To the Ends of the Earth by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online Page B

caretakers maintaining the sepulchral stateliness of the place. Scattered among these large Simla buildings are the bungalows—Holly Lodge, Romney Castle, The Bricks, Forest View, Sevenoaks, Femside—but the inhabitants now are Indians, or rather that inheriting breed of Indian that insists on the guidebook, the walking stick, the cravat, tea at four, and an evening stroll to Scandal Point. It is the Empire with a dark complexion, an imperial outpost that the mimicking vacationers have preserved from change, though not the place of highly colored intrigues described in
Kim
, and certainly tamer than it was a century ago. After all, Lola Montez, the
grande horizontale
, began her whoring in Simla, and the only single women I saw were short red-cheeked Tibetan laborers in quilted coats, who walked along the Mall with heavy stones in slings on their backs.
    I had tea with the Bhardwaj family. It was not the simple meal I had expected. There were eight or nine dishes:
pakora
, vegetables fried in batter;
poha
, a rice mixture withpeas, coriander, and turmeric;
khira
, a creamy pudding of rice, milk, and sugar; a kind of fruit salad, with cucumber and lemon added to it, called
chaat; murak
, a Tamil savory, like large nutty pretzels;
tikkiya
, potato cakes;
malai
chops, sweet sugary balls topped with cream; and almond-scented
pinnis
. I ate what I could, and the next day I saw Mr. Bhardwaj’s office in Gorton Castle. It was as sparsely furnished as he had said on the railcar, and over his desk was this sign:
    I AM NOT INTERESTED IN EXCUSES FOR DELAY;
I AM INTERESTED ONLY IN A THING DONE .
    —Jawaharlal Nehru       

In Jaipur with Mr. Gopal
    “W HAT’S THIS ?” I ASKED M R . G OPAL, THE EMBASSY LIAISON man, pointing to a kind of fortress.
    “That’s a kind of fortress.”
    He had ridiculed the handbook I had been carrying around: “You have this big book, but I tell you to close it and leave it at hotel because Jaipur is like open book to me.” Unwisely, I had taken his advice. We were now six miles outside Jaipur, wading ankle-deep through sand drifts toward the wrecked settlement of Galta. Earlier we had passed through a jamboree of some two hundred baboons: “Act normal,” said Mr. Gopal, as they hopped and chattered and showed their teeth, clustering on the road with a curiosity that bordered on menace. The landscape was rocky and very dry, and each rugged hill was capped with a cracked fortress.
    “Whose is it?”
    “The Maharajah’s.”
    “No, who built it?”
    “You would not know his name.”
    “Do
you?
”
    Mr. Gopal walked on. It was dusk, and the buildings crammed into the Galta gorge were darkening. A monkey chattered and leaped to a branch in a banyan tree above Mr. Gopal’s head, yanking the branch down and making a punkah’s
whoosh
. We entered the gate and crossed a courtyard to some ruined buildings, with colored frescoes of trees and people on their façades. Some had been raked with indecipherable graffiti and painted over; whole panels had been chiseled away.
    “What’s this?” I asked. I hated him for making me leave my handbook behind.
    “Ah,” said Mr. Gopal. It was a temple enclosure. Some men dozed in the archways, others squatted on their haunches, and just outside the enclosure were some tea and vegetable stalls whose owners leaned against more frescoes, rubbing them away with their backs. I was struck by the solitude of the place—a few people at sundown, no one speaking, and it was so quiet I could hear the hooves of the goats clattering on the cobblestones, the murmuring of the distant monkeys.
    “A temple?”
    Mr. Gopal thought a moment. “Yes,” he said finally, “a kind of temple.”
    On the ornate temple walls, stuck with posters, defaced with chisels, pissed on, and scrawled over with huge Devanagri script advertising Jaipur businesses, there was a blue enamel sign, warning visitors in Hindi and English that it was “forbidden to desecrate, deface, mark or