Ari's Planet

I fell asleep on the bus and awoke in a different, quieter place. I got out of Pushkar around 11:30, on the bus to Ajmer (just 6 INR). In Ajmer, I caught a bus to Bundi (101INR), about a 5 hour ride including a half-hour stop. Either I am learning to deal with Indian bus stations, or the bus station in Ajmer was relatively organized. The bus was pretty comfortable, with plenty of room for the knees and none of the bone-rattling I expected based on the LP. Having sent various items home, my backpack fit, just barely, in the overhead rack. A few more packages home and it will be a breeze to handle. I sat behind a young German couple also on their way to Bundi. After naps of varying duration, I woke with a start to gaze out at the old fort and palaces of Bundi lit by the late afternoon sun. Blue houses filled the valley and a small artificial lake reflected kites caught in trees. The bus rumbled on for another 20 minutes until it reach the dusty bus station.

I caught a rickshaw to the little pond for 20 INR, having learned not to name a guesthouse to avoid any commission tactics. I checked out the Lake View guesthouse, but they wanted 200 INR a night and I was aiming for 150 per night. A friendly young fellow came up and said he was the owner of the Shivam guesthouse. He and his bubbly sister showed me a room, but they wanted 350 as a double or 250 as a single. The room was clean but still too expensive. So I wandered down to RN Haveli Guest House, I was greeted by William and he and his sister showed me one street-level room and another rooftop room--without even bargaining one of the friendly ladies who runs the place dropped the penthouse to 150 and I was sold. On the way down the alley I passed the dead rat and the cow and the little beggar girls and the pump and the trash pile; how could any walk down an alley in India be complete without them?

When I came down to check in I met the matriarch and was soon shown the LA Times travel article and another magazine article about the ladies and their haveli. As the story goes, their father died in 1988. Their mother tried to make ends meet and raise her daughters by working in their fields and selling the produce. Several dry years of poor monsoons made this untenable, so she decided instead to jump on the tourist bandwagon and open a guest house. Their guest house is located in a traditional haveli, a structure with an inner courtyard that allowed the women to remain secluded from the outside world, that has been in their family for 250 years. According to the article, it is very unusual for women to run a guesthouse. They have had to endure scorn from their town for violating these cultural norms. They are especially censored if the young ladies are seen speaking to male guests, so they restrict their contacts with said to the interior of the guesthouse. The older sister is very direct and not shy at all: she will charmingly engage you in conversation.

I met a young woman from Wisconsin and we watched Tom and Jerry on the TV, both remarking how we had seen this particular episode when we were kids. She was volunteering in Kolkata and taking a bit of a break to travel with her French fiance. It was evening and having had no lunch I would have welcomed a convenient meal at the guest house. Their menu, unfortunately, was very expensive, with thali running 150 INR. In a typical Indian food joint thali costs 30 INR. They also needed 1.5 hours to prepare the meal but I was too hungry to wait. Thus began the hunt for reasonably priced food in Bundi.

There is no cheap food in the tourist area. The only restaurants are in the tourist guest houses, where thalis run 50-150 INR. I stopped in one place, ordered a fairly sad thali for around 60 INR. Just as I was finishing up out of one of the adjoining rooms stepped the German couple who had ridden with me on the bus. Bundi is a small town. Still feeling hungry, I wandered along to another guest house. Up on the roof were two women from France and an American from Wisconsin--the second Wisconsinite I had met that night. I ordered a potato paratha and a butter chapati. We got to chatting, and it turns out the American has been traveling for over a year. We were soon joined by a photojournalist, and the conversation go on the track of narrow escapes. I had never been in one, but the photojournalist narrowly escaped becoming a pancake under a boulder while the American wanderer walked through a raging week-long storm in a haunted Icelandic valley. I enjoyed speaking with them. They were the first people I had met who had that long-term traveler mindset, a kind of wandering in the world without dates. Especially the American, who fashioned himself a homemode canvas to paint and takes the world at a different pace.

I got back to my penthouse and slept a sound sleep until woken at 6am by an ear-splitting siren. For a brief moment I feared for my life, it sounded like an air-raid siren, but a few seconds later the mosque started that morning call to prayer. The siren is a wakeup call, in case you somehow could manage to sleep through the prayer. I slept a bit more, then got up in time to see the sun peeking aronud the hilltop. I spent a few minutes taking pictures of the morning light playing across the monkeys and doves climbing and flynig through the kite-strewn tree outside my room. I had a bit of toast and then headed to the palace.

The palace, which dates from around the 16 or 17th century (based on the room dates), is filled with several rooms, each addition having been made by a different Maharaja. It is elegant and oddly winding. Each of the additions is painted in a different style. Some of the paintings are fine, the dominant colors being red, blue, and gold. Colored stones are placed in a few of the windows. An empty bathing area prompted me to remark to some tourists that "this hotel lacks hot water". Parrots flitted from the crenalations around the rooftop. I went on to the adjoining palace, where a room filled with fine paintings, mainly of Vishnu surrounded by many lovely ladies. Outside I ran into the American, and he showed me the way up to the fort. We climbed through a small doorway set in one of the wooden gates, just large enough for a hobbit. We sat and talked a bit about travel, I watched the sun's shadow move across a stone and could nearly see the movement as it changed my seat from shade to sun and I thought of the large sundial in Jaipur whose shadow moves 4 meters an hour.

The fort is wonderful. It is old and nearly empty, very few people making the way up. Bushes with small white flowers and thorn bushes fill the grounds. A large radio or TV tower stands to the west. Several baoris, large open wells, are scattered around the fort. The views of the dry landscape are spectacular. To the north, in the distance, can be seen what look like limestone cliffs. A lake sits to the north east. In the center an impressive yellow tower rises. Double-walls defend the fort, whose doors are covered in spikes. Beneath the walls to the west a ravine, through which a shepherdess moves her goats, protects the castle. The walls are crenelated and are made of filled rubble. On the eastern side is a Shiva temple, marked by a bull facing the shiva lingam. The inside of the temple is painted pink. At the edge of the fort I pushed through some thorn bushes and found a great viewpoint. Stepping toward the outer wall, I could suddenly hear the din of the small city. Its blue houses stretched out below, the rooftops covered in short walls making a patchwork of lines. A rusting cannon lay in one part, another lay pointed out over the city below. It seemed like the perfect place for a young boy to play. The cannon were the only good kind: the kind that cannot be fired, that are decaying to rust. They are decaying to rust because man has found new ways to make more deadly cannon. Man who is like a kite, soaring in the sky, at the mercy of winds, until we are snared upon a tree, our bodies shredded.

I came back down, then wandered the streets of the bazaar. In one section are the metalworkers, making tin and steel pots. Their hammers fall, over and over, stamping out a simple pattern, the sound bouncing off the ends of the bazaar, mingling with music. I wonder how the men do not go deaf. I found lunch, another overpriced thali lacking even rice, at the Kesari Guest House. The rooftop was enclosed to keep the monkeys are bay, the grandfather and children ran around with toy guns. I walked down to the fruit and vegetable market. While purchasing some clementines (called oranges in India), a man kept on insisting I take his picture. I said ok ok, just let me finish, he was so insistent, annoyingly touching my camera, I took his picture so he would shut up, then he wanted me to send him the picture, which I managed to dodge. I took a few more pictures and gave people my web site address to avoid having to send them copies--a task which can be rather tedious. I walked down to a couple of the large and impressive baoris.

I went today by one of the big open wells they use here in Rajasthan. A cow was wandering around the trash. Advertisements were painted on Shiva's temple next to the big well. People would walk down to the water along zig-zagging steps. The well is dry now, which is just as well as it would otherwise be a seething cesspool. Around its edges people instead now urinate and defecate. A child was defecating and cleaning his bottom with water--the Indian style toilet, which equates to the open-air toilet. It stank. A few tourists were looking around. In one area, some sort of viewing spot, a room was painted in Brahmin blue and appeared to be kept clean and used as a temple. The step-levels are now used for drying cow dung patties to be used as fuel. In each cow patty are the impressions of the makers hands, fingers overlayed upon fingers. But what I wondered the most about was the story of the defecating child. Why is that what stayed with me? I have seen this plenty before. I think because it was a kind of summary of all of the things in this holy place.

After a bit of Internet use and a long dinner at Shivam Guest House, I got back to the RN Haveli to find the living room filled with tourists. Apparently I missed the traditional dinner, but I did get to have some snacks. A doctor and EMT from Belgium deftly avoided getting dragged into treating the mother, who had injured her back, knee, and ankle falling down the steps. I could appreciate both predicaments: the mother clearly wants some treatment, the doctor is not licensed in India, is on vacation, and lacks the diagnostic tools necessary to begin treatment. Loud music was blaring from one of the rooftops, and I was sure it would be another sleepless night. The music was being played in anticipation of a Muslim festival in which men self-mutilate by impaling their bodies with various instruments in very painful and dangerous sound manners. Fortunately the music stopped during the night and I was able to sleep--up until the 6am wakeup siren.

I got out early in the morning, walked past the little artificial pond, then along the road to town. The music-blaring-guys were mesing with their speaker. Imagine a low-quality stereo speaker, only there's only one, connected in a very jury-rigged manner to various old amplifiers and music input devices and powered by electricity directly siphoned off the mains, being played way past its clipping range so that the sound of the Indian music is loud, tinny, and highly distorted--an effect hightened by the already tinny and whiny character of the music. I went up to the secondary wall lining the hilltop to observe the city below. A muslim grave sits at the western end of this wall. The grave is painted green and must have belonged to someone important as red and yellow threads were tied to its low surrounding wall. A monkey sat on the defensive wall. I came down, checked out the youngsters attempts at getting their amplifier going, then went back down to the guesthouse.

A monkey had stolen one of the daughters dresses. It sat itself on a neighboring rooftop and was entertaining itself with her red dress. As I looked around I saw other monkeys carrying their own brightly colored trophies. Eventually the monkey lost interest in its prize. The dress was torn in several places following the undesired attentions. I went down for some breakfast and chatted with the mother, two newly arrived tourists, and the photojournalist. We snacked on some special Ayurvedic food, a kind of dark spicey paste, filled with a long list of things (plants and spices), the names of none of which did I recognize but which the mother and daughter assured us would keep us healthy. The photojournalist was waiting for his ride to see the petroglyphs, said ride being rather late as it seemed to be running on Indian time.

I went to the Maharajah museum next door and paid the 100 INR admission and 50 INR photography permit. This is another one of those family album museums, where the kings' personal portraits, possessions, and hunting trophies are displayed. Portraits show meetings with such noted people as the queen of England, Hollywood stars, and the guy who invented ballpoint pens (the last probably having a greater impact on our lives than the former). In the main building are displayed various hunting trophies: tigers, leopards, buffalo, deer, bear, and other smaller cats, as well as a large marlin. Colored glass filters the light that falls across the trophies, through their glass eyes, and onto the pale-yellow walls. The dead animals stand out from the othewise empty hall, fake tongues hanging in their mouths in grimaces imparted by the taxidermist.

Now, I await the Muslim festival of self-mutilation.