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how to get to Kansas City. After an hour of hiking through vicious,
blistering heat, up and down the baking, dusty streets, I managed to
locate a man who was believed to own a car - although he himself
did not appear to share this belief. He did admit he had a friend who
knew someone who might be able to assist. After many glasses of
chai, and many false leads, we found a man who possessed an
assemblage of steel and rubber that one could, at a stretch, have
called a car. I had little faith in its ability to move, however; the
engine groaned and strained for ten minutes before erupting into
an emphysemic sort of life.
A couple of hours later, daubed from head to toe in dust and grime
glued on by my own sweat, I was finally bouncing mto Venkatagïri.
The place made Cuddapah look like Brasilia. If it had changed at all
in eight hundred years, there was little to prove it, beyond what might
have been one crooked, sagging telegraph wire. Bazaars choked in
swirling dust like dirty mist, flamboyant, irreparably decayed temples,
shimmering heat mirages, narrow streets mobbed by cows, by
turbaned men in stained khadi dhotis, by women in brilliantly
coloured saris who covered their heads while revealing the family
wealth in their cobblestone-sized gold earrings. Everywhere there
was that bittersweet sense of crumbling splendour, none of it more
crumbling or more splendid than the colossal edifice of the palace
itself. The size of a large Oxbridge college, surrounded by a
forbidding thirty-foot-high wall, this edifice dominated the centre
of town. In fact, it was the centre of town.
My 'taxi' swerved, hooting, through a massive entrance, past the
kind of gates built to keep ancient Muslim armies out, and screamed
to a halt in a bleak, flagstoned courtyard of awesome dimensions.
There followed a loud and acrimonious dispute over money, the
driver eventually pocketing my rupees with a sullen scowl, then
navigating his rattling heap of exploding metal back out into the
swarming streets.
Toasted between the pitiless sun and roasting flagstones, I looked
around. A man in ragged white pyjamas eyed me suspiciously from
the shade of an archway, but when I called out the nature of my
business, he disappeared, muttering to himself and hawking as if
there were mud in his lungs. After several minutes wandering in
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