Dial 101 for fire

Bharatpur, 3rd March 2011

I’m sitting outside our room in the dark, waiting for the Wolfcubs to calm down enough to allow themselves to sleep.  L has just managed to call the Indian fire-service, by mistake, as she tried to turn on the flashlight on WD’s mobile. Prior to that, she’d trampolined onto this laptop, whilst jumping on our bed, but no harm seems to have been done.  Does the whole business of growing-up basically boil down to learning how to manage sleep and fatigue (and maybe a few other bodily needs)? 

M has had a bit of a wobble this evening – I think she’d been stressed at the idea of another rail journey (after our last experience) and tired of being different, feeling people are laughing at her and not understanding why.  I so completely empathise.  I had been pretty apprehensive about further train travel – we’d done team strategy for all eventualities (‘W, do you know who the station master is?’) – and tire of being the highlight of a boring afternoon in the Hindi Belt.  Fortunately this particular 3 hour train journey didn’t involve any scrum or mishap, just pleasant company, good snacks and endlessly repeating village scenes through the open window (women in brilliant synthetic headscarves of citric yellow or Fanta orange working in the fields of mustard or ripening wheat, hay ricks, buffalos...). WD and I read the Times of India – spectacular headlines like ‘Did Berto foot the nip-tuck bill for bunga-bunga girls?’, ‘Colin Firth to visit India?’ and minimal coverage of other world news, beyond the assassination of a Pakistani Minister, a Christian who opposed the Blasphemy laws there.   We did draw an audience in the reservations hall, where we trying to get onward tickets, and then outside trying to fend off the over-eager auto-drivers.  Calm down everyone, it’s only the WolfGang!

L and W, whilst equally exhausted, have had a breeze – playing on the train, L helping W to write his ‘novel’ (Booker Prize 2012?) and to learn some basic ‘literacy’ (she’s on an educational mission, watch out W!), rollicking around, doing their journals and having a shower, showing no apparent signs of tiredness until the bedtime moment came.  Still, it’s quiet in there now, good probably? 

WD has had a last minute change of plan.  The thought of another dirty, hassle-full North Indian tourist city wasn’t enchanting anyone - to the degree he was contemplating diverting completely away from Agra but the girls are insisting that we do go to the Taj Mahal (they’ve read the Shah Jehan comic and are completely, completely sure they must see this monument to love and maternal mortality), even though the WPs think it might be quite cool to have been India for nearly six months and not go there...But WD does need to go to Mathura and Vrindavan (the landscape of Braj, Krishna’s birthplace and homeland) for research/grant-justification purposes (as well as  academic curiosity), which lie north of Agra, so we are heading in that direction anyway.  So we hopped off the train a stop early at Bharatpur for a few quiet days and WD can do his fieldwork daytrips from here rather than Agra, and cut the time we spend actually staying in Agra to a night or two.

The Jungle Lodge is a low-key budget option in a quiet backstreet of Bharatpur.  It costs a sixth of what we had been paying in Jaipur, but still has clean sheets, towels, functional hot water, a menu of toasted sandwiches and watery dal, and a garden (not a jungle), full of daisies, shady trees and a dangling bees’ nest.  You sometimes wonder exactly what you’re paying so much more for, as you go up the scale.  Usually a TV and lots of subservient men in berets.  The Madhuban (where we ended up in Jaipur) was a pleasant, modern surburban villa, turned ‘heritage’, full of affluent, older Europeans on organised (shopping) tours of India.  Not the place for the WolfGang to run wild:  WD doesn’t cope well with the loss of autonomy such places inflict on you (like a ‘complimentary’, well sort of, taxi to the station) and the children had to turn the volume down a bit, for the ladies having lovely cups of tea (china cups with saucers) in the garden.  Its location, up a quiet residential street, meant we were a way away from alternative food and supplies, having to depend on the hotel’s expensive menu or drive into the noisy, hectic town centre for alternatives.  The first night we misjudged completely, and all went to bed hungry (though I/WD sneaked a teaspoon of peanut butter when no-one was looking – how sad is that?).  Our poor children were understandably upset and could be heard demanding ‘one chapatti’ into the dark – the begging call of street kids here – to no avail.  

Jaipur was quite hard work in general.  We had an underwhelming afternoon visiting the old city which looked not the famous pink, but a miserable dirty brown, full of traffic and chaos, and the Palace at its centre scored only a 4/10 (and that was mostly on the basis of its imaginative weapons displays – we liked the excesses at play, where ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ and various other messages were spelt in daggers, cross-bows and shields). Maybe we are now a little blasé about our Rajput palaces?  Mostly I think the weather (stormy, low cloud) and family mood collided in an unhelpful way.  Good things about Jaipur – family autos (where the back has been removed, to add a row of seats facing backwards so you can watch incoming buses and two-wheelers just about manage to break in time) and Raoul (a five year old British Asian/Italian from Battersea, staying at our hotel) who provided intense play satisfaction for L and W.  His mum, Sunni, had a memorably explicit Kamasutra-theme enamelled choker which WD and I could scarcely tear our eyes away from.  We wondered what the Punjabi relatives had made of it.

Our day trip to Amber (the fort-power base of the Rajputs prior to Jaipur, 12 km out of town) was so different.  The sun was out, our mood was upbeat, we’d beaten most of the tour buses there (in a knackered old gear-less auto, that didn’t make it up any sort of incline without the WPs getting out and walking) and laughed at the slow and ungainly descent up to the fort of fat white tourists on the back of hard-working elephants with sad eyes, an unlikely army. Amber Fort has an imposing location, and looks fabulous - just the place for a game of ‘Far Pavilions’.  

We got caught up in a toilet tariff-scam.  WD and I were very peeved to have to fork out 10 rupees a head to use the loo, having just spent 200 rupees each to get into the site.  We pay an inflated foreigner rate (anything from 4-20 times more than an Indian tourist).  So WD was arguing the ‘if you’re charging international prices, then foreign tourists will expect facilities like toilets to be free’-line and was told to put it in writing in the Visitor’s Book.  When I asked for this, all ready to make a crusading public health case (about the necessity of FREE toilets for children/menstruating women/people with diarrhoeal illness/men with prostatic issues...), the ‘in-charges’ got quite touchy and gave me a refund rather than allowing me to make an official written complaint.  Not sure if this was simply to avoid losing face, the very opposite of an organisational culture welcoming feed-back or if we’d uncovered more widespread corruption?  (Apparently the pay toilets should only have been 5 rupees a head...)

We went to the Anokhi museum in an old restored haveli just down from the Fort to learn about block-printing and natural dye-processes. The contrast between the tourist scrum of the Fort and the quiet back streets where the museum was located could not have been more dramatic – goats being driven out to graze, old ladies chatting in the shade, a crazy Esher-like stairwell, babies being washed under the water-pump...The children had a go at block-printing and enjoyed the precise, sharp thump you have to deliver to get the print perfect.  M plans to go back to do one of the 2 day workshops there in her ‘year-off’.  W, however, was more concerned that Granpa Ian might need some Anokhi French knickers from the shop. (We’re not sure why he thinks Granpa Ian, in particular, might specially like them?) We had to fend off two health outreach workers, obviously on an immunisation drive, who were very determined that W should be added to their under 5 stats and were on the verge of dropping an oral polio vaccine dose into his mouth, before we intervened (Sam the Honest Nurse at Manor Surgery had got there first).  No informed parental consent needed here.