Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

This was in the lobby of the Umaid Bhawan (on whose walls and platforms were more stuffed leopards and tigers than I'd ever seen together in my life), where I had gone hoping to talk with the Maharajah of Jodhpur. His grandfather Maharajah Umaid Singh had commissioned this palace to be built in 1928. At the time, this part of Rajasthan, the desert kingdom of Marwar, was beset by famine and drought, and the idea was that this project, which took fifteen years to complete, would be a way of occupying and employing his subjects, the desperate and hungry Marwaris. It was one of the last palaces, and certainly the last great palace, to be erected in imperial India. The finished building, of russet Rajasthani sandstone and marble, set on a hill at the edge of Jodhpur, is a vast roseate palace with a great glowing dome, with touches of the Gothic and jocular art deco, with pinched Mughal turrets, elaborate porches, and the weirdest architectural capriccios of Rajputana. It may have been built to give Marwaris employment, but there it stood to inspire awe.

The present maharajah lived decorously in one wing, designated as the Royal Apartments. Prince Charles was upstairs in a large suite with his last duchess, his entourage nearby. Upstairs too were the water conference people, looking for answers to the inevitable ecological catastrophe in India—more drought and famine. In the luxury hotel wing were the other guests: honeymooners, tourists, Indophiles, the lucky few, and, traveling light, an idle grinning note taker—me, talking to a helpful Indian woman.

"Bad omens. Time to burn joss sticks?" I asked.

"No, more serious than that. 'Don't look at the sun,' I was told by a member of the maharajah's family. 'Don't go outside.' I said, 'But I have work to do!'"

She said that if I was interested, I could attend the elaborate ritual for Navratri at the Mehrangarh Fort on the other side of Jodhpur, above the blue-painted city, a hilltop garrison so imposing, Rudyard Kipling called it "the work of angels and giants." The puja—prayer ceremony—would be led by priests and members of the maharajah's family, the maharani, and the maharajah himself.

"Essential to propitiate goddess Durga, because of solar eclipse," the woman said.

The ritual would mark the start of the nine days of fasting and praying. And some people ("in the villages," as smug city-dwelling Indians liked to point out) would be sacrificing a goat.

"Burning it?"

"No. Cut off head of goat. Let blood flow"

One very hot day in Jodhpur, I followed the procession of Rajput royalty to the steep-sided fort and across its ramparts. The Durga temple (the traditional family temple of the Jodhpur royals) at the fort was an old one—the fort itself dates from the mid-fifteenth century—and it was mobbed with devotees and semi-hysterical subjects of the maharajah, a living connection to the sun diety.

Following him in the heat of this sun-struck fort was a shuffling mass of people with flutes, bells, gongs, drums, and garlands of flowers, all of them chanting, "Durga Mata ki jail"

—Praise to Mother Durga.

Ritual is important to me, not for its dubious sanctity, but because it is a set of gestures that reveals the inner state of the people involved and their subtle protocol. From under an awning I strained to see the ceremony, the mutterings, the water splashings, the prostrations. The priests were both submissive and self-important, attending to the maharajah, who was performing the puja under the gaze of his loyal and chanting subjects. Here, an element of theater was added to an element of devotion.

The most painful moment was the arrival of the maharajah's son Shivraj Singh, the Yuvraj of Jodhpur and heir apparent. There were whispers that he might at last show himself, and this stirred a great intensity of anticipation, because he was known to have been severely injured.

The yuvraj was thirty-one, very handsome, and for years had been a renowned polo player—a great rider, a high scorer—and a champion of the game at which Jodhpur had distinguished itself for centuries. But just a year before—in February 2005—the yuvraj had been in a polo accident. As he attempted to turn his horse sharply, it had stumbled, the yuvraj had fallen to the ground, and the horse had landed on top of him. After lying in a deep coma for more than a month, the poor man at last flickered to consciousness. With a period of intense physiotherapy—his therapist was a young American woman—he had regained rudimentary use of his limbs, and here he was, in his first public appearance since the horrible accident.

In a turban, white jacket, and trousers, draped with garlands of marigolds, with an attendant on either side of him, he struggled to stay upright, making his way to the temple through the thicknesses of rose petals that had been strewn on the ramparts. His faltering was hard to watch, yet he was a man who had come back from the dead.