Rajasthan

When Papa and I went to Kamal stationers to buy ink pens back when ballpoint pens were not allowed in my school, Papa would always test the pen for me and he’d always write the same thing when he tested them. Rajasthan. That is my earliest memory of the place. It is yet another state in this country to which I feel a sense of belonging, one of the (many) places I call home. And still, what I write here is my first experience of Rajasthan.

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This Diwali Rajasthan greeted me with clouds and clouds of dust. I could see nothing from the aircraft except billows of pale brown sand as we descended into Jodhpur. I was reminded, rather dramatically during this trip of two very filmy phrases – banjar zameen and mere desh ki mitti. There won’t be a soul or any sign of inhabitation until the horizon if you began to drive from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer. Only brown sand and shrubs as far as you can see; a sense of infinity that hadn’t occurred to me earlier. The sun beats down on the earth; dust rises and flies across, unobstructed for miles. I thought it was beautiful. It probably had to do with being so close to the Indian border; I felt this tremendous affection for my country’s soil which I have never felt before. It could be absolutely barren land for all I care, but it was ours. All the way to the shifting horizon and beyond.

As though to contrast heavily with the seemingly dull landscape, people in Rajasthan dress gorgeously. Just when your eyes are aching because they haven’t seen any colour for miles, you’ll spot a multi-coloured pagdion someone’s head. He’d otherwise be dressed in white sitting on his haunches under a shrub. Or in the shadow of a truck. Or you’ll pass through a little town where there the law of natural chaos is strictly followed. Tractors and rickshaws will be parked at all angles, the street will be indistinguishable from the soil because it will be covered in sand and a woman dressed in bright orange or bright pink with a ghoonghat over her head and a child in her arms will be walking a few steps behind a man with a pagdi. That is an indication of her marriage with him. She might not be thrown into the fire with her dead husband like many ancient queens and concubines anymore, but she still walks a few paces behind him. Maybe it is so that he embraces death before her? Wishful thinking.

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In Jaisalmer every building looks like a monument and each looks like it rose out of the sand – the Golden Fort, Bada baag (complete with its memories of every concubine every king possessed), the tiny arches that pop up here and there along the road without warning, the RTDC hotel Moomal and any modern telephone booth. There has been no attempt to separate history from daily life; people continue to live in the Golden Fort. They’ve modified their ancient houses to their modern taste. Internet cafes have appeared where perhaps a munim once sat. Cows, goats and little kids roam about freely. Some of them have towers with old cannons to themselves. Most of the intricately carved havelis in the town are still used as regular houses and those that are not – try as you might, it is impossible to snuffle the charm out of them, no matter how many cobwebs you might deploy there.

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At the fort in Jodhpur however, there has been a conscious effort at retaining the old look and grandeur. Everything down to the bedcovers have been maintained or mimicked. And when you look down from the fort over the blue city of Jodhpur it strikes you what a seat of power this elevated palace was; what it meant to be a Maharaja, to build this fantastic structure, to have an army to protect it and to have nearly total control over all the lives in those blue houses. Frightening.

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What was even more frightening however, was an abandoned village that we saw near Jaisalmer. An entire village, just standing there; intact, but without its people; silent, almost like a graveyard; ghostly, even in broad daylight. The people left, all at once. If you haven’t thought of it already, you suddenly realize what it means to live in the extremities of the desert. It suddenly dawns on you how fast the sand heats up and how fast it cools, how rarely it rains, how you have not spotted a flower since you left Bombay. What is it like to live here? How does anyone come to love it?

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And then the sun sets on the sand dunes. You stare across hillock after hillock of sand, painted orange with hues of the setting sun; all the way up to Pakistan. And as you watch camels grunt and the little kids run about them while trying to woo foreign tourists, you slowly understand. The breeze blows, the sand cools within minutes below you. A sarangi tune plays in your head. A bright, multi-coloured pagdi flashes across your mind’s eye. You understand that this is beautiful and peaceful and settling. Over the haze of the sand you watch the scarlet sun disappear. You look up a little while later and gape at the most gorgeous star-studded night sky you have ever seen. And you understand completely. How one comes to love it. And why the only song in your head has been padharo mhare des.