After our three days dealing with wild animals in Tadoba—big cats and small boys, we undertook an ill-advised traverse to Rajasthan, a state in the north west of the country. I shouldn’t really say ill-advised as it was me who wanted to do it, and I wasn’t exactly listening to advice. If there is one thing I do wrong in India, it’s that I approach life and all its challenges with an attitude of ‘well, this is how it should work’. This has never served me well: not once in almost three years. But I still do it, even though I know full well that the better approach would be to ask myself, ‘I wonder how this works here in India?’
On this occasion, the challenge in question related to flights. There were two flights. Both were with the same airline—one arriving at and the other departing from the same airport within a couple of hours of each other. In my view, these should have been connecting flights which could have taken us smoothly from Nagpur, via Delhi, to Udaipur. I mean, the middle airport was Delhi, for goodness sake: the capital city and a major international and domestic hub. If anywhere was going to offer connections, surely it would be the capital city airport? But it was not and did not.
There were two different flights which styled themselves as connecting, offering the luxury of checked through baggage and no need to repeat security. But they had a seven-hour layover between them, and that layover was in Mumbai, of all the places I didn’t want to sit in an airport.. No, I decided it was far better to force the connection in Delhi, taking a huge gamble on timeliness, efficiency and luck.
We booked a meet and greet off our first flight into Delhi, so that we could be ushered round from the baggage carousel to the departures to repeat the entire check-in process for a second time in a matter of hours. It was a mad dash and required a certain amount of arg-ing, barging and pleading with our best ‘help us, we’re foreigners’ faces to make the logistics work, but work it did.
In normal circumstances, we would have felt like heroes. We beat the system! We connected the dots! We found the jugaad! (Hindi for ‘workaround’) But with Jasper in the funk he was in, these were no normal circumstances. Instead of feeling heroic, we felt broken, battered and bruised. As we all stopped to catch our breath, and in Joanne and Dee’s case—to take advantage of the first Subway sandwich they had seen in a week—Jasper raged and kicked and tried to hurl food and personal items across the food court.
It’s one thing for him to drive us up the wall, but it’s another for his red mist to put himself in danger. And in an airport like Delhi, where thousands of hurried travellers scurry up and down escalators, in and out of lifts and on and off golf buggies without a second look at what or who is in their way, we ran the very real risk of him getting injured or lost. All he really needed was a nap, but was that on his agenda? No, it was not. Kicking the seat in front on the flight, batting away proffered drinks and shouting at us to change the show on his tablet were far higher priority on both flights. By the time we landed in Udaipur, we were almost ready to let him run down an escalator just to teach him a lesson.
From the plane we moved to a car and then to a boat for the approach to the hotel. There is something undeniably regal about arriving at your hotel by boat—even if the property next door isn’t a palace. In this case, the property next door was a palace: the Udaipur City Palace in Rajasthan's 'City of Lakes'. Udaipur is one of several places in Asia which style themselves as the ‘Venice of the East’. Other notable competitors are Suzhou in China and a second Indian claimant, Alappuzha in Kerala. While I haven’t visited Venice, I am confident that none of these are going to cut it as a replacement once Venice is under water. That said, Udaipur has at least earned itself the appropriate reputation for romance, crowned as Rajasthan's most romantic city, mostly on account of the photogenic nature of its popular lake: Lake Pichola.
Both the Udaipur City Palace and our hotel for two nights, the Jagat Niwas, sit on the lake's eastern side, offering spectacular views of the water, the boat traffic and mesmerising sunsets. However, even as we pulled up to the jetty, cleverly disguised as a lounge, the red flags about the suitability of our hotel for our wayward preschooler started to appear. The facade emerged directly out of the water—one, two, three floors of windows, balconies and a rooftop without a safety rail in sight. And that we could walk straight off the boat, over a floating jetty, into the hotel lobby meant that someone could very easily do the same in reverse. As we entered the lobby area, our faces rose skywards to take in the grandeur of the central courtyard, surrounded on four sides by a dizzying, vertical labyrinth of steep, marble staircases, ornamental banisters, and narrow balconies. Boastful bougainvilleas tumbled out of their planters over onto corrugated iron awnings, blurring the lines between the hotel’s three floors and obscuring what little wall there was separating a tiled terrace from a free fall.
Even before I had time to take stock of the splendid array of heritage dangers, Jasper had charged off up one of the staircases, smashing his shin against an unusually tall step a few seconds later. The pain must have been excruciating, judging by the speed with which the egg appeared over the bone and the sharp, rapid panting with which he bravely fought back tears. Up until that point, his very busy legs had been largely autonomous, bypassing his overtired brain as they ran and kicked and jumped. But the pain must have re-established the connection because for a good hour after the collision, the leg prevented him from doing anything; walking, sitting, lying and, to our distress, even getting some much-needed sleep.
It wasn’t only Jasper who struggled with the stairs: even Dee quickly identified certain disconcerting stairwells that he preferred to avoid for fear of misjudging the bottom step, somersaulting over the railing and ending up in a nosedive towards the reception. In Dee’s case this simply meant he had to take the long way round, via the bar, on his way to and from the rooftop. For Jasper, it meant he couldn’t be let out of sight.
Our first night at this hotel was Diwali—India’s largest, most important Hindu festival of the year (and that’s saying something because the Hindus have a lot of big, important festivals.) We established in our first year here that Diwali is not dissimilar to Christmas in that it’s a cosy, family-focused festival without the bombastic performative elements which accompany many of the other festivals. It’s not about parades, or drums, or dancing, or throwing colour at one another. It’s about celebrating the victory of good over evil—light over darkness—with lanterns, rituals and by spending time with loved ones. There are, of course, fireworks because it wouldn’t be a celebration if there weren’t fireworks.
As part of our ‘India at its best’ tour guiding strategy, we had brought along traditional Indian outfits for all of us and had gifted Joanne and Dee theirs in time for dinner on the roof. Whether because of the serenity of the lake as it wound down towards evening, the hypnotic sunset, the formal wear, the fresh air or the celebratory smiles on everyone’s faces, dinner was perfect. Sadly Jasper did not participate in the experience as much as we might have liked because, with a three foot wall between him and the sheer drop into pitch black water, we opted to plug him into the matrix instead of wrangling him and he spent dinner watching PAW Patrol on his tablet.
When we finally wrestled an overtired, over-stimulated (but probably underfed) Jasper into bed we were cursing the decision to spend Diwali in a hotel with no double glazing and which backed onto a part of the city where real people lived. By real people, I mean young children who wanted nothing more than to spend the entire night setting off bangers. And not small bangers either. These were rockets that could be loaded into a piece of pipe or tubing and would go off with the sound of a bomb, although luckily without the destruction. Rather confusingly there were also without the beauty of a firework, so really, they were just very loud and very annoying to parents trying to encourage their angry almost-4 year old that it was definitely time to go to sleep. Thankfully, once he did drift off, Jasper was unwakeable until morning, unlike Dylan and myself who were repeatedly disturbed by banger attacks at erratic intervals.
Our second day in Udaipur was earmarked for touristing. As jaded, long term expats, Dylan and I don’t tend to do a lot of ‘active’ touristing in India. We will visit places, be impressed by them, and then check them off a mental list of things we have done, but it’s all very passive and often a byproduct of something else: a work trip taking me to Karjat, a rugby social inviting us to Alibaug, a visceral need to see a tree tricking us into making a trip to Lonavala. One of the main reasons we don’t seek out tourist trails or sites is because Jasper gets harassed. Tourists come from all over India as well as all over the world, and many of them haven’t seen a lot of children who look like Jasper. Instead of simply staring at him and, if they must, taking clandestine photographs to show friends and family back home, these people reach out to touch him—on the face. Sometimes it’s a gentle cupping of the cheek, other times it’s a harsh pinch leaving a mark. But every time it happens, it awakens in me an inner bear I didn’t realise I had until I moved my motherhood to India. While Jasper roars (his is an inner lion), I growl at these people. If I catch them in time, I bat their hands away and lock eyes with them as I state firmly ‘No touching’. If they somehow manage to catch me unawares and steal a pinch before I notice, Jasper tells me what's happened and I spin round, raise my voice loud enough to be both alarming and humiliating ‘Why did you touch my child?'
Indian colleagues and friends of mine would say ‘ah it’s a cultural thing’, but on this matter, I am unwilling to budge in my vehemence to defend Jasper. He hates being touched, and quite rightly too. Who are these people to think it’s acceptable to touch the face of a small child who is just minding his own business but who just happens to look different? Every time it happens I chide myself afterwards for not having had the quickness of mind and the confidence of hand to pinch them back on their cheek. One day I will. Until then, I can only hope that the shock and shame they wear after our interaction will stick with them and they will think twice next time. On this particular trip, with Jasper in the mood he was in, I am surprised one of these people didn’t lose a finger or sustain a serious abdominal bruise, such was his propensity to respond to everything with violence.
All things considered, he actually did quite well on the palace tour. He was interested in the elephant-sized gate defensives (spikes at elephant head height) and enjoyed the narrow, winding passageways and miniature paintings. He insisted on being carried most of the way, up and down steep, uneven staircases, which gave Dylan an extra workout while I did my best to help Dee and Joanne navigate the same. While beautiful and as rich in history as they are in gems, Rajasthan’s palaces are not particularly accessible for the old or the young, even without the added need for self-defence. As we emerged into the midday sun at the end of our tour, we knew that our collective enthusiasm for sightseeing was spent. And anyway, some of us had shopping to do.
Joanne and Dee had a long list of souvenir gifts to buy and shopping in foreign countries happens to be one of my most valuable skills. That is to say, haggling in foreign countries is one of my most valuable skills—and one which Joanne quickly embraced. I like to think I come across as firm but fair, but really, I just see it as sport. There are certain rules to haggling: never accept the first price, or the second, or the third; always keep smiling—the bigger the smile, the bigger the ‘discount’; walking away is part of the game, as is coming back, as is walking away again; if you are happy and they seem happy, you’ve probably reached the right price, whatever that might be.
A quick learner, and even quicker enthusiast, Joanne soon found her own groove and I began to wonder if giving her my bank card was such a good idea. Her shopping was so successful in Udaipur that we couldn’t carry it with us towards our next destination. Instead, we had three bed spreads, two tailored jackets, several kurtas, a few shirts, a handful of table runners and some very soft shawls shipped straight down to Mumbai to meet us on our return. It was when Joanne confessed to asking the shop assistant in a Sketchers store in one of Mumbai’s high end malls on her last day in India ‘Is this your best price?’ that we realised we had truly created a monster.
Udaipur turned out to be the Shroedinger’s cat of our holiday: simultaneously necessary and unnecessary as a stopover. On reflection, we would neither forgo the beauty of our Diwali dinner nor repeat the experience. We would neither recommend it to another family travelling with a small child, nor suggest skipping it. The journey there was both a disaster and a success. The hotel was both calming and stressful. The palace tour was both memorable and forgettable.
What Udaipur taught us was that heritage properties do not make for relaxing parenting environments, whether we are staying in them or visiting them. I fell for the promise of sunsets, lake views and plunge pools, completely forgetting that I have a 4-year-old. Where we had rooftops, I needed lawns; where we had uneven stairs I needed paved walkways; where we had a tour guide, I needed a kids club.
Udaipur also taught us the power of the nap. Jasper doesn’t nap in his ‘real life’ any more and so isn’t receptive to being put to bed in the middle of the day while on holiday. But without a nap, the sights, smells and activities become too much for him and his meltdowns go nuclear. My go-to response to his refusal to nap is to take him swimming because nothing tires his little body like complete and repeat submersion (his idea of fun, not mine). At our first hotel in Tadoba, we had lost this as an exhaustion tactic due to the hotel pool being infested with an invisible but aggressive insect which left Dylan and me looking and scratching like we had some kind of skin infection. At our Udaipur hotel, our issue was that the pool was smaller, chillier, deeper and fuller with childless guests than would be welcoming to a feral Jasper. And so Jasper powered through nap time, day after day, to all of our detriments.
Actually, not all of our detriments. In case you are wondering how the oldies in our party were handling the constant movement, sensory overload and revolting grandson, the answer is very simple: they were, of course, napping.
Lost for words - what an extraordinary time you’re having !!!