Of Mr RaM and Singh the Bridge

Two gentlemen had occasion to hand me their cards on the drive from New Delhi to Jaipur.

One was called Mr DaUlat RaM (c/O YRaSaD, GaOR, DISt JaIpuR) yet he looked about ten with the handwriting to support that impression. The other was a Sikh who saved us from panthers, adders and goodness knows what other beasties when our hired car chose to reject its differential at dusk in the middle of nowhere.

Mr RaM first appeared in my lens as a head behind a willow tree. I had in fact been trying to capture his little sister, bright sari amid the alien corn, but she fled screaming as from a dervish.

So Mr RaM manfully offered to be her proxy, though his dhoti was much less striking. But having survived the ordeal, he felt encouraged enough to ask for a copy of the photograph, scrawling name and scant address on a notebook page.

I trust the Indian postal authorities are aware of YRaSaD GaOR. There didn’t seem much more to the place than the cornfield and an adobe or two.

The Sikh’s card, by contrast, was as grand as himself. It listed two telephone numbers, a fax and telex. It also identified him as Mr Harbinder Singh. His business lay with the Rajasthan State Business Construction Corporation. We were later to learn that almost all Sikhs are called Singh as most Welshmen are called Jones. Singh, meaning lion, is a religious appellation.

Singh the Bridge encountered us late that evening, 30 kms short of Jaipur, when quiet desperation had set in. Our driver, we interpreted from muttered pidgin, had left on the doorstep of an overcrowded bus for differentials new. The hills were coming alive with all manner of creepy-crawlies, at least in the Occidental mind.

Five other local buses we had thumbed without result. Reasonably. No room in any of them for an extra chicken. Traffic dried up. So did fine expectations of cold beer and a hot bath at the famed Rambagh Palace, our night stop, redolent in its brochures of maharajahs and dancing girls. Until Mr Harbinder Singh happened along.

He arrived, chauffeur-driven, a striking figure in charcoal suit, bearded like the pard, a strip of black tape connecting both ears to hold in place a resplendent scarlet turban. He was, he said formally, bound for Jaipur and at our disposal.

I should explain here that, as Sikhs are called Singh, so most motorcars in India are 1956 Morris Oxfords. The car fits the country’s rugged demands. The same mould has been used for all those years, with cosmetic improvements to grille and dashboard.

Mr Singh’s model was current, ours decidedly not. But even at the point of rescue there was a certain aptness in transferring from one to another of exact dimensions, without the need to contract to the size of chickens on a passing bus.

Chickens, anyway, don’t often travel with luggage and it was this thought that suddenly led me to realise the departed driver had locked ours in the boot of the broken car.

Mr Singh dismissed our concern with mild surprise and a gesture to his chauffeur to retrieve the cases forthwith. One standard Morris Oxford, it seems, one standard key.

We made the Rambagh Palace several hours late to find a five-star reception waiting, as it were, in the warming drawer. Yet smiles were not strained. I slept in a bed that might have been the Maharani’s, the ghost of sentinel eunuchs past more prominent that panthers.

So ended the first full day in an extraordinary country. Culture shocks had abounded, prime among them the absolute mass of humanity. Urban India is more people than you’ve ever seen. They saturate your eyeballs. Yet nicely so, for Indians are above anything colourful and civil.

At Madras airport, we had sat seat-belted for an hour and a half, waiting for a mist to lift. Americans and Europeans would have begun vandalised the plane. Our fellow-passengers seemed to view it all as gratuitous entertainment.

The wait afforded the study of faces. Hundreds of millions of people must throw up clones. Omar Sharif was there, right across the aisle. So was the younger Nehru, forage cap and all. However, there were Western facsimiles too – a pallid Robert De Niro, Peter Ustinov, and the man from our London office, looking ridiculous under a dishcloth.

Crowds meant traffic, and we were to find Jaipur as traumatic in that respect as any other place. The famed Pink City only has a million and a half inhabitants but they all appeared to be concentrated in one central square, going round and round in their Morrises and tri-shaws, on bicycles and camel carts. Pedestrian crossings don’t exist. The trick, we were told, was to walk slowly, keep a high profile and not think too hard of death.

We never went to Kolkata, yet I’m prepared to believe what they say: that certain streets are uncrossable. To be on the other side one has to be born there.

What else of India? Give me another ten thousand words. Briefly, the surprises. Verdant scenery. Jacarandas and even baobabs. Omnipresent elephants. Skills and invention. The variety of costumes, majesty of architecture. The sheer photogenic qualities. The spectre of abject poverty.

And the Taj Mahal? Magnificent beyond description. A sensual feast.

Did you know, by the way, that it actually derives its name from a restaurant in Soho? I didn’t either but I have it on the best authority from a Londoner I met at the airport pub in Mumbai.

Amazing how travel broadens the mind.

Time Wounds All Heels column