Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  "You're a lawyer?" I asked.

  "I am a journalist. Environmentalist. I am going to a conference on water issues in Jodhpur." She turned back to the window. "Prince Charles is going to address our meeting about water conservation."

  "Prince Charles is in Jodhpur?"

  "At Umaid Bhawan. As I said, to address our conference."

  That could hardly have been the reason. I had seen his name in the Delhi newspapers; he was on a private tour of India with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, formerly Parker Bowles, née Shand, and now Mrs. Charles Windsor—her first visit to the country.

  "Maybe you'll get a chance to meet the prince."

  She shrugged and made a face. "I don't care."

  "It's a big deal, isn't it?"

  Though she was grubby from a night on the train and was sitting in wrinkled pajamas, she attempted to be haughty, saying, "I've had enough of royalty."

  I could see she was simply trying to put me down, and that fascinated me. I didn't mind that she took me for a backpacker, a scrounging vagabond, an idle traveler—that much was true. What she didn't know was that, as she was faced away from me, I had just finished writing in my notebook, Sourpuss—wrinkled pajamas—sunken eyes—I've had enough of royalty. And since I was also planning to stay at the Umaid Bhawan Palace, perhaps we could all meet for tea—grouchy woman, Prince of Wales, and me.

  "What a coincidence. I'm going there too," I said. This did not get a rise out of her. I asked, "Who do you write for?"

  She glanced over her shoulder, mentioned the name of her magazine, then turned back to the window, so that all I saw were her skinny shoulders and her rumpled clothes. Perhaps she suspected that I had leaned out of my berth during the night and peered down at her twisted form, as she emitted flutterblasts of halitotic snores.

  When the shawl seller woke up, he looked out the window and, seemingly on the basis of the telling contours of a few dusty hills, said, "Half an hour to Jodhpur."

  We chatted while the woman sulked and muttered into her cell phone. He too had been at the cricket match in Delhi. I said, "Cricketers used to clap and look bored or phlegmatic. When did they start hugging each other and rolling on the ground?"

  "About ten or fifteen years back," he said. "The Australians started it. They made it more American style. Changed the colors, made it commercial—changed the whole sport."

  "If you don't mind?" the woman said, pushing past us. We were entering Jodhpur Station, but she was in such a hurry to get out of the train that she was already thrusting her way—sharp elbows out—to the end of the coach and to her water conference, though, looking at her, you would have thought she was headed to a witches' sabbath.

  There is always a mob scene when a train arrives at a large station in India: the onrush of porters, coolies, men with wheelbarrows and luggage carts, water carriers, food sellers, taxi drivers, rickshaw wallahs, hotel and guesthouse touts. They pile onto the platform and block the doors so as to be first.

  I allowed them to entrap the grouchy woman, and I slipped past, moving quickly to the taxi rank with my small unimpressive bag.

  Near the middle of Jodhpur my car was surrounded by big serious men carrying brass plates. The plates were glittering and heavy, and the men lifted them, seemed to shake them at me, gesturing for me to roll the window down.

  "Who are these men?" I asked the driver. "What do they want?"

  "It is Navratri, sar. They are celebrants."

  I opened the window, assuming they wanted some rupees for their brass plates, but no: one person stepped forward and, putting his thumb into red powder, applied a dot to my forehead.

  On the way to the Umaid Bhawan, the driver told me that Navratri was just beginning—nine nights of fasting and praying, devoted to the goddess Durga. This mother goddess is one of the fiercest in the Indian pantheon, easily recognizable from the weapons in her many arms and her necklace of skulls—she is much fiercer than the male gods, and is a power of both creation and destruction. Durga means "the Inaccessible." I was put in mind of the petulant woman on the train, a Durga incarnation howling into her cell phone, who throughout the trip was making herself inaccessible to me.

  "Also Navratri, very important to Surya," the driver said.

  I had been to Surya temples. Surya, the sun god in Hindu cosmology, is worshiped more devoutly in Rajasthan than in other places because, as I later found out, the royal Rajput family—the Rathore clan, rulers of Rajasthan—are regarded as suryavanshis, descendants of the sun god.

  An unlucky aspect of this year's Navratri and this sun imagery was that a solar eclipse had occurred the previous day in this part of India, and the darkening of the sun was clearly visible in Jaipur.

  "It was not an auspicious day," a woman told me at the Umaid Bhawan Palace, and this was bigger news in Jodhpur than the arrival of Prince Charles and his duchess. A solar eclipse during this religious holiday was a bad omen.

  This was in the lobby of the Umaid Bhawan (on whose walls and platforms were more stuffed leopards and tigers than I'd ever seen together in my life), where I had gone hoping to talk with the Maharajah of Jodhpur. His grandfather Maharajah Umaid Singh had commissioned this palace to be built in 1928. At the time, this part of Rajasthan, the desert kingdom of Marwar, was beset by famine and drought, and the idea was that this project, which took fifteen years to complete, would be a way of occupying and employing his subjects, the desperate and hungry Marwaris. It was one of the last palaces, and certainly the last great palace, to be erected in imperial India. The finished building, of russet Rajasthani sandstone and marble, set on a hill at the edge of Jodhpur, is a vast roseate palace with a great glowing dome, with touches of the Gothic and jocular art deco, with pinched Mughal turrets, elaborate porches, and the weirdest architectural capriccios of Rajputana. It may have been built to give Marwaris employment, but there it stood to inspire awe.

  The present maharajah lived decorously in one wing, designated as the Royal Apartments. Prince Charles was upstairs in a large suite with his last duchess, his entourage nearby. Upstairs too were the water conference people, looking for answers to the inevitable ecological catastrophe in India—more drought and famine. In the luxury hotel wing were the other guests: honeymooners, tourists, Indophiles, the lucky few, and, traveling light, an idle grinning note taker—me, talking to a helpful Indian woman.

  "Bad omens. Time to burn joss sticks?" I asked.

  "No, more serious than that. 'Don't look at the sun,' I was told by a member of the maharajah's family. 'Don't go outside.' I said, 'But I have work to do!'"

  She said that if I was interested, I could attend the elaborate ritual for Navratri at the Mehrangarh Fort on the other side of Jodhpur, above the blue-painted city, a hilltop garrison so imposing, Rudyard Kipling called it "the work of angels and giants." The puja—prayer ceremony—would be led by priests and members of the maharajah's family, the maharani, and the maharajah himself.

  "Essential to propitiate goddess Durga, because of solar eclipse," the woman said.

  The ritual would mark the start of the nine days of fasting and praying. And some people ("in the villages," as smug city-dwelling Indians liked to point out) would be sacrificing a goat.

  "Burning it?"

  "No. Cut off head of goat. Let blood flow"

  One very hot day in Jodhpur, I followed the procession of Rajput royalty to the steep-sided fort and across its ramparts. The Durga temple (the traditional family temple of the Jodhpur royals) at the fort was an old one—the fort itself dates from the mid-fifteenth century—and it was mobbed with devotees and semi-hysterical subjects of the maharajah, a living connection to the sun diety.

  Following him in the heat of this sun-struck fort was a shuffling mass of people with flutes, bells, gongs, drums, and garlands of flowers, all of them chanting, "Durga Mata ki jail"—Praise to Mother Durga.

  Ritual is important to me, not for its dubious sanctity, but because it is a set of gestures that reveals the inner state of the
people involved and their subtle protocol. From under an awning I strained to see the ceremony, the mutterings, the water splashings, the prostrations. The priests were both submissive and self-important, attending to the maharajah, who was performing the puja under the gaze of his loyal and chanting subjects. Here, an element of theater was added to an element of devotion.

  The most painful moment was the arrival of the maharajah's son Shivraj Singh, the Yuvraj of Jodhpur and heir apparent. There were whispers that he might at last show himself, and this stirred a great intensity of anticipation, because he was known to have been severely injured.

  The yuvraj was thirty-one, very handsome, and for years had been a renowned polo player—a great rider, a high scorer—and a champion of the game at which Jodhpur had distinguished itself for centuries. But just a year before—in February 2005—the yuvraj had been in a polo accident. As he attempted to turn his horse sharply, it had stumbled, the yuvraj had fallen to the ground, and the horse had landed on top of him. After lying in a deep coma for more than a month, the poor man at last flickered to consciousness. With a period of intense physiotherapy—his therapist was a young American woman—he had regained rudimentary use of his limbs, and here he was, in his first public appearance since the horrible accident.

  In a turban, white jacket, and trousers, draped with garlands of marigolds, with an attendant on either side of him, he struggled to stay upright, making his way to the temple through the thicknesses of rose petals that had been strewn on the ramparts. His faltering was hard to watch, yet he was a man who had come back from the dead.

  What was touching about the Durga puja was that it marked the cycle of life and death, it celebrated rebirth, and so everything that happened here in the blazing sun of the fort, the ringing of bells and gongs and the Durga chants, mattered to this broken young man who was a living symbol of how the mother goddess could help.

  The priests applied powder to his forehead, tied a sacred thread to his wrist, flicked water, and passed out sweets, all this to the shrieks of the chants and the sound of flutes and gongs.

  "Durga Mata ki jai!"

  The prince was led to a gilded chair under a white cotton canopy near the temple, the portly maharajah beside him, the maharani in purple silks, the retainers with trays of sweets, the priests and the hundreds, perhaps thousands of worshipers tumbling over one another for a glimpse of their semi-divine king.

  I was standing behind the canopy, trying to keep my bare feet on the cooler, shaded part of the bricks. The yuvraj signaled that he wanted water. The heat was like a glittering hammer. I watched him make a great effort to hold the glass and tip it and drink. He was clearly in bad shape, yet he was determined to complete this act without help, and when at last he was led away, looking frail, determination was more evident in his movements. He was a man with inner strength; I felt that he had come a long way and that his willpower would take him further; in the course of this fragrant and harmonious ceremony his posture had become resolute and more certain.

  There is something about the presence of royalty—it is a throbbing in the air, a vibrancy, a buzz—that sets people's pulses racing. Probably it is not much different from the excitement on the red carpet on Oscar night, but it is heightened by the religious fervor associated with ancient royalty. It was obvious here at the fort, with all the Jodhpur royals on view, looking pious and protective as the delighted people watched them—a kind of rapture inspired by the big reliable-looking maharajah, his lovely queen, his wounded son, the image of the mother goddess smeared with ritual paste, flames leaping from oil lamps, and the powerful chiming of gongs and bells.

  I stayed in the hotel part of the Umaid Bhawan, hardly believing my luck at being a guest at such a place. I made a tour of the Jodhpur bazaar and the antique shops, looking for treasures and trying to sort the real from the fake. But it hardly mattered; what I liked best in an Indian market was simply walking from stall to stall, from shop to shop, threading my way among the plodding camels and the rickshaws and the browsing cows in a city where nothing looked modern.

  A few days later, more regal vibrations set the Umaid Palace buzzing: heightened activity, lots of breathless movement, a briskness I had not seen before. After lunch, I saw a long red carpet being unrolled.

  "Prince Charles is leaving," one of the carpet rollers said, kneeling on the polished marble floor of the outer lobby, straightening the edges of the thing.

  I wanted to have a good look at Prince Charles's new wife, so I lingered by the great arch of the palace entrance.

  "May I help you, sar?" It was a security man.

  "I'm waiting for Prince Charles. I want to say hello." The security man had a badge and a truncheon. I added, "I met him once."

  I took my place at the very end of a line of people who were saying goodbye: butlers, cleaners, chowkidars, sweepers, syces, hotel staff, secretaries, menials, and me.

  All the hotel guests had gathered for the farewell; all the attendees of the water conservation conference were there too. I searched their faces and spotted the grouchy woman from the train. She was small, troll-like, round-shouldered, across the room. She did not see me until the prince approached my line, and when our eyes met I winked at her. Ha! She darkened in a way that I had come to recognize. I remembered how she had barked the word "audacious" into her cell phone.

  The prince and the duchess made their way down the line, thanking each person, and when my turn came I said, "Paul Theroux. You came to the premiere of the film of my book The Mosquito Coast in London twenty years ago. I'm sure you don't remember."

  "Of course I remember," he said, smiling and snatching at my hand. He had a high pink color and thinning hair, a correctness of posture, and the frustrated smirk of someone who believed he had never been taken seriously enough. He looked boyish and slightly sheepish rather than princely.

  The duchess was just behind him, looking untidy, older and somewhat motherly in the faintly bawdy way of some doting mothers with big awkward sons: friendly, frumpy, a bit hunched, smallish and compact, potbellied in her tight combination of dark jacket and skirt—much too formal for this desert heat, more appropriate for a garden party in England, which she perhaps believed a maharajah's banquet to be the nearest equivalent. That was forgivable in someone who had never been to India before.

  She touched the prince's arm and said in a vague and likable way, "Bother, I've forgotten my dark glasses."

  Someone overheard her and quick-marched to deliver the order that the glasses must be found.

  Prince Charles said to me, "What are you doing here?"

  "Just traveling, sir. Heading south."

  "Are you writing something?"

  "Trying, Your Highness. Scribble, scribble."

  This made him laugh. "I'm scribbling too. But not books. And not for publication, though I sometimes wish..." And instead of finishing the sentence, he laughed again.

  The previous month, portions of the prince's Hong Kong diary had become public. He had printed it privately and circulated it among his friends. It was full of colorful observations and a few pointed ones, and the unexpected sharpness of these had made headlines in London newspapers. He had mocked the hand-over ceremony, called some of the Chinese notables "waxworks," spoken of the Chinese president's "propaganda speech," and scorned the goose-stepping Chinese soldiers. He also complained of being stuck in club class, rather than first, on his way out: "Such is the end of empire, I sighed to myself." What this proved was that though he may never be crowned king of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, he could still make a decent living as a travel writer with such breezy generalizations.

  "Travel safely," he said. Then a photographer caught up with him, and he was posed with the staff for a group photo. As the picture was taken he said into the dazzling flash of the camera, "Are you absolutely sure you want me to do this?"

  Then the duchess's dark glasses were found, and off the royals went to their private plane. They had an entourage of twenty-six people
, including the prince's private chef.

  "The prince apparently doesn't like your food," I said, teasing a man who told me he had helped organize the royal visit.

  "Oh, his highness is very particular about his meals," the man said, suddenly fussed and stern, as though remembering. "There was quite a hullabaloo here to find the ingredients for a certain kind of brown bread that the prince likes to eat. Certain herbs. They finally found them somewhere in the market."

  ***

  ANOTHER DAY, I HAD TEA with Maharajah Gai Singh II. The thirty-eighth Rathore Chief of Marwar and Maharajah of Jodhpur was fifty-eight but seemed older, with the weather-beaten air of an aged warrior. He had assumed the throne and had taken on the title of maharajah at the age of four, on the death of his father. He was well known for having no pretensions. He may have been descended from Surya, the sun god, but he urged everyone to call him Bapji—Daddy Dearest. Just as well. The English had never allowed themselves to be impressed with semi-divine claims of ancestry. In Victorian times, the College of Heralds stated: "The Aga Khan is held by his followers to be a direct descendant of God. English Dukes take precedence."

  Bapji had allowed part of the Umaid Bhawan Palace to be converted to a hotel, in much the same spirit as some of the hard-up English aristocracy with their castles and stately homes, turning them into museums and teahouses, fitting them for rose garden tours and game parks and croquet lawns, so that they could go on living in one wing and paying the bills. In the most heavy-handed way, by amending the Indian constitution in 1969, Indira Gandhi had stripped the Indian royals of their privy purses. In response, some maharajahs became businessmen, others became landlords, and many sold the family silver. Indian antique dealers were always unwrapping daggers or crystal goblets adorned with crests and saying, "Royal family of Cooch Behar, sir. Deaccessioned, sir. I obtained the whole blooming lot, sir."