The Kite Runners

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The tiny boy, I guessed about four years old, had already run past me twice, in opposite directions, along the busy Ajmer Road as I searched in vain for an internet café. I wondered if he was part of some scam until I noticed that he had no interest in me whatsoever; in fact the last time he passed me I had to step into the road to avoid him running straight into me. What on earth was he up to running back and fore over the rubble? I followed his gaze up into the clear blue skies over Jaipur and was hit by a sudden realisation; he was a kite-runner. He watched intently the descent of a scarlet scrap of paper on the other side of the dual carriageway full of rush-hour traffic before throwing himself out across the road, sprinting now between the tuk-tuks and the ancient buses to be the first to catch the defeated kite. Miraculously he wasn’t flattened and jumped high in the air to snatch it ahead of some other boys who were closing on him on that side of the road. His face broke out into a broad grin as he waved the paper high above his head to an older boy, on top of a five-storey apartment block behind me.
Kite-flying and kite-fighting, as described in great detail by Khaled Hosseini in his novel, are as much enjoyed in India it seems as they are in the Afghanistan of ‘The Kite Runner’. Jaipur was covered in defeated kites; they lay scattered all over the streets and hang forlornly from trees, telegraph wires and the walls and parapets of even the grandest of buildings in this the pink capital city of Rajastan. It had been the venue for an International Festival that recently drew many competitors from around the world. Judging by the scars from the glass-pasted threads on the fingers of both Kuldeep and Biminder, our guide for our tour of Jaipur, it seems that everyone gets involved and this certainly seems to be the case, in the early evening, when the sky fills with the beautifully-coloured paper diamonds.

Jaipur has the clearest skies of any of the cities we have visited in India, despite its three and a half million inhabitants, probably due to the lack of heavy industry. Its largest employment sector is in the extraction, polishing and sales of gemstones, mined both locally and overseas. Two hundred thousand workers produce a profit of several billion rupees (!) every year from the business and our visit before lunch to a fine jewellery emporium convinced us that this might not be a marketing exaggeration. Laid out over three large floors, with a complete lack of security, was the largest collection of jewels – diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds glinted at us from every case. The salesman tried his best to entice Diana and Emily with their birthstones, opals and moonstones, and Diana was very taken with a white gold emerald ring (priced about a fifth of what it would cost in the UK). Thankfully our tight travelling budget prevented any purchase but perhaps we will come back one day, if the futures foretold for us by a palmist at Choki Dhani the evening before hold true. Diana (stubborn, then kind – surely not!) is due to become very famous after the age of 45 and will live on to her eighties at least. I (lazy, but kind – oh, come on) won’t enjoy success with work but will prove very successful in business instead and will live to 90+. William is destined to become a scientist of some repute (Mrs Crumpler take note) and Emily, a creative spirit, designer, singer and actress, will go on to have two children.

Our tour of Jaipur began with a short stop at the Palace of the Winds, the 953-windowed five-storey ornate façade behind which runs only a single corridor. This was a place where the wives of the powerful and wealthy could come and see parades and processions with no risk of being seen themselves. Obviously a popular stop for tourists, the surrounding streets were a magnet for hawkers and beggars and we succumbed and were pulled in by a gap-toothed snake charmer, with skin the colour of antique oak. William and I sat beside him, and he lifted the lid and up popped the head of a cobra. Responding rhythmically to the music of the charmer, the cobra swayed its way higher and higher until he was almost at eye level with William. We were encouraged to stroke the cobras smooth scaly back and to have the snake wrapped around our shoulders. The fact that the snake had had both poison and fangs removed made it no less scary when it struck out at us with a loud hiss, moving far quicker than it had seemed capable of moments before. It was with some relief that the snake was reclaimed and we were soon back in the car and on our way to the Amber Fort.

Jaipur is a relatively new city with a history of only 300 years; the nearby settlement of Amber goes back over a thousand years and was once the capital of the Mimas, the inhabitants of this area before invaders from the north settled in this area. There was plenty of evidence that this was an area much fought-for; the surrounding steep hills topped by tall walls, punctuated regularly by watch towers, and three local lakes dammed so that the whole valley could be flooded in case of attack. Amber Fort, the royal residence of Raja Man Singh, on a steep hill, is surrounded by elephant traps and a set of three walls. It must have once been impregnable – now all it takes is a couple of hundred rupees to climb the steep approach, through the massive walled gates, atop a beautifully-decorated elephant. Layla, our 35-yr old female elephant, and her mahout, Guruh, who looked twice her age, carefully navigated the busy pathway and there was something quite hypnotic about the slow oscillation with which Emily and I were carried up into the courtyard. As the gradient increased and the elephants breathing became more pronounced, it was revealing to see them spitting on themselves, from their trunks, to keep cool. We also noticed several men scooping the poop up the slope, as elephant dung is used locally for making parchment. We all felt that we would have liked to know more about the elephants, especially having witnessed their dexterity in retrieving and returning dropped items from the roadway with their trunks. Biminder reassured us that, despite the spiked sticks carried by the mahouts, the elephants’ welfare is monitored carefully by the government and that there is a limit to how many rides they can make in a day. When the hawkers weren’t shouting at us to take our photographs, the tinkling of the bells decorating their huge necks blending with the tidal breathing of the elephants, surrounded by the pink city walls under a deep-blue sky, made for a truly atmospheric journey.
Diana and I had started the day feeling a bit ‘forted-out’ but after our tour of the inside of Amber Fort we returned to Jaipur reinvigorated by the pillared pavilions, the brightly-painted entrances to the various audience chambers, the royal wives’ apartments with their maze of corridors and staircases and the famous and beautiful Shish Mahal. This palace of mirrors has tall marble walls, pillars and archways inlaid with exquisite mirrored patterns that are said to dance to the flame of a single candle. Its lofty position overlooking the surrounding hills and the valley below, the beauty of the buildings and the cleverness of its design (including air-conditioning and a fully-functioning spa) from five hundred years ago made this our favourite fort.

After a late lunch of delicious meat kebabs in a very small and cool restaurant, decorated throughout with a peacock motif (including the dining chairs), we visited Jantar Mantar, one of Jai Singh’s five astronomical observatories. With sundials capable of keeping time to a precision of two seconds and a whole host of other instruments for predicting the movements of the heavens and recording astronomical time, this walled compound was a unique achievement at the time of its construction in 1716. Needless to say, I was in my element here and could have spent much longer trying to work out the exact purpose of the devices at this World Heritage Site, and Diana would happily have continued conducting her own observations of the sun! Unfortunately, William and Emily had had enough of their father trying to explain altitude, azimuth, declination and the orbits of the planets … so we returned to our hotel for some journal and postcard-writing. It was with some irony that William turned on the television at bedtime to catch a BBC documentary about a tiger family living in a national park in the north of India … elephants aside, it all looked very much like Ranthambore ...

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[Ben Ryder]

Carling's camper?
Is that Carling's camper van?