Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
enthusiasm, nearly slamming into the remains of a bullock cart
before slithering to a halt by what termites had left of the veranda.
Double doors leading into this dessicated ruin of a house were
suddenly thrown open from inside by a weary man with legs like
old plumbing. Inside, the place echoed resonantly. Its floorboards
were riven with cracks and bulging from decades of unrelieved
aridity. The walls were hung with dozens of faded sepia photographs,
in crooked and mutilated glassless frames, of people playing cricket
in another era. My minders flung open the clacking shutters on the
far side, pieces tumbling off, to reveal an extensive area of uneven
ochre sand dotted with rotten posts from which clung shreds of
netting.
'Cricket pitch, cricket pitch,' the driver announced, proudly
waving an arm at it all.
I tried to look suitably impressed. A little later, strolling the
grounds, I realised that the long, low lines of partially collapsed
outbuildings had been stables. Hundreds of stables, for the old raja's
hundreds of horses, I presumed. I saw no horses, however, and no
elephants. The shattered stalls, with only a hot wind blowing through
them to break the silence, made the place seem all the more
abandoned and sorrowful. The rajkumar had talked of the past in the
present tense.
Returned to the palace, I was immediately shown into what was
patently the rajkumar's bedroom, where he sat cross-legged on a
gigantic and dangerously unstable four-poster job, holding court.
Several prosperous looking men, with paunches that could easily
have housed a sack of grain each, sat around him on the bare stone
floor, soliciting princely approval for business schemes or
intervention in vexing matters. My presence was studiously ignored,
although the deaf-mute brought me chai in which a large flying
ant was swimming lengths.
'Tonight we shall visit tennis club,' declared the rajkumar
sometime later, after his court had dispersed.
'If you're too busy-' I started to say. He cut me off.
'No, no, not at all. I have full programme set up for you.'
The tennis club proved to be not far from the palace, and, unlike
the cricket club, was still more or less functional. We travelled the
