February 2-13 Ten days in India: Delhi, Agra, and Udaipur
Observations to follow but here is what we’ve done:
Monday, Feb. 2 Six and a half hour flight on Cathay Pacific from Hong Kong to Delhi. This is NOT the same aircraft we traversed the Pacific with! Oh well. No more Asian faces. All Indian now. Cindy sat across the aisle from a huge, fat, disgusting man who snored from the moment we got on the plane. Picked up at the airport by Steve and driver Ravi, a new employee to go with the rented car they’ve got for the next few months. An Indian dinner prepared and created by the live in mother-of-two, Subitha.
Tuesday, February 3: Never left the house except to go to dinner at an Indian restaurant. Phone calls, more banking issues: unbelievably, my ATM card expired on January 31 and the new one is presumably waiting in Erie in a big stack of mail.
Wednesday, February 4: Steve, Cindy and I go to the Red Fort, built by Moghul emporer Akbar in 1500 something. Still remarkably in tact and lovely grounds. Red sandstone, hence the name. Not to ever be called chickens, the three of us spend the next two hours wandering through the Chandry Chowk (market), a warren or labyrinth of commerce, filth, hawkers, spitters, bathers in puddles, little stalls six feet wide at the most, neighborhoods of squalor. Everything we have ever been told or expected. I am no more startled than I expected to be; indeed your senses are
immediately impacted; the one that was pleasantly surprised is the sense of smell. We wind up at the biggest mosque in the world.....
Thursday, February 5: On Elizabeth Corwin’s recommendation, we tour the Delhi craft museum; at Lynn McBrier’s suggestion, we have lunch and a glass of wine at the famous Imperial Hotel, an oasis of green and smooth colonial serenity in this raucous sea - so easy to leave all the riff-raff outside, right? Then across the street to the cottage industry emporium, four floors of inlaid wood or marble furniture, silks, jewelry, scarves, pashminas, clothes, leather, etc.
Friday, February 6. Ravi dropped us to shop in an area that mainly attracts expats, lovely wives of diplomats shopping for Indian luxury at a cheap price. Which is what we did. Three tops, a pair of those tight at the bottom pants, and six scarves later, I parted with $100. We joined Steve and Marielle for lunch around the pool on the Embassy compound where at least 40 of the families also live in townhouses. Seemed a bit claustrophobic to me and I think Steve and Marielle are smart to have chosen to live in a separate neighborhood. There are bars on all the window, but they are, of course decorative, and a guard appears discretely at night to guard the precious diplomats inside. We enjoyed a manicure, pedicure and one hour full body massage for a total of $18 plus tip.
Saturday and Sunday, February 7 and 8: A five and a half hour drive both ways to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, without question the most beautiful building and compound I have ever seen. In terms of reputation and experience, the Taj Mahal ranks up there with the pyramids of Egypt or Machu Pichu. In actuality, it far surpasses the others, possibly because it and it’s grounds are completely and perfectly intact and you don’t have to imagine walls or colors and jewels where there is only a pile of rubble. Perhaps also because of the horror and filth you have to pass through in order to get there. A $15 entrance fee keeps the poverty far away....
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, February 9-12: Ravi and Steve drive us to the Delhi airport for the Air India flight to Udaipur via Jodhpur. We’re told that this flight would ordinarily be filled with Caucasian tourists to fill the palace hotels of Rajastan but they are all Indians and many on the way to Mumbai, the third stop on the flight. We are met by Uswar holding a sign reading Chrispine Chrispine which turned out to mean me. No air conditioning in this cab. About a half hour ride through the dust of several smaller towns and into the city of Udaipur, through streets so narrow that the cows can’t get past people on bikes.
The Hibiscus Haveli deserves a paragraph or two. Carol, an Englishwoman, and Babu opened a bed and breakfast sort of place with three rooms several years ago and recently moved a few doors away into a larger property that they own. They also bought the property next store and it will be their home when renovations are complete. Cindy had read several travel blogs extolling the cleanliness and pleasantness of their hospitality and it certainly is true.
Our room is huge and faces the Lake and the Lake Palace Hotel if you can peer over the top of several rooftops, trees, and hovels. A very mixed neighborhood but lovely. More luxurious international and Indian resort groups are expanding into Udaipur, buying up properties like the one that Carol and Babu previously rented and on which they had three years remaining on their lease before they were forced to move. Fortunately, they already had purchased this property and were planning on operating both places. Our room is huge with newly updated bathrooms, everything out of stone, firm (hard?, uncomfortable?) Indian beds, bright colored cottons on beds and windows. Immaculate in spite of the challenge of the constant dust. It is so unbelievably dry here that there is no dew on the grass even early on a cool morning.
We grabbed a cab shortly after choosing our room and headed for Eklengi where the local "ruler" mentioned later attends the Monday night temple services every week and receives the offerings and obeisance of the locals. Checking our bags in lockers outside and under the attention of lots of security, we entered a 700 AD temple replete with hundreds of small shrines probably added successively over the centuries. We purchased garlands of flowers which we did NOT smell and handed them into the shrine where the great man was although we couldn’t really tell which one of the turbaned men inside was he and which his acolytes.
Back to Udaipur, through a back alley, past what might have been a sewer, to a lovely restaurant on the water where there were perhaps 50 people dining, most of them foreign tourists. The lake is extremely low so the scene is not as beautiful as the pictures but after the monsoons, it will be fuller. We can see boats plying back and forth to the Lake Palace, and watch some fireworks.
On Tuesday morning we walk to the City Palace and engage a guide who we ended up spending the whole day with. He is an employee of a tour company who was just freelancing on his day off. More about the City Palace later. Huge, built with a mountain in the center, scene of elephant fights, consorts, pageantry, narrow passages to keep any invading enemies from being able to enter easily, the whole deal. The real deal. Kings palace. Queens palace. Magnificent mosaics of semi-precious stones. The exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Museum that I saw in November is of court paintings from this very spot. Not having the benefits of photography, the emporers ordered artists to record the events of the royals’ lives. The paintings are done on silk and painted with single hairs from a squirrel’s tail or several camel’s eyelashes using paints created from ground lapis or malachite etc. Magnificent.
After the palace tour, we emerged back onto the loud and busy street and were taken to the artist cooperative to see the revived miniature artists’ showroom. I couldn’t stop myself from purchasing a painting on silk of the city palace and the lake, mostly in browns like the desert scene all around. I love it and will get far more pleasure from it than custom made clothes hung in a closet. Across the street, our guide took us to a silk tailors’ cooperative and Cindy was measured for and had made a beautiful cream colored embroidered silk top with gold-tan silk Indian narrow legged trousers. They were delivered to our haveli that evening, returned for fitting the next morning, and delivered back again that night.
By now the day was late and our guide delivered us to the boat landing for a tour of the lake and a trip to one of the islands that the maharana is operating as a hotel. Gardens and beauty abound again. We returned to the Sunset Terrace within the City Palace complex for a cappuccino and a sandwich and then wandered back through the streets of town, stopping to pick up a couple of pastries to have for dinner in the dining room of our haveli with a pot of freshly made coffee.
On Wednesday morning we headed for town. By now we are easily recognizable and being called into shops for the third and fourth time. "Later" isn’t working very well any more. In some shops we are heavily pressured, in others, not. By the end of the day, we have spent six or eight hours on our feet, walked the town four times up and down the main street, purchased lots -of gifts for very little, returned Cindy’s clothes for fitting, been escorted by the miniature painter and the tailor and many of their relatives and co-workers to a turban shop, a spice shop and given general directions to keep us safe and happy - and to patronize their cousins’ and uncles’ shops. It has made it all so personal and so much fun. Probably we could be cynical about the motives for all this care and friendship but we prefer to think that these young men were kind, were reciprocating for our patronage - and really didn’t have much else to do given the paucity of tourists in town.
We ate on a rooftop restaurant looking down on the lake and the palaces and the more elegant hotels then found our way back to the Hibisus, changed into some of our new tops, hired our first rickshaw and headed for the Udaivilas, the Oberoi Hotel. And were denied entrance. Since the Mumbai incident, security is very, very tight at the Taj and Oberoi Hotels and we had already been told that we could not get into the Taj Lake Palace Hotel even to eat unless we had a reservation. The gate to the Oberoi is shared with the Trident Hilton Hotel and we were granted admission there. Oh the greenery, gardens, magnificence and expansiveness of the hotel and its grounds, the lovely pool, the plethora of greeters and employees, the vast dining room and beautiful bar. And we were the only people there. Well, I exaggerate slightly because there was one family of about eight sitting around the pool and two ladies walking the grounds. We took a walk around and could peer into many of the rooms where there were clearly no occupants and then had a lonely but lovely glass of wine on the outside veranda as the sun set.
Returning to the haveli, we sat in around the dining room and talked to Carol and/or Babu, played with the huge black great dane, Alfi, and the new Great Dane puppy, Oscar, and talked with the only other two guests, a 39 year old Israeli drop out and his Thai wife who are traveling about India.
I am spending this, our last morning here in Udaipur before flying back to Delhi, catching up this journal and hanging around in the garden reading. I have loved it here and find this to have been my favorite place in India. Perhaps because here we were on our own and not the guests of someone else. Perhaps because we can really appreciate getting out of the chaos of Delhi’s 12 million people or Agra’s three. Perhaps because of the special poignance of being in our sixties and knowing that we very likely shall not pass this way again.
Ruminations and Observations:
1. How to deal with the poverty issue philosophically? First of all, I suppose we have all seen enough documentaries on India and pictures of the poverty. Is there something wrong with me that I am not as shocked or horrified as I was told I would be? How is it possible to go past a man whose limbs are twisted at angles you can’t imagine who is begging in the middle of six or eight "lanes" of traffic and crawling with flipflops on his hands and then go to lunch at the Imperial Hotel? How can I be inside an air-conditioned car with a driver and turn my gaze away from the woman holding a baby and scratching with am empty milk bottle in her hands at the window of that car? How can I ever laugh again and sing and take a beautiful trip when thousands of people I have just seen with my own eyes are living in total squalor? How can such a magnificent structure as the Taj Mahal, one of the wonders of the world, and which took 22 years and thousands of man hours to build, be smack in the middle of a filthy, chaotic city such as Agra and no one notes the incongruity? Where did the driver hired to drive the car we rented to go to Agra sleep that night while we were in a Taj Hotel (not a particularly nice one, we all felt....)
And then I try to think about it from a macro-economic point of view. India has enjoyed one of the highest levels of growth of any country in the world. The U.S. among others has poured billions (or is it millions? Decimals have come to mean so little.) of dollars into development here. India is touted as the world’s largest democracy and a fine example of entrepreneurial capitalism. But how, if you were one of Delhi or Agra’s city fathers, would you begin to think about tackling the problems all around you? I kept thinking about just cleaning up the garbage, planting a few trees, greening the thoroughfares. But then I’d realize how inconsequential all those things are compared to the way human beings are living. And high GDP growth may be the only way that India will be pulled out of the morass but 9 or even 10% of nothing is still nothing. How long will it take for the compounding to amount to anything?
2. At the risk of moving too quickly from the horrific to the sublime, I’ll stop halfway between to comment on traffic and driving. From huge diesel belching trucks, to foul looking ancient buses laden with twice as many people as can be safely held, to cars, to motorized rickshaws where whole extended families are crowded in like clown cars, to bicycle driven rickshaws, to motor scooters, to simple bicycles (also loaded with at least a few people), to cattle wandering freely, to oxen pulling carts loaded with stuff, to the occasional camel pulling a wagon, to the elephant we saw working in the streets of Agra, everyone is on the roads. Lane markers are merely a suggestion and where there would be three lanes in the U.S., there are here six or eight. Driving is done with the use of the horn. On the back of every truck, bus, and public vehicle is written "Horn Please." What’s that all about? So it’s a cacophony of sound and fumes and one would think terror. Except that nothing is moving fast enough for anyone to get too badly hurt, I guess. The driver of the motorbike may be wearing a helmet but you can be assured that the wife and three kids in front and in back are not. I witnessed a three year old sleeping behind his father and holding on. Did he fall off a few blocks later? How would he have gotten to the hospital? Is there a hospital?
It becomes very clear that getting around India is not simple. There is very good reason why one doesn’t rent a car and drive it herself and why the driver is provided. (Perhaps he is really in a cleaner and more comfortable position sleeping in the car in the Taj Hotel parking lot than in whatever hovel he calls home.) The trip to Agra took five hours including the break at the only pit stop along the way where there are public (squatter) toilets and the distance would have been about the same as going from Erie to Cleveland. Trains might be preferable. Planes are supposedly cheap within India but our tickets to Udaipur are $220, not exactly cheap, and then there is the problem of getting to and from the airport.
3. There is construction and construction dust everywhere. People are not only begging and destitute. They are also employed or engaged in entrepreneurial activity or working as servants and drivers and gardeners. In Marielle and Steve’s neighborhood, there are many new and remodeling projects in process and you see groups of workers along the road. It all looks chaotic and unorganized but at least it is happening. Many of the workers are women and they are all dressed in their saris. We’re told that the women are doing most of the work but the men do the heavy part. You could have fooled me. It’s the women I see with the picks, carrying huge piles of rocks on their heads, and lugging buckets of cement. I have not seen a single steam shovel, backhoe, jackhammer, or cement mixer. As in Athens, cement is mixed on the street in front of the building so no street is actually smooth as a result of hastily scraped off and dried cement. Where are the children of the construction workers? In Udaipur, they are probably at home with grandma and the rest of the extended families in villages outside of town. We saw buses crammed with six or eight people to a seat lumbering up over the hills at sundown one night. In Delhi, the family often lives on the construction sight, setting up makeshift living quarters out of boxes and bags, bathing by sponge bath from some source of water.
4. Scenes from the window of the car: Tent cities or cardboard cities with women carrying water jugs on their heads and children in tatters, dogs everywhere, cows wandering through it all. A field immediately adjacent to the road where at least a dozen people were squatting with their pants down and defecating.
Scenes from the window in Udaipur: Here we are staying at a very inexpensive bed and breakfast with a bit of a view of the famous lake Pichali and in the middle of a neighborhood. I am sitting in a window seat the size of a single bed on the second floor. Directly in my line of sight is the loudspeaker for the call to prayer for the local mosque. It is mounted on a house and each morning I have watched the members of the family emerge and do everything that involves water at the curb. There appears to be an outhouse with its back to me and giving out onto the small space where this toiletting occurs. There is a huge water barrel and I see the people dipping tin cans and buckets into it. Each person first emerges carrying a toothbrush and tooth powder and strenuous brushing ensues. I saw one boy of about ten give himself a bath which involved lots of soap and shampoo and even a brush. He was wearing something like boxes shorts and as far as I could tell, none of the parts inside those shorts got even a rinse but every other square inch of skin was scrubbed till it should have fallen off. Some of the people brushed their teeth with their fingers, the rinse water is the wash water, and all is done squatting and spitting and rinsing into the street.
Overhead on all rooftops and swinging from limb to limb in the several big trees are monkeys the size of dogs. Carol, the owner of the property, says they ate all her petunias. They’re fun to watch and don’t seem to bother anyone but then I haven’t opened my window, mostly because there are no screens and there are lots of mosquitos at night since the waters in the lake are low and it is swampy. I just watched a mommy monkey with baby clinging to her underside walk by me on the neighboring roof and jump into the tree.
Next, out come the women with larger buckets of water in which they are washing dishes and clothes. Apparently the cooking or breakfast preparation and consumption have occured inside the house. The clothing is hung to dry in the dust and dirt which is the air all around. We saw one two year old being washed by his mom. She squats behind him and he bends over to have his butt washed by water splashed up from a cup. Children head off for school, usually with fathers walking behind them. The women remain at home and huge volumes of laundry occupy the clothes lines outside.
5. Guides. Of course, I have discovered guides or guided trolley tours in first world countries are great ways to see and learn. In India they are essential in order to fend off the vendors and hawkers and other would-be guides. Yes, they are good. Yes they are well informed. I’m not sure what the training is but I hear them all saying the identical things at the same places. They probably learn by listening to each other. Such is the way oral tradition continues.
6. Some Udaipur history: Udaipur is the only town in Rajastan that didn’t eventually cave in or sell its soul to the Moghuls who brought Islam by the sword to India in the 15th or 16th century. The tours of the palaces and cities show three or four hundredyears of continuous rulers who never capitulated. The current maharana of Mewar, his wife, and two grown children still live in the huge city palace but he has a hotel and restaurant management degree from Australia. He has turned two thirds of the city palace into a museum with a three star hotel in one part. The 4th highest ranked hotel in the world is the sparkling white Lake Palace Hotel, formerly the summer quarters and no more than a five minute tuk-tuk ride from the city palace; the maharana owns it jointly with the Taj group. (There is another palace visible on a hill nearby for surviving the monsoon season.) In addition, he also owns another eight or ten hotel properties known as the HRH group, not His Royal Highness but the Heritage Resort Hotel group. Smart and adaptable man. Once independence came to India in 1947, the princes stopped receiving funds or recognition from the state so other means of surviving were required. Many of the bed and breakfasts or even fancy hotels are owned and operated by former nobles.
