On Fire
Page 46
In Jaipur, Arjun Kamat just rolls over. He has no idea what time it is and doesn’t care. Trying to stay up with his studies from such a distance hasn’t been exactly the piece of cake he had hoped it would be, and he has quite frankly been studying overtime to make it work. If this thing with Miller and Scott doesn’t resolve itself soon, he’s going to have trouble making the term. For Arjun, that is totally unthinkable, utterly out of the question. For one thing, it would mean the loss of his semester’s fees, totaling what in his society would be considered a sinfully large amount. All down the drain! What a disgrace!
His phone has other ideas, and keeps signaling that an important email has arrived in his in-box. This reminds him of why he rolled over in the first place, a failed attempt to ignore the stupid phone to begin with. He groans and reaches for the night table, resigned.
It’s one of Bog’s encrypted emails and he groans again. He’s not sure if he remembers how to decrypt it. So he sets it back down and rolls into his bed for a few minutes more, only to realize that he’s not going to go back to sleep anytime soon. Besides, his plans for the day come back to him. He has planned on visiting Jaipur’s downtown. He wants to see the Palace of the Winds again. Also the Amber Fort. Thinking about it makes him anxious to get started.
His uncle, a businessman whose apartment this is, left hours ago. As a result, Arjun has the place to himself. He struggles to rise, pulls on a pair of trunks, always conveniently kept on the side table chair, and finds his way through the front room to the door.
It opens onto an ornate white balcony, one of three stories of balconies that look down to a decoratively tiled pool. The balcony has heavy white columns and arches overhead. There are wicker chairs, a lead top table, lots of potted plants, and a number of rolled up bamboo curtains hanging from the ceiling. He bounds down the stairs, past some bougainvillea, dodges several sets of iron chairs and tables, and finally lands one foot on the raised edge of the pool before instantaneously leaping in. It’s the deep end and he has no fear that he can dive as deep as he wants to. But he comes up quickly and in a few easy strokes arrives at the pool’s opposite end.
He tries to remember again what he has to do to de-crypt the message from Bog. As best he can recall, it isn’t hard. Obviously, there is a program. He’ll have to find it. He resumes his swim, finishes it after about 50 rotations, and returns to the apartment where he dresses and stuffs a bag with a few things before heading out. He saunters down an asphalt lane bordered on both sides by lush vegetation to the thick, whitewashed concrete wall with the ornate balusters that surrounds the property to a black wrought iron gate. The gate is usually open and he passes through it to the street, walking on to the next corner, a very busy thoroughfare where he can hail a bus. As Arjun takes the corner, he doesn’t notice the SUV pulling away from the opposite curb further down the street.
The city bus takes Arjun to the center of Jaipur, which is sometimes called the Pink City, after the color of its most prominent landmarks. With a population of three million, Jaipur is the capital of and the largest city in Rajasthan, a province of northern India. Arjun has become used to explaining to this to his Stanford friends, when they ask about where he is from. He usually adds for the Americans’ benefit that it’s a city larger than Chicago. He knows that it would leave a greater impression on the mostly Californians if he could say that it’s larger than LA. But LA has a million more people than either Chicago or Jaipur. The result, therefore, is that nobody in California is impressed with where he is from. They never remember that he’s from Jaipur. Only India. Of course.
Arjun leaves the bus and at the light walks across a broad avenue with a small group of people, some clearly from other countries. This is the Palace quarter and the old city. Jaipur is divided into six of these quarters by a higher order of arterial streets, each of which measures well over a hundred feet wide. In addition, the city depends below the level of the arterial on a regular grid network of streets. Though laid out in the early 1700’s, these features mean Jaipur is, much more than most in India, a planned city, and the only one this old in country.
Arjun walks first to the Jantar Mantar, a series of oversized astronomical instruments laid out across the grounds of the quarter. The founder of Jaipur is also responsible for their construction and built similar kinds of instruments in other cities. The fourteen instruments here are the best collection, having been well preserved over the centuries. A giant sundial, the Samrat Yantra, which is ninety feet high, is accurate to one millimeter per second or six centimeters per minute, as the shadow of the sun moves across it. Arjun walks the steps to the top, where there is a cupola for making celestial announcements. Samrat Yantra, he reminds himself, means Supreme Instrument, and this strikes him as an inspired claim. There are few other sundials in the world as large. He says a silent prayer for himself and his family before he retreats from it heights.
The Jantar Mantar is in effect an observatory, and Arjun enjoys wandering about it, reading the various plaques that explain the purpose and origins of each instrument. They compose a lesson in geometry made in stone and marble that appeals to his quantitative and scientific mind. This observatory is now used for mere astrological predictions, fortune telling to Arjun. The Jantar Mantar’s past was however an expression of soaring human intellect and newfound discovery that challenged even the greatest minds of its time.
Arjun sits on a low wall and pulls out the sandwich he packed and a bottle of water. He eats while watching the groups of tourist and listening to their guides. The reactions of the tourists are interesting to watch. He could stay here all day.
Instead Arjun gets up and walks a short distance to the Hawa Mahal, or Palace of Winds. It is the women’s chambers of the royal palace complex and is essentially a five story screen allowing the women of the royal family to view festivals and street activities while remaining themselves unseen, as befitting purdah. The five stories are constructed with octagonally shaped windows built with stone screens, the entire palace of pink and red sandstone. It is full of beautifully adorned halls with marble floors and extensively decorated columns and arches. Windows constructed of many brightly colored panes of glass reflect rainbows of colored light into the interior. The Palace has many gilt columns, a large central courtyard with fountains, and a super structure of stairs behind the main wall of pink stone that can be climbed to the highest pinnacle of the structure. He has been here before and as always takes these stairs to the top to obtain their great view of the City, the nearby City Palace, and the field of giant astronomical instruments. Afterward, he wanders throughout the many halls of the Palace.
He finally leaves and looks to the north and the nearby mountains, basking in the sun under a nearly cloudless sky. Atop a gargantuan quarter mile tall, sheer rock cliff visible from where he stands is an ancient fort sitting like a thin stone prominence along the peak of the high ridge. Arjun sets his sights on it.
Chapter 47