Jaipur

 After our visit to Varanais we flew to Jaipur via Delhi, a trip that took most of the day but was restful because it gave me a day off from the intense days we've had. Somehow just sitting in an airport and on planes proved a kind of tonic. Jaipur, in Rajasthan, is yet an other India. It's visual culture, geography, food, and way of dressing, and it's landscape, bear little relation to Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Delhi, or Varanasi. What strikes you from the moment you leave the airport are the wide roads, large, new, well lit business buildings, bars, and restaurants. The prosperity. One small telling detail. On many of the business streets coming into the city there were diagonal parking spaces for cars on the streets in front of stores. This jumped out at me as a very western mode of organization I'd not seen anywhere else in India. I really could not recall seeing parking like this anywhere. In most Indian cities autorickshaws and cars are crammed into parking lots or jammed in chaotic ways together off the road. The order of the cars here seemed emblematic of some level of more general order I was being introduced to. And sure enough here, in this city late out by Princes and Majarajas, there's a logical city grid of streets and traffic flows in a relatively logical and manageable way.

Jaipur is also a whimsical city. Its central tourist sites, the City Palace, it's astronomical observatory called Jantar Mantar, and the extraordinary Hawa Mahal have an element of kitsch and folly to them that starkly contrast with the devotional seriousness and frenzy of Varanasi, and with the agelessness of the place, for Jaipur is a 17^th century city built to help the Majarajas help administrate the British Raj. The City Palace is an interesting place to visit, but one quickly notices that, in contrast with the magnificent Taj Mahal, that the walls are plaster, not marble, and the decorations are painted, not inlay work, a kind of reminder that this place came late and the Maharajas here did not have the resources Shah Jahan had. The shopping bazaars in the old city are uniqe. There is little motor traffic on the streets, which are divided into areas which specialize in different items – predictable trinkets for tourists where the hawkers are active in trying to get you in, but also lanes where Indians are doing there own shopping or buy vegetables where no one hassles you at all. Like most places that have become tourist meccas, I found the shopping in Jaipur pretty much ruined by the tourist trade, for the goods for sale where mediocre and the agressives sales pitches annoying. I was happier wandering the back lanes where tourists didn't go, which I did by myself for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon when we'd finished visiting the spectacular Amber Fort, which is a short drive from Jaipur.

Located on a hill above a man-made lake, the building itself is breathtaking to see from the road and parking lot, and changes angles and shifts colors in interesting ways as one makes their way up the path and into the main courtyard of the fort. It's a pretty splendid structure, but again, like the City Palace, it has a painted lady kind of look to it. The trajectory of our walk up to and through the structure was more interesting to me than the structure itself. The initial series of courtyards and pavillions are pretty impressive, nicely decrorated, well-kept up, and full of tourists. But then as one makes there way north through the building, into the more common areas which are less and less decorated and kept up, the often superficial grandeuer of the place steadily gives way and attenuates. It was fascinating to make my way to the far end of the fort. I wandered through an increasingly labryinthine series of stairs and halls that were unpainted, plain, and dark. There were fewer and fewer tourists in these areas and less noise, until finally there was no one else at all and what I was seeing was all form, light, and shadow. There was only silence, which is a magical thing to find in India, which usually roars. All I could hear was the occasional flapping of a pidgeon's wings. As I made my way back to the more central parts of the Palace it was like watching a movie in reverse. Color and decoration returned, more and more people showed up, the noise steadily increased, and soon I was back in the rush of people visiting the more colorful pavillions and courtyards, until finally I spilled out with them onto the path and down the hill where we met up with our drivers.

How we hooked up with our driver, Raja, is an interesting story. In the afternoon of our first day in Jaipur Ross wanted to stay in for a nap but I was restless to do more and so I set off from the hotel lobby to grab an auto rickshaw to walk in a nice park I'd seen on our way back from the old city, just to enjoy the afternoon light. The guy who happened to appear as I emerged turned out to be a guy named Nawab Ali, and he turned out to be unlike any auto rickshaw rider I've encountered in India. He spoke pretty good broken English and was quite interested in talking with me. It turned out that, like most auto rickshaw drivers here he makes a living getting tourists to engage him for an afternoon or the whole day. The deal goes like this: he'll take you to the sites you want to visit but when it comes to shopping he's going to take you places where he gets a commision on what you buy. This means you often get hijacked by these guys (it happened to us the next day), taken to places with pretty tacky goods where the prices are high and the aggressive selling unpleasant. Anyway, I hit it off right away with Nawab. I knew the deal, but I liked him. He took me to the park, but then after a short stroll I came back and asked about a temple I might visist and he whisked me off to what turned out to be a spectacular place, the white marble Bilda temple on a hill beneath an old fort. Sice it was a major holiday I was treated not only to a marvelous sunset but fireworks as well. By the time I'd returned to the hotel I decided to engage Awad, or his brother, Raja, who had a car, to take us around the following two days. The next day Raja took us by car to the Amber fort, then tried, as most drivers do, to hijack us for some shopping at places where he gets a cut. We indulged him one stop, but then cut it off. Ross ended up going back to the hotel and I had a nice two hour walk through the bazaars and back alleys, taking photographs rather than shopping.