Return to Rajasthan

The first time, Robyn Davidson hated it. Then she fell in love with it. Now she's showing it off to her friends.

by Robyn Davidson

I've been coming to India, for weeks, or months, or years, for more than two decades. The anger I used to feel when out of my depth has been ground down into quietude. In that sense, at least, I have been Indianised. I let many things pass. My particular deep end was a two-year stint of migrating with nomads in Rajasthan. It was hellish for us all, but made more hellish, for me, by linguistic isolation.

Cranks such as Rousseau made solitude seem glamorous, but sensible people know that it is really awful. I had gone to the nomads believing that I would understand more if I had no companion with whom to construct a separate cultural bubble. I left convinced that solitude is best enjoyed with friends.

Since then, I have gradually shifted from the cliche of hating India to the cliche of loving it. I think of it as home, and speak Hindi well enough to impress visitors, if not locals. And, after all these years, I am ready to invite certain judiciously chosen foreign friends into my life here.

Guests, however delightful, are hard work. There are those, for example, who have a problem with lavatories. Others cannot stomach the food. Some collapse under the horror of visible poverty. Others do not notice the poverty and grind, seeing only beauty and glorious smiles.

On this trip into the Indian desert, I am taking Rosa, a resilient first-timer who, if required, can pee behind a thorn bush, to the curious delight of passers-by, without turning a hair.

She will be a good companion.

We start out from Delhi in mid-morning. And we are still driving through Delhi a long while later, past malls the size of national parks and high-rise apartment blocks on land that was empty scrub a few years ago.

"This is real India? I say from the back seat." "This energetic, blind struggle upwards, or downwards, into post-Fordist capitalism." But my friend has gone to sleep.

At last we emerge from the long reach of conurbation. I ask Koju, our driver, to stop the car. He pops a cold bottle of champagne; Rosa and I stand sipping from long-stemmed glasses, whipped by gusts of warm, gritty wind. Thus fortified, we feel the exhilaration that is the appropriate spirit in which to begin a journey.

Heading west, we follow, more or less, the half-buried skeleton of the Aravalli Range. Farms give way to scrubland and granite, and the further into Rajasthan we go, the more my painter friend keeps gasping and pivoting in her seat. The colours! The castles! The men! The women!

The light is dust-hazy, the landscape pastel dun. The high-key colours of skirts, reds, greens, yellows, candy-pink, fuchsia and marigold, shining with silver or gold, are held by the background in harmonious contrast.

The women, balancing brass pots or bundles of wood on their heads, glide along with a roll of the hips and a sway of the arms that is mesmerisingly lovely. Rajasthan is designed for what the Buddhists call "lust of the eyes."

Wherever one looks, from Jaipur to Ajmer to Jodhpur to Jaisalmer, in windswept palaces or airy havelis, gathered around village wells, walking along dusty roads, framed by carved windows, are these kohl-eyed, nose-pierced, hard-working, smile-flashing, fabulous women.

But let's move on to lust of the stomach. Because it is time for lunch. We stop at a tiny restaurant I know, between Amber and Jaipur, which looks from the outside as if it might be a goat shed, but serves the best North Indian cuisine this side of anywhere.

You enter the shed to find a dozen tables set with laundered linen, slowly revolving fans, subdued lighting and the enormous bulk of the proprietor and chef, Amer.

He serves each dish himself, and a faint, superior, Cleeseian smile appears under his moustache each time you groan in sensual pleasure and try to push away another treat. This is the kind of heavy, rich food brought into India by the Muslims.

Vegetarians and dieters will not be happy here. Afterwards, I feel it is time for my friend to attempt a bazaar. "Yes, I would love to walk around and explore, but I don't want to buy anything," she says. "Perhaps one or two carefully chosen things, when we get back to Delhi...."

"Oh, really?" I think. "Just you wait until you enter the Aladdin's caves out there. Nobody can resist them, or their proprietors, who, after all, once sold to hard-nosed princesses."

So we enter the melee that is the Jaipur bazaar. We join the stream of life, consisting of female goatherds; urchins, thin as scraps but electric with energy; women in black chador; young men wearing Nikes and backward-pointing caps; old men in doorways smoking chillums and rewinding their enormous turbans; lyre-horned cows who push you out of their way because they know they're sacred and you're not. (One thing I notice when I write about India: I end up listing things.

How else to do justice to its profusion?)

It is marriage season. There are musicians dressed in white uniforms with epaulettes and red cummerbunds, playing brass instruments loudly and badly. And, standing in the midst of it all, a pure white stallion with pointed Marwari ears, waiting to pick up a gold-encrusted groom.

We enter several shops, but my friend buys nothing. I am amazed. It is the 12th-century citadel of Jaisalmer that finally undoes her. I send her off there on her own, because I first saw the place in 1978.

The golden sandcastle glowing on the rim of the Thar desert was a sight I shall never forget, and I do not want it sullied by overlays of contemporary Jaisalmer, its skirts now lined with new hotels and busloads of tourists. For all that, if you've never seen Jaisalmer, it is a must.

Rosa returns buried under parcels, having fallen victim to silver-tongued merchants who enticed her from tiny medieval doorways while she gazed, speechless, at sandstone palaces carved into lace.

IT IS yet another lovely day when we set out for Kuchaman fort. Now, it could be argued that the exteriors of Rajput forts are paranoia in stone. But some of them are so glorious that the rapaciousness that made them is beside the point. More than a century has passed since the Rajputs cut heads and protected their kingdoms from marauders.

Power and privilege have gradually been taken from them, so that their principal function these days is to prevent their properties from sinking under the sand. But there is no cloud without its silver lining. Their financial plight has meant that most are turning their palaces, forts and havelis into hotels, and for that one can only be grateful.

Kuchaman is quite simply magnificent. It rises on top of a 1,000ft rock cliff. You drive up to it by 4WD, along an almost perpendicular road once used by elephants. Inside, the martial architecture of ramparts and bastions, studded with guns and honeycombed by secret passages and dungeons, gives way to the most fanciful assemblage of delicate palaces, temples and courtyards.

The rooms have been added over generations, and each displays the taste and caprices of its particular rajah. One courtyard is constructed as a chessboard. Real soldiers were used as chess pieces. A little palace is entirely covered in gold leaf. Best of all is the mirrored room, a giddying kaleidoscope. When a candle is lit, the room displays its raison.

One candle becomes a million candles, flickering and dancing in the most charming way. You feel as though you are inside a jewellery box. Thus our days pass in a glut of eye lust and tummy lust. More restaurants, more palaces, more forts, havelis and roadside dhabas.

A visit to a charming maharajah to view his collection of priceless miniatures, a reckless drive through a jungle in an open Jeep at night, looking for leopards... and a lot more shopping.

Back in Delhi, in that reflective, rather melancholy mood that descends after a friend's departure, I congratulate myself nevertheless on the success of the venture.

Rosa has had the holiday of her life, nothing went wrong and she didn't even have to pee behind a thorn bush in front of an audience. I imagine her readjusting herself to London, and to post-industrial time. Rather her than me.

www.timesonline.co.uk