Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

JAIPUR JUNCTION STATION in the middle of the night was crowded with people, though in India it was hard to tell the travelers from the squatters. Even in the dark hours of the morning there were chatterers and tea drinkers under the glaring lights, family groups huddled over pots of food, some people sleeping in heaps, stretched out like mummies, or like corpses in body bags. Others were haggling over tickets, and dawn was far off.

"Get a coolie" were Kapoorchand's parting words.

I left him to his arduous pursuit of virtue. I didn't need a coolie. I needed a taxi. A group of touts and drivers, tugging my sleeves, followed me outside, and I chose the oldest of them, on the assumption that he would be the most reliable, and we settled on the fare before I got into his old car. He drove me into the darkness, but kept his word. And even at that hour I found a welcome at the hotel, and a glass of juice, and a cozy room; I slept soundly.

I had stayed in this hotel before, the Rambagh Palace, but it had been barer then, a big echoey place of marble halls. In the morning I saw it was now luxurious.

"I did not see the inside of a train station, I did not take a train or board a bus, until I was in my late teens," an Indian woman told me at the Rambagh Palace.

She was in her early forties, a well-brought-up woman from a good family who had always gone to school in a chauffeur-driven car. "I never saw a poor person. I never saw a slum. I never took public transport. I didn't know how to buy a ticket. Home to school, school to home—that was the routine. But one day I rebelled. I was about seventeen or eighteen. I told the driver, 'I'm walking home.' He followed me in the car. He was afraid for me, and afraid of what my father would say. But walking home, and then taking trains later, I finally saw what India was really like. And I was so shocked. I had no idea such poor people existed in India."

In the market and antique shops of Jodhpur I had seen a number of reverse-glass paintings that had attracted me, and one had bewitched me. This was a painting of an Indian Nautch girl—a dancing girl—caught in a sinuous move, intentionally teasing, probably painted in the middle or late nineteenth century, with Chinese characters in black brushstrokes on the wood-slatted back, and set in a decaying frame. I wasn't sizing it up. I was teased, indeed falling in love. It was an old feeling.

The collector's instinct, which is also a powerful appetite, begins with a glimpse of something singular, and a smile of recognition. The technique of painting on the back of a pane of glass, building up effects that were visible when viewed from the front, was European in origin (a cheaper and quicker version of stained glass); but the style of this piece was Chinese, the subject secular and unusually sensual. Europeans in the eighteenth century introduced this technique to India, where it flourished. The Chinese had learned reverse-glass painting from early Jesuits in China at about the same time or earlier, and some itinerant Chinese artists eventually reached India, where they produced many of these secular pictures. Portraits of royals and dancing girls and scenes from the Ramayana had been painted, and Indian artists had begun creating their own reverse-glass paintings—theirs were of Krishna and Shiva, Ganesh and Hanuman—in brighter colors, with highlights of gold and silver.

What entranced me was that, though these paintings were superb, they were not treasures in the classic sense, not yet very popular with the big-money buyers. They were beloved objects from a simple household, created by an individual hand, someone with enthusiasm and vision.

I bought the painting of the Nautch girl (probably done by a Chinese painter in Gujarat) and looked for more. It was not easy to find others, but I was delighted by the variety I encountered—religious, mythical, erotic—and by the out-of-the-way places where I found them.

Traveling with, say, something like glass painting in mind (it could also be lime pots, weavings, tribal earrings, Deccan daggers, or the bestiary of molded brass handles from palanquins), it is possible to make an amateur study merely by wandering in the bazaars. Yet another pleasure of traveling in India is the dawdling in antique shops, in markets and museums, talking to dealers and collectors and connoisseurs. After you've seen hundreds of the paintings, some dusty, some cracked, taken out of drawers and attics and cupboards, you begin to develop an eye, to distinguish the real from the fake, the good from the hastily contrived ones.

In the stifling attic of a shop in the Jaipur bazaar, near the pink façade of the Hawa Mahal, bristling with windows—the Palace of the Winds—Mr. Kailash was showing me some glass paintings. They were too crusted and cracked and neglected-looking not to be genuine, but when I mentioned the cracks, the man began to hector me.