by Tahir Shah
Vadodara was to entertain us for one day, then in the evening we were to catch a train to Udaipur. The sun shone brightly but had not yet begun to warm the air. My body was red and sore from a thousand insect bites. We had breakfast at the Hotel Aditi. Macaroni cheese came sweet, with a runny white sauce. I had encouraged Osman to order the macaroni, saying that it was very European. Disgusted by the sauce, he had requested for the pasta be taken away and rinsed. Osman never had very much good to say about the Europeans. He jumped at the fact that the British almost certainly renamed Vadodara, their own “Baroda” because they could not pronounce the real name. Nowadays the two names coexist.
We took a walk around the town.
Vadodara was not, as many now think, anglified by the British, but by its own Maharajas; for it was the capital of a state, rather than part of British India. Nevertheless there are Devonshire cottages, great institutes dedicated to Queen Victoria, street lamps and four-faced clocks. Unfortunately, when the Maharajas lost their authority, all they had created fell into a general state of Indian dilapidation. The paving stones were cracked and the clocks’ hands long removed. Whatever the former rulers had tried to create had been replaced by a more peaceful Indian way of life.
We strolled into the grounds of Maharaja Gaekwar and viewed, for one rupee, the paintings in his gallery. He had a European collection which would make many museum curators in the West envious. Prideep and Osman cackled away together in low voices, laughing freely at what I had been educated to respect. In Mumbai, I recalled, I had met an Indian lady artist who told me about the French Festival in India. She reported that several priceless paintings by Europeans, such as Monet and Manet, had been transported to Delhi and hung there for a few weeks. The French guardians of the masterpieces were horrified when Indian visitors to the exhibition ran their grubby fingers over the canvases. They insisted on feeling the workmanship.
* * *
The floor of the bazaar was covered in life and moving limbs. Naked children filled Thums-Up cola bottles with dust and chewed on bits of glass. They pointed at us, their noses running and their hair matted with dirt. A boy was pulling himself along the ground. His legs, wrapped in linen bandages, were totally concealed. One leg stretched forward, the other backwards: he was doing the splits. I stared in fascination and pity, for the child was still moving although attached to a pair of dead legs. He put out a hand, but only I saw his attempts to reach out to the world above him.
We walked into the blue smoke of peanut burners; my eyes darted about, taking in people living like spiders sprawled across a web of absolute poverty.
Osman was miserable. He had stopped reading out compass-points and was the picture of dejection. I was astounded that his feelings for Prideep were suddenly so strong, when until recently they had hated each other. Osman dropped hints continually that we should seek the alchemist’s assistant and get him to protect Prideep from the eternal curse.
“Do you really think it”ll make a difference?” I asked Osman as we trudged along. “All that performance last night by the fortune-teller might have been a ruse to increase his cousin’s business. Alchemy isn’t as productive as is widely believed.”
But Osman insisted:
“You heard what the wise Baba said, and you saw his manner when he said it; his voice trembled and he didn’t want to reveal the future at first. It is our responsibility, as Prideep’s guardians, to help.”
Having agreed that the visit might be interesting, Osman pulled out the directions that he had made, and we set off.
The rickshaw labored under the weight of its driver, three passengers, and our luggage. After careering for several miles away from Vadodara, it turned onto a road obviously used mostly by oxen. Osman and I looked at each other as if to note that the rickshaw was lost: a very usual occurrence. Prideep was humming the song from Tridev; he clasped the portable stove and sighed as we bumped along. His seemed to be the only mind that was at rest.
The rickshaw came to an abrupt halt and we were required to pay twelve rupees. Prideep had become friends with the driver and offered to make him some carrot soup. The two men crouched over the paraffin Primus: one shielding it from the breeze, the other pumping the handle.
Grinding sounds and cries in Gujarati radiated from a black hut some thirty feet from where the rickshaw had stopped. Was it the alchemist at work? Would we see molten gold produced? We knocked. There was no answer. Osman pushed the door open and called to a boy who was sharpening knives. The child ran off. A man, whom I assumed to be his father, appeared, and motioned us to enter.
The interior of the hut was dark, smoke-filled, and smelt of sulfur. In one corner six gray sacks were piled up on each other; in another had been placed a miniature cage in which a brown rat was scurrying. Much of the hut’s main room was taken up by a large homemade workbench. Cluttered with odds and ends, the surface of the bench was sprinkled with a kind of fine black sand. And, at the far edge of the counter was a sinister apparatus, festooned in cobwebs and dirt. A mess of beakers, tripods, burners and primitive condensing-tubes, I suspected that the contraption might once have been the alchemist’s tool.
The alchemist’s assistant was a very average-looking man, dressed in a white loincloth and the remains of a string vest. Osman began to speak to him in Hindi. There was no communication. He tried English; our host replied in Shakespearian English. I explained that we had met a fortune-teller on a train and we were to ask for “Bhindu”. He was Bhindu. Could he produce an amulet to protect Prideep from his fateful future? He, and only he had that skill, we could be assured. Osman smiled and asked how long it might take to make such a powerful charm. Two hours, and it would cost one hundred rupees. The whole procedure seemed rather commercial; I had a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that we were being exploited.
With the smoke blinding us, and the stench of sulfur unbearable, we went out into the sunshine to allow the master to craft the charm.
The carrot soup was very tasty. Prideep had gathered some wild herbs and seasoned the carrots and water with them. Osman paced up and down. In the black hut, magical spells were being cast. Fantastic words and sounds escaped through the broken window pane. We waited. The driver fell asleep. A goat came and went.
Then the alchemist’s assistant opened the door and beckoned us forward. He held in his hand a rust-colored talisman, one inch square. A leather thong passed through an eye at the top. It bore a single sign rather like an asterisk in the centre of three concentric circles. I handed a note to Bhindu, who stood in the doorway, he tucked it deep into his lungi. I asked if he still practised alchemy.
“Alchemy, not now. The master hath died.”
“How did you learn such fine English?”
“From the teach-book.” He went and delved deep in the back of the hut, returning with a leather-bound volume. I read the words from the first page:
“A Practical Grammar of the English Language, by John Bum, Printed Glasgow, 1766.”
We thanked the alchemist’s assistant and went back to the rickshaw. Osman called Prideep to him. He spoke slowly in Hindi. I could just understand what he said.
“I want you to promise me one thing. Can you do that?” Prideep nodded and waited for Osman to continue.
“Will you promise to wear this amulet around your neck always?”
Prideep frowned but agreed that he would, if only to make his friend happy.
Osman tied it around Prideep’s thin neck and spoke. “My friend, you must not question this ever or fail me. You are bound by a promise. Never cut the thong and I pray that God shall always love you.”
Vadodara passed from under the railway tracks and we left Gujarat, India’s only dry state, behind. Osman read numbers off the compass and coal smoke churned in our wake. My heart beat in time with the sound of the steam-engine chugging along. A feeling that life in the world was idyllic pervaded. Images of the bazaar and the boy with dead legs seemed to be but phantoms as we prepared our minds for the jo
urney that lay ahead.
The train stopped at a station a couple of hours from Udaipur. It was called Zawa. Rain poured from the sky and the population of Zawa — some two hundred people — loitered on the platform watching our arrival. Many were sheltering from the sheets of water under moth-eaten black umbrellas. When I climbed down to stretch my legs, I met a young man with deep-set eyes and straggly mustache, who was hawking oranges. He lamented that no one ate oranges when it rained, and said that the people of Zawa always trooped out to watch the train pass through their village. It was tradition.
Leaving the orange-seller to his trade, I climbed back into the carriage. And there we lay on our bunks waiting for the iron wheels to move. They did not, for what seemed like days. Then it was announced that we would depart at three o”clock. The driver climbed down from the locomotive, and lay on a bench. He fell asleep, the stoker at his feet. Groups of old men crouched about, smoking bins, and wrapped in blankets against the chill. Goats chewed on reeds, or ambled about eyeing the black umbrellas as if they were delicacies of some mouth-watering cuisine.
At Udaipur, a rickshaw laden with our bedraggled group left Udaipur City station behind. The journey had been seriously delayed, largely due to the apparent lack of enthusiasm by the driver for his career.
The first rays of light were reflected as pink rings in Prideep’s eyes. We jerked up and down as the rickshaw capered from one pot-hole to the next. It labored up narrow streets, making the sound of a Spitfire. The ground was knee-deep in rain water. Suddenly a surging undercurrent caught the floundering black rickshaw, transforming her into a makeshift raft.
None but a sacred cow bore witness to the driver’s pleas for help. Every hotel and guest house in Udaipur seemed to be full. The driver beached the craft on the steps of a great temple. We abandoned the rickshaw and pressed on through the dark waters in search of a room.
Osman thumped at a giant Mughal door within a courtyard, sensing that the building might provide accommodation. There was no reply. Just as we were about to leave, a bolt was slid back and a cloaked figure welcomed us. We had arrived at Bada Haveli. The host was Lala, a man of exquisite bearing, gentle features and gray-green eyes.
Lala greeted us, his hands with palms placed together and fingers at a point,
“Namaste,” he said bowing his head and placing his palms together. “You are very welcome to stay here for as long as you wish. This is a traditional house, there are few of the modern conveniences which other hotels offer.”
The Bada Haveli lay amidst a network of chambers. Courtyards opened into secret gardens and steps led to upper levels. A haveli is a house built for a nobleman, a gentleman of standing. We were taken by Lala to our rooms. My bedroom had an antechamber — three feet wide and four feet long — which Lala referred to as a “breakfasting room”. The windows had no glass, but neat-fitting wooden shutters with filled pointed arches in the classical Mughal style. The bed was a marble slab with a sheet on top, and a bolster at one end. It was very hard. The floor was stone and decorated by drips of multi-colored candle wax.
Lala rushed about tending to our needs. He brought a cake of red soap that another guest, he said, had left behind.
Osman and Prideep took the room next door. Stained-glass panels had been set into one wall. When the sun shone, its pink light was tinted in greens and blues. Prideep’s face glowed with the sort of excitement children feel at Christmas. Amongst the green and blue rays were columns decorated with mythical scenes. Lala smiled, acknowledging our obvious delight that the lodgings were so bewitching.
On the second level was a garden where squirrels played, darting about after each other. We climbed up onto the rooftop. Steps protruded from the walls — an advantage of “afterthought” architecture. There we sat for two hours gazing out across the city as it woke and came alive. Women were preparing their homes for the day, feeding children and hanging bundles of clothes to dry. Shopkeepers began to put their wares on display as the narrow streets of Udaipur bustled with the frenzied activity of the morn.
The architecture, the color of the light, the smell and sounds of the city as it woke, intoxicated us all.
Lala brought a tray of peanut balls, honey and a loaf of fresh coarse bread. He was fasting, but looked on with no sign of temptation as we feasted in his presence.
This was an extraordinary man. It was a delight to meet a person so eminently charming and kind. We were grateful that such civilized courtesy should be showered upon us; especially since we had only just met.
Lala spoke softly with a dignity that captivated his audience:
“My family were the official astronomers to the Maharajas for many generations,” he said. “Being of that status allowed us to build a house on the third highest site in Udaipur. When my father died, I had no choice but to rent out parts of the building to guests. I have not had the means to develop amenities as yet. But in the future I hope that more tourists will come.”
“Do many foreigners come and stay here?”
“The problem is that I refuse to pay the unreasonable demands of the rickshaw drivers who bring people from the station. They want half the rent money. That is too much, so they take tourists to the other hotels.”
Rex was the only other guest at Bada Haveli. Aged about forty, he wore wire-rimmed spectacles, and was dressed in Bermuda shorts and a sunflower shirt. A strong Afrikaans accent obscured his words:
“Magik place trekker, tell ya vere’s nowhere like et end thet’s a fect. Vis ees me thed time een Endia, I alvays geet a tren stret here froem Deelhi.”
“Have you seen any other part of this country?”
“Nope min. Ven I geet tired of Bada Haveli arnd Udaipur I’ll move on... but teel thet heppens I’ll keep comin’ ’ere min.”
Osman asked me about Bermuda shorts, “Do people really wear those in the West?”
“Well, some people do,” I replied.
“In India the poorer people wear short pants like that; no one would do it out of choice. Not even in Gwalior!”
From the roof of Bada Haveli we surveyed Udaipur with its many shrines and fine buildings. The largest sacred building, the Jagdish Temple, dates back to about 1640 AD. A pair of elephant statues stand guard at the foot of the steep steps which lead up to the shrine. The highest building is the City Palace, which gleams in white marble and granite, supreme over all below. Only the Lake Palace can rival it — floating below in the midst of Lake Pichóla — it is surely one of the most spectacular monuments ever created by man.
The Lake Palace, like some vast Mississippi paddle-steamer fashioned from white marble, fills every inch of its island. Osman, Prideep and I looked about in awe. The South African was right: this was indeed a magical place.
We went down to the street where old men squatted, framed by doorways, shadows filling the folds in their crinkled skin. Sacred cows became traffic bollards at will in the narrow streets — around which large men in orange turbans swerved at great speed on their fragile scooters.
We wandered about the Bada Bazaar, where silver amulets and bracelets are bought and sold. Dealers crouched on white cotton mattresses, perched above the gutter, squinting through thick spectacles at workmanship that is very fine indeed.
We walked out of the Suraj Pol, the Gate of the Sun, with its long iron spikes, ten feet above the ground, intended to stop the elephants of a hostile army from charging the doors. And we passed children who demanded “one rupees” and little girls who giggled when they saw Osman. The sky — and the mountains which it touched — were reflected in the lake’s green algae.
Five girls stood in the water washing their clothes. They were bare from the waist up. I averted my gaze and made Osman and Prideep do the same.
Suddenly the sound of hooves could be heard behind us. I turned, as my eyes crossed, trying to focus on the gigantic black mass of bones and flesh that was charging toward us. We stepped to one side and choked as dust swirled above the fresh hoof-prints. A buffalo had run
amok and was making a beeline for the horizon. No one paid much attention. Haggard crones stopped talking to their friends for a moment, stepped aside as we had done, and continued chatting as before. Do buffaloes often carry on like that? Baffled, I put the problem to the back of my mind, and walked on, out of the town. Alone. Prideep and Osman preferred to hide in the shade of a tall acacia and spy on the girls who were now taking off the rest of their clothes.
Two hundred bicycles went by. Whole families balanced on the backs of the Calcutta-made frames, waving at all they passed. Where were they going? Were they following the buffalo, perhaps? What was the buffalo in pursuit of? These questions, and more, captivated me. So I decided to tag along too.
Thirty minutes later and there was no sign of the buffalo. A stall-keeper who sold Thums-Up cola pointed into the distance when I asked where the bicycles and the black brute had gone. Where were they going? The man waggled his head from behind a sea of cola bottles. I carried on along the earthen track, due east from Udaipur.
After another half hour, in pursuit of the bicycle tire tracks and hoof prints, they stopped. The buffalo was lying under a tree, exhausted. About three hundred bicycles were sprawled around it in heaps of twisted metal. Their owners had formed a ring and were concentrated on a man in the centre.
The figure was dressed like a westerner in jungle green khaki shorts and a safari shirt. He held a black umbrella filled with large holes above his head. Silently, the front row of the audience stood up and paraded around the man in khaki shorts. They were all painted and dressed in bizarre costumes.
A man with a full black beard was dressed as a lady. One had a denim cone tied as a hat above his head; half his face was painted black, the other half white. Two men in dark glasses had swords, and another a club. The last capered about with two angelic wings attached to his arms. The audience stared. The buffalo panted. And I watched in wonderment as the characters began to dance.
