Chapter 19

Another Planet

Bangkok, Thailand

December 2

Our three days in Mumbai were a whirlwind of social calls with some sightseeing on the side. There were aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends to meet, and these joyous reunions invariably took place over elaborate multicourse meals. Since everyone involved was a member of the strictly vegetarian Jain faith, you might imagine that these repasts were bland. But nothing could be further from the truth. We ate a bewildering array of chickpeas, lentils, mung beans, naan, chapattis, and puris spiced with cunning combinations of chili, turmeric, mustard seed, fenugreek, cumin, and coriander (to name the few spices I recognized). These feasts always ended with a sweet dessert and a soothing glass of masala chai—tea leaves boiled in milk and flavored with secret family mélanges of clove, cinnamon, pepper, and ginger.

When Devi’s father loaded us onto the plane to Udaipur, our foreheads were dotted in blessing. We were well fed and content and only regretted that we’d scheduled such a short stay in Mumbai. We hadn’t encountered such gracious hospitality since we left Sardinia two months earlier, and we added Mumbai to the list of places we hoped to revisit soon.

In Udaipur, Devi wanted to stay in the renowned Jag Mandir Palace Hotel—the so-called floating palace built in the middle of Lake Pichola. Unfortunately, the hotel was completely booked months in advance, so instead we settled for a converted hunting lodge called the Shikarbadi. The Shikarbadi, set on the edge of a dry lake, wasn’t as fancy as the Jag Mandir Palace (or a Holiday Inn, for that matter), but it did boast excellent riding stables, and spacious grounds abundant with spotted Indian deer and feral pigs. The kids loved this place, and we spent our three days in Udaipur riding horses around the hotel grounds and visiting tourist attractions in town.

Foremost among these was the City Palace—a truly massive agglomeration of royal mahals erected by a succession of Rajput maharanas over the course of several centuries. Although the City Palace had obviously seen better days, its faded opulence still evoked the bygone glory of the local kings. We also enjoyed a serene afternoon at the Saheliyon-ki-Bari—a luxurious formal garden built for the ladies of the royal court in 1734. The gardens featured life-size marble elephants, graceful pavilions, broad lotus ponds, and a fascinating array of gravity-flow fountains that operated without pumps.

But, without doubt, the most fascinating thing we did in Udaipur was simply walk the city streets. In Mumbai, Devi’s dad whisked us around in private cars, so we didn’t get the chance to wrap ourselves in the sensuous fabric of Indian street life. But in Udaipur, we witnessed the kaleidoscopic spectacle at close range. The narrow lanes of the old quarter teemed with mustachioed men in red turbans and women in dazzling Day-Glo saris. Sacred cattle, affectionately decorated for dewali²³ with pink and gold polka dots, wandered the streets, and mangy pigs rooted through noxious garbage heaps. Men urinated on walls; deformed, mutilated beggars vied for our attention (and our change); and all manner of motorbikes, cars, trucks, buses, and rickshaws honked and beeped incessantly as they tried to coerce a path through the milling crowds. All in all, it was an unremitting torrent of exotic sights, sounds, and smells.

On our last day in Udaipur, Devi and I decided we should see the Rajasthani countryside in this same intimate fashion. So we cancelled our air tickets and reorganized our journey from Udaipur to Delhi as a thousand-kilometer drive through the heart of Rajasthan. We couldn’t find any one driver who would take us the whole way, but the hotel organized a minibus that would go as far as Jodhpur, two hundred miles to the north. As we climbed aboard the bus, Devi and I speculated that this road trip would be one of the more adventurous legs of our round-the-world voyage. In that respect, we weren’t disappointed.

Our first stop on the road to Delhi was the famous Jain temple in Ranakpur. The roof of this fifteenth-century architectural wonder is supported by 1,444 intricately carved pillars. No two are alike, and they’re staggered so that you can always see dozens at a time. Jains don’t worship a deity, per se. Instead, they revere twenty-four tirthankaras²⁴ who set forth the precepts of the faith several thousand years ago. The most important of these precepts is ahimsa or non-violence, and observant Jains take great pains not to injure any life, no matter how seemingly insignificant. In practice, this means most Jains are strict vegetarians. But Jain monks go so far as to sweep the road in front of them so they don’t inadvertently step on any mites or other tiny insects as they walk. Jains don’t proselytize, and their faith is rigorous, which is probably why there are only four million Jains left in a nation of a billion people. As Devi’s Jain father says, it’s a lot easier being Hindu.

Devi urged me to make a contribution toward the upkeep of this magnificent shrine, so I sought out the head priest and gave him the equivalent of about $50 dollars in rupees. He must have considered that a generous gift because, from that point forward, he became our personal guide. The priest blessed our family elaborately, chanting at length and placing yellow dots of paint on our foreheads. He helped us make a puja²⁵ before a four-faced statue of the tirthankara Adinath. Then he benevolently patted the children on the head and directed us toward the roof of the temple where there were spectacular views of the nearby Aravalli Mountains.

The roof also held countless domes, parapets, nooks, crannies, towers, and covert little rooms to explore. Willie and I climbed a long stone staircase with no guardrail on either side, opened a door, and found ourselves inside a cramped tower chamber that held a serene tirthankara image and a young Scandinavian-looking fellow who was deep in meditation. The young man opened one eye to look at us and Willie and I quickly retreated.

There was so much to investigate on the roof that we lost track of time, and after a while, no one noticed that we were the only ones there. Apparently the rooftop is closed to visitors during the late afternoon, and when we tried to get down, we found that the only staircase was blocked off at the top by an iron gate. Since the temple was a place of sacred reflection, we didn’t think it would be appropriate to scream for help. So we waited ten minutes until a monk passed by the foot of the staircase. Then we all whispered “psst, psst, psst” to attract his attention and held the bars like prisoners to indicate our plight. The monk ran off to find a key, and before long we were liberated. We figured that was our cue to leave, so we found our shoes and returned to the minibus, pleased that we could show the children such a glorious manifestation of their Jain heritage.

The drive northwest from Ranakpur to Jodhpur was unforgettable. Trucks meticulously decorated with painted murals plied the narrow blacktop. Countless herds of goats, sheep, and camels crowded the berm. Painted oxen turned water wheels and pulled plows as they have for centuries, and women working in the fields wore saris in brilliant shades of red, orange, and fuchsia, forming streaks of luminous color against the dusty landscape. In the smaller roadside villages, everyone looked up from their work and waved as we passed, flashing bright teeth in gentle brown faces.

Indian highways are not for the faint of heart—or even the sane of mind. The road was rarely wide enough for two trucks to pass each other, and the question of which truck would give way was often settled at the last possible moment. While not as outwardly flamboyant as the manic Greek and Turkish drivers we encountered earlier in our trip, Indian drivers still seemed to get into some truly spectacular auto accidents. In the space of a single day, we saw a bus lying on its side, two trucks knocked right off their axles, and a flipped gasoline tanker. I later read that more than 150 people die in auto accidents in India every day—a staggering number considering the fact that a very small percentage of the population own cars. Our Lonely Planet guidebook suggested renting a car and drive ourselves around India, but after viewing the carnage firsthand, I’m glad we didn’t try.

We arrived in Jodhpur after sunset, and from the edge of town, we could see an immense hilltop edifice illuminated by floodlights. This was the Umaid Bhawan Palace, ancestral home of the local maharaja and our hotel for the next two nights. It took several thousand serfs fourteen years to build the hundred-room palace and its formal gardens. By the time they finished, India was on the verge of independence, and the thousand-year Rajput regime was breathing its last gasp. As a result, the palace became a costly anachronism and the royal family—like obsolete aristocrats everywhere—were obliged to take in paying guests to make ends meet.

The palace was built on a spectacular scale. The lobby ceilings were a hundred feet high, and our room was six times the size of a normal hotel suite. There was a huge indoor pool in a muraled hall, a private cinema, and a garden gazebo the size of a house. The floors of the palace were marble, the ceilings were carved from rare woods, and some of the furniture was actually crafted from solid sterling silver. The service was impeccable, and for two days we lived the life of Rajput royalty—all for the price of an average New York City hotel room. Everyone in the family enjoyed the amenities, but Kara in particular took to royal life like a fish to water. Given the chance, I believe that she would have settled here permanently.

From Jodhpur, we drove more than a hundred miles east to the holy town of Pushkar. Eleven months of the year Pushkar is a quiet way station on the Hindu pilgrimage trek. But for twelve days in the month of Karttika (October–November), the town attracts nearly a million people. They come for several different reasons. Hindu pilgrims gather to bathe in Pushkar Lake, a large pond said to have sprung up miraculously when a lotus fell from the hand of Lord Brahma. At the same time, thousands of desert nomads ride in from the Thar Desert to trade their camels and other livestock. Then tourists like us come from around the world (mostly Europe) to witness the whole vivid spectacle. And finally, merchants, hawkers, and traders of every stripe swoop in to sell their wares to the gathered multitude. The resulting mehla²⁶ is one of the largest, most exotic and colorful festivals on the face of the earth.

We knew we were approaching Pushkar when we saw increasingly more camels on the narrow road. At first, there were just a few small herds of ten or twelve camels. But closer to town, the road was choked with hundreds upon hundreds of the loping ten-foot-high beasts. The children’s faces were glued to the windows as our driver tried to blaze a trail through the camel herds.

While a few hundred decorated camels sauntering down the road is undoubtedly a colorful sight, nothing could prepare us for what we found near the edge of town. There, we were amazed to see a three-hundred-acre field of sandy dunes filled with thousands of desert nomads—the men in bright red turbans, the women in colorful saris. And with them—grunting, groaning, gurgling, hauling carts, running, lying down, drinking from troughs, snorting, pissing, and spitting—were more than fifty thousand camels decorated with black spots, stripes, and mysterious signs, tinkling bells, and embroidered harnesses. The children’s jaws just dropped, and Lucas, with his beguiling grasp of the obvious, exclaimed, “There are a lot of camels here, Mommy!”

After a wide-eyed survey of the nomad camps, we crossed the road to find our own accommodations. These turned out to be two old saffron-colored tents—numbers K40 and K41—in a gigantic tent village erected by the Rajasthani Tourist Board. Each tent contained three army field cots made up with grayish sheets and thin well-used olive blankets. Toilet and bathing facilities were located in a large and rather smelly tent, where attendants heated water for the showers in a huge black iron pot over a wood fire.

Just that morning, we’d been living like courtiers in a fairy-tale palace, and now we found ourselves pretty much at the other end of the spectrum. The boys didn’t mind the new digs at all, but Kara, who had savored her languid afternoons sipping Cokes on the palace veranda, was unimpressed by her change of fortune.

“Are we supposed to sleep in here?” she sniffed.

“Think of it as camping,” said Devi.

“I don’t like camping,” said Kara. “I like the palace.”

“You’ll like this, too,” said Devi. “Just give it a chance. Right, David?”

“Absolutely,” I said. And Kara shot me one of her “get real” looks.

We ate a passably good vegetarian lunch with several hundred other people in a huge communal dining tent, and then we wandered across the road—past dozens of souvenir stands—to the nomad camps. We rambled around the dunes all afternoon, snapping pictures and shooting video until the sun slipped behind Nag Pahar, the Snake Mountain. The lingering sunset shimmered through dust kicked up by fifty thousand camels, suffusing the field in a dusky golden glow.

I flagged down one of the many camel carts that served as provisional taxis during the mehla and asked the driver—a handsome thirty-year-old man with an enormous handle bar moustache and a rakish red-and-black scarf—to take us on a tour. The driver, whose name was Kelas, sat on the open front edge of the rough cart deftly guiding his camel. Occasionally, he passed the reins to his nine-year-old son, Skaloo, who held them with enormous pride.

We loped rhythmically across the dunes to a nearby road where various amenities were set up for sojourning nomads. There was a fairground with two decrepit Ferris wheels and a long row of makeshift stalls that sold fancy camel harnesses, rope, textiles, silver jewelry, bootleg music cassettes, homemade candy, and tall burlap sacks full of rice and beans. As we rolled slowly past the crowded stalls, I sensed a great vital surge of human activity. Tailors measured nomads for suits. Barbers shaved their customers with straight razors, and Rajasthani women wrapped head-to-toe in gauzy pink and orange saris sifted through equally colorful piles of yellow curry powder and red chili peppers. Above it all, tinny Indian pop music wailed relentlessly from a dozen loudspeakers.

The road eventually led to the town of Pushkar itself. By then, it was dark, and as our camel clopped down the pavement past rows of small houses, we could peer into lighted windows and doorways. In some houses, large families sat in a circle eating dinner on the floor. In others, ten or twelve children crowded around a flickering television set.

We passed through the town and circled to the other side of Lake Pushkar. Kelas reined the camel to a halt at the water’s edge, and we all climbed down off the wooden cart. Gazing across the water, I could see a dozen lakeside pavilions decked with strings of twinkling lights. Each of the pavilions had a set of wide stairs—called a bathing ghat—that lead down into the inky lake. On this festival night, the ghats were jammed with thousands of ecstatic chanting pilgrims who were floating countless little oil lamps out onto the lake. These pinpoints of light formed constellations on the surface of the pond, and since it was a starless night, the firmament looked as if it had been turned upside down.

The stirring undertone of the pilgrims blended with the high Indian pop music from the fairgrounds and the distant murmur of a million people gathered on the plains around Pushkar to form a strange, otherworldly din. In fact, everything about this scene—the eerie discord, the shadowy forms, the pungent smells—felt profoundly alien.

Willie nuzzled against me, shivering in the cold night air, and I picked him up, glad to feel his familiar weight in my arms. Devi came close by, too, and I wondered whether this Indian scene evoked any old, unconscious memories in her, or whether she, too, found it a wholly foreign spectacle.

“Well, Toto,” I said, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

“No,” Devi said, shaking her head in astonishment, “we’re as far from home as possible.”

On the way back to the tent village, Kelas skirted the town completely and steered the camel cart down deserted paths under a black, moonless sky. After a while I was disoriented, and I wondered whether Kelas would ever get us back to our tents. But in time, we rolled to the edge of a hillock above the camel fields. It seemed like a completely different place at night. The camels were pegged and hobbled and nomads were warming their hands around dozens of campfires scattered randomly across the dunes. As we passed each circle of nomads, I could hear them swapping stories in an unfamiliar tongue.

When we finally bid Kelas and Skaloo good night, Devi, Betty, and I carried the children back to the tents and laid them in their cots. By then it was bitterly cold, and we spread every jacket and sweater we had on top of them. Finally I collapsed into my own astonishingly uncomfortable cot with all my clothes on. As the temperature dropped toward freezing, I clutched the thin old blanket to my breast, grateful for whatever little warmth it could provide.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough, because the next morning I woke up with a hacking cough. Devi, Betty, and the kids made it through the frigid night and the one that followed without any ill effects, but for me, it was the beginning of a very unpleasant period. As I became progressively sicker, our last four days in India melted into a foggy-headed blur. It was a great shame because during that time we stayed in Jaipur’s fabulous Rambagh Palace, ascended to the Amber Fort on elephant back and toured the sublime Taj Mahal. It’s not that I don’t remember those things. No one who’s ever seen the Taj Mahal—under any circumstances—will ever forget it. It’s just that my body shut down a few more defenses with each passing day, and India—already a very foreign place—began to feel surreal.

By the time, we got to Jaipur, I had a cold, diarrhea, and some sort of skin rash. By Delhi, the cold had turned into bronchitis, and I could barely stand up. Finally I retreated to my bed and spent my hours deconstructing Hindi music videos on Indian MTV (an activity best undertaken in a delirious state). When the rest of the family returned from their day of sightseeing, I lay in bed and groaned ostentatiously.

“Do you want me to get you a doctor?” asked Devi, who’s well used to my sickbed martyrdoms.

“No need for that,” I said with a well-crafted blend of courage and pathos. “Just wheel me onto the plane to Bangkok and I’ll make it somehow.”

The midnight flight from Delhi to Bangkok took eight hours. That didn’t help my bronchitis much, but it gave me time to reflect upon our two weeks in India, and what the children may have learned there. For the most part, India was sort of a shocker—loud, crowded, filthy, bureaucratic, disorganized, prehistorically sexist, and wildly inhumane in its distribution of wealth. The cities were so polluted that it literally made me sick, and even the Taj Mahal—possibly the most glorious edifice ever built—was located next to a stream so putrid that Kara gagged as she walked past it. (There was, among other things, a rotting cow carcass in there.)

Nevertheless, I’m glad we came here, and happier still that we brought our children. Even though I dragged my own fat carcass off the subcontinent weak and decimated, I can say with some pride, that we managed to get three small children across India without so much as a tummy ache. And while they were there, Kara and Willie had some rare opportunities. They met many of their Indian relatives and learned something about their family history and their Jain heritage firsthand. They also saw in unremitting detail what life is like at the bottom of the heap—a memory that should make it difficult for them ever to take their advantages in life for granted. And they saw true wonders of the world here—the camel mehla, the palaces of the maharajas, the Mehrangarh Fort, the markets of Jaipur, the Palace of the Winds, the Amber Fort, the Taj Mahal, even tribal girls dancing in the night with pots of fire balanced on their heads. These are all purely Indian things that will be forever etched on their souls and mine.

²³ The Hindu festival of lights.

²⁴ Literally “ford-makers.”

²⁵ An act of propitiation or atoning sacrifice.

²⁶ Indian religious festival