The Great Railway Bazaar

Chapter Eleven

That's this?' I asked Mr Gopal, the embassy liaison man, pointing to a kind of fortress.

'That's a kind of fortress.'

He had ridiculed the handbook I had been carrying around: 'You have this big book, but I tell you to close it and leave it at hotel because Jaipur is like open book to me.' Unwisely, I had taken his advice. We were now six miles outside Jaipur, wading ankle-deep through sand drifts towards the wrecked settlement of Galta. Earlier we had passed through a jamboree of some two hundred baboons: 'Act normal,' said Mr Gopal, as they hopped and chattered and showed their teeth, clustering on the road with a curiosity that bordered on menace. The landscape was rocky and very dry, and each rugged hill was capped with a cracked fortress.

'Whose is it?'

'The Maharajah's.'

'No, who built it?'

'You would not know his name.'

'Do you?

Mr Gopal walked on. It was dusk, and the buildings crammed into the Galta gorge were darkening. A monkey chattered and leaped to a branch in a banyan tree above Mr Gopal's head, yanking the branch down and making a punkah's whoosh. We entered the gate and crossed a courtyard to some ruined buildings, with coloured frescoes of trees and people on their facades.

Some had been raked with indecipherable graffiti and painted over; whole panels had been chiselled away.

'What's this?' I asked. I hated him for making me leave my handbook behind.

'Ah,' said Mr Gopal. It was a temple enclosure. Some men dozed in the archways, others squatted on their haunches, and just outside the enclosure were some tea and vegetable stalls whose owners leaned against more frescoes, rubbing them away with their backs. I was struck by the solitude of the place – a few people at sundown, no one speaking, and it was so quiet I could hear the hooves of the goats clattering on the cobblestones, the murmuring of the distant monkeys.

'A temple?'

Mr Gopal thought a moment. 'Yes,' he said finally, 'a kind of temple.'

On the ornate temple walls, stuck with posters, defaced with chisels, pissed on, and scrawled over with huge Devanagri script advertising Jaipur businesses, there was a blue enamel sign, warning visitors in Hindi and English that it was 'forbidden to desecrate, deface, mark, or otherwise abuse the walls'. The sign itself had been defaced: the enamel was chipped – it looked partly eaten.

Farther along, the cobblestone road became a narrow path and then a steep staircase cut into the rock walls of the gorge. At the top of this was a temple facing a still, black pool. Insects swimming in circles on the pool's surface made minuscule ripples, and small clouds of vibrant gnats hovered over the water. The temple was an unambitious niche in the rock face, a shallow cave, lighted with oil lamps and tapers. On either side of its portals were seven-foot marble slabs, the shape of those handed down from Sinai but with a weight that would give the most muscular prophet a hernia. These tablets had numbered instructions on them in two languages. In the failing light I copied down the English.

1. The use of soap in the temple and washing clothes is strictly prohibited

2. Please do not bring shoes near the tank

3. It does not suit for women to take bath among male members

4. Spitting while swimming is quite a bad habit

5. Do not spoil others clothes by splitting water while swimming

6. Do not enter the temple with wet clothes

7. Do not spit improperly to make the places dirty

"Splitting? I said to Mr Gopal. 'What is splitting?'

'That does not say splitting.'

'Take a look at number five.'

'It says splashing.'

'It says splitting.'

'It says -'

We walked over to the tablet. The letters, two inches high, were cut deep into the marble.

' – splitting,' said Mr Gopal. 'I've never run across that one before. I think it's a kind of splashing.'

Mr Gopal was doing his best, but he was a hard man to escape from. So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable; I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere; sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.

Jaipur was a pink princely city of marvels, but the vandalism and ignorance of those people who herded their goats into the frail ruins, painted over frescoes, and used the palace as a backdrop for filming diminished its attraction. A shouting film crew had occupied the City Palace, and its presence made the place seem a construction of exorbitant fakery. I gave my lecture; I was anxious to catch the train, but the timetable said there would not be a train to Delhi until 12.34 the following morning. It was an awkward time to leave: a day and an entire evening lay before me, and I did not relish the prospect of standing at Jaipur Junction at midnight.

'Today we go to the museum,' said Mr Gopal, the day after Galta.

'Let's give the museum a miss.'

'Very interesting place, and you said you wanted to see Moghul paintings. This is home of Moghul paintings!'

Outside the museum I said, 'When was this built?'

'About 1550.'

He hadn't hesitated. But today I had my handbook. The building he had placed in the mid-sixteenth century was the Albert Hall, started in 1878 and finished in 1887. In 1550 Jaipur did not exist, though I didn't have the heart to tell that to Mr Gopal, who had sulked when I contradicted him the previous day. Anyway, a weakness for exaggeration seemed a chronic affliction of some Indians. Inside the museum, another guide was showing a tentlike red robe to a group of tourists. He said, 'This belong to famous Maharajah Madho Singh. A big fat man. Seven feet tall, four feet wide, and weighing five hundred pounds.'

At Jai Singh's observatory, a garden of astronomer's marble instruments that looks at first glance like a children's playground, with slides and ladders and fifty-foot chutes splayed out symmetrically against the sun, Mr Gopal said he had visited the place many times. He showed me a great bronze disk that looked as if it might be a map of the night sky. I asked him if that was so. No, he said, it was to tell the time. He showed me a beacon, a submerged truncated hemisphere, a tower with eighty steps, a series of radiating benches: these were also for telling time. All this delicate apparatus, used by Prince Jai Singh (I read in my handbook) for finding altitudes and azimuths and celestial longitudes, Mr Gopal saw as a collection of oversized clocks.

While Mr Gopal was having lunch I sneaked off and bought my ticket to Delhi. The station at Jaipur Junction is modelled after the lovely buildings in the walled city. It is red sandstone, with cupolas, great arches, and substantial pillars that approach the palatial; inside are murals of lemon-faced women and turbaned men, enlargements of the traditional paintings, with borders of posies.

'I take it I won't be able to catch the train until after midnight,' I said.

'No, no,' said the clerk. 'Sooner than that.'

And he explained. The first-class sleeping car was already on the siding, being cleaned up to join the Delhi Mail. I could board in the early evening, and after midnight the Mail would pull in from Ahmadabad and this sleeping car would be hitched to it. He said I should not be alarmed if I boarded a sleeping car detached from a train: the train would arrive on time.

'Come down here tonight,' he said, 'and ask for two-up first-class ACC bogie. We will show you.'

Later in the day I had a long meal with Mr Gopal in a Jaipur restaurant and afterwards announced that I would be going to the station. Mr Gopal said there was no train: 'You will have hours to wait.' I said I didn't mind. I went to the station and climbed aboard the cosily lighted sleeping car that was parked at the far end of the platform. My compartment was large. The conductor showed me the desk, the shower, the lights. I took a shower, and then in my bathrobe wrote a letter to my wife and copied out the commandments from the temple at Galta into my notebook. It was still early. I sent the conductor out for beer and had a talk with the Indian in the next compartment.

He was a professor at Rajasthan University, and he was interested to learn that I had given a lecture for the English Department. He said he rather disliked university students; they littered the grounds with election posters and hired people to clean up after the election. They were silly, short-sighted, and disorderly; they were always posturing. 'Sometimes,' he said, 'it makes my blood boil.'

I told him about Mr Gopal.

'You see?' he said. 'I'll tell you something. The average Indian knows very little about his religion, or India, or anything else. Some are ignorant of the most simple things, such as Hindu concepts or history. I agree with Naipaul one hundred per cent. They don't like to appear ignorant before a Westerner, but most Indians don't know any more about their temples and writing and what-not than the tourists – many know a lot less.'

'Aren't you exaggerating?'

'I am saying what I know. Of course, when a man gets older he begins to take an interest. So some old men know about Hinduism. They get a bit worried about what is going to happen to them.'

I offered the professor a beer, but he said he had some paperwork to do. He said good night and went into his compartment, and I withdrew into mine. We were still at the siding at Jaipur Junction. I poured myself a beer and lay in my berth reading Forster's The Longest Journey. I had been misled: this was no travel book; it was the story of a bad short-story writer and his callow wife and sniping friends. I threw it aside and read a few pages of The Autobiography of a Yogi, then fell asleep. I was awakened at half-past twelve by a bump: my bogie's being coupled to the Delhi Mail. All night the train rocked and clicked towards Delhi, while I slumbered in my cool room, and I was so refreshed on arriving that I decided to leave that same evening for Madras to see if, as my map said – though everyone claimed it was impossible – I could take a train to Ceylon.