Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
needed priests to chant mantras every dawn to prevent it collapsing.
With sewers and flush toilets ever more common for city folk, could
the usefulness of Harijans as sweepers of excrement be similarly
viewed as also all but over?'
'But you said the Paliwals were good people.'
Ah, came the reply, but that was then, and this is now. Had these
cameleers been in the dewan's private army a hundred years earlier,
they would doubtless have viewed the Paliwals as just a more
threatening variety of parasite, hungry for power and obtaining it
through financial skulduggery.
Before turning in, I wandered through those quiet houses, where
the crosier's curve of faith still seemed to run in the walls. Modest
and orderly even in their ruin, they were perhaps homes for the
ghosts of lost and tranquil times. The only threatening presence
here was us, or the world we represented, the world that destroyed a
better one in creating itself, perhaps from the chaos left from that
lost one.
Everywhere you looked in India there was evidence of a past that
had attained mythical heights. From philosophy to architecture,
few civilisations have left such an awesome record. It was reputed
to have made even the gods jealous of humanity. And now the place
that once had all the answers - from the meaning of life outlined in
the Vedas, the Upanishads, or the
Bhagavad Gita
, to the zenith of
architecture in the Taj Mahal or the great temples of the South -
India had now become the place that had only questions. It
questioned its past, even, but most of all it questioned its future, and
questioned whether it
had
one.
A dawn suitably dark with deep, embattled clouds hung over my
last hours with the desert and the camels. A Land Rover arrived to
speed Bentley and me, as if by time machine, back to Jaisalmer. The
city was all too near. And all too modern after the ageless sands and
the wreck of human dreams they still contained, and whose stones
they would soon wear away, back into more ageless sands. OPIUM
IS BAD FOR BODY read a Hindi sign by the road. It hadn't been
too bad for mine - which was, however, beginning to feel bad
without it. The sign seemed to affront ancient ways that had proven
