Today I went to a palace…again. And I got to ride an elephant…again.
The Amber Palace in Jaipur led off one of the most amazing days of my life. I woke up with my usual thirst for NCAA scores and learned that one of my nickel teams, Bucknell, defeated the mighty Kansas Jayhawks. More importantly, my beloved Aggies made it through the second round of the NIT Tournament.
We left for the fort/palace at 7:30, and once we got there we immediately hopped on elephants and headed up a very steep climb to the entrance. I’ll never get tired of riding on elephants—this one was as great as the last. I got to see Justin and a vendor conduct a transaction by throwing puppets and money back and forth at each other, and I got a picture taken sitting on the elephant’s head. The palace was amazing. You could see the city, the garden, the lake, and the mountains from it, and it had an intricate system of stairs and corridors connecting all the 12 queens’ living quarters.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the best part of the palace, the monkeys. In one particular part, about seven or eight of them were right above our heads, and later they walked right past us. In fact, my only reprimand of the trip came today, when Beth had to call me over to listen to our guide rather than watch the monkeys.
The way out of the palace was as hectic as usual, and included in the chaos was a guy who takes pictures of people on elephants. On the way up, we were hassled by a photographer who kept wanting us to look over at him. He would take a picture and then say, “50 rupees. You no like, you no buy.” They have them developed while you’re in the palace, and when everyone comes out they’re frantically flipping through photos and finding the people to sell them to. It really is an interesting business model. Anyway, my guy didn’t find me, and I didn’t care to find him, so I just left.
From there we went to the Jaipur observatory, which is a collection of interesting astronomical structures that were arrayed throughout a few acres. A king in the late 1700s was very interested in astronomy, so he sought out the best practices in other countries and used them to build his own observatories, the biggest of which was in Jaipur. Its structures were fascinating—most of them contained giant curves with stairs, prompting Kevin to remark that it felt like being in a Salvador Dali painting.
After the observatory I walked the others to the City Palace before heading to my movie. At one point Beth said, “You know, on this street there’s cars, motorcycles, autorickshaws, bicycle rickshaws, cows, and camels, and it doesn’t even phase me.” Which is right—there are so many things we see on a regular basis that will be flat impossible to convey to anyone back in the States. The traffic, the swastikas, the begging, the honking, the smells, the feeling of being the only white people in a sea of Indians—none of these come through in pictures or verbal descriptions.
When we were about a hundred feet from the City Palace I was stopped by a vendor, which is not unusual. What is unusual is that he showed me a picture of me on the elephant from earlier in the day. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. I bought the picture, but I was more interested in how he got it. He couldn’t tell me (didn’t know English) but apparently all the unsold photographs get sent to the City Palace (the #2 tourist attraction in Jaipur, about an hour away) so that more people can be picked out. I still have no idea how they make money at it, but I find it fascinating.
Raj Mandir is considered the best movie theater in India, but India isn’t exactly known for its theaters. It has only one screen and seats around 1200 people, and tickets cost between 18 and 75 rupees. Getting my 50 rupee ticket involved standing in line among a bunch of Indian teenagers who have no concept of personal space. It was really uncomfortable, especially considering I had no idea when the ticket window was going to open.
I entered the theater lobby at 2:45 for a 3:00 show (the intermission was at 4:30 and the movie was set to let out at 6:05), and it really was an all right theater. The carpet was coming up in places, but there were a lot of nice seating areas in the lobby as well as chandeliers and other ornate decoration. The popcorn was about three times cheaper than in America, but in America the concession guy doesn’t normally stick his hand in the popcorn and pull out handfuls to eat.
I met some interesting people at the theater. The first kid I talked to was in the tenth class, and he was there with his little brother and sister. He was interested in where I had been in India and why I was here. His siblings seemed to see me as some sort of strange curiosity, and they smiled sheepishly while keeping their distance. The second guy I talked to was about 30 and was there with his wife. We weren’t able to talk as long because of language problems.
A 3:00 movie doesn’t actually start at 3:00 in India. I thought the large number of people in the lobby was a function of not being able to eat in the theater, but they actually keep the theater doors locked until right before the movie starts. The doors finally opened at about 3:10, and even though there’s assigned seating people streamed in immediately as if there was a fire in the lobby.
Despite being the best movie theater in India, Raj Mandir relies on handwritten seat assignments, which left me unable to determine whether I was in seat D32 or O32. I ended up sitting in O32 because I thought it was in the 50 rupee Emerald section. As I was standing in the aisle to let other people by me, someone hopped into my seat, which was next to his friends’ seats. The man I had talked to in the lobby saw what was going on, and he motioned me to take back the seat. I did, but then an argument ensued over whose seat it actually was. The man came over, looked at my ticket, and told me I should be in D32. He walked me over to D32, except he did it “Indian style,” which is holding hands. My natural reaction was to pull my hand away, which in retrospect probably offended him. Oh well.
When I got to D32, I quickly noticed that I was the only person in that row or any of the four rows behind it, while the rest of the theater was full. An usher came up yelling a bunch of stuff in Hindi and motioning for me to get out, so I went back to where I had been and found a seat in O31. Which is good, because O31 is an aisle seat, and those seats would have been much too small for me to sit in without the extra legroom.
The movie, Bewafaa, was about 90% in Hindi, with the 10% in English being token words and phrases that didn’t contribute to my understanding of the plot. It was about a woman who lives in Canada but has to go back to New Delhi when her sister dies giving birth to twin girls. There was a lot of music, including a 10-minute musical montage right when the woman gets back to India. The actual look of the film was pretty high quality, but there were a lot of things that just wouldn’t pass in the States. The acting was terrible. The sister who was supposed to be pregnant with twins wasn’t showing even right before she had her babies. They wanted to have a shot of the Taj Mahal in the movie, so they just had the characters go there for no reason (to an area where they wouldn’t actually have had access to). Mostly, though, you just didn’t really care about the characters. The woman is supposedly facing all these struggles in living in India and raising these children, but they don’t let you in on any of that. They just kind of show her looking sad while a song is playing. The other thing that was annoying was all the stuff yelled by the audience throughout the movie, especially during a pretty risqué bath scene (knees and bare back were shown), in which a bunch of people were yelling and whistling. The woman in the film might have turned out all right in the end, but I wouldn’t know because I left at intermission to attend Mass.
I found a Catholic church in Jaipur that had a 5:00 Sunday Mass, and it was supposed to be a 10-minute walk from the theater. The only problem is that I still have yet to see a street sign in India, and all the people I talked to about where Ashok street was either didn’t know where it was or couldn’t understand what I was asking about. After 30 minutes I found someone who said he knew where the Catholic church was, and he put me on a bicycle rickshaw at a rate of 9 rupees. We headed in a direction I didn’t think I was supposed to go, but after about 10 minutes we ended up stopping at a church. It took me a while to find the gate, and it looked like nobody had been there in a long time. Right after I got inside the gate I saw some kind of employee who told me that the only service was at 10:00 a.m. The doors to the church were locked, so I just found a bench to sit down at and put my head down and prayed.
After a while a man came out, and I could tell that he was probably a priest. He told me that he was the pastor at St. Andrews and asked me a bunch of questions about where I was from and about my travels. When I told him that I was going to be in the air on Easter Sunday, he said, “You need to come inside.”
On the way in he told me about the church’s founding by Scottish missionaries and about the 1000-1200 people who currently attend mass there. “I wish you could’ve been here this morning,” he told me. He allowed me to sit inside for a while, and after a few minutes he walked out with me, I thanked him, and he said that it was his pleasure to open up the church to anyone who wants to come in.
Honestly, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had opened up the church. Just finding it was the thing. Maybe that’s something everyone who wants to call himself a religious or spiritual person should be made to work for. A lot of us routinely go to church on Sunday without thinking about what it’s worth to us—we never have to think about what would happen if it were taken away. But in the past couple weeks there’s been something building up in me, a real need. I learned what it’s like to have to make it to church. Approaching countless different foreigners in a not so great part of town is no fun, but I felt like I had to do it. Even when I knew I would have been showing up at least a half an hour late, I kept trying. I know that when I make it back to Austin I’ll probably view attending Mass as somewhat of a chore, but it was nice at least once to feel that real sense of desperation.
As soon as I left the gate and walked back onto the streets, I sensed a change. My walk through the shops and back toward the hotel was a little more peaceful than usual. Some of the shops were closing, so there weren’t as many people shouting “Hello!” and trying to get you to come in their shops. I didn’t even have any beggar kids following me for several blocks. I smiled at more people, and they reacted better to me. I remember one guy in particular who was trying to pull his rickshaw into the street when a cow walked into his path. We made eye contact and both kind of laughed.
The only person I really talked with was a kid of about thirteen years who asked me why tourists won’t talk with Indian people. I told him about the numerous peddlers and beggars and about how it’s impossible to get anywhere if you stop and talk to all the people who want your attention. He said that not all Indian people are like that and to prove it he offered to take me to a place nearby and have some coffee and just talk. I said I would prefer just to talk in the street, and after fighting me on it a while he agreed just to stay there. He asked about my trip and about my perceptions of Indians. I asked him what he wanted to be when he grows up, and he said he wanted to be a tour guide. Then he told me about his family’s shop, gave me their card, and told me to come by in the morning. What’s sad is that I was expecting the sales pitch the whole time and wasn’t at all surprised when it came. Most people in India are very nice and laid back and not at all intrusive. The problem is that you have to be in the right place to have a conversation with them. Most of the time, though, you’re walking down a city street where all kinds of people can just come up and talk to you. People with something to sell will ask you where you’re from before trying to get you in their stores. Little children will put their fingers to their mouths and say “Please” or “Rupees” and will usually tug on your clothes or walk within a couple inches of you. Begging women will try to get in your way. All of them open with the very friendly but very well-rehearsed “HAL-low!” greeting.
Before going back to the hotel I decided to watch a children’s cricket game I had seen earlier in the day. On the way there I was discovered by some small children who wanted some money. At this point I was far enough away from the market to attract big crowds of beggars, so I pulled out a 5 rupee coin and gave it to them. I had only the one coin, so I told them to share (like that was going to work) and eventually lost them by the time I got to the cricket fields.
The cricket field was just a rocky dirt lot with two games going on simultaneously. I watched the game the smaller children (about middle school age) were playing, but after a couple minutes one of the kids spotted me and came over. He asked my name, and then he said, “Hello, [Hindi word].” I tried to ask him about the game, but he was too interested in messing with me. Before too long a half dozen of his friends had come by, and they were all saying Hindi phrases and laughing as I tried in vain to find out about their cricket game. Eventually I left and the went another direction, but I wasn’t alone for long. The children I had give the rupee coin to noticed I was coming their way, and they again asked me for money, but this time they were more clingy and demonstrative. And I couldn’t shake them, because they knew I had money and was willing to give it away. It wasn’t until an older sibling or neighbor came by that I was finally past them. I caught a rickshaw back to the hotel after that.
Today’s food of the day was the milkshake I had at McDonald’s. It tasted just like home, as did the fries. (My real food of the day was the fried rice I had for dinner, but I’m beginning to sound like a broken record. I’ve had more fried rice this trip than I thought one human could consume.)
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