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Land of holy pigeons

Jeremy Clarke

Wednesday, 15th October 2008

Jeremy Clarke on his trip to Rajasthan

My memories of it seem too far-fetched. Perhaps I only dreamed I went to Rajasthan for five days. The fabulous hotel at Jaipur, for example — did I really stay there? Were we really greeted on arrival by dancing warriors and ceremonial elephants? Or was it dancing elephants and ceremonial warriors? (The heat was dizzying.) I must have done. We must have been. I have photographs.

The Oberoi Rajvilas’s lobby, restaurant, library and shop are housed in a replica adobe fort, complete with loopholes and battlements. Behind the fort the guests’ villas and tents lie scattered about the lakes, gardens and temples in hamlets and encampments. The entrance to my villa was like an award-winning arbour at the Chelsea Flower Show. The peacefulness of the place was amplified by a splashing fountain, and somewhere in the branches above my head, by a dove, gently brooding on the sound of its own voice. It was news to me that temporal perfection was possible. I worried about it at first. It seemed almost blasphemous. Then I got used to it. Lounging beside the pool, I watched an elderly gardener spend a morning replanting individual blades of grass in a threadbare patch of lawn just four inches square. You didn’t have to walk anywhere. Golf buggies dexterously driven by amazingly beautiful, inflexibly polite women ferried us around this exotic paradise. I’d never been chauffeured in a golf buggy before. Sometimes I fancied I was Patrick McGoohan in the Sixties cult series The Prisoner.

After breakfast one day we left the hotel’s cool precincts and made an excursion across town to see the Amber Fort, built by Jaipur’s celebrated warrior prince Jai Singh in the 16th century. We were driven by Vikram, a dead ringer for Errol Flynn complete with pencil moustache, in one of the hotel’s fleet of limousines. Vikram wore the ankle-length gown and the massive warrior-caste turban. The interior of his car was fridge-cold, and for our journey he’d chosen an ‘Asian fusion’ CD — a hallucinatory mixture of Western rock music and traditional Indian sounds that hit the spot.

Vikram edged the car out into a Jaipur-bound arterial road. We’d set out at a busy time. It was the middle of the rush hour during an industrial revolution. We surged into town on the crest of a wave of mopeds, horses, rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, elephants, minibuses, city buses, tractors, camels, bicycles, lorries and motor cars of all degrees of decrepitude — with Vikram pressing his horn calmly and without rancour.

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