JODHPUR — Measured against India’s other urban centers, Jodhpur, known as the “blue city,” is relatively small, with 2.8 million inhabitants in the metropolitan area. Still, on your first encounter, it suffocates you with both heat and noise. Soon enough, however, you will also be breathing in the most beautiful colors and most intoxicating scents of curry and saffron, cinnamon and cardamom.
It is called the blue city due to its Brahman houses that have been plastered with a mixture of indigo and whitewash to keep out the heat and insects. There is aggressive traffic like you have never seen, which may make you feel as if everyone is out to get you on two, three or four wheels — and legs.
If relaxing means slowing down your day, you won’t find it here. But if it means making the day yours — and seeming to stop time altogether — then this is the right spot. Your senses are bombarded with so much information that you are forced to give up from sensory overload.
Motorized rickshaws and endless motorcycles whizz in between each other, and around everyone else. I was driven around Jodhpur six times in one of those motorized rickshaws — and, yes, we managed to hit two people on two different occasions, once a motorcyclist with a soft, metallic ping and a pedestrian, who yelled at us furiously. But we did make sure to give the holy cows a wide berth.
Even that is a bit too much, all these rules, religious ones, what is considered unclean, the Gods, the symbols, the chanting. Feet are unclean, your left hand more than anything else, one well is reserved for Brahmans only, and if someone from a lower caste were to drink from it, he/she might be torn to pieces within minutes by an angry mob. But just a few meters next to that same well, rats are frolicking among the torn rubbish sacks thrown out onto the street. Dirty and unclean are two very different things in this country.
The right hand is clean, you eat with your right hand, and only with your right hand, which means that you will have to tear your flatbread with one hand as well and that is surprisingly difficult, and you use the flatbread to grab the solid pieces within curries that taste like everything you ever hoped for and thought of when thinking about India — foreign but also lush and exciting, like a thousand little adventures rolled into one.
From the rooftop
You shouldn’t be here if the only criteria for your journey was sensible leisure. My editors sent me to do my best to relax, and that’s what I had in mind, sitting around and people-watching, or preferably on the beach, the ocean lapping at my feet. But an ocean is the last thing you will find in this desert-like city of Jodhpur.
I did try to relax one morning, while sitting on the roof top terrace of one of those so-called “Haveli,” former aristocratic houses that have been turned into hotels. I just sat around and starred into the blue sky. But the sky is full of flocks of birds, and five eagles were soaring above the old Maharaja’s Fort and Palace Mehrangarh, in which the respective Maharajas wielded power.
It seems so close from down here, and yet the Maharajas lived in a world that was completely removed from the city below. Every window arch, every wall has been finished with craftsmanship and attention-to-detail unbeknownst to us nowadays. Fort Mehrangarh, the “majestic fort,” is a magical place. But the current Maharaja is living in an even more beautiful palace outside the blue city now, part of which has been transformed into a luxury hotel to pay for all the opulence since the Maharajas’ principalities were dissolved in 1956.
At one point, a group of three parrots landed nearby as I sat on the roof terrace. While they came to have a drink of water, I noticed that the neighboring roofs were crowded with apes who were lounging around delousing one another. One of the apes was holding his leg in the air while grabbing his foot so effortlessly that any yogi would have been envious. I certainly was.
