TRAVEL
Rajasthan
Stiff upper lip in the Raj
Frederick Forsyth
Of course, it all became completely absurd. Sally Burton heard that Sandy and I were going on a quick tour of Rajasthan to see the bits and bobs left behind by the Mogul empire and the Raj, and asked if she could come too. Not a problem. We booked for three. Then Aliai Forte got the news and wondered if she might tag along. Rocco did not mind; it was November and the trip allowed him to go off to Yorkshire and get in some serious shooting.
So that Aliai would not be lonely she asked along her friend Giovanna from Rome. I rang the agency and made that five bookings. At the last minute Elaine Paige thought the Raj might be nice in November. Thus it was that I found myself, as one does, in pitch darkness before dawn on Delhi station with five glamorous blondes amid a tidal wave of surging, pushing, shov- nig, shouting humanity struggling for six seats on a very grubby train to Agra. When it Came, I looked for the luggage van. There Was none, so 11 pieces of luggage plus six hand-held carry-ons had to be stowed in the rather frail overhead racks. Anglo-Indian relations were at breaking-point. Fortunate- ly, I seemed to have acquired 26 porters, so one did not have to carry much oneself except a diminishing brick of rupees. I recalled my plaintive plea back in Lon- don: just one soft holdall each, please. No chance. Agra was nice and very full of Indi- ans. Everything over there is very full of Indians. A camel shat on my toecap and we went to see the Taj Mahal, though I do not think the two were connected. We never did get inside the Taj Mahal, but just admired the exterior. There were about 50,000 other People queuing to get in. Apparently there was a festival going on. That's another thing; there's always a festival going on. I discovered that Aliai had a thing about Shops, the way an iron filing has a thing about magnets. After Agra we had a minibus and like the BBC reporter Brian Hanrahan in the Falklands I found myself counting them out and counting them back again. Usually, dur- ing the second process, I got as far as four and then looked for the nearest shop where Alles blonde head could be seen bobbing about among the bales of fabric.
On the way out of Agra our guide told us we were going to see Fatehpur Sikri. 'Per- haps he's a masseur,' said Sandy hopefully, for the road was very bumpy. He turned out to be an abandoned city.
At Jaipur we were quartered in the Raj Palace which in the middle of the night came under sustained mortar and machine- gun attack. Of course I knew what to do; I had seen Carry On Up the Khyber too. In a trice I had an old musket off the wall, stove out several panes of the window and pre- pared to defend the memsahibs. Then the manager arrived to say there was a festival of brides going on. Twenty thousand mar- riages were taking place by moonlight, accompanied by about one million fire- works. We stood down and ordered char.
At the Amber Fort I greeted every histori- cal revelation with the phrase, 'Well, good- ness gracious me.' Sandy shot me one of Those Looks and a nearby elephant obvious- ly agreed and broke wind. On the road to Deogarh I was told pretty sharply to stop referring to our driver as Mr Rogan Ghosh, which apparently is something aromatic. So's our driver,' I muttered and lapsed into silence. And there's another thing: you can't get a good hot Indian curry in India. The two we did find were in the Sheraton at Agra and the Lake Palace at Udaipur, both heavily westernised restaurants. Where are the curry chefs? Bradford, I think.
By Udaipur I was knackered. A thousand miles, umpteen shops, a legion of street vendors, several phalanxes of beggars and enough forts and palaces to fill a large cof- fee-table book are enough to give any chap a good reason for a beer on the terrace, gorblimey.
I still had my five blondes, 11 suitcases, six carry-ons and a few rupees. More, Phad suc- ceeded in the most important task of all: no one had got the dreaded Delhi belly. I had examined every cooked meal, refused every salad washed in untreated water, insisted that every drink have its seal unbroken, mouths were kept closed in the showers, teeth brushed with Evian. So we flew back from Udaipur to Delhi and on the way two of us had an in-flight snack. We transferred at Delhi to the London flight and arrived just after dawn. Within 24 hours the two nibblers were confined to the loo.
There's one thing I've learned about the subcontinent. In the end, India always wins.
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