THERE WERE two types of people at the Evergreen Guest House in Jaipur: Westerners dealing in precious stones and first-time travellers. Seeing as the only vital stones I’d ever come across originated in my uncle’s gall bladder, I targeted the latter group for light conversation. The majority looked a little out of sorts though, keeping their noses firmly wedged between the pages of Lonely Planet’s guidebook.
After two days of sitting in silence, sleeping in smelly grey sheets and swimming with pigeons, it was time to leave ‘Neverclean’. I bought a ridiculously cheap bus ticket at the Rajasthan tourism office offering a full day’s tour of the maharajas’ palaces. As the bus chugged its way into the compound, I realised that sticking to one’s budget could sometimes be a greater source of agony.
The bus had seen a few wars, definitely lived through independence and possibly The Uprising in 1857. It was mid-summer, and the windows provided enough hot air to get Richard Branson interested. The seats could have been mistaken for holograms if my shorts weren’t melting into them.
The tour guide refused to start until everyone on the bus was silent. Most passengers were Indian, interested in learning more about the desert state. India was quite like Europe in that almost each state had its own cultural identity, history and language. Once the babies were hushed, and the men stopped shouting, our guide began the tour in English. In the next nine hours, I made out two phrases: ‘On the left hand side’ and ‘on the right hand side’. That was it. Everything else got lost in translation.
During our first stop at Lakshmi temple, I made my first friend.
“Hello. I’m Narinder. Where you from?”
“Hi. Stef. Cyprus.”
As the blank look swept over his face I knew immediately my origins were not going to be explored any further.
“Here alone? No girlfriend? Ha, never mind, you still very young. Much time.”
It took me a while to convince Narinder I was two years older than him, while his wife and two children looked on in disbelief. Narinder was a chef at one of the more luxurious hotels in the Taj Group chain. We spent the rest of the journey talking food and visiting the complex maze of rooms where each maharaja would house his harem so that only he and his eunuchs could find them.
The next day I tried to take a rickshaw to the Galta Monkey Temple. As soon as one driver cottoned on to the fact I needed transport, another three turned up and a deranged bidding war started. All four took turns to drive in front of me and give me their ‘last price’ as if they were passing batons in a relay team. I walked away from the ensuing chaos, reluctant to negotiate with pushy touts.
Finally, I fixed a price with a serene-looking driver some distance away. I paid more but was happy to be away from all the madness on the street. It turned out the monkey temple had more rats than monkeys. A stunning village girl, no older than 16, was manning the temple with her albino mother. The red mark in the parting of her hair revealed her as a young bride.
“Where you from?”
“Cyprus,” I replied with a thin veil of hope.
“Write me your country.”
I did as she asked, captivated by her simple beauty. Before I could even show her the paper, she asked: “Your country make donation of pen?”
Feeling a little dejected that her interest in me had been corrupted by ulterior motives, I gave up my pen, and tore the paper on which ‘CYPRUS’ was written.
“Here, take that too. It’s no use to me here,” I muttered.
That night I went to one of the only bars in town, the Polo Bar at the Rambaugh Palace Hotel. Despite the introduction of democracy in India, making it the largest secular democracy in the world, Rajasthan was still littered with evidence of its feudal past.
Although some of the older palaces were open for tourism, others remained in the private hands of the maharajas. Some still lived in their palaces, while one prince realising he could make a lot more money letting other people stay over, converted his palace into a hotel. On entering the large complex, I was struck by the beauty and opulence of the place. White marble everywhere. Even the rickshaw driver was gobsmacked, and like myself, felt a little out of place in the pristine surroundings. He dropped me off a good 100m from the hotel’s entrance, wary of tarnishing the polished road leading up to it.
As I made my way to the Polo Bar, I passed the outdoor restaurant, lit by hundreds of candles. The hotel guests, a mixture of jet-setting Westerners and affluent Rajputs, were adorned in designer ‘Indian’ attire. They ate their meals facing the magnificently manicured gardens while two tabla players patted their instruments discreetly, reluctant to disturb the palatial ambience.
Inside the bar, I met up with Elizabeth and Marc, from England and Northern Ireland, who I met during the other day’s budget bus tour. Both were studying medicine in Scotland and had come to India to work in a Delhi slum for two weeks. Seeing as none of us had spent more than £6 a day for what seemed like an eternity, we all agreed to live it up in the Polo Bar for one night. Like me, they were stunned by the sheer opulence of the place. It was hard to reconcile the glaring poverty and dirt outside with the marvellous structure and attention to detail within. The contrast shook me but not enough to throw away my banana and mango daiquiri. As I sipped on my 450 rupee cocktail, it occurred to me that I was gulping down a week’s wages for many. On leaving, we were warned by Reception not to wait outside the palace grounds for the taxi to appear as it “could be dangerous”.
I returned to ‘Neverclean’, hidden within a labyrinth of dark alleyways. People were actually paying to live like maharajas, I thought. Fair enough, they certainly got a taste of one part of Indian life. But a very limited one, restricted to the confines of their hotel, which might as well be in any country in the world. The pool in my Jaipur guest house might have been pigeon-infested but at least from there, if I wished, I had access to all the social and economic strata in the state. Nothing was hidden under the rug. Restricting my movements to ‘horse blinder tourism’ would be like visiting Versailles at the end of the 18th century and commenting on my return: “It was lovely, they really know how to make a good cake.”
