Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

NIGHT TRAIN TO JODHPUR: THE MANDORE EXPRESS

I KNEW WITHOUT BEING TOLD that the train to Jodhpur would be leaving from platform 16; it was obvious from the look of the waiting travelers. Most of the world dresses alike, in blue jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers. Rural India is one of the exceptions to this worldwide sartorial monotony, and Rajasthan remains outstandingly itself, self-possessed and multihued. At Old Delhi Station it was possible to see from the clothes of the women on the platform that they awaited the Mandore Express to Jodhpur.

Where else would they be going, draped and painted like that, dressed in yellow and red saris, russet shawls fringed with gold embroidery or ocherous borders, long saffron wraps, winking veils, heavy gold jewelry, ropes of knuckle-sized beads and heavy bangles, feet and hands painted with henna, the age-old plumage, brilliant and colorful? They were people of the vast desert state of Rajasthan, where the houses of Jodhpur are bright blue, the façades and palaces of Jaipur are pink, and men's turbans are crimson. As though to distance themselves from the dusty hues of their surroundings, Rajasthanis are emphatically adorned. But this is true of desert dwellers generally, for whom gold jewelry is wealth, and whose remarkable sense of color seems a guarantee against ever becoming indistinguishable or lost.

The Mandore Express was an overnight train to Jodhpur — where I'd never been before — on my route to Jaipur, which I had written about long ago. Jodhpur is a city of weaving and furniture making, traditional crafts, and these included copying antiques. Indians know Jodhpur as a producer of deceptive fakes that are sent to all the markets and bazaars and to credulous museums abroad — terracotta, porcelain, brassware, statues, idols, swords and daggers. Jodhpur also had a Vatican-sized maharajah's palace that had been turned into a hotel, and the maharajah still lived there — rode polo ponies and rejoiced in the nickname "Bapji."

Fish-glued to the side of the train was the manifest, a list of passengers and berths for second class AC. I found my name, but before the train drew out of the station I saw some vacancies in first. I appealed to the conductor to upgrade me. He took my money, made out an excess-fare receipt in triplicate, handed me a sheaf of chits, and showed me to a four-berth compartment. Two people had already seated themselves: a young man reading Debonair magazine and opposite him a young woman braying a mixture of Hindi and English into a cell phone. The fierce-sounding woman had the humorless beaky face and cold eyes of a shrew. She was an example of how physically ugly a person's face becomes in the middle of delivering a loud complaint; she was a gargoyle in horn-rimmed glasses.

While she howled, Rakesh, the man opposite, told me he was a salesman and exporter of shawls and scarves. He was going to Jodhpur, where his cloth was printed and dyed with the vivid Rajasthani colors.

"I come on this train every few weeks," Rakesh said. "It's the best way. I arrive early in Jodhpur, do a full day's work, and head straight back on the night train. This saves me from having to pay for an expensive flight and a hotel room."

He then offered me some of his food: spiced chickpeas, a bag of cashews, some obscure dumplings and deep-fried fritters.

"Must I repeat?" the young woman said, her eyes flashing. "I am on train. And I am furious. They are all against us! Three ministries, three secretaries. Finance Ministry is worst."

A scratchy reply from the phone had her scowling again.

"I don't give a fig! We must be strong!"

More babbling had her rolling her eyes and scratching her hairy arms.

"You did not see memo? It was audacious!"

I smiled, impressed, because I could not remember ever having heard the word "audacious" used in conversation by an English-speaker in all my eavesdropping life.

Then she began to sound like a field marshal: "But we can win! We must prevail! We will regroup. We will respond in kind. Never mind, I tell you!"

Clicking her tongue, she drowned out the reply.

"Enough, enough. You can find me in Jodhpur on my mobile," she said, and silenced the thing with a stabbing finger.

It was an amazing display of unselfconsciousness. I often think that people shout into cell phones in order to warn any casual listeners that they are to be reckoned with; that cell-phone screaming is more a show of aggression to eavesdroppers than for the person at the other end of the line.

As a wanderer in India, I was grateful for anyone or anything that came my way as I went about casting strangers for roles in my narrative. Here, purely by chance, I was in a compartment with a sympathetic salesman who offered me food and with a hairy troglodytic woman shrieking abuse into her cell phone.

"Do you mind?" she said sourly, twisting her beaky face at me. "I've had a long day."

She meant that the bench I was sitting on was her berth and that she wanted to turn in. I had been assigned the upper berth. This was one of the niceties observed on Indian Railways, especially in mixed compartments: I had to climb into my berth. It was early evening, and we had twelve hours of travel ahead of us, but she insisted on sleeping. Still, it was wonderful how by taking the train an idle traveler like me could penetrate to the sleeping quarters of a middle-aged native woman and (if I wished) could look down and observe her snoring and scowling in her dreams.

I obliged. I crept up the ladder to my berth and began reading Christopher Hibbert's fluent and well-documented account of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, The Great Mutiny. The uprising (bloodthirsty Indian troops) and its aftermath (bloodthirsty British troops) comprised one of the most violent racial convulsions in Indian history, yet the narrative was full of life and unexpected pleasures. An English notable and resident of Delhi named Thomas Metcalfe "could not bear to see women eat cheese," and sent them out of the room to satisfy themselves with their cheddar; and Lord Macaulay summed up his low opinion of Indian achievements by saying, "Medical doctrines that would disgrace an English farrier. Astronomy which would be ridiculed at an English girls' boarding school. History, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns 30,000 years long. And Geography, made up of seas of treacle and butter."

In the darkness, the train rattled fast through the cool desert night, clanging on the rails. I slept, seeming to rotate, like a person undergoing what a science-fiction writer would call "matter transfer." In the morning, seeing the foul-tempered woman again, yawning fangy and open-jawed like a jackal, I was reminded of another description in Hibbert's Great Mutiny, of a woman "with large, dark and unforgiving eyes."

But, this being Rajasthan, I was treated to a ravishing early morning sight. We were drawing into a station where a stunning young woman, a purple sari fluttering around her slender body — a woman of movie-star beauty, great glamour, and poise — walked lightly on pretty feet past me on the platform, carrying a basket of fresh tomatoes. I got out to get a better look. I watched her cross the platform to another train to sell tomatoes, and then a smiling old woman approached me with a pitcher of milky coffee, poured me a cup, and I stood there in the golden morning, uplifted by all this. The train whistle blew and we were off again, and, passing the sign Please Discourage Beggars, I returned to my compartment.

The shawl salesman was still asleep, but the grouchy woman was awake and sitting, facing out the window, her back to me. The rattle and clatter of the train crossing the desert contrasted with the scene: the lively sound, the vacant landscape. Skinny trees here and there like dead saplings stood in the rubble and dust of flat empty India.

I peered past the woman and said, "This is lovely. After Delhi, the great emptiness."

"It is not empty at all," the woman said.

"It sure looks empty to me."

"There are people everywhere, if you would look."

I was looking, but there were none.

She laughed, forcing contempt through her impressive nose. "You think it is empty. It is not empty!"

Believe me, it was the edge of the Marusthali Desert, in sun-baked Rajasthan, and it was empty.

But she said, "It is intensively farmed. It is all cultivated."

"Some of it is," I said, seeing some furrows raked into a gully and some stalks of withered grass, perhaps wheat.

"All of it is! Don't you see?"

This was a very irritating woman, a scold, who at seven-thirty in the morning was shrieking in contradiction.

"What's that, wheat?"

She snorted and said, "These people would not be so stupid as to plant wheat. They plant something that needs less water. They cultivate millet."

"I see."

"And those trees that you are ignoring. They hold the nitrogen in the soil. They are beneficial."

"I see."

Attempting a tone of haughty condescension, she merely sounded rude, and her rudeness was comically like self-parody. What she said could have been interesting, but her nagging tone made it abusive. I suspected the reason was that this Indian woman had assumed that she would be sharing the compartment with one other person, the shawl salesman, and what she found was a third person, a big tattooed foreigner from beyond the pale, glaring at her through sunglasses and scribbling in a notebook. Her intention was to make me feel unwelcome, and I mentioned this in my notes, adding that this was to be expected in the new robust and assertive India of peevish caste-obsessed bureaucrats.

"You're a lawyer?" I asked.

"I am a journalist. Environmentalist. I am going to a conference on water issues in Jodhpur." She turned back to the window. "Prince Charles is going to address our meeting about water conservation."

"Prince Charles is in Jodhpur?"

"At Umaid Bhawan. As I said, to address our conference."

That could hardly have been the reason. I had seen his name in the Delhi newspapers; he was on a private tour of India with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, formerly Parker Bowles, née Shand, and now Mrs. Charles Windsor — her first visit to the country.

"Maybe you'll get a chance to meet the prince."

She shrugged and made a face. "I don't care."

"It's a big deal, isn't it?"

Though she was grubby from a night on the train and was sitting in wrinkled pajamas, she attempted to be haughty, saying, "I've had enough of royalty."

I could see she was simply trying to put me down, and that fascinated me. I didn't mind that she took me for a backpacker, a scrounging vagabond, an idle traveler — that much was true. What she didn't know was that, as she was faced away from me, I had just finished writing in my notebook, Sourpuss — wrinkled pajamas — sunken eyes — I've had enough of royalty. And since I was also planning to stay at the Umaid Bhawan Palace, perhaps we could all meet for tea — grouchy woman, Prince of Wales, and me.

"What a coincidence. I'm going there too," I said. This did not get a rise out of her. I asked, "Who do you write for?"

She glanced over her shoulder, mentioned the name of her magazine, then turned back to the window, so that all I saw were her skinny shoulders and her rumpled clothes. Perhaps she suspected that I had leaned out of my berth during the night and peered down at her twisted form, as she emitted flutterblasts of halitotic snores.

When the shawl seller woke up, he looked out the window and, seemingly on the basis of the telling contours of a few dusty hills, said, "Half an hour to Jodhpur."

We chatted while the woman sulked and muttered into her cell phone. He too had been at the cricket match in Delhi. I said, "Cricketers used to clap and look bored or phlegmatic. When did they start hugging each other and rolling on the ground?"

"About ten or fifteen years back," he said. "The Australians started it. They made it more American style. Changed the colors, made it commercial — changed the whole sport."

"If you don't mind?" the woman said, pushing past us. We were entering Jodhpur Station, but she was in such a hurry to get out of the train that she was already thrusting her way — sharp elbows out — to the end of the coach and to her water conference, though, looking at her, you would have thought she was headed to a witches' sabbath.

There is always a mob scene when a train arrives at a large station in India: the onrush of porters, coolies, men with wheelbarrows and luggage carts, water carriers, food sellers, taxi drivers, rickshaw wallahs, hotel and guesthouse touts. They pile onto the platform and block the doors so as to be first.

I allowed them to entrap the grouchy woman, and I slipped past, moving quickly to the taxi rank with my small unimpressive bag.

Near the middle of Jodhpur my car was surrounded by big serious men carrying brass plates. The plates were glittering and heavy, and the men lifted them, seemed to shake them at me, gesturing for me to roll the window down.

"Who are these men?" I asked the driver. "What do they want?"

"It is Navratri, sar. They are celebrants."

I opened the window, assuming they wanted some rupees for their brass plates, but no: one person stepped forward and, putting his thumb into red powder, applied a dot to my forehead.

On the way to the Umaid Bhawan, the driver told me that Navratri was just beginning — nine nights of fasting and praying, devoted to the goddess Durga. This mother goddess is one of the fiercest in the Indian pantheon, easily recognizable from the weapons in her many arms and her necklace of skulls — she is much fiercer than the male gods, and is a power of both creation and destruction. Durga means "the Inaccessible." I was put in mind of the petulant woman on the train, a Durga incarnation howling into her cell phone, who throughout the trip was making herself inaccessible to me.

"Also Navratri, very important to Surya," the driver said.

I had been to Surya temples. Surya, the sun god in Hindu cosmology, is worshiped more devoutly in Rajasthan than in other places because, as I later found out, the royal Rajput family — the Rathore clan, rulers of Rajasthan — are regarded as suryavanshis, descendants of the sun god.

An unlucky aspect of this year's Navratri and this sun imagery was that a solar eclipse had occurred the previous day in this part of India, and the darkening of the sun was clearly visible in Jaipur.

"It was not an auspicious day," a woman told me at the Umaid Bhawan Palace, and this was bigger news in Jodhpur than the arrival of Prince Charles and his duchess. A solar eclipse during this religious holiday was a bad omen.

This was in the lobby of the Umaid Bhawan (on whose walls and platforms were more stuffed leopards and tigers than I'd ever seen together in my life), where I had gone hoping to talk with the Maharajah of Jodhpur. His grandfather Maharajah Umaid Singh had commissioned this palace to be built in 1928. At the time, this part of Rajasthan, the desert kingdom of Marwar, was beset by famine and drought, and the idea was that this project, which took fifteen years to complete, would be a way of occupying and employing his subjects, the desperate and hungry Marwaris. It was one of the last palaces, and certainly the last great palace, to be erected in imperial India. The finished building, of russet Rajasthani sandstone and marble, set on a hill at the edge of Jodhpur, is a vast roseate palace with a great glowing dome, with touches of the Gothic and jocular art deco, with pinched Mughal turrets, elaborate porches, and the weirdest architectural capriccios of Rajputana. It may have been built to give Marwaris employment, but there it stood to inspire awe.

The present maharajah lived decorously in one wing, designated as the Royal Apartments. Prince Charles was upstairs in a large suite with his last duchess, his entourage nearby. Upstairs too were the water conference people, looking for answers to the inevitable ecological catastrophe in India — more drought and famine. In the luxury hotel wing were the other guests: honeymooners, tourists, Indophiles, the lucky few, and, traveling light, an idle grinning note taker — me, talking to a helpful Indian woman.

"Bad omens. Time to burn joss sticks?" I asked.

"No, more serious than that. 'Don't look at the sun,' I was told by a member of the maharajah's family. 'Don't go outside.' I said, 'But I have work to do!'"

She said that if I was interested, I could attend the elaborate ritual for Navratri at the Mehrangarh Fort on the other side of Jodhpur, above the blue-painted city, a hilltop garrison so imposing, Rudyard Kipling called it "the work of angels and giants." The puja—prayer ceremony — would be led by priests and members of the maharajah's family, the maharani, and the maharajah himself.

"Essential to propitiate goddess Durga, because of solar eclipse," the woman said.

The ritual would mark the start of the nine days of fasting and praying. And some people ("in the villages," as smug city-dwelling Indians liked to point out) would be sacrificing a goat.

"Burning it?"

"No. Cut off head of goat. Let blood flow"

One very hot day in Jodhpur, I followed the procession of Rajput royalty to the steep-sided fort and across its ramparts. The Durga temple (the traditional family temple of the Jodhpur royals) at the fort was an old one — the fort itself dates from the mid-fifteenth century — and it was mobbed with devotees and semi-hysterical subjects of the maharajah, a living connection to the sun diety.

Following him in the heat of this sun-struck fort was a shuffling mass of people with flutes, bells, gongs, drums, and garlands of flowers, all of them chanting, "Durga Mata ki jail" — Praise to Mother Durga.

Ritual is important to me, not for its dubious sanctity, but because it is a set of gestures that reveals the inner state of the people involved and their subtle protocol. From under an awning I strained to see the ceremony, the mutterings, the water splashings, the prostrations. The priests were both submissive and self-important, attending to the maharajah, who was performing the puja under the gaze of his loyal and chanting subjects. Here, an element of theater was added to an element of devotion.

The most painful moment was the arrival of the maharajah's son Shivraj Singh, the Yuvraj of Jodhpur and heir apparent. There were whispers that he might at last show himself, and this stirred a great intensity of anticipation, because he was known to have been severely injured.

The yuvraj was thirty-one, very handsome, and for years had been a renowned polo player — a great rider, a high scorer — and a champion of the game at which Jodhpur had distinguished itself for centuries. But just a year before — in February 2005—the yuvraj had been in a polo accident. As he attempted to turn his horse sharply, it had stumbled, the yuvraj had fallen to the ground, and the horse had landed on top of him. After lying in a deep coma for more than a month, the poor man at last flickered to consciousness. With a period of intense physiotherapy — his therapist was a young American woman — he had regained rudimentary use of his limbs, and here he was, in his first public appearance since the horrible accident.

In a turban, white jacket, and trousers, draped with garlands of marigolds, with an attendant on either side of him, he struggled to stay upright, making his way to the temple through the thicknesses of rose petals that had been strewn on the ramparts. His faltering was hard to watch, yet he was a man who had come back from the dead.

What was touching about the Durga puja was that it marked the cycle of life and death, it celebrated rebirth, and so everything that happened here in the blazing sun of the fort, the ringing of bells and gongs and the Durga chants, mattered to this broken young man who was a living symbol of how the mother goddess could help.

The priests applied powder to his forehead, tied a sacred thread to his wrist, flicked water, and passed out sweets, all this to the shrieks of the chants and the sound of flutes and gongs.

"Durga Mata ki jai!"

The prince was led to a gilded chair under a white cotton canopy near the temple, the portly maharajah beside him, the maharani in purple silks, the retainers with trays of sweets, the priests and the hundreds, perhaps thousands of worshipers tumbling over one another for a glimpse of their semi-divine king.

I was standing behind the canopy, trying to keep my bare feet on the cooler, shaded part of the bricks. The yuvraj signaled that he wanted water. The heat was like a glittering hammer. I watched him make a great effort to hold the glass and tip it and drink. He was clearly in bad shape, yet he was determined to complete this act without help, and when at last he was led away, looking frail, determination was more evident in his movements. He was a man with inner strength; I felt that he had come a long way and that his willpower would take him further; in the course of this fragrant and harmonious ceremony his posture had become resolute and more certain.

There is something about the presence of royalty — it is a throbbing in the air, a vibrancy, a buzz — that sets people's pulses racing. Probably it is not much different from the excitement on the red carpet on Oscar night, but it is heightened by the religious fervor associated with ancient royalty. It was obvious here at the fort, with all the Jodhpur royals on view, looking pious and protective as the delighted people watched them — a kind of rapture inspired by the big reliable-looking maharajah, his lovely queen, his wounded son, the image of the mother goddess smeared with ritual paste, flames leaping from oil lamps, and the powerful chiming of gongs and bells.

I stayed in the hotel part of the Umaid Bhawan, hardly believing my luck at being a guest at such a place. I made a tour of the Jodhpur bazaar and the antique shops, looking for treasures and trying to sort the real from the fake. But it hardly mattered; what I liked best in an Indian market was simply walking from stall to stall, from shop to shop, threading my way among the plodding camels and the rickshaws and the browsing cows in a city where nothing looked modern.

A few days later, more regal vibrations set the Umaid Palace buzzing: heightened activity, lots of breathless movement, a briskness I had not seen before. After lunch, I saw a long red carpet being unrolled.

"Prince Charles is leaving," one of the carpet rollers said, kneeling on the polished marble floor of the outer lobby, straightening the edges of the thing.

I wanted to have a good look at Prince Charles's new wife, so I lingered by the great arch of the palace entrance.

"May I help you, sar?" It was a security man.

"I'm waiting for Prince Charles. I want to say hello." The security man had a badge and a truncheon. I added, "I met him once."

I took my place at the very end of a line of people who were saying goodbye: butlers, cleaners, chowkidars, sweepers, syces, hotel staff, secretaries, menials, and me.

All the hotel guests had gathered for the farewell; all the attendees of the water conservation conference were there too. I searched their faces and spotted the grouchy woman from the train. She was small, troll-like, round-shouldered, across the room. She did not see me until the prince approached my line, and when our eyes met I winked at her. Ha! She darkened in a way that I had come to recognize. I remembered how she had barked the word "audacious" into her cell phone.

The prince and the duchess made their way down the line, thanking each person, and when my turn came I said, "Paul Theroux. You came to the premiere of the film of my book The Mosquito Coast in London twenty years ago. I'm sure you don't remember."

"Of course I remember," he said, smiling and snatching at my hand. He had a high pink color and thinning hair, a correctness of posture, and the frustrated smirk of someone who believed he had never been taken seriously enough. He looked boyish and slightly sheepish rather than princely.

The duchess was just behind him, looking untidy, older and somewhat motherly in the faintly bawdy way of some doting mothers with big awkward sons: friendly, frumpy, a bit hunched, smallish and compact, potbellied in her tight combination of dark jacket and skirt — much too formal for this desert heat, more appropriate for a garden party in England, which she perhaps believed a maharajah's banquet to be the nearest equivalent. That was forgivable in someone who had never been to India before.

She touched the prince's arm and said in a vague and likable way, "Bother, I've forgotten my dark glasses."

Someone overheard her and quick-marched to deliver the order that the glasses must be found.

Prince Charles said to me, "What are you doing here?"

"Just traveling, sir. Heading south."

"Are you writing something?"

"Trying, Your Highness. Scribble, scribble."

This made him laugh. "I'm scribbling too. But not books. And not for publication, though I sometimes wish…" And instead of finishing the sentence, he laughed again.

The previous month, portions of the prince's Hong Kong diary had become public. He had printed it privately and circulated it among his friends. It was full of colorful observations and a few pointed ones, and the unexpected sharpness of these had made headlines in London newspapers. He had mocked the hand-over ceremony, called some of the Chinese notables "waxworks," spoken of the Chinese president's "propaganda speech," and scorned the goose-stepping Chinese soldiers. He also complained of being stuck in club class, rather than first, on his way out: "Such is the end of empire, I sighed to myself." What this proved was that though he may never be crowned king of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, he could still make a decent living as a travel writer with such breezy generalizations.

"Travel safely," he said. Then a photographer caught up with him, and he was posed with the staff for a group photo. As the picture was taken he said into the dazzling flash of the camera, "Are you absolutely sure you want me to do this?"

Then the duchess's dark glasses were found, and off the royals went to their private plane. They had an entourage of twenty-six people, including the prince's private chef.

"The prince apparently doesn't like your food," I said, teasing a man who told me he had helped organize the royal visit.

"Oh, his highness is very particular about his meals," the man said, suddenly fussed and stern, as though remembering. "There was quite a hullabaloo here to find the ingredients for a certain kind of brown bread that the prince likes to eat. Certain herbs. They finally found them somewhere in the market."

***

ANOTHER DAY, I HAD TEA with Maharajah Gai Singh II. The thirty-eighth Rathore Chief of Marwar and Maharajah of Jodhpur was fifty-eight but seemed older, with the weather-beaten air of an aged warrior. He had assumed the throne and had taken on the title of maharajah at the age of four, on the death of his father. He was well known for having no pretensions. He may have been descended from Surya, the sun god, but he urged everyone to call him Bapji — Daddy Dearest. Just as well. The English had never allowed themselves to be impressed with semi-divine claims of ancestry. In Victorian times, the College of Heralds stated: "The Aga Khan is held by his followers to be a direct descendant of God. English Dukes take precedence."

Bapji had allowed part of the Umaid Bhawan Palace to be converted to a hotel, in much the same spirit as some of the hard-up English aristocracy with their castles and stately homes, turning them into museums and teahouses, fitting them for rose garden tours and game parks and croquet lawns, so that they could go on living in one wing and paying the bills. In the most heavy-handed way, by amending the Indian constitution in 1969, Indira Gandhi had stripped the Indian royals of their privy purses. In response, some maharajahs became businessmen, others became landlords, and many sold the family silver. Indian antique dealers were always unwrapping daggers or crystal goblets adorned with crests and saying, "Royal family of Cooch Behar, sir. Deaccessioned, sir. I obtained the whole blooming lot, sir."

Bapji had made himself popular as a member of the Indian parliament and as an ambassador. To raise funds, he had collaborated with the Taj Group in creating a luxury hotel. Over the years, it had fallen into disrepair, but it was restored to its former glory. It was also something of a menagerie of the moribund — toothy tiger heads on most walls, stuffed leopards in feline attitudes on plinths and above staircases, buffalo, antlered bucks, pairs of enormous elephant tusks in the game room and even in the private apartments — trophies of alpha males gathering dust, and photos of memorable days: upright hunters cradling rifles, with their boots resting on dead tigers and dead leopards.

"Welcome, please sit," Bapji said when I arrived in his study. He was a stoutish man in a traditional Rajasthani outfit resembling white pajamas, the long shirt called a kurta, and tight trousers — jodhpurs indeed. And he was barefoot. The room was a repository of family photographs and books and files, and on the coffee table in front of me, videocassettes of Godzilla, Great Journeys, and Yes, Minister. A cricket match was in progress on a television across the room, and it remained on, Bapji glancing at it from time to time throughout our conversation.

"Things have settled down. It was quite busy with the royal visit, as you can imagine. But it was a private visit."

"What other kind is there?"

"A formal visit. In that case it would be state-sponsored. The prince would get one day off — the informal part of a formal visit, so to say. But this one he paid for himself."

"He seemed pretty jolly."

"He's happy. She's happy too."

It seemed to me that Bapji and Charles were about the same age. I said, "You weren't at school with him by any chance?"

"I was at Eton. Then Oxford — Christ Church, the first in my family to go to Oxford. He was at school at Gordonstoun." Bapji smiled. "A grim place — highly spartan. He would have been happier at Eton. His boys went there."

"Had you met the duchess before?"

"I knew her brother, Mark Shand. And she has a sister Annabel. I don't know her."

A servant brought tea and cookies. I asked Bapji about his ancestry — whether it was true, as I'd heard, that his family was descended from the sun deity.

"It's true, we're associated with Surya," he said. "There is no sun worship as such, but you know the yoga position, the surya namaskar. Our family goes back to the Ramayana. We are kshattriya—warrior caste."

This was a delicate way of putting it: the family claims descent from Lord Rama, who is associated with the sun. By contrast, Lord Krishna is associated with the moon.

"This is all documented?"

"Oh, yes. Our family history is well recorded. My ancestors arrived in these parts in 1211. Prior to that, the grandson of Jai Chand ruled, so our family traces their relation to the Rashstra Kuta family, early in the tenth century."

He was speaking of a family tree stretching back a thousand years, from branches to roots.

"I seem to remember being in a sun temple."

"There's one in Jaipur."

It was at the height of Galta Gorge, near a temple I had visited long ago on the outskirts of the city.

"Are you fasting for Navratri?"

"I am doing my best. Fasting depends on choice. Some people eat nothing for nine days — take only water. Some eat one meal. Some eat fruit. And there are Rajputs who kill a goat — as a prasad, an offering. Alcohol is also offered. And, yes, some drink it."

"I hadn't realized that everyone did something different."

"I'll tell you," he said.

"I hope you don't mind my writing this down," I said. "I find this interesting."

He waggled his head in the Indian way, meaning, Okay. And now I realized what was lovable about him, what made him sound trustworthy and unpedantic: it was his lisp, a slight slushiness of delivery, a lopsidedness in his jaw, which made him seem, in spite of his full mustache, like a small boy.

"Each community assigns special values to certain foods. That which makes you strong and excitable is forbidden to Brahmins, because theirs is an ascetic tradition. But a sadhu might smoke hashish" — and he raised his hand and puffed an imaginary joint. "But bhang is not smoked. It is powdered and made into milkshakes, called thandhai."

"What's the mixture?"

"Milk, water, ground almonds, and some other ingredients added to it. And of course the bhang—you call it cannabis? It makes you pretty silly."

"I must try it"

"Some people start laughing. Some people pout," Bapji said. "Opium eating is also part of our culture. That's become a ritual in western Rajasthan. In the past it was common, eating opium."

"No religious sanction against it?"

"No. It's a tradition. We kshattriyas can eat meat and drink alcohol, though within the kshattriya caste there are some differences. Especially at the two ends of the spectrum, you can say — the high castes at one end, and the scheduled and tribals at the other end."

"I thought vegetarianism was the norm," I said.

"There is an untruth abroad that the majority of Indians are vegetarians." He laughed in refutation and wiggled his toes. "It's not true. One Englishman made a study. He found that, on balance, there are more nonvegetarians than vegetarians in India."

"You eat meat, sir?"

"Us, yes, meat eaters! Hunting was part of our tradition. And there was a tradition of a goat being slaughtered in front of the temple." He made a slicing, throat-cutting gesture with one hand. "I saw you at the puja the other day at the fort. Goat sacrifice would have been done there some years ago."

"How long ago?"

"In my lifetime," he said. Not long ago — he'd been born in 1948. "As a young boy I saw it, the killing of the goat. It was very shocking to me. But my mother said, 'It is part of growing up. If the sight of blood bothers you, you can't be a warrior. "

I loved his candor, his ability to talk about anything, his interest in explaining the minutiae of drug use and goat sacrifice. He leaned forward, eager with a new detail.

"There are subtleties, you see. Apparently, if the goat doesn't shudder, it won't be accepted as a sacrifice. The animal needs to be afraid, to be suitably terrified, to stand still but also to visibly show fear. If not, you take it away and put a ring in its ear. The animal is impure."

Though Bapji did not say so, I later learned from pilgrims that at the Kali temples — deemed very sacred — in Kolkata and Gauhati, goats (always black ones) are beheaded and bled as sacrifices every day, sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty. The carcasses are later butchered, cooked in the temple kitchens, and served in curries to the poor.

Behind his head was a shelf of photographs. I recognized one as being the Rajmata of Jaipur, the former Gayatri Devi, a great beauty in her time. Rajmata literally means queen mother. She had endured a number of hardships — not just the early death of her husband and eldest son, but a fairly long and vindictive imprisonment by Mrs. Gandhi for refusing to knuckle under when the constitution was arbitrarily changed. A heavy smoker, known to be a connoisseur of single-malt whiskey, the rajmata lived in Jaipur much the way Babji did, in an annex of her grand palace.

Bapji explained the connection: "The first wife of the Maharajah of Jaipur was the sister of my grandfather. The deal was that his niece would also marry. So aunt and daughter" — that is, the sister and her daughter, I guessed—"were both married to the same man. The aunt was eight or nine years older than he was — you see, he was only fifteen."

I was somewhat lost in this explanation, and not sure of the dates, but it was so steamy in its complexity it didn't matter. I urged him to go on.

"His British guardian wouldn't let them cohabit. She came out of the bedroom in a huff. 'What's the point of being married if I can't sleep in there? Ha-ha!"

He got up and stretched, and we walked to the wide pink balcony that overlooked the palace gardens, a white marble pavilion shimmering in the distance on the green lawn. He said, "I was born in this palace. This was my only home. How old are you?"

I told him.

"You look younger than me," he said.

But then his life had been somewhat more eventful than mine, not just his glorious birth as a descendant of Lord Rama, the relentless rituals, the goat sacrifices, and the prophetic assumption of his mother, the reigning maharani: "You must be a warrior." But his becoming a maharajah at the age of four, after his father, just twenty-eight, died in an air crash. His princely world of privilege had been turned upside down by Mrs. Gandhi. Still in his twenties, he'd been a diplomat, the Indian high commissioner to Trinidad. And there was his son's tragic accident, something else to age him.

As if that weren't commotion enough, there was an unstable younger brother — illegitimate and vindictive — who made several attempts to behead Bapji. On one occasion, the filmmaker Ismail Merchant, who had made a movie at the palace, was present, and watched horrified as the crazed brother blundered into a dinner party and swiped at the guests with a sword. Ultimately, Merchant reported, this mad, disinherited brother was himself beheaded and cut to pieces. All this Babji seemed to bear with equanimity.

"Maybe I should do yoga," Bapji said, clutching his belly through his kurta.

"How did you like diplomatic life?"

"I enjoyed it. I got on very well with the Indians in Trinidad. They were keeping the balance, and so was I. It was like walking a tightrope. But I told them that I was not their high commissioner. They were Trinidadians, weren't they? I made it plain to them that I was not batting on their side."

Probably it was the cricket match on television that brought back the memory and the metaphor.

"My predecessor was an old Muslim gentleman who wrote a memo to the effect that he wanted to ban cricket tours between India and Trinidad because they aroused strong emotions." He laughed recalling it. "A black Trinidadian came to me and said, 'We want cricket tours! We want to see Gavaskar!'" — a great batsman. "'What happens among us is our problem!'"

Bapji broke off to watch the end of the cricket match, and when it was clear that India could not be beaten, he talked about the military tradition of his state. Celebrated in India, but unsung heroes everywhere else, the Indian army had been heroic in both world wars. Bapji explained that in a decisive battle in September 1918, the Royal Jodhpur Lancers led the charge into Haifa with the Hyderabad and Mysore mounted lancers on their flanks, surprising and defeating the German-Turkish army dug in on Mount Carmel.

"They charged straight into machine guns. Uphill — great horsemanship, great valor. Dalpat Singh led the charge and died in the action." Bapji was gesturing again. "Straight across, into the fire. Of course, many died, but they killed four hundred men and took Haifa. They were very brave."

He was looking out the window at the expanse of green lawn behind Umaid Bhawan. He straightened and twisted the ends of his mustache.

"My people have courage." He nodded. "Heroes."

He asked how long I would be staying. I said that I was going to leave for the station soon and I'd be on the train that night.

"You'll see my grandfather there."

He was not being enigmatic. He meant the equestrian statue of Umaid Singh in front of the Jodhpur railway station.