INDIA - MADHYA PRADESH - OMKARESHWAR & BANDHAVGARH

The Narmada gives a spiritual significance to all the settlements on its banks, but Omkareshwar is more special because of its river island whose shape resembles the mystical syllable Om (ॐ), that gives the town its name.

The concept of Om is of great dharmic significance and the tendrils of its meaning spread through the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cultures, but it can be usefully defined as ‘the absolute’.

Omkareshwar thus attracts many pilgrims who come to circumambulate the island’s circuit of temples and to bathe in the river, whose level here has in recent years been sadly depleted by a massive dam resembling an alien spaceship straddling the valley just upstream.

Richie and I arrived in the bustling mid-afternoon and checked in to an extremely basic and flimsy concrete-box hotel room. There was an antique evaporative air cooler built into the wall. This pharaonic technology propels air through a mat of wet straw or bamboo and evaporation cools the outflow.

It’s an effective process, but the banshee screeching of our unit’s bone-dry fan and the hideous gurgling of its tubercular water pump drowned out the street noise - no mean feat in an Indian town.  

Other amenities in our room were just as archaic. Richie recoiled from the squat toilet and bucket shower like a flapper femme fatale in a silent horror movie. But I didn’t notice him recoiling from the six-euro nightly tariff.

The plan was to spend a few days kicking (further) back and exploring Omkareshwar. Our onward journey, though, was less clear, but the next stop at Bandhavgarh National Park was determined, and we needed to figure out how to get there. Conducting online research in a local travel agency was a memorable experience.

Oh hey 128k dialup that continually disconnects! Long time no see, decrepit Win2K machine that hasn’t been defragged in twelve years! You look splendid in low-res, toolbar-laden malware-bloated IE6 sucking up 78% of CPU! - And great to catch up, incredibly frustrating Indian Railways timetable website whose logic requires chess grandmaster status to comprehend!

All these together at last; great fun in forty-degree heat. What fun it must have been to navigate India in the Hippy Trail days. After grappling with this killer combo for a few hours we found that it had become necessary to leave Omkareshwar early the next morning for the town of Khandwa, there to catch a train to the city of Jabalpur, there to catch another train to the village of Umaria, there to take a rickshaw the final 50km to the tiger park.

It was unfortunate that our time was cut short. Although not as pleasant or accessible as Maheshwar, Omkareshwar is an interesting and atmospheric town. Its hills and river bridges and its pilgrims, sadhus and mendicants reminded me of Rishikesh - or rather of how Rishikesh might have been before the Beatles rolled through in 1968 and left the place like a Hindu Disneyland.

So we spent what remained of that evening walking the winding paths of the Om island, past the never-ending stalls hawking religious icons, tacky souvenirs and flower garlands, and ended up eating dinner at an empty backpackers’ hostel whose grateful one-eyed proprietor sent his boy on a ten-minute run through the twisting backstreets to fetch bottles of soda water to go with our lime juice.

We woke at 4am the next morning to find the hotel doorman sprawled snoring on the floor of the locked reception room. Like a greenhorn I spent five minutes tapping politely on his window to open the gate so we could catch our taxi. Then I remembered that this was India, so I smashed the shutters repeatedly with my fists, and soon got a dozy response for which I gave the appropriate baksheesh.

***

Khandwa to Jabalpur

We drove through total darkness for hours before the sun rose. Night driving in India is unnerving on country roads, but on the highways it becomes truly terrifying. Oncoming trucks blinded us with their high beams, swerving to a random side in the seconds before collision. Convoys travelling in our direction left eight inches of space between their bumpers so, when overtaking, we were forced to drive on the wrong side for heartstopping minutes.

India’s infrastructural modernisation proceeds at breakneck speed with scant consideration for local concerns. Without signage or diversions, the traffic must find its own way through the endless roadworks. On the ouskirts of Khandwa our long-suffering driver drove into a dead end and had to weave audaciously in reverse past the heavy machinery.

We’d been generous with our commuting time and arrived at Khandwa Junction before 7am - several hours before the earliest scheduled arrivals. I purchased a couple of unreserved cattle-class tickets to Jabalpur. As we sat on the deserted platform waiting for the omelette-wallahs to arrive and fire up their kerosene burners I decided to seek the advice of the mighty Deputy Station Manager.

This was a tall and languid middle-aged dandy whose orange hennaed hair and moustache jarred offensively with his snow-white suit and shoes. He sat behind a heavy wooden desk in a small room whose every surface was piled high with boxes and ledgers and files and other accoutrements of Indian bureaucratic authority.

Despite clearly having nothing to do, it being 7am, he waved me away dismissively with a vague recommendation to take the second train to Jabalpur, due to pass several hours after the first.

A group of young off-duty Indian Railways employees arrived and countered this advice. *All* the eastbound services were full, they said; crammed with labouring Biharis returning from Bombay to their native state for a brief summer holiday. Best to just board any passing train and haggle for an upgrade, paying no more than Rs150 per person to the conductor.

So when the first train arrived we jumped onto a sleeper carriage that was unbelievably jammed. Families squeezed eight to a bench and single men in plastic sandals carpeted the filthy floor. Children played and slept atop baggage heaped on the upper berths.

Richie and I stood swaying and sweating in the aisle for a couple of hours until our fellow passengers began to take pity. First they offered to stow our bags behind their heads and under their kids. Then they found room where there was none, and allowed us to perch on the edge of their seats.

The woman beside me wore many golden bangles and many golden earrings, one of which was attached with a golden chain to a golden nose stud. Shuffling to make a tiny space, she crossed her legs and unfolded a banana leaf upon which she began dextrously to chop onions, tomatoes and chillies into chaat for her family.

***

A group of hijras moved through the carriage. “Gays, gays,” dismissed the woman beside me.

Often erroneously defined as ‘eunuchs’, a better term would be ‘transsexuals’, although some hijras campaign to be recognised as a third sex. The word derives from the Arabic root hjr, ‘to leave one’s tribe,” from which also comes the Arabic hijra, signifying Mohammed’s journey in exile from Mecca to Medina.

Despite an established culture dating back to the Kama Sutra, and despite favourable mention in both the Ramayana (in which the community is blessed by Ram) and the Mahabharata (wherein Krishna assumes female form in order to marry a man), South Asian hijras are perceived as a lowly caste and are traditionally isolated from mainstream society.

Much blame for this can be directed at the late British Raj which, with its social arrogance and hysterical conservatism, criminalised the hijra. Although these laws were repealed very soon after Indian independence, the stigma had after a hundred years become intransigent.

Some hijras earn a living by ceremonial performance (or rather to depart promptly from the ceremony once their part has been played), but many more resort to sex work, and the community as a whole is often subject to prejudice and persecution ranging from the vocal to the violent.

The small group in our bogey comprised a strikingly beautiful teenager in a yellow sari, with piercing green eyes and a determined and graceful articulation, who was clearly the star of the show. S/he was followed by two plump ladies in blue and green, and a shambling and sniggering man in late middle age, with an obvious mental disability, who compulsively drew a pink veil across the grey stubble on his cadaverous face.

Moving through our carriage the hijras flirted aggressively with the younger male passengers, touching them around the face and (presumably) shaming them with coarse talk. Although they tried their best to avoid eye contact and remain studiously ignorant, most of the male passengers contributed paper money - as did many women.

Despite clearly being the richest pickings in attendance Richie and I were bypassed without a glance, which I thought unfortunate. To this day I regret not asking them if they would allow me to take photos in exchange for a donation, but my camera was buried deep in my bag.

***

A while later the oppressed train conductor discovered us goras. He beckoned me to fill out multiple forms and pay Rs300 for a bench along the aisle from which I believe (with shame) a couple of lower-paying passengers had been evicted. There Richie and I lay head to foot for the next five hot hours until arrival at Jabalpur.

***

Bowling in a rickshaw through the roasting city we found our chosen hotel to be full, so we checked in to the next option. A wedding was taking place downstairs, and gangs of associated children shrieked through the corridors on a sugar high.

After venturing out to obtain snacks and booze, Richie and I sequestered ourselves in the blissful windowless cool of our air-conditioned room and spent the afternoon taking a break from India in the company of James Bond. Later we went to eat in a restaurant filled with portly middle-class families sucking up mountains of pistachio ice-cream.

Early next morning at Jabalpur station we strode illegitimately into the first-class ‘retiring’ room and awaited the train to Umaria and the national park. I went outside for a smoke and was accosted by the pink-veiled hijra from the day before. He pursued me hooting and grabbing drunkenly at my crotch. A crowd gathered and the auto-wallahs laughed coarsely but good-naturedly from their rank.

After a few hours our train arrived at Umaria and we had no choice but to stump up the Rs500 for a 45-minute rickshaw ride to the national park. The road was nicely tarmaced by the state government right up to the park gates, where responsibility for its upkeep fell to the forestry authority, and its quality immediately became abominable.


***

Bandhavgarh

As Dublin boys, Richie and I were amused, after a day’s hard travelling through rural India, to arrive in Tala village, in the remote Bandhavgarh National Park. We were a long way from Tallaght, and the temperature was forty-three degrees Celsius.

It was low season and the local state tourist lodge was operating at 5% capacity. But their grudging discount was so derisory that the nightly charge at the adjoining no-frills guesthouse was exactly equivalent to the difference between their full and discounted rates - so we went for the cheap option.

As Richie slept off the journey, I headed out to meet other travellers, to get the lowdown on the park and its workings, and to find the local English Wine Shop. Drinking Kingfishers at sunset on the rooftop of the Royal guesthouse, I met an incoming safari group.

I was dismayed to learn from them that there were several areas within the park, each served by different entrances. Passing through Gate 1 virtually guaranteed a tiger sighting, but access needed to be arranged months in advance (by fax, naturally) through one of the five-star resorts outside of town. Gates 2, 3 and 4 were for plebeians like us.

It became clear that the only way to get through Gate 1 was to arrive well before dawn and literally beg for a spare seat in one of the jeeps in the queue. So we resolved to do just that.

Arriving at Gate 1 at 5am the next morning we found Indian bureaucracy to be alive and well. Waving their daily permits, a mob of local drivers jostled and clamoured to be authorised by an ancient official behind a single tiny office window. All the other Indians squatted around drinking tea and smoking. The poncy five-star guests sat bolt upright in their jeeps gently stroking their giant cameras.

We approached some of the more empty jeeps and offered to pay handsomely for a space. This was an interesting experience. Perhaps it brought us closer to the lives of those destitute Indians outside railway stations who shove malnourished children in one’s face and make heartbreaking hungry-mouth gestures.

Some of the five-star crowd merely ignored us with incredible arrogance. Others waved us away without looking. So rude and nasty! Most of the rest - mainly Indians - tried to explain that “the driver wasn’t allowed to take anyone else.” Bullshit: the driver does what he’s told and gets some extra baksheesh.

There were only five of us looking for a space, and there were at least fifteen free spaces in the queued jeeps. But we got nowhere, two mornings in a row. Astounded by this lack of charity from fellow travellers, we gave up and went through Gate 2.

Three days, three jeep safaris, and not a sniff of a cat, although we were tantalised by tiger and leopard tracks fresh in the sand. We also saw some rare deer and fancy birds. But the most memorable creature we encountered was a caricature of a German woman who we named Leni Riefenstahl.

Leni was a stylish but slightly manic photographer in her late middle age, travelling solo. Without asking, we soon learned her pedigree: she’d visited Bandhavgarh, and most other wildlife parks in India, many times, aside from other far-flung expeditions to Africa and Indonesia. I resisted the urge to ask her why with all this experience she had failed to gain admittance through Gate 1 and had to beg for a seat alongside rubes like Richie and me.

On our first safari she sat in the front and noticed that our teenage driver was very tired. "Aha, mein freund, I see zat you are sleeping!” she roared, “But we come to see tigers, yes? So, let us go!" And then she fell asleep herself, almost immediately, as if she’d been shot dead, and her dyed-blonde head in its wrap-around shades and designer scarf bobbed obscenely close to the gearstick.

When we got back she flayed the poor boy for having been five minutes late that morning. With him still within earshot she turned to us and bellowed, "I tell him, not five fifteen AM, not five AM, but four forty-five AM you vill be here! And he is laughing!" She threw her head back, "Kha, kha, kha! And he says Oh! Kay! And actually his head is waggling! But I say, you must tell zese people many times, or zey are not listening!” 


She had a point. She also twitched around the face.

INDIA - MADHYA PRADESH - MAHESHWAR

Richie and I left Mandu for Maheshwar in Vishwas Jaiswal’s tiny and rickety LPG-powered red Maruti hatchback - the same car and driver that had delivered me to the town of Dhar five years previously. Vishwas had then been a body-building bachelor and had regaled me with ribald stories of how foreign women flung themselves at him.


“Yes, many western girls are saying Oh Vishwas, oh handsome, very strong, yes Vishwas please take me in your taxi, and I am asking, Where going? and they are saying, No problem Vishwas just please going with you any places, ha, ha!” He had added charitably that “Swedish girls very good for poking.”


Now married with two children, Vishwas is no longer poking Swedes. His preposterous skintight nylon trousers and garish polyester shirt have been replaced by much more sensible and comfortable attire; he’s gained a paunch and some extra chins; and he has allowed his clipped Errol Flynn moustache to spread into a much more luxuriant model. All these are sure signs of matrimony in the Indian male, although, to be fair, merely being over twenty years old is also a fairly good indicator.

Leaving Mandu

Vishwas didn’t remember me from 2006, despite my having paid half of his fare with duty-free cigarettes, but he gracefully pretended otherwise. He did, however, recall the massive thunderstorm that hit Mandu on a sultry Diwali that year, and talking about the past seemed to embolden him. Once out on the road some of his old swagger returned. Cranking up the Bollywood hits, he drove at insane speeds over the half-finished roads, and performed a slick manoeuvre through a petrol station courtyard to avoid the new highway’s toll booth.


 ***

Maheshwar ghat

Having been mentioned in the Mahabharata, the riverside town of Maheshwar possesses an ample supply of temples, and its strategic position during the rise to local dominance during the 18th century of the prestigious Holkar dynasty (particularly under the long reign of the much-venerated philosopher Queen Ahilyabai) has left it with an extensive fort palace and a series of impressive ghats along the Narmada.


***


Spending time in places like Maheshwar is one of the main reasons I travel in India. Small and remote enough so as not to attract many western tourists, yet ancient and significant enough to possess cultural and architectural clout, it’s a laid-back town where the pace is pretty slow and there’s not much to do other than amble around soaking up the atmosphere and mingling with the local folks.

Maheshwar

Vishwas dropped us at Laboo’s Café, a quaint guesthouse whose accommodation occupies the former guards’ quarters in the main gate of the town fort. Despite the absence of other guests the owner wasn’t receptive to my attempts at haggling, but I didn’t mind. There were good views from the battlements and the courtyard was shaded by a huge bougainvillea.

Our room at Laboo's.

Maheshwar backstreets.

Maheshwar

Our room’s thick walls ensured a relatively cool and quiet night’s sleep, despite both the whining of an ancient pedestal fan, which we figured to be older than both of us combined, and the unbelievably deafening fanfare of a perambulating pickup truck that aggressively advertised a new “Technical eSchool” on the outskirts of town.

Maheshwar

During our short stay in Maheshwar we spent a lot of time down on the ghats. With their universal societal importance as the sites of essential trade, washing, and fishing, and their specific religious significance to the Hindus, these massive stone steps down to the water play a central role in any Indian riverside town.

Maheshwar ghat

Anyone who has stood on the ghats at Varanasi and watched the filthy Ganges oozing past in its sickly froth can appreciate just how uninviting a dip in an Indian river can seem. According to legend, the Ganges herself became so polluted that she assumed the form of a cow and came to bathe in the Narmada to be cleansed.

Maheshwar ghat

Although I’m no riverine goddess, I’m certainly a fat cow, and on yet another extremely hot day the Narmada seemed pretty clean to me, so I jumped in, swam out and splashed around.


It’s a pretty special experience to float on the lazy current of a warm Indian river as the evening cacophany of sounds and aromas drift across from the ghats and the sandstone palace turns pink in the sunset. Perhaps it didn’t cleanse my sins, but it certainly washed away the memory of years sitting in an office cubicle staring into a screen.

***


In an attempt to describe how I felt, I would say that it seemed as though my personal sphere of perception was abruptly exposed as almost childishly myopic. Its borders were revealed as being arbitrarily self-imposed and with a breathtaking immediacy they dissolved from my conscious mind. A multiplicity of opaque possibilities unfolded, along with a wonderful feeling of infinite communal opportunity. Past, present and future were enriched by a certainty of ineffable promise that remained just beyond my full comprehension.

This was undoubtedly a spiritual experience, one of many I’ve encountered in my life, only some of which were induced by psychoactive substances. Many things make travel addictive, but this sublime feeling must be one of the main active ingredients, and I'm always chasing the next hit.


*** 

For atheists, spiritualism is a semantically loaded concept and, predictably, we tend to have a greater consensus on a negative definition than a positive one: spirituality does not require the divine. Rather it implies an empathic awareness of the connections between individuals, communities, nature and the cosmos - a unity that is not a priori unknowable, but merely seems so because the moment of experience is so transient.

Swimming in the Narmada

My own dry definition of spiritualism is a temporary segue into objectivity of the subjective consciousness - which is itself ultimately reducible to neurochemistry. Perhaps it’s sad to believe that the fleeting splendour of spiritual experience will one day be defined by patterns of synaptic firings, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could induce objective empathy in the human mind? Think of the misery and suffering that could be avoided. We might even be able to make communism work.


***


Sadly, on emerging clumsily from the river and standing to dry in the breeze, realism, subjectivity and their attendant neuroses fell back upon me like a bag of hammers. Never have I felt more out of place. In the company of a multitude of skinny Indian boys, all smiles and ribs and knees and elbows, I felt like a hirsute albino zeppelin that had been rendered temporarily buoyant only by the cash stuffed within my ample folds.

Thankfully I had swum with another Irishman who shared my bloated blancheur - not Richie, who refused the experience, no doubt concerned (rightly) about leptospirosis or Crohn’s disease - but Jimmy, a wandering carpenter with an improbable blonde quiff and handlebar moustache, whose Aussie visa had expired and who was heading back, very slowly and unwillingly, to an uncertain future in Ireland.


And so we three retired to drink shot glasses of scalding spicy tea from the Narmada ghat’s chai-wallah, and to ooh and aah over his adorable little boy, as the sun set and the bats began to flap over the darkening river.

Chai-wallah's son

INDIA - MADHYA PRADESH - MANDU

Only a tiny fraction of the millions of travellers who flock between Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, the three vertices of India's touristic Golden Triangle, make the short detour south to Madhya Pradesh, or MP as it’s commonly known.

It's easy to understand why: the landlocked state's dry and dusty climate, inferior infrastructure, and sheer size - roughly equivalent to that of Poland - mean that journeys between the distant tourist sites are long, hot and arduous.

Travelling here is always uncomfortable and can often be stressful, but those who make the effort are rewarded with a much more authentically Indian experience than can be had in neighbouring Rajasthan.

One might think that the unpopularity of MP, and its poverty, would result in even more hassle and exorbitant price gouging for the foreign tourist, but this is not the case. Here, local people approach goras* with kindness, curiosity and an almost childlike innocence, while the children themselves clamour for attention and photos rather than for pens and rupees.

Unlike some other Indian states I’ve visited, there are very few touts in MP, and travellers are often quoted a reasonable price. It's a predominantly rural and tribal state where the swaraj* way of village life has continued without much change for thousands of years. For sophisticated Mumbaikars, Dilliwallas and Kolkatans, MP is truly mofussil*.





*The Hindi noun gora means ‘white’. Often, though not always, used derisively towards westerners.
*Swaraj is Gandhi's idealised concept of non-hierarchical Indian 'home rule' in which "every village [is] self-sustained and capable of managing its own affairs."
*Mofussil is analogous to the English term 'in the sticks'.

***

The western city of Indore is MP's largest and is a busy place of limited charm. The last time I arrived there I was approached on the tarmac by kindly soldiers who took my elbow and ushered me back towards the plane in the assumption that I had disembarked by mistake. When I insisted the opposite, they smiled and asked, Why you come here? - nothing is here for you.

How wrong they were. Some of my best memories of India come from that trip to MP in 2006. I met wonderful people and I experienced some of the world's most sensational, and least visited, Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim historical sites which, for the most part, I had all to myself. I didn't see another gora for eight consecutive days.

This time there was no confusion at the airport and I went directly to meet another gora: my friend Richie who had flown out from Ireland to travel with me for a few weeks. I took a cab to Indore's mid-market Surya hotel - where the ratio of staff to guests seemed, as is usual in Indian business hotels, to be at least three to one.

None of them attended the reception desk. Instead they all stood with hands clasped looking with expressions of sad concern at a filthy mechanic who extracted a series of greasy cogs and wheels from the workings of the broken elevator.

After checking in with the usual bureaucracy - documents photocopied; multiple signatures; passport and visa numbers, issuance and expiry dates; my previous and subsequent destinations - I shouldered my bags and climbed six flights of stairs, past three concierge desks, to our room.

Richie peered through a crack in the door with a head like a scarecrow, distinctly the worse for wear after flying in that morning via Abu Dhabi and Bombay. After shooting the breeze for a while he seemed to revive, so we headed out for what I hoped would be a cheap-and-cheerful dinner and a few drinks at an atmospheric rooftop restaurant.

But I had the wrong expectations. I had forgotten that this was not Rajasthan. There are no rooftop restaurants for travellers in Indore, so we ended up trading salacious gossip in hushed tones in an oppressively silent family restaurant, followed by a couple of drinks in an oppressively silent bar where groups of heavy men lurked in the dim corners raising whiskey tumblers to their moustachioed lips with burly gold-encrusted fingers.

***

Our first destination was the medieval ruined city of Mandu, perched on a plateau near Indore, where I had spent an amazing Diwali in 2006 - fireworks, and thunder and lightning, and whiskey and hashish, and delicious chaat*, and frenzied cricket, and bonfires on the plain as far as the eye could see.

On that occasion I had spent twelve hours travelling the 100km from Indore to Mandu, squeezed into local buses between a fat sadhu and a tiny schoolgirl. Changing vehicle at the manic bus station in the town of Dhar I hung around eating oily samosas, drinking scalding chai, and watching the bony cattle munch placidly on the garlands of marigolds bedecking the buses.





That was a memorable, though exhausting, journey and this time I wanted to do it again. But a miserable local bus experience of Richie's on his own last trip to India made him insist on a rented taxi. As we settled the hotel bill in Indore, the reception desk a sign was missing a letter and so read “CHECK OUT TIM 10AM.” I hoped I was looking my best.

The hotel clerk who had arranged our taxi astonished me by graciously refusing to accept some decent baksheesh* - the first time I had experienced this embarrassing situation. Clearly I had mistaken someone of either a relatively high caste or position for someone who would denigrate themselves by accepting trifling sums from porcine foreigners.

This time the journey from Indore to Mandu took just three hours, thanks largely to the new highways which are in varying states of completion across the state. But it was very hot - hot enough for our bottles of iced water to attain the ambient temperature within five minutes. There are few more unpleasant liquids to drink than water as warm as one's own blood.

*Chaat can be loosely translated as ‘delicacy’. Savoury bread-, pulse- or potato-based street food with onion, tomato, peanut, coriander, tamarind, yogurt and many spices.
*Baksheesh is a tip or a bribe.

***

At Mandu in 2006 I had stayed by the cliffs at the edge of town, in a basic room crawling with bugs that batted off my face as I tried to sleep and crunched under my feet as I used the bathroom in the darkness. And when I gave the elderly night watchman twenty rupees for waking me at 5am to see the sensational sunrise over the plain he embarrassed me by falling to his knees in thanks.

This time, to my consternation, Richie had booked accommodation at the town’s most expensive resort. At a thousand rupees each per night, it was over twice what I was accustomed to paying, and quite outside my budget. But our little air-conditioned bungalow was pleasant and we flitted gleefully between a bedroom, a sitting room and a walk-in dresser. Our veranda looked onto a lake, sadly depleted by several years of failing monsoons.

In the morning, small groups of colourful sari-clad women appeared on the lip of this lakebed with huge copper pots balanced on their veiled heads and gold bangles jangling on their thin arms. Picking their barefoot way down into the dry basin they collected their families' daily water from grave-like makeshift wells sunk deep into the cracked yellow clay. I felt pangs of guilt thinking of our hotel’s large swimming pool.





At noon a crowd of little boys splashed around in the distant knee-high remnants of the lake chasing lazy storks through the heat haze. And as the sun set families of monkeys squabbled screaming in the lakeside treetops as the scent of frying spices drifted across the water.

This timelessness that pervades rural India affords the western intruder a view of a lifestyle that at a macroeconomic level has changed little in thousands of years. The microeconomic changes have of course been non-trivial - many people now have mobile phones, and the roofs of their hand-built adobe homes are now made of corrugated steel and sport satellite dishes fixed in place with stones. But they still ride bullock carts to market and burn dried cowpats to cook their dinner.

***

How different the sultans’ lives must have been when they wintered here at Mandhavgarh, the City of Joy. The plateau has borne a fortified settlement for thousands of years, claimed by many kings, but its golden age was as the capital of the Afghan Khans of Marwar and their succeeding dynasties, who broke from the Delhi Sultanate in 1401 but were inevitably folded into the Mughal Empire 150 years later by Akbar.

During this brief independence Mandu was heavily crenellated and populated with many ornate structures in a refined Pashtun architectural style that was much admired by later conquerors - including Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, who sent his architects here to study Hoshang Shah’s exquisite tomb - India’s first marble building - as a model for the Taj Mahal.





Such was the magnificence of the brief Marwari interregnum that it warranted the construction of a special palace for the royal harem. The sultans were spoiled for choice: the long and narrow Jahaz Mahal, or Ship Palace, built between two artificial lakes, housed a thousand Turkish concubines.





Although now stripped of all ornament, it’s easy to imagine the glittering jewels and rich textiles that once adorned the vaulted halls of the Jahaz Mahal. From the graceful lotus-shaped rooftop bathing pool, fed by spiralling floor channels, one can see rising from the adjacent lakes the stone platforms which would once have borne lanterns, musicians and medieval go-go dancers.

Scattered across the plateau are numerous other monuments - elegant crumbling chhatris, or tombs: cupolas enclosed by jali screens of tan or red sandstone laboriously pierced by intricate geometric and arabesque patterns; deep baoris, or step-wells, with Escheresque staircases descending to the water; cathedral merchants’ halls and caravanserais; and the ruins of mighty palaces proclaiming the victory of Islam by featuring prominently in their brickwork inverted carvings from demolished Hindu temples.

But the most atmospheric of Mandu’s monuments is the pavilion of Rani Rupmati, perched on a cliff on the outskirts of the city, overlooking the Narmada river plain on one side, and on the other the palace of her husband Baz Bahadur Shah. The tragic coda of this interfaith love story has inspired many poems. Emperor Akbar, obsessed with the beauty of the dancing Hindu queen, easily defeated Bahadur’s forces and conquered Mandu, but Rupmati poisoned herself on the clifftop before she could be forced into the imperial harem.





***

Richie and I wandered this splendid evocative city for three days. Although this visit to Mandu was never going to compare with my wonderful Diwali experience five years previously - not least because of the forty-three degree heat on this trip - we had many memorable encounters.

As soon as we left our hotel we were much in demand. Little boys called down from every treetop and shopkeeping families clamoured for group photos. In the shade of a spreading neem tree in the little market square we were treated to chai by a travelling pharmaceutical salesman.








The family in whose memorable company I dined in 2006 had replaced their atmospheric home with a dark and cavernous concrete hall built for busloads of tour groups. Now it was empty, but the same ancient matriarch sat gazing at soap operas blaring from the wall-mounted television and her demented ramblings were still studiously ignored by her crushed middle-aged son who brought our thalis* from the distant smoky kitchen.

Richie sprang up and down the treacherous steps to Rupmati’s pavilion with the supple grace of a young goat. We endured a lengthy historical lecture from an elderly Dutch traveller wearing a long grey beard and white socks under his sandals. Later, in a barn outside of town that previously functioned as a royal mosque, we smoked charras* and drank beers with another Irish traveller until a nearby local, sleeping outside, shouted at us to move on.


*Thali is the Hindi word for ‘plate’. As a meal, it’s a delicious selection of basic daily curries served in small bowls with rice and bread.
*Charras is hashish.