Jaipur is the capital city of Rajasthan state situated on the edge of the Thar desert. It has a population of about 2.4 million with the roughly the same ethnic/religious make-up of the rest of northern India. That is to say Hindus comprise about 80% of the population. There are 53% males and 47% females….now there’s an odd statistic. Much of the city was actually planned by one of the many Singhs in the line of Singh Maharaja rulers, Sawai Jai Singh. It, unlike all other ancient Indian cities, is layed out on a rectangular block basis with streets running perpendicular to one another. Inside of the old city all buildings are painted pink (hence the familiar name, The Pink City). This is not the pink of little girls dresses; this is the pink of a salmon laying in the sun for too long. The streets were designed as wide avenues, but they’ve been endroached upon by time and squalor. There are hundreds of little cubby hole shops, now installed with garage door looking devices to close them off, also painted pink. Mahboob, our Jaipur guide, explained why many, if not most of them, were shuttered by saying that they were temporary shops. They only opened for certain festival days or weeks, then closed and moved on to another more propitious location. I guess the rent roll would be pretty hard to keep current. We spent a good bit of our time at the Observatory also built by Sawai Jai Singh in 1728, just after he had completed the layout of the center city. The observatory was designed to answer questions about astronomy, astrology, and forecast the weather. I’m not nearly smart enough to explain it all, but suffice it to say that he built a sundial that could accurately tell the time (on a sunny day, of course) to within a tolerance of two seconds. Another device he constructed could tell the variance of actual Jaipur time relative to the prime meridian based time for any moment in time. This was quite a guy.
We arrived late afternoon after another grueling two hundred km car trip and decided to hunker down to recuperate in the hotel. The Oberoi Rajvilas is another of the great Oberoi hotels, and one of the earliest of the chain. It is a exquisitely refurbished palace set on thirty-two acres on the outskirts of the city. It’s not the kind of location that you go out the gate for a stroll and a cup of coffee at a neighborhood Starbucks. We are staying in a tented villa which is on a secluded cul-de-sac with two other villas near the rear fenced perimeter of the property. A beautiful setting to be sure, but as we discovered about 4:00 am the next morning we were too close to humanity for comfort. As I arose for my morning ablutions, I heard what sounded like screeching and wailing accompanied by banging of tinny cymbols. I explored further by stepping out on our terrace and was confronted by a cacophony of sound unlike any I’d heard. It was obviously coming from outside the grounds of the hotel, so there seemed nothing to be done except go back to bed and stuff the earplugs in a little further.
The mystery of the mornings sounds was solved when a travel agent looking lady commiserated with me about the Kite Festival. I replied, “kite festival? What does that have to do with this morning’s racket. She said, “the kite festival started last night, and what you heard was the beginning of the celebration, and it wasn’t just this morning, it had gone on all night. Indian love their parties”. That was my introduction to The Festival of Mankar Sankranti. I found, as the day went on, that there was much more to Marnkar Sandranti than kite flying. To be brief, the festival commemorates the day on which Lord Rama brought the Ganges down to earth. The tradition is that one approaches the Ganges, ideally at the confluence of one of the major tributaries (don’t ask me why) at the appointed hour and then rushes headlong with those of similar mind who have gathered. They splash around, cover themselves in sacred Ganges mud, and generally frolic for some time and then repair to the shore for more festivities, and some kite flying. If you’ve read what I’ve previously written about sanitation practices, you can see the health perils of this endeavor. Perhaps Lord Rama looks out for his celebrants.
We went to see the Amber Fort today, because that what one does in Jaipur. It’s a massive structure complete with exterior walls to keep the bad guys out and a huge interior structure for a few hundred of the Maharaja’s closest friends, family, and retainers. The part I liked the best was the harem quarters. There were twelve equal apartments for each of the twelve “official wives, and each apartment could be entered via a secret passageway from the Maharaja’s suite of rooms on the level above. I guess they had green eyed monsters even then. The architecture was an amalgamation of mughal, arabic, and something else that I can’t remember, but it all hung together. The buider of the edifice, Sawai Man Singh I, when he wasn’t busy creeping through secret corridors, was either collecting taxes, settling local disputes, or fighting some war or another. His direct decendent, Sawai Bhawari Singh, still lives in a portion, and a quite nice portion it is, of the palace…..the remainder of which is given over to museums, cafes and trinket shops. Bhawari is revered by the local citizenary for his lineage, for his wealth, but mostly for the fact that he commanded a regiment of the Indian Paras who had great success in killing their Pakistani counterparts in the 1972 war. I’ll bet you didn’t even know there was a war between India and Pakistan in ’72.
For those of you who have read The Kite Runner, you’ll have some idea how all this works. Kite flying is both a creative endeavor, combat, and a competition to see how many kites one can “win”. Most of the kites I saw, and, yes, the one I flew, were small diamond shaped kites of some synthetic material with a very short tail and attached to extremely light weight glass coated string. They are flown from any open space, but since there isn’t much open space, they are most often flown from the roof tops of buildings. When one’s kite goes down for any reason, it’s “first hog to the trough”, so to speak. Whoever gets there first and recovers the kite is said to have “won” the kite.
We had taken a break from our tourist duties for “tiffin” and were seated in a sparsely grassed courtyard in front of an Indian hotel of the second or third rank. As we drank our diet Pepsi’s using a straw in order to avoid what S. calls bottle filth, a youngish man was artfully coaxing a kite into the sky while dodging electric and phone wires, tree limbs, and protrusions of all sorts from local buildings. I spent several minutes admiring his craft and then asked if he would mind if I took a picture. He readily agreed and then motioned for me to take command of the kite. I’ve been flying kites since long before Ghandi, so I thought, “no problemo”. As soon as I took control, the kite developed a mind of it’s own, and decided to take a dive bombing run at the hotel balcony where two small children had to take cover. I over corrected by yanking furiously on the glass coated string almost severing my index finger at the knuckle. The kite then decided to do a series of barrell roles that I could only watch, the headed for ground zero. The gentlemen who had gotten me into this then inquired of me, “does Sahib need helping”. I was trying to back peddle to keep some pressure on the rapidly falling kite while giving the string a series of short jerks that I had seen the owner use to good effect. I suspect this strategy might have worked if I hadn’t stepped on a crouching cur dog. He yelped, I let go of the kite, the owner recovered the string, and I, shamefacedly, went back to my diet Pepse and observer status.
Well, I should say that I’ve taken a little poetic license with the kite incident for color, but the elements are all there. A lot like life, it’s own self.
