At least one’s last impressions are more in keeping with happier architectural times. To reach Agra Cantonment Railway Station from the hotel area one has to skirt around the massive walled city that is the famous Red Fort, one time home to the 105-carat Koh-I-Noor diamond.[70] The Red Fort re-surprises on each acquaintance by its imposing scale, exquisite Moghul inlays and poignant irony. Rebuilt, imposingly, by Akbar in the late sixteenth century and rebuilt again, exquisitely, by his grandson Shah Jahan after he had built the Taj Mahal, it was also where Shah Jahan died, imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb, the only view from his cell a perfect one of the perfect Taj Mahal in the middle distance.
A more mundane sight awaits us at 5.40 p.m. at the Agra Cantonment station, the 12965 Gwalior Udaipur Super Express; one only wonders how slow the ordinary Express must be as our Super takes nearly five hours to trundle over to Jaipur, 150 miles away into the night.
Jaipur
Even today, with refrigeration, sterilization and public awareness of sanitation it is hard for foreigners to avoid a touch of tummy trouble in India. In Mark Twain’s time here our Western stomachs would have been more robust than the over-sterilized, spoon-fed intestines we sport today, but I am still amazed that the Twain party had been in India for six weeks before being laid low. It has been as if each time a page of Following the Equator has been turned and they are all still standing upright a sense of relief and disbelief turns the page too. Who ate what where we will never know, only that Livy missed that meal, for by the time the party arrived at Jaipur Twain, Clara and Smythe were laid low - and would stay laid low for the next two weeks. One can only sympathize with Smythe, feeling deathly and being unable to rearrange all the forthcoming Talks.
They were attended by a remarkable doctor, Colonel Thomas Holbein Hendley, the Residency Surgeon, who was, as we shall see, much more in Jaipur than just a doctor. Hendley not only ordered the lecture tour to halt while the leading light and his supporting cast recovered but also insisted they were all vaccinated against smallpox, an unpleasant procedure in the days when one could almost knit a jumper with the injection needles and vaccine doses were large enough to pass for a snifter in the officers’ mess. Back home they were worried. The St. Louis Dispatch wrote that “Somehow Jaipur sounds very desolate and far-away-from-home. I’d hate to be sick with rajahs and rickshaws and ajahs and fellahs and punkahs and all that sort about me.” The Dispatch needn’t have worried: Twain loved it all, even from his sick-bed, especially the rajahs and rickshaws and ajahs and fellahs and punkahs. Me too.
They stayed and recovered at the Kaiser-i-Hind Hotel, one of the few genuine hotels in India, which was described by Twain as a “neat little hotel run by nine Indian brothers, and wonderfully noisy”. We know from Following the Equator that it was in the British cantonment area of Jaipur and so somewhere near the Jaipur Club where the Strathcarron party is ensconced. Livy cheered herself up reading Kipling’s “The City of Dreadful Night”[71] and wrote “it gives one a most frightful idea of this country”. After a proper American club breakfast, Sita is volunteered to find out what has happened to the Kaiser-i-Hind Hotel and its nine-brother family, Gillian remains immersed in Autobiography of a Princess, about the last Maharani of Jaipur, I am off to retrace Twain’s footsteps, as he would have trodden on recovery ten days later.
For Twain the tonga ride from the Kaiser-i-Hind to the Old City, the center of the famous Pink City of Jaipur, was “a journey which was full of interest for that country road was never quiet, never empty, but was always India in motion, always a streaming flood of brown people clothed in smouchings from the rainbow, a tossing and moiling flood, happy, noisy, a charming and satisfying confusion of strange human and strange animal life and equally strange and outlandish vehicles.”
***
Quite so; still is. The journey now is by auto-rickshaw, rather than by tonga. The great throng of rainbow-colored, happy, noisy motion is still just as he described; only the volume has changed - and “changed” doesn’t begin to describe the change. That “country road” is now a manic highway full of belching buses, lopsided flatbeds and fairy-lit lorries for the offence versus bemused camels and float carts, sturdy oxen and dogcarts, plodding asses and donkey carts, and heaving humans and flat carts for the defense, all observed and judged by a mass of microbuses with humans hanging onto the roof racks, deranged taxis, agitated auto rickshaws, struggling cycle rickshaws, swarms of amorphous motorcycles, daydreaming bicycles and - heaven help them - terrified pedestrians, all accompanied by the random and blaring blasts of tinny horns and basso profondo klaxons. It sounds like an amplified version of the orchestra warm-up for a Stockhausen gig or Miles Davies in one of his more obscure moods.
It is indeed a strange quirk of the human condition than when one puts a representative of homo indicus anywhere near a moving vehicle he is transformed from a soul of endless patience and dogged perseverance to a complete maniac with the patience of a weaning grizzly and the perseverance of a tiger shark on its first day off the Dukan diet.
Twain’s description of Jaipur holds good today:
The city itself is a curiosity. Any Indian city is that, but this one is not like any other that we saw. It is shut up in a lofty turreted wall; the main body of it is divided into six parts by perfectly straight streets that are more than a hundred feet wide; the blocks of houses exhibit a long frontage of the most taking architectural quaintnesses, the straight lines being broken everywhere by pretty little balconies, pillared and highly ornamented, and other cunning and cozy and inviting perches and projections, and many of the fronts are curiously pictured by the brush, and the whole of them have the soft rich tint of strawberry ice-cream.
That soft rich tint of strawberry ice-cream, the Pink by which the City is known, has changed in the meantime into a tone of dull orange, not unlike the shade of a dowager’s lipstick. Whatever color it is, it needs a make-over and has needed one for quite a few decades. For, as we have seen, it is another quirk of homo indicus that he has no interest in maintaining any man-made structure or endeavor. His own religion and culture are as old as any that exists, and are honored in their history and lived to their full glory day-by-day; they are as ancient as the gods and as current as their believers. Could it be that because he doesn’t see Hinduism as a man-made religion but as divine and immutable philosophy, that he simply eschews anything that is man-made? After all, by definition it only temporary anyway. Take the Albert Hall for instance.
The same Dr. Hendley who confined the Twain party to Bedfordshire (and having just finished his epic oeuvre, The Medico-Topographical Histories of Jaipur and Rajputna) also persuaded the then ruler of Jaipur, Maharaja Ram Singh II, to not only paint the whole city pink but also build a splendid monument to honor the 1880 Grand Tour of India by the Prince of Wales, the son of Queen Victoria, Empress of India, later to be King Edward VII. This monument was to be named - like the museum and auditorium in London’s South Kensington - after Victoria’s late husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Like the London building it was to be a museum, but here in Jaipur also a gigantic display cabinet and workshop for local craftsmen and artists.
When Twain visited the building it was only ten years old and he noted that: “In the midst of the spacious lawns stands the palace which contains the museum - a beautiful construction of stone which shows arched colonnades, one above another, and receding, terrace-fashion, toward the sky.” It is, from a distance, indeed a beautiful building, in a style that its guide book rather airily calls “a serendipitous convergence of Rajput, Moghul and English” but Gillian prefers to think of as tropical-Gothic.
It is up close that, literally, the cracks appear; it is clear that since 1887 the building has been left to decline, unhindered by repair, to from whence it came. I was there to visit the library in the search for Mark Twain and/or Kaiser-i-Hind references. The library is on the top floor. There is a splendid uniformed guard by th
e ground floor gate and a typically arcane Indian procedure needed to get past him. I need permission to visit the library; fine, but from where? From the director; fine, where’s the director? He escorts me to the office; the director wants a written application; around her enormous desk several other supplicants are filling in forms for permission for this and approval for that in Hindi and English. She gives me a blank sheet of paper; I apply in my best handwriting; she pores over my passport and signs in beautiful black-inked calligraphy, “Lord Strathcarron, foreign historian, allowed acc. and extend hosp, KSS.” She then stamps her note twice, the first with precision, the second with a flourish - and a smile. I’m in.
Up the three flights of scuffed stairs, under broken light fittings and peeling walls, is the library. It would seem no new titles have been added or indexing evolved since Dr. Hendley’s time. The librarian, a helpful, wiry, very black Tamil named Nattar, immediately directed me to the City Palace library, a proper working library. This one, he said, was a museum library; “the library is part of the museum, not for book browsing”. And so why the permission and procedure needed to see the museum-books? He smiled a face full of white teeth and wobbled his head in the Indian way that means everything from yes to maybe to who-knows.
The City Palace is a walled city within a walled city, deep in the heart of old Jaipur. To reach it means traversing Tripolia Bazaar, the main west-east road through the Pink City. It’s an overwhelming experience; India condensed; India accelerated; India flagrant and unabashed; India without padding. Just to reach Tripolia Bazaar means walking through a mayhem of side roads, each one a decoction of India in itself. Beggars abound and flaunt their wretchedness competitively, unusual these days in India. Rickshaw drivers pester you and by pestering you while positioned diagonally across the road pester everyone higher up the traffic food chain: motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, small cars, taxis, large cars, town buses, military jeeps, lorries and state buses. While they pester you fester; even in the “cold season” the temperature is uncomfortably close and everyone who can move moves towards the shady side of the street. In the motorized logjam, accompanied by the usual blares going nowhere, the bicycles, oxen, camels, donkeys and humans have to make do as best they can, and as for the foot soldiers... use the pavements you might think? Ha! The pavements are motorcycle parks, the kerbs are car parks and the roads are parks for all of the above plus any form of rickshaw and idle cart. Thus the congestion has come full circle; everyone is everywhere. You, the visitor, along with everyone else must fight for survival in the cacophony of chaos that is the middle of the road. And these are still the side streets.
Then you have to cross the main road. There is no system one can suggest as there is no order to the proceedings, but a wise precaution is to line up downtide of some crossing locals and dance as they dance through the maelstrom keeping them uptide. Eventually one reaches the other side, nerves in tatters and deliria.
From all this madness the City Palace is a wonderful oasis. Calm and traffic free - and thanks to a healthy entrance fee, hustler and beggar free - delightfully low-rise and even until quite recently well maintained, it was the Maharaja of Jaipur’s palace until his kingdom was absorbed into India in 1947. Now its collection of halls and receiving rooms has been made into a variety of museums and armories and yes, a working library.
Livy, not being unwell, came here alone. She wrote to her youngest daughter Jean:
The other day I went to the museum here in the morning. I knew that up to 12:00 no men were allowed to go into the museum, so that the Hindoo women & ladies might be free to go in without being afraid of being seen by the men. I thought it would be a good time to see them with their gorgeous dressings. It was a fine site. Every part of the Museum, even up to the balcony & the second story, & even to the roof was packed full of these brilliantly dressed ladies. Only trouble was that I was as great a curiosity to them as they were to me. They crowded about & shattered & examined me & followed me about. I would go behind cases & get into other rooms to try to get away but ever without success. The crowd was always about me. When they talked I pointed to my mouth & said I could not speak Hindustani. One of them would seem to suddenly understand it & then tell the others.
In the library one can see photographs of Jaipur in Twain’s time. The streets are as empty as a Mid-West county town in the ’fifties on an off-market day. It is like that in the City Palace compound now, the equivalent of the Jaipur that Twain saw then; no wonder he loved it so much.
I asked for the curator and was looked after with great enthusiasm by Pankar Sharma who immediately found several books about late nineteenth-century Jaipur. More to the point he knew all about the Kaiser-i-Hind. Sita had called round earlier that morning; I text her to head back to Pankar’s desk.
She arrives moment later looking as fresh as she started the day; I fear I must look like I’ve been through a desert, which in an urban sense I have. We talk about the Kaiser-i-Hind. “Yes, a wonderful building, in the Baroque style, most unusual here. The porticos have wonderful inlaid Saracenic marbles. It is one of our city’s treasures,” says Pankar.
“Is it open? Can we go there?” Sita asks.
“Yes, I think so, but it is in very bad condition. It is no longer a hotel, too dilapidated.”
“It belonged to nine brothers,” I say.
“That right, the Momden family. Muslims, but educated.”
“And where is it?” I ask
“Just opposite the Sheraton Rajputna Hotel, a new skyscraper.”
We beetle into an auto-rickshaw and beetle off to the Sheraton. Auto-rickshaw travel is fraught at the best of times but mostly because of the noise rather than any danger. The two-stroke engine under the driver is often unsilenced but worse your ears are unprotected and at bus and truck horn height. The danger is diminished because it all happens so slowly, which also of course prolongs the horn exposure.
Eventually, the calm of the City Place long dissolved, we arrive at the Sheraton. But there is nothing there opposite it, save a large empty lot. The building had been demolished two years ago. But not all had gone for one outpost remained.
“It’s our family mosque,” explains Mujid Momden, a much removed descendant of one of Twain’s nine hotelier brothers. Now 35, he has mixed feelings about the old family home and hotel being replaced by the new family fortune.
“It will be a new high-rise hotel, like the Sheraton there. The opposite of the Kaiser-i-Hind.”
“You must all be very rich,” I suggest.
“Not really, there are so many of us.”
“From Mark Twain’s nine brothers?”
“When we sold the hotel they were one hundred and eighty-three signatures needed. All could claim part of the old hotel. We inherit like this. We each had to sign saying we knew of no other claimants. But how could we not? The Kaiser-i-Hind had been in our family for two hundred years. The new hotel is American. Ha! They had more lawyers than my family members. We must be sure no tail-end Charlies, popping in the woodwork they said. It took five years to complete the sale. But there must be more family somewhere - we know of some in Canada.”
“But the old hotel was a ruin, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, nobody wanted to restore it because so many family members owned it. Who spends money on something that is not yours?”
“So everybody owned it yet nobody owned it?”
“That is how it happens here.”
“So that could explain why all the beautiful old buildings in India are falling to pieces, uncared for, unloved. No-one is inclined to pay to restore them when so many others own a tiny bit of it.”
He wobbled his head in the Indian “yes”.
“A-ha!”
***
Meanwhile we are having our own drama. After the latest travel trauma (reaching the Sheraton) we are pausing here in the hotel in the air-cond
itioned shade for a calming cup of coffee by the fountain. There, as bad luck would have it, Sita picks up a copy of this morning’s Times of India. She’s pale enough already but now turns paler still and gasps “Oh my God.”
To backtrack: we had agreed at the outset that she had to take time off the trip to attend one of her interminable cousins’ interminable weddings. We agreed it should be while we were all in Jaipur as this is where the Twain party’s tour stalled and it would give us a break from the travel too: me a chance to shuffle through all the notes and Gillian a chance to organize the photos and videos, all in the civilized setting of the Jaipur Club. So far so good but we had also agreed that to save time Sita would fly home to Mumbai and back again. First potential problem: Sita hates flying, or more to the point, she hates the idea of flying, as she hasn’t actually tried it yet.
“Oh my God,” she gasps again, holding up the newspaper. “Listen to this. This morning’s Times of India, right?”
NEW DELHI: Four persons, including a Civil Aviation official, a pilot and two touts have been arrested by Delhi Police in connection with the latest fake flying license scam. With these fresh arrests, a total number of 10 people have been taken into custody in connection with the racket.
The police have now grounded 14 pilots who have obtained their commercial licenses by submitting fake records. In addition three Civil Aviation officials and two more touts who the police believe were the “other end” of the scam have been questioned and released on bail.
A person is eligible to fly a commercial aircraft only when he or she secures a so-called CPL, which is given out after a person completes 200 hours of flying during the training. This is a costly exercise and the 14 pilots whose licenses have been revoked had allegedly not flown the mandatory hours to skimp costs and are alleged to have bought fake certificates from the government’s flying training institute using touts who hang around the training schools.
The Indian Equator Page 22