Back of Beyond (41 page)

Known as the “Jaisalmer of Gujarat,” Bhuj is a medieval maze of tight, winding streets, flurried marketplaces, ancient palaces (now museums), and Hindu temples decorated with gaily painted gods, abandoning themselves to the joys and terrors of all their incarnations. Someone described it as “stepping into a Salman Rushdie world of mystery and intrigue.” I didn’t sense much of the intrigue except in the intense secretiveness of the Gujarat shopkeepers and merchants, whose agile abilities with the abacus and whispery deal making confirmed their reputation as India’s most skillful traders.

But mystery—definitely. Everyone seemed to have a mission. There were few beggars or loiterers. You sense constant purposeful movement here with little time to notice foreign travelers. People were friendly, but in a kind of indifferent way. It was as though this remote city, rarely visited by outsiders, responded to a higher agenda of purpose, reflecting centuries of accumulated tradition and independence from the rest of the country.

For once, I enjoyed the anonymity. I felt like a floating camera lens, recording scenes, capturing the flavor of the place, but almost invisible. No lines of chattering children followed me around; no hands grasped at my elbows demanding handouts; no merchants leaped from their tiny trinket, tailoring, and “traditional art” shops to snare me inside.

The Indian government has one of the largest military bases in the country just outside the city, purportedly to keep a wary eye on the Pakistanis and their always imminent invasion across the Rann of Kutch. But somehow you wonder if they’re also watching the mysterious Bhujis and Kutchis too….

“Ah yes, Bhuj is rather different from other Indian cities.” I’d been lucky enough to meet one of the descendents of the royal family here who lived in a few simply furnished rooms with an English country house feel to them, deep in the recesses of the Rao Pragmaljis palace. He was a tall, thin-featured man, who spoke with quiet English public school eloquence: “We have always possessed a certain reticence about our role in the Indian nation as a whole. Gujarat for centuries has been an outward-looking region—we were seafarers and world traders while the rest of the country was a conglomeration of introverted, subsistence agricultural states. Gujurati merchants and entrepreneurs are all over the world, little colonies everywhere—India is just one of our many homelands, so to speak. Our outlook is somewhat broader.”

We were walking in stocking feet along the dusty passages and halls of the “new palace,” built early this century in mock-Gothic, town-hall-style. The palace had obviously been unused for years. Pigeon droppings encrusted the ornate tilework and carved stone traceries. The main audience room, rich in baroque trimmings, possessed a cobwebby melancholy. An ornate (but very mildewed) throne stood on a raised platform at the far end. Stuffed tiger and antelope heads on the walls dribbled sawdust from cracks in their hides as we shuffled across the dusty floors. It was very quiet. The sounds of an always hectic city were shut out by windows crusted with grime.

My royal companion was obviously a well-traveled and well-read individual, and somehow our conversation had switched to a comparison of Western and Eastern attitudes toward life (as it so often does in India).

“Western man is a crisis-torn, self-divided, cosmic misfit. Excuse my saying so, and a terrible generalization I admit, but I have found it to be often true. Western man tends to be bound up, imprisoned, by his materialism and the limits of his conscious mind. Unless one has the urge and the means to find out what is beyond mind—the conditioned brain, so to speak—to discover what is beyond the experience and the act of experiencing; beyond the act of observation and the observer; the thought and the thinker; what is beyond space and time, in fact—what is beyond all these symbols. Unless one has an innate passion to find out, to discover for oneself, one will never be equipped to live in a full way—a full life.”

He paused to point out a collection of music boxes and clockwork toys cocooned in dusty spider webs and scattered randomly over an enormous Rococo table, a gift from the French royal family prior to the revolution that rocked Europe.

“You see, you must have understood this from all your travels in Nepal and India. Meditation, detachment, and self-control are the steps by which human beings remake themselves closer to their origin. Unless outside the mind and in touch with the timelessness of being—what is man? What is the point?”

We were now at the top of the palace tower (after climbing a hundred or more steps whitened by decades of droppings). Bhuj lay below us, a tight winding warren of streets and alleys bound by those gray walls. One of the main gates ended by a broad man-made lake in which the towers and turrets were reflected. The water was gold in the late afternoon sun. Women were pounding clothes on the stones at its edge. There were tree-lined walks and little temples and oxcarts and bell-ringing pedicabs. And beyond stretched the bare land, rising to the fort-encrusted ridges of the Black Hills, and then fading into the silver haze, out across the edges of the great Rann.

“But I’m not a pessimist. Honestly, I don’t think I am.” The prince (in name only) added, “The world is becoming a small, better place, I think. I believe we are on the threshold of a new time when man—particularly Western man—will come face to face with the boundless energy in himself. We are all moving toward the inward and the beyond. At least”—he smiled and shrugged his shoulders—“that is what I would like to hope.”

We stood quietly watching the timeless scenes in this strange little city on the edge of the world’s greatest nowhereness.

“Now, come on. Let me show you the real palace. Come and see how the Raos once lived when all this was ours.”

The contrast with the dusty hollowness of the new palace was immediate. We walked past the “Ladies’ Palace” with its finely carved wooden-lattice windows (“so the ladies could see everything but not be seen”) and stepped through thick studded doors into an Aladdin’s cave of regal splendors. Enormous silver-encrusted thrones; ornately carved carriages for state occasions; doors of the most intricate inlaid teak and ivory designs; displays of jeweled swords and fans; more hunting trophies and lions’ heads from the Gir Forest. We ended up in a magic place, the Pleasure Hall, deep inside the palace where fountains once played and a miniature moat of cool water ran around a central dias covered in gold-and-silver-threaded cushions. Here the Maharao would recline, reflected in mirrors all around the walls. “There was so much fun,” the prince told me, “singing, throwing water, games—and other things—all in lots of candlelight reflecting off these gold decorations. Can you imagine how it was?”

I could indeed. What a life these Maharaos must have lived in this Pleasure Hall, conveniently close to the Ladies’ Palace, enjoying all the perks of seemingly boundless power, plotting new glorious battles, parading around in those elephant-drawn carriages. I wondered if the titular prince was perhaps a little envious. But he was far too self-controlled to let on.

And I had other things to think about anyway. I wanted to get to Rann.

On the way back to the hotel, a little event occurred that made Bhuj a warmer place for me, a touch more accessible than I’d first thought.

I was passing a baker’s shop. The smell of hot flat bread was enticing, and I paused to buy a small chapatilike round, toasty hot and bubble crusted. And then I noticed a street vendor nearby cooking up all kinds of vegetarian delights in black iron cauldrons over charcoal fires—kormas, palaks, bhaturas, and masalas, brimming with chunks of eggplant, peas, lentils, and beans. For a few pennies I bought a large spoonful of eggplant curry and asked him to place it carefully on one half of my chapati. I folded the other half over, pinched the edges and made a sort of Indian version of an Italian calzone. It was delicious! All those rich spices locked inside a patty of hot bread.

The baker was watching me and smiled as I filled my mouth with my improvised snack. Then I had an idea. Why couldn’t the baker make some more of these by layering the thin raw dough with any kind of curried filling and then baking them for the normal ten minutes or so in his oven.

He seemed a friendly type so I stepped back into his store and explained my idea. At first, and quite understandably, he seemed reluctant. I mean after all, who the hell was this crackpot foreigner to suggest changes to his centuries-old, father-to-son-to-son traditions? But when I explained that I’d buy half a dozen of these custom-designed calzones for double the selling price, he laughed and agreed to perform the experiment.

The street vendor joined in the fun, suggesting the various fillings, and we watched as the baker pushed the little dough creations deep into his oven. Ten minutes later they were done—and they were magnificent! The flavors of the bread and the curry melded together in a hot, fist-sized snack. No mess, no fuss. A perfect Indian fast-food concept.

I shared my six “Bhujizones” with the curry vendor, a nearby tailor, two wide-eyed children, and a man on a mule who had stopped to enjoy the fun. I only got to sample one of them. The others were gobbled up in a few minutes. Then the tailor ordered two more; another man in long brown robes, who seemed very self-important, ordered three; more kids clustered around, and pretty soon the baker had a street-blocking audience as he stoked the fires and set about baking fresh batches. Everyone was laughing and chewing and ordering more. Suddenly the city seemed like a fun place to be.

Later on in the evening I passed again and the baker was still churning out his new creations. I waved and he came running over carrying two of them wrapped in little squares of newsprint. He gabbled something very fast (complimentary I think), shook my hand vigorously, and vanished again to tend his baking Bhujizones. I have often wondered since if, together, we’d added another variant to India’s wonderful street-food offerings.

The following day brought another unexpected series of incidents.

“Please, sir, do not forget, if you wish to visit the Rann, you will be required to carry a permit,” the hotel manager advised me.

Getting a permit. Okay—no problem. I was more familiar with Indian behavior now and forsaw no difficulties….

“It is best, sir, if you will get to the office early,” he advised. It was not even two o’clock in the afternoon. Plenty of time.

But I should have known better.

The process required visits to three separate government offices; endless filling out of forms (and filling them out twice due to a clerk’s inability to spell my name correctly); langorous pauses for betel nut chewing and tea; returning to previous offices to “clarify” form entries; minute inspection of every detail of my passport (including the binding!); an impressive display of seal-making using a stick of red wax and a candle (only to have the seal snapped into half a dozen pieces a few minutes later by the next official on my list—in the next room); constant confusion over the forms themselves, which were all in English, only hardly anyone spoke English; meticulous compiling of papers (at one point I carried fourteen different sheets of paper from one department to another held together by sewing pins); a warning from the next to the last official that if the forms were not all completed by closing time at 6:00
P.M.
I would have to start the whole process over again the following morning; and finally, at five minutes to six, waiting for the last signature from a man who looked very imperious and sat on a tall chair raised on a carpet-covered dias and seemed to be far more interested in the condition of his fingernails than in my pile of wilting, ink-stained forms.

But I was proud. Throughout the whole four-hour ordeal I had never once raised my voice or played the arrogant colonial (whom I’d discovered deep in my psyche while traveling in India). I smiled. They smiled. They shared tea with me. They offered me betel “pan” and I accepted (it took hours to get all the little pieces of nuts and spices and whatever else goes into its elaborate preparation out of my teeth). I offered them bidi cigarettes, which they accepted (but on one occasion politely mentioned they would have preferred Marlboros). And then—clutching my precious papers like winning lottery tickets—I returned to the hotel for a traditional vegetarian
thali
dinner (usually the only food available in Bhuj hotels).

Tomorrow I’ll finally be off to the Rann, I told myself. I celebrated by ordering a second enormous metal tray of thali and was just finishing off my rice, dhal, vegetables, and paratha when someone started beating on my door with the urgency of a fireman in the midst of a blazing inferno.

“Police. Open.”

Now what? I opened the door.

Two neatly dressed policemen stepped promptly into my room with the worried manager trailing behind, shrugging hopelessly.

“Passport.”

Keep calm, I told myself, don’t blow a fuse. Be like you were earlier on at the government offices.

So I was.

I answered all their questions, let one of them search my luggage, smiled as they meticulously inspected all my permits, and smiled again as they saluted smartly and left. The manager was very apologetic.

“They very nervous, sir, of people going to Rann. Much trouble with drugs and weapons.”

He couldn’t seem to stop shrugging his shoulders.

“That’s okay. I’m just a tourist.”

“Yes—I am knowing that, sir. But they…” His twitching shrugs completed the sentence.

“Honestly. It’s okay. And thank you for looking after me.”

He left, bowing and shrugging simultaneously.

Five minutes later, another knock on the door. This was becoming an Inspector Clouseau nightmare. I opened it. And behold—another enormous tray of thali with two bottles of Thums Up Cola.

“Complimentary manager,” the young boy said.

What a nice way to end the day. Three dinners!

This had been a long journey, one of the longest of my world-wanderings. All the way from Kathmandu to the far western limit of India to the vast nothingness of the Rann of Kutch.