Brickworks

Here's a brickworks, old style, near Sonagiri, MP, India. Bricks are not things that are made in a huge industrial brickyard and exported on the back of lorries or by train for hundreds of miles; they are made in the local brickyard and come chugging to you along the country roads on a tractor trailer.

This is the way bricks were made in England, once upon a time. My father is a local and industrial historian; I remember the excitement of looking for old lime kilns on family holidays, sometimes hidden under brambles and briars, sometimes at the bottom of a well tended country garden.

So it was fascinating for me to see little local brickyards dotted all over the countryside. In the UK industry tends to be corralled and neutered - it's hidden out of the way on 'industrial estates' or whole swathes of townscape are given up to it, and we try to distance it from the places where we live. In India, on the other hand, manufacturing is still something that is done openly, that you see on the street and in the fields.

In some ways that's good. In other ways, not so good - pollution can be a problem, and some areas become degraded when there's no planning, no control over land use, and no oversight of public areas. But on this bright day on the way to Sonagiri, I got a smile and a wave from the brickward workers, and watched the smoke of the kilns that were being fired drift up into a still sky, and wondered, as I walked, whether the decline of British manufacturing started when we decided that it was dirty and noisy and uncivilised, and we ought to hide it away.





Brickworks, a photo by Andrea Kirkby on Flickr.

My Indian Top Ten

As a journalist I often get asked to write 'top ten tips' or 'ten ways to' or 'ten reasons why'... never six, or eight, or nine, but ten. It's got a certain feeling of completion to it, I suppose. (If we had more fingers, it might be a bigger number...) And it's a common format. I quite often see top ten destination pieces.

What editors want, of course, is a Pareto formula 80/20 - 80 percent the regular stuff, and 20 percent offbeat. So for instance if I were to write top ten tips for selling your house, eight of those tips would be basics (touch up the paintwork, tidy away the trash, make sure your garden has 'kerb appeal'), and two might be funny (make sure you don't oversleep so the potential purchasers find you in bed!) or niche (bachelors, consider putting throws over the black leather suite) or detailed (clean out the fridge).

So if I were writing an Indian top ten article for a newspaper, it would have to feature:

1. the Taj Mahal
2. Goa
3. Jaipur
4. Delhi
5. Keralan houseboats
6. Varanasi
7. Udaipur
8. Mumbai

and then I'd be allowed to mention a couple of places I really liked. For a backpacker publication the first eight might include Hampi and Rishikesh and exclude Mumbai, and a culture-led list might include a couple more World Heritage sites (Ajanta, Ellora perhaps) and exclude Udaipur or Delhi, but I don't think the lists would be very different.

Well this list is going to be different. It's purely and simply the places I have loved the most.

1. Hampi
2. Mandu
3. Orchha
4. Bundi
5. Gujarat in general.- Champaner, Palitana, Girnar
6. Chanderi
7. The Brahmaputra
8. Trichy
9. Parasnath
10. The Indus Valley in Ladakh

Hampi, the former capital of Vijayanagar, is a village in a city - quite literally since part of the village has been built inside the ruins of Vijayanagar's bazaar.

It's pretty well known and pretty touristed, with a lot of guesthouses and tourist-orientated shops. But it's still small town India - tiny schoolgirls with their hair in plaits and gingham shirts tucked into grey pleated skirts walk up the road with serious faces every morning, the temple elephant goes for its bath, pilgrims sleep in the temple courtyard. I was invited to a wedding at one temple up in the hills; I talked philosophy and religion with the priest at one Shiva shrine, where cool air blew through cracks in the mountain into the cave; I chatted to a woman who'd come back to find the place she'd stayed twenty years before, and had found it. And I walked; from temple to temple, palace to palace, in the fine landscape of tumbled rocks and conical hills on both banks of the roaring Tungubhadra, in a world whose colours were so delicate and luminous it seemed to have been painted in watercolour.

Mandu, like Hampi, is a once-capital become a village; but it's not a big tourist stop; Indian tourists come to see the palaces and temples, but it's only the pilgrims who stay. I met some at the Rama temple, more at the tiny Neelkanth temple (one a raja's summerhouse) that hangs on the edge of a precipice overlooking the plains of Madhya Pradesh. I went to the evening service with some of them, who were half way through the circumambulation of the river Narmada - up one bank and down the other - carrying nothing but their puja materials in a bag; a mirror, a sacred image, incense, an oil lamp. I left early; as I sat on the veranda of my guest room at the temple, departing pilgrims waved and wished me good evening, a ceremonious kindness.

Mandu is relatively flat. But on every side of the plateau, massive cliffs fall away, and narrow gorges claw their way into the massif. Below, bright green fields chequer and stripe the plain. There are monuments of great ambition - the mosque, the tower of victory, the royal palace with its subterranean chambers where funnelled breezes and channelled water cool the air - and there are small domed tombs and miniature mosques scattered in the fields, past villages where children yell and the grated ice man comes once a day on his tricycle.

Back at the temple after my day's cycling, I talked to a young Hindu pilgrim monk. I'd thought at first he was a temple pujari, but no, he was only staying for a week or two; he dreamed of teaching meditation coupled with the Thai boxing he used to practise when he was in the world.

"Once I was in the jungle," he told me. "I went with a friend, but my friend said this is too hard, I'm going, you can die here if you want to. And I stayed in the jungle. One day I saw a leopard, very close, just like you are now, and I said: Hari Ram! if I die, I die. And the leopard looked at me and walked away. If your faith is strong, you can do anything."


Orchha is a place where I did the wrong thing, and it worked. I let a rickshaw driver take me to a guesthouse. Temple View Guesthouse is now 'family' as far as I'm concerned. I settled in. One American tourist told me she'd 'done' Orchha; it took her three days to feel bored and constricted. After a month, I loved the place. It's another former capital, like Mandu and Hampi, with palaces, royal cenotaphs, and fine temples; but it's also a buzzing small town, when the Ramraja Temple has a festival, and people come from all over Bundelkhand; or during the marriage season, when the streets are alive with processions and sound systems, stallions wait patiently for the bridegrooms down by the river, and newlyweds with their friends visit the little garden shrine behind the Phool Mahal.

Do Orchha as a day trip and you'll be the target of hustle. Stay there a week and people get to know you; the little deaf guy and his friend from the Chaterbuj temple, Ram Babu the fruit man and 'magic fingers' (karom champion and magician both), even the children of the village and the pujari of the Hanuman temple. Orchha is my home in India. What more can I say?

Bundi is another small town. Yes, small town India is so much nicer than city India. I accept the attractions of Mumbai, for instance (including some amazing shops for vintage Indian fountain pens, as well as colonial architecture and the tremendous cave temples at Elephanta), but the smaller towns are where my heart is. Bundi, in Rajasthan, has everything you want: palaces piled high on the sides of a hill, all pavilions and pinnacles, with the most lovely mural paintings I've seen, in which Krishna dances with the cowgirls, and Persian fairies oversee a huge military operation on the walls below; a massive fort above the town, where troops of wild monkeys roam; a bustling market, fine stepwells, and a calm lake that gleams red in the sunset. (I wish I'd stayed longer there and not gone on to Udaipur, a parody made for tourists.)

I'm going to be broad-brush with my next member of the top ten and nominate an entire state, Gujarat. Foreign tourists just don't go there. Travel is sometimes hard - there are reliable buses, but they're hard to find out about, no one has a timetable; there are dharamshalas and small hotels, but sometimes every hotel in town seems to be full, or you end up in a workers' hotel with shared showers and toilets a long way down a gloomy corridor. But look where you end up!

The lovely town of Mandvi, where you may still see wooden dhows being built, though that industry is dying out, and where the sandy beach runs 8 kilometres out of town towards the distant domes of a royal palace; Champaner, a Hindu holy mountain sheltering a former Muslim capital where mosques and even monumental pigeon-houses dot the countryside; Palitana, a temple city where only the gods stay overnight; the high peak of Mount Girnar, where steps lead up to Jain and Hindu temples, through the morning mists to the raw sunlight; Dwarka, where Krishna devotees kidnapped me to dance in the streets with them, and fed me till I nearly burst. Even Ahmedabad has its delights: the marvellous Calico Museum with its fine textiles and bronzes, by far the best museum I've visited in India; fine mosques where jali screens give dappled light, ancient pols with old wooden houses and fine gateways, and some of the best drinks and juice places in India (because, of course, Gujarat is a dry state).


Not far from Orchha  is Chanderi. Yet another small town, and one that didn't even make it into the edition of the Rough Guide I was using. Good. That keeps the tourists away. So does the fact that there's no guesthouse there; only a 600 rupee a night hotel. And only two restaurants, both hole-in-the-wall cafes where all the other customers were locals.

Perhaps my love of Chanderi stemmed initially from the fact that I had the luck to met Kalley Bhai, a local guide who showed me round the town after dinner and a cup of tea, for free. We wandered through the Bazar - one of the most famed bazars of the sixteenth century, though now it's a small town market frequented by cows, sleepy-eyed cats and local children - and he showed me tiny but exquisite havelis, friends who made confectionery (little hard sugar dragees, or squishy cakes), stalls selling Chanderi weaving. The weaving here is lovely, a cotton-silk mix; you hear looms click and thud in some of the old palaces. There are mosques and minarets, fine arches, extensive lakes; there's a giant Jain tirthankar carved into a cliff-face, a fort marooned above the city, tiny hills inviting you to climb them all around the town. There's one of the finest works of architecture I've seen in India, four storeys of what was a seven storey palace, where, if you dare (and I dared, though my heart was bursting through my ribs with fear), you can stand on a narrow remnant of vault and look down into the central light well.

I was invited to take tea with a young girl's family after I admired the carved door of her haveli. I spent time chatting with the confectioners. I climbed up to the fort, and wandered round the lakes, and my rickshaw driver let me sit in his rickshaw for half an hour and brought me tea while we waited for the bus, and charged nothing extra for the service. That's the kind of place Chanderi is.

Assam, like Gujarat, doesn't get as many tourists as other states, and I didn't have enough time to see it properly, just a few days in Guwahati and around. (For some reason, as soon as I arrived in Guwahati everyone assumed I wanted to get out of it - "Shillong, Shillong," the bus-touts chorused. But I stayed.) The Brahmaputra, for me, is one of India's genuine highlights - nearly two kilometres wide, with temple-crowned islands scattered across its braided channel, and tiny square-sailed boats carving its grey waters. Assamese temples are unlike those anywhere else in India, with open, wooden mandapas in front of gloomy shrines with huge stone pillars that crowd in, rising high above; inside, the darkness swims, heavy with incense.In one, the nine planets have their own small hearth-altars, with lamps and fires shining in the dark. In others, steps in the sanctuary lead down to a slash in the rock where a spring or stream flows, symbol of the dark goddess. Majuli, upstream, is a marshy, massive island full of small wooden shrines; or further downstream there's Hajo, a delightful town that surprised us with its hospitality and with its looming temple on the hill above a tank where huge fish come to be fed, and turtles lurk in the green water.

Tamil Nadu is the temple state, and I love Trichy for its combination of fine temples and a buzzing modern city. The Rock Fort amazingly combines a hilltop temple with views across the wide Carvery river and the plain with cave temples dug into the rock; in one mandapa I found a man sitting on a mat, chopping vegetables - the temple provides a charitable lunch for the poor. Across the river lies the Srirangam Temple, which holds an entire town within its multiple, concentric walls; and the Jambukeshwar temple, a little further out, has a huge tank full of water hyacinth, soaring gopuras, dim corridors, and gardens full of tall trees. But from the Rock Fort it's just a few minutes' walk to the shopping malls full of consumer electronics, or the grocery market where red-skinned onions roll across the pavement and buyers thrust their hands into sacks of rice to assess the quality.

Bihar is off most tourist maps, but if you are interested in either Buddhism or the Jain religion, you'll end up there - at Pawapuri where the last great Jain teacher, Mahavir, died, or at Bodh Gaya where Buddha received enlightenment, or at Parasnath, the great Jain pilgrimage mountain.A day on Parasnath involves 18km of walking, and about 1 km of ascent, and there are also visits to temples and shrines off the main route to be factored in. It's hard. It's very hard.

I was about two-thirds of the way up when exhaustion hit me. My legs were solid pain; I could feel tears starting in the corners of my eyes. The rucksack straps had numbed my shoulders. I nearly gave up. A dholi passed me, a sedate old gentleman on his litter with four bearers propelling him upwards; he smiled, I scowled.

"It's hard," a girl said.

"Yes," I said; and at the same time I realised she'd spoken in an American accent.

It turned out the whole family were climbing Parasnath together. The senior generation in their dholis, the younger on foot, and fasting, and her brother - languid and elegant in a long white kurta - barefoot, too; "because Dad is always going on about how things were much harder in the old days, and I'm not going to let him do it this time." They'd started before dawn; they were tired; they had one more temple to visit before they got to the top. They gave me new strength.

It's worth the climb. The temple at the top is nothing much, architecturally; but the views over the foothills and the huge low plain, and the forested slopes scattered with bright white temples, and the cool, fresh air, and the sound of chanting and bells, and the knowledge that you've done your duty, you've walked those long, dusty, painful kilometers (and it's all a long downhill yomp back to the dharamshala from here) - it's hard to describe how good that is. How it heals the soul. That's Parasnath.


Varanasi has to be on my list, I suppose. I rather thought none of the regular top ten would make it, but Varanasi is something special. There's hustle, from "Madam boat madam boat" to "I am Brahmin, madam, I am living here and reading philosophy," to the men who want to sell you silk which turns out to be polyester, and at higher prices than the genuine article from the big silk Mehrotta factory shop, to the guys who frequent the burning ghats and want you to stump up the price of a bit of wood (and I know my wood, having been responsible for buying a good bit of prime rosewood, cedar, and spruce, but most UK timber yards don't sell it with gold leaf on both sides, which must surely be the case given the amount these chaps want for stuff that's only going to feed the fires).

But... the light in Varanasi is different. It's as if the Ganges infuses liquidity into it; the light is soft, luminous, delicate, from morning mists to afternoon sunlight. The narrow galis of the old city hide palaces, ancient temples, tiny dark squares where huge trees sway above; there are market stalls selling wooden toys and gilded bronze bowls, mouth-freshening sugar-coated fennel seeds and bottles of palm oil, and Varanasi glass beads that tinkle and glitter. Above all, there's the Ganges, huge and sluggish, or rapid and hungry in monsoon, and the immense flights of steps which rise up from the tiered ghats towards the city, topped by palaces and temples, spires and minarets. Varanasi surprised me with light and shade. It's the sacred centre of India; how could I leave it out?

This list is a little biased to the north. (Though not the far north; not Ladakh, which I love, but which frustrates me with its bias to neatly packaged treks, and where perhaps I need to go with a motorbike to appreciate it properly; not Chamba, though it's a lovely place, with its ancient small temples in their compound, and its dusty Chowgan in the centre of town, and the great hills all around, and the wonderful mountain pasture of Khajjiar, and the tiny temple town at Bharmour, a twisting, frightening couple of hours on the bus; not Rewalsar either, with its lake in the mountains and its easygoing Buddhist monks and Tibetan chefs and the attractions of cheap, and highly alcoholic, cider.)  I didn't want it to be; I love the south. I love Madurai, with its temple that you can stay in all day and not be bored, a huge, living temple pullulating with rites and chants and crowds. But it's a horrible city, full of mud and bad hotels. I love Kanchi with its many temples and its courteous people, and Bijapur with the huge hulk of the Gulbumgaz and the delicate tomb of Ibrahim Rauza, better than the Taj Mahal and far less crowded. I love Gokarna on the sea with its beaches, where the cow tried to get into the teashop, and the temple corridors are dim with smoke and incense, and pilgrims bathe in the ocean at dawn and come out with their loincloths wet and their mobiles dead if they forgot to put them safely on the sand. I have a very soft spot for Lonavala, which combines the attractions of early Buddhist cave temples with the temptation of locally made chikki, nut brittles and nougats for which the town is famous. It's a tragedy that the top ten format forces me to leave them out... but none of them quite made it.

Men at work: days in Leh

It all started with a cat.

I'd been a couple of days in Leh, taking it gently as all the books tell you to when you travel from nearly sea level to 3,500 metres in a single hour; I was tired of the easy life, bored with the shops, their same-old same-old souvenirs (soapstone Buddhas, brass elephants, pashminas) and their soapy chatty smiley salesmen who never stopped accosting me; I wanted to get out.

I took a bus to Spitok. It's seven kilometres, I think; just a bit further than the airport - the monastery sits uncomfortably on a ridge of rock that cuts right across the end of the runway. At six or seven in the morning, planes roar into Leh and thunder away again.

There's a good road for a way, but then I found my way up to the Gonkhang lay across scrabbly scree, dipping down from one side of the ridge, and then scrambling up a steep, narrow corner of rock to the terrace of this improbably perched temple. (When I looked down from there, I could see the way I should have come, an easy stride up from the road to the main monastery, and wide steps up from there.) Horrid horned deities lurked in the damp temple, their faces covered by veils; from time to time worshippers appeared, prostrated themselves, hung scarves around the deities' necks, lit butter lamps in the soot-blackened lamp-house next door. An old thin-faced man took twenty or hundred rupee notes for the gods, administered puja. (Under the veils, the gods had too many arms, too many skulls round their necks; were they Buddhas or Kalis?) When I was alone with these statues I found myself feeling nervous, like walking down a narrow alley late at night; there's nothing there, you keep saying to yourself, till it becomes a mantra.

I took the stairs down. I found myself, eventually, outside the back of the monastery, in a small courtyard, with a door half-open to the interior; it looked unwelcoming, and I felt loath to venture in.

Then the cat appeared.

He was one of those confident cats you sometimes see who know the world revolves around them. He miaowed at me, gave me a hard stare, and walked, tail waving gracefully, to curve himself round the edge of the door and disappear into the dimness.

Well, what could I do but follow him?

He led me up a narrow staircase, to a landing, out eventually to a small courtyard on an upper level, where he promptly jumped up to a window ledge and on to the table inside, popping up again to stick his head out of the window and miaow at me. But every time I reached out a hand to scratch his head, he'd turn around and jump down the few inches to the table; and every time I pulled my hand back, he'd jump back to the windowsill. These were cat games; I was a cat toy, there solely for his amusement. It amused me, too.

When I heard a low chuckle I realised it amused someone else; an older lama who was coming across the courtyard. As he opened a small door, the cat narrowed its eyes, then leapt fluidly down from the window and ran across, looking up at the lama before disappearing inside. I smiled. The lama smiled, and then beckoned.

One side of the room was dark, the wall covered in glass fronted niches which hid twenty-one gilded Taras. The other was all glass, huge windows looking out over the Indus river, the low but sharp cliffs on the other side, the fields below. Here, in the rather grey light, the lama sat to work on his butter lamps, the cat lying lazily against his knee, and I sat cross-legged facing him, watching.

Brightly coloured lumps of buttery putty swam in a bowl of cool water in front of him. He had already half completed a plaque, laying the base colours, and now he was making the surrounds; long, thin sausages of putty, first balled up in his fingers, then pressed through a wooden bar with tapered holes in it to create long strings of putty, and then gently laid on the plaque and prodded into position. Then came flowers; built up, petal by petal, in his hands, with tiny balls of red or white rolled up in his fingertips and applied to the top as stamens. He'd just put the fifth one on when he must have seen something wrong; just as evenly, delicately and slowly as he'd laid them on, he pulled the whole assembly of flowers off, and started again. One of these little offerings to Buddha takes three or four hours to make; he'd already made four, which stood in front of a small altar to one side, and which he showed me so that I could take a picture of them.

I watched for about an hour, I think. Indian tourists came in, took a photo, left. The lama kept working and I kept watching, and from time to time we exchanged smiles, and the afternoon went by.

It was getting late when I left, about five, I think, and I was going to wander down through the village, huddled cubes of building on the slope that tumbles down to the Indus valley, and catch the bus back into Leh. As I came out on to the monastery roof, though, I heard singing, far away yet loud. I squinted into the sun; no sign of any singer, till far in the fields I caught sight of a plough team, two oxen yoked to the plough. It was the ploughman who was singing as he went.

So instead of taking the bus, I took the path out to the fields, where the brown silt is fertile and the river isn't far away, and I found three plough teams all working the same field, round and round - as fields here aren't square, but rounded, and ploughed from the outside in, all the teams following each other and turning in unison.

The song isn't just sung for joy; it's sung for coordination. "Go straight! To the right! Go slow!" I was told, when I asked what the words meant; as the leading driver yells the refrain, "A-oh," he turns his oxen and swings his plough around, the song warning the other drivers to do the same. Everyone sings, antiphonally, a question and answer, a call and response.

Round and round the field they go, and as they go, the women (almost always: one man, who'd tired himself out ploughing, joined them later) throw the seed on to the ground, to be ploughed under, and trodden in. Three families were ploughing that day; Ladakhi agriculture is a hurried, fraught business, packing the whole process from sowing to harvest into the few snow-free months from May to September, and everyone in the village helps with everyone else's work. The youngest baby had come along, clambering into so many women's laps that I soon gave up trying to guess who the mother was, and running away every time I pointed a camera at him; two grandmothers vied for my attention, and posed theatrically for portraits; two women poured me buttery tea ("proper Ladakhi tea, no India tea here") and pushed chapattis at me, and the Rayban-wearing ploughman who represented the youngest generation working here turned out to have excellent English, and translated. Tea break, of course, is a big Ladakhi tradition; here, it happened as soon as one field was ploughed; big thermoses were pulled out of baskets, and tea towels unfolded to get at the bread, and everyone sat on a grassy bank in the sun till it was time to get on with the next field. I've rarely felt so happy.

And all the time, a young dzo was watching. (A cross of cow and yak, the dzo lives at lower altitudes than the yak, and works hard for his living.) Was he a spare, I wondered?

"He doesn't work," Raybans said. "This year, two year old, he watches. This year he sees, he learns, next year he works."

***

Back in Leh, I found that the disappointingly cosmopolitan tourist shops of the main bazaar were not all the city had to offer. If instead of going right from my guesthouse to the bazaar, I turned left down Nowshara Market, I'd find shops with Ladakhi traditional costume, not pashminas, and proper shirts, not rainbow-patterned hippie gear.

About half way down was a small shop with a window full of Taras and Buddhas; nothing else. No elephants, no pencil boxes, no Kama Sutra carved in fake ivory, no handbags or silly hats. Just Buddhas, Taras, a solitary Guru Rinpoche.

Intrigued, I went in. At the back of the shop, a man was sitting painting the eyes on to Taras. Twenty-one Taras, he told me, for a monastery which had commissioned them for its shrine room.

"I finish them today, they come tomorrow to pick them up," he said. The brush licked delicately at the iris of another eye.

He was happy to talk about his work. He trained at the Norbulingka school in Dharamsala; he was shortly to go back there for a month (indeed, next time I passed he'd shuttered the shop, which is one reason I'll have to go back to Leh - I still want to buy one of his Taras). He showed me some of the lesser known saints; he explained their attributes - why Guru Rinpoche is always shown with the skull and trident; White Tara with a third eye in her forehead, and eyes in the palms of her hands. Manjushri with his sword, for truth and the ability to divide it from falsehood.

I asked what statue I should buy, if I bought one. Not the prettiest or the most exotic, but what would do me the most good.

"First you should have the Buddha, of course," he told me. Well, that's good, as I do already have a Buddha.

"Then you should have Tara, for luck," he said. "She brings long life. Every house needs Tara."

Every statue is first cast in bronze; he buys them in, ready for gilding and painting. Some are only partly painted, just the details picked out; others are almost gaudily covered in colour. (In the tourist shops and the Tibetan markets, mass-produced, poorly cast statues clustered in their dozens - but these were quite different. I always look at the hands first; a bad casting has cubist hands, all straight lines, or mittens with just a scratched line to divide the fingers. Look at a good statue, though, and you'll see each finger delicately carved, real life in the mudras, the sacred finger-talk.)

I stayed a little while, taking pictures, and watching the work. And even though I never managed to buy my own Tara, just watching patiently, I like to think, brought me some merit.

Stanzin Phuntsok's Traditional Gallery is in Nowshara Market, Leh

All of India in four hours

India is a huge country. I've travelled in India twice, first for three months, then for nearly six; and I still haven't seen most of Himachal Pradesh, or any of Uttarkhand, or much of Bengal, or any of the North-East states apart from Assam. And both the Thar Desert and the Rann of Kutch remain on my 'to-do' list.

So if nine months isn't enough time to see the whole country, it seems strange that I'm writing about how to visit India in four hours.

First stop, Mount Abu. A welcome coolness pervades - the plains of Gujarat were toasting nicely in the forties, but it felt at least ten degrees cooler once my bus had crawled from Abu Road's station up the side of the mountain to Mount Abu itself. A fresh breeze off the lake takes the temperature down even more. And there are mature trees everywhere; Mount Abu seems almost like a garden city.

Plus, you can get quite good pizza. Which after a month of Gujarati thali was an appealing thought.

Early morning saw me up already and striding out down the road southwards. I stopped off at a Gujarat state-owned hotel for breakfast - a very good breakfast, French toast and a big pot of tea (or 'service tea' as the menu calls it).

"This is a Gujarati hotel?" I asked.

"Yes madam. Owned by Gujarati State Tourism."

"But we're not in Gujarat. Mount Abu is in Rajasthan, isn't it?"

"Not always," the waiter said. I had visions of the mountain skating around on the geological strata beneath, like a giant ile flottante in a lake of cream, before he continued.

"When India got independence, all this was Mumbai state. Then state was split in two, Gujarat and Maharashtra. Changes, all kinds changes, and Mount Abu becomes Rajasthan, but Gujarati government kept this hotel and other places. So this is Rajasthan, but Gujarat owns the hotel."

Which explained why every other place in town (but not Uncle Sam's Pizza) had Gujarati thali on the menu. And why one restaurant had a prominently displayed sign saying "No Gujarati thali," as if they were fed up of people wandering in and saying airily, without looking at the menu, "Oh, can we have a Gujarati thali."

Anyway... I wandered on. The road went uphill slightly. It got curvier and curvier. It passed a house with a temple built into the front room; oboe music writhed in the air, with tinkling bells which might have been real ones, or might have been part of the music from the loudspeakers. The road spun around on its own tail and stopped abruptly, because there was nowhere for it to go. Ahead, a cliff fell away, down and down towards the plain, and the lowlands stretched dull fawn and dry for ever away from the mountain under the glaring blue sky.

From here, four hundred steps, or seven hundred, or seven hundred and fifty, depending on who you ask, descend to the temple and the spring. Deep steps, steps with paving slabs that tip and wobble, steps of varying and unpredictable depth. Steps that twist like a corkscrew around the crevices of the cliff, always in the shade of huge trees, trees that obstruct the view; you can't see any temple, you can't even see the plain or the sky.

And then, suddenly, there was the temple, and in front of it the square tank, and the spring water rushing into the tank and making the surface shimmer with light.. I watched while an Indian family did their puja; rolling up their trousers, and gingerly descending the steps to touch the marble cow's head from which the water issued, and then their own foreheads, and to drink and sprinkle a little of the water, and brush some of the fresh water back on their hair like Mods refreshing their Brylcreem; and then going meekly into the temple above the spring, where a bearded priest gave them prasad and recited scriptures for them.

 This was a dry day, and the whole of Gujarat had been brown and shrivelled up for weeks, and yet the water was not seeping or dribbling but rushing out in a torrent.

A younger priest arrived and started to pick leaves out of the pool. The Indian family got up, and left. A woodcutter was smashing a log with his axe somewhere in the trees. A little later he came through, taking his sandals off to lug the branch he'd cut to the other side of the pool. A mynah bubbled. A leaf fell, taking for ever to fall slowly, into the water where it skittered and turned in the wind.

Some places you go to, and you wonder what all the fuss was about. The Taj Mahal was like that for me. Other places you immediately feel a certain - I hesitate to use the word holiness, but that's what it feels like; a certain spiritual quality to them. Kathok Lake in Yoksum, Sikkim is like that for me. So is Wayland's Smithy on the Ridgeway, in southern England. Gaumukh was one of these places; still, serene, sacred.

I went into the temple. The bearded priest must have been about my age, a bit older perhaps; his smile was ready, his eyes bright.

"You have come to India," he said. I thought that's obvious, but he continued; "You have come to Gaumukh, and Gaumukh is all India. The water, the water is Ganga, the sacred river. And the mountain, that is Himalaya, where Shiva lives. Ganga and Himalaya, that is all of India. So you travel all of India in one day, and when you are here, you make your bath in Ganga and you visit Mount Kailash in Himalaya, all at one and the same time."

We chatted a little. He gave me prasad; little hard nubbins of sugar candy as white as Tippex that cracked between my teeth. He told me the water was good to drink; he indicated a little metal pot I could use to take the water from the spring, if I needed it. He told me I should bathe in Ganga. I didn't bother to roll my trousers up. (They were dry, anyway, within a few minutes.) The steps were slightly slippery; I held on to the cow's ear to steady myself, and cupped a hand under the water. It was fresh, cool, sweet. I drank my fill.

And that was India. Two hours to walk there and two hours to walk back, and all of India rolled up in a single visit.

Orchha – India the slow way

Today I played my first game of karom. Ram Babu, the fruit and juice vendor, turns out to be a champion and was quite happy to teach me how to play. I lost eight games in a row.(But I did improve. At the start I couldn't even hit the pieces. By the end I was turning in two or three good shots a game.)

I wandered up river, having found a little gate in the high wall that surrounds the town and its hinterland, and defends against a riverside attack; I turned right, where previously I'd turned left, through fields muddy with the previous day's rain to the banks of the Betwa. I scrabbled on shingle or plains of great rounded grey pebbles that rustled and turned under my feet, and climbed over pinkish granite rubbed clean and flat by centuries of monsoon floods. A man carrying a bucket picked his way from rock to rock as delicately as a bird; women were doing their laundry in the shallows downriver, and the towers of the Teen Mahal shimmered in reflection. I saw the spires of a temple I'd visited two days before reflected in a still pool. I saw a mysterious tower in the woods on the opposite bank, and no way to reach it. I gave up when the bank became a cliff, and the water too deep to paddle across, but I could still see shallows in the middle distance, and women in pink and yellow saris doing their washing.

Like so many Indian hikes this turned out inconclusive, reaching a dead end, so that I had to follow cow tracks back to the main road, relinquishing my plan to follow the river. I came back on the 'bye pass' (Indian spelling, as always with its own idiosyncratic charm) past a fine ruined haveli, its three storey gate tower topped by the curved roof that's typical of Bundela architecture. I looked for a way up, but the stairs had caved in. I had to make do with the natural rise of the land for my view of Orchha in the valley below.

I ate lunch from Bal Kisan, at his little stall in the busy pedestrian street that runs up from the main road to the Ramraja temple. His little girl recognised me and grinned; he's more ceremonious, said 'namaste', started making my patty. The potato patties sat already made, light golden, on the side of the huge iron pan; he swept one into the centre, chopped it into segments with what appeared to be a bolster chisel, piled chickpeas on top, then fresh chopped onions and coriander; swished it round a few times, mixed, swished, chopped again, and swept it all off the pan into a paper bowl, topping it off by ladling on sweet sauce and adding a pinch of ground coriander. Total cost: twenty rupees – which is standard for the fare, but I've rarely had such a huge and tasty version of it.

I wandered down to the chhatris at the other end of town to see the sunset. A
dog bounded towards me – a dog with neatly trimmed fur and a brass-studded collar, whose German owner turned up later. We chatted; the underlying violence of India was his story, the way he'd nearly been lynched when he tried to help a road accident victim and the mob somehow got the idea he was responsible for the accident; robbery in Manipur, a crash on the bridge by the Jhansi turnoff. I've never encountered more than hopeful 200 rupee scams in India – but that violence is always there; things can turn nasty in a moment, situations are always volatile. Someone sits in the wrong seat on the bus and suddenly fists are flying... but not in Orchha, somehow, where when my bus to Sonagiri passed the road to Ramraja Temple, one man opened the window and let fly a devout and very short prayer (and five voices joined 'Hey!' at the end) before sliding the window decisively shut again. That's as eventful as things have been in Orchha this week.

I spent an afternoon picnicking at the farm near the Laxminarayan temple that my guesthouse family own. Being one of the two vegetarians who wouldn't eat any of the mutton from the goat that had been slaughtered for us; the other being younger brother, who said later, "I saw its eyes, it looked at me, I could not eat it." Playing with the younger children, watching the chapati making – hard work, pushing into the resistant dough with whole fists – chatting with Korean students sitting on a mat under the shade of slender trees, feeling the cool breeze, listening to birdsong.

The end of the day comes. Ramraja Temple's two clear, fine treble bells ring the day to a close; ting-tang, ting-tang, ting-tang, calling to rest in the gathering dark. A sound that is sweet and melancholy and you hardly hear over the chatter and the sound of frying food in the guesthouse kitchen, unless you listen for it.

From time to time I leave Orchha for an adventure; a day of torrential rain in Gwalior, saved by a sudden outburst of sunshine that made the huge Jain rock carvings shine like gold, and the streams falling from the cliffs glitter with rainbows, and from which I returned three hours late, to be warmed at the cow-pat fire that smelt like creosote; a wonderful day climbing around Sonagiri's temple-encrusted hill; a trip to Datia with its bat-haunted palaces. But most of the time I spend just wandering, taking life easy, enjoying the fact that I've found somewhere in India I can call home.




Disclaimer: just a happy customer of Temple View Guest House and consumer of the complimentary chai offered - no affiliation, and no money off my bill for writing this. :-)