face, a shallow cave, lighted with oil lamps and tapers. On either side of its portals were seven-foot marble slabs, the shape of those handed down from Sinai but with a weight that would give the most muscular prophet a hernia. These tablets had numbered instructions on them in two languages. In the failing light I copied down the English.
1. The use of soap in the temple and washing clothes is strictly prohibited
2. Please do not bring shoes near the tank
3. It does not suit for women to take bath among male members
4. Spitting while swimming is quite a bad habit
5. Do not spoil others clothes by splitting water while swimming
6. Do not enter the temple with wet clothes
7. Do not spit improperly to make the places dirty
"Splitting? I said to Mr Gopal. 'What is splitting?'
'That does not say splitting.'
'Take a look at number five.'
'It says splashing.'
'It says splitting.'
'It says -'
We walked over to the tablet. The letters, two inches high, were cut deep into the marble.
' – splitting,' said Mr Gopal. 'I've never run across that one before. I think it's a kind of splashing.'
Mr Gopal was doing his best, but he was a hard man to escape from. So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable; I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere; sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
Jaipur was a pink princely city of marvels, but the vandalism and ignorance of those people who herded their goats into the frail ruins, painted over frescoes, and used the palace as a backdrop for filming diminished its attraction. A shouting film crew had occupied the City Palace, and its presence made the place seem a construction of exorbitant fakery. I gave my lecture; I was anxious to catch the train, but the timetable said there would not be a train to Delhi until 12.34 the following morning. It was an awkward time to leave: a day and an entire evening lay before me, and I did not relish the prospect of standing at Jaipur Junction at midnight.
'Today we go to the museum,' said Mr Gopal, the day after Galta.
'Let's give the museum a miss.'
'Very interesting place, and you said you wanted to see Moghul paintings. This is home of Moghul paintings!'
Outside the museum I said, 'When was this built?'
'About 1550.'
He hadn't hesitated. But today I had my handbook. The building he had placed in the mid-sixteenth century was the Albert Hall, started in 1878 and finished in 1887. In 1550 Jaipur did not exist, though I didn't have the heart to tell that to Mr Gopal, who had sulked when I contradicted him the previous day. Anyway, a weakness for exaggeration seemed a chronic affliction of some Indians. Inside the museum, another guide was showing a tentlike red robe to a group of tourists. He said, 'This belong to famous Maharajah Madho Singh. A big fat man. Seven feet tall, four feet wide, and weighing five hundred pounds.'
At Jai Singh's observatory, a garden of astronomer's marble instruments that looks at first glance like a children's playground, with slides and ladders and fifty-foot chutes splayed out symmetrically against the sun, Mr Gopal said he had visited the place many times. He showed me a great bronze disk that looked as if it might be a map of the night sky. I asked him if that was so. No, he said, it was to tell the time. He showed me a beacon, a submerged truncated hemisphere, a tower with eighty steps, a series of radiating benches: these were also for telling time. All this delicate apparatus, used by Prince Jai Singh (I read in my handbook) for finding altitudes and azimuths and celestial longitudes, Mr Gopal saw as a collection of oversized clocks.