A Maharini’s secret garden
Juliet Nicolson
JODHPUR
After flying to Rajasthan with a woman’s big toe wedged halfway up my nose, I was delighted to find some relief from the claustrophobic intimacy of the night flight. Our heritage hotel, the Balsamand Lake Palace, once the Maharajah’s summer residence, was a peaceful mile away from the entrancing but hectic beauty of Jodhpur’s city centre.
From the red sandstone tea pavilion that overlooks the private lake, I watched a longnosed heron’s slow dive towards the murky water. Kneeling on the rickety swimming platform and deep in concentration, a small boy was cleaning his teeth. The Maharajah had moved out many years earlier, leaving behind him heads of noble beasts pinioned to the walls jostling for space with portraits of the families that had shot them. Silent but smiley, joke-twirley, moustachioed and turbanned staff hovered about, anxious to do anything to please, from seeking out a springier mattress for the bed to chasing away a noisy peacock whose screech was disturbing the peace of our strawberry lassi breakfast.
As our taxi nudged its way into Jodhpur, through streets packed with elephants decorated in neon-painted flowers, and around the supermodel legs of the straw-laden camels, we passed the gates to the local army garrison, a reminder of the threatening proximity of Pakistan.
The colossal pinkish-grey fort of Meherangarh sits high on the hill above the city. Enemy elephants had once thundered towards the seven wooden gates each as thick as a wrestler’s thigh, only to be thwarted by the sudden hairpin turn that could bring thousands of tons of animal power crashing to a halt. With the desert stretching into the distance, the gleaming wedding-cake crematorium was visible from one side of the fort, while on the other side a pool of brilliant Venetian-blue buildings lapped at the foot of the hill.
Just below the fortress wall, a small unobtrusive door leads to the Maharani’s beautiful private garden. High in the branches of bougainvillea-laden trees the monkeys, India’s version of Mary Lennox’s robin, peered and chattered, perplexed by a rare disturbance in their secret garden.
Until the middle of the last century the Maharani had lived much of their lives in purdah, entirely hidden from public view, although once in the 1920s, on a visit to London, the British paparazzi caught a regal ankle on film as it emerged from a RollsRoyce. The entire newspaper run showing the transgression was pulped overnight on the instruction of George V. The intense jumble of cornflower-coloured houses that shimmer in the Jodhpur sun and make up the twisting lanes of the ancient city are painted blue by the Brahman, the priest caste, to repel mosquitoes. With only room for a donkey, goat or bicycle to squeeze through, not even a whiff of garlic permeates these clean-smelling, clean-living streets: the Brahman believe the bulb encourages forbidden lascivious thoughts. But around a corner gaseous black smoke belched from the sweltering oven of a Victorian open-air confectionery factory as tiny, sooty children staggered under the weight of vast, fat-encrusted baking pans. The surprisingly white fluffy coconut cakes that emerged at the other end looked dangerously inviting. Lumbering and swaying towards me was a diseased cow that had lost that instinctive, god-given ability to swerve at the sight of a human.
Tangled skeins of television cables hung across the street only an inch above our heads; an old woman lay on the floor of a baker’s shop, barely strong enough to lift a fluttering hand to pull her sari over her painracked face while her son kneaded dough beside her. Amid the smells of sweat, spice and mint, the wedding sari shoppers were almost invisible in the undulating waves of brilliant-coloured fabric, drowning in laughter and silk. At the clock tower, near ‘the omelette man’ with his teetering cardboard columns of egg boxes, sat the dentist, yanking out teeth with rusty neolithic instruments, while the hairdresser’s customers waited patiently for his attention, pudding bowl already in position. The only thing apparently not for sale was a pair of jodhpurs.
One night we went for dinner in the antiseptic grandeur of the Umaid Bhawan Palace, where the famous Hello!-fest of Liz Hurley’s Indian wedding took place. We ate and drank celebrity-style until the bill came. Tagged with shame at being caught short, we slunk home, sending round a lorryload of rupees the following morning, happy to escape the rich corporate life and return to the magical lake.
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