It has been three weeks here in Jaipur. I have a job, an apartment and some beginning sense of my new home. To see where I work, check out http://www.idex.org.in. To see the marble floored apartment I am sharing with Andrea, get yourself a plane ticket. To get a sense of my sense of my new home, check out the following.
Jaipur: city of Jai Singh, a Rajput king circa early 1700s, who had a yen for planning and astrology. City of Jai Singh, a king who built a massive observatory consisting of various stone proto-telescopes and a huge castle consisting of architexture which guidebooks call whimsical (meaning like Mughal architecture but not as impressive). City of a king who built his old city on advice from the Shastras, which is something like basing a city on the dictates of the Talmud, built it with really wide streets and seven geometriclly ordered sectors and a faceted palace façade where the women could sit and watch parades.
Jaipur: The Pink City, which unlike Jaiselmer to the West, which is “Golden” only at sunset, lives up to its name 24/7. A pink city built of sandstone whose color was meant to echo the deep red brown of the Mughal cities. A city where the supposedly whimsical Rajput architects thought dull pink would somehow echo rust brown red with good affect. A city that has been pink since 1727 but has been especially bright in its stucco pinkness ever since they repainted it to welcome the Prince of Wales in 1879. A pink city where the building color code remains more forceful than the house painting rules in American suburbia, and the shops in the bazaar are really numbered.
Jaipur: capital of Rajasthan, India’s largest state (geographically anyway). Capital of Rajasthan, member of India’s Hindi belt, that assemblage of basically failed states stretching from Rajasthan in the West to Orissa and Bihar in the East, Hindi speaking states where poverty and bad government and female infanticide and illiteracy and every social ill you can imagine are a part of everyday life. Capital of Rajasthan, a state that if just as poor as its Hindi belt brethren, especially for its large population of tribal groups, at least has adequate law and order, probably because so many people from Rajasthan are in the army. Capital of Rajasthan, a state whose law and order success makes its historical and cultural attractions available to Western tourists, not because they are more cultural or more Indian or more anything, but simply because they are safe.
Jaipur: city of Jai Singh, whose yen for planning and wide streets has produced an entire town where driving is pleasurable. City of really wide grid-like streets where you can take your two wheeler, in my case a scooter, and get up to 65 km an hour and feel safe, not that there aren’t dangerous potholes or busses veering into your lane or people driving on the wrong side of the road, but you still feel safe, the roads are pucca, and the feeling of driving down them at twilight, when the heat has finally abated and the smog paints the sky pinker than the stucco walls of the old city is exhilarating in a breaking-into-song sort of way. City of wide streets and big round traffic circles where cycle rickshaws stay to the outside and Tata Sumo SUVs hog the tightest line, honking urgently but without aggression.
Jaipur: North Indian city where some people are counted and some are not. City where 2 million documented citizens are counted and 2 million undocumented are not. Or perhaps city where 1.5 million undocumented people, or 1.7 million, or 2.1 million are not counted. City where uncounted people live in places where you’d expect, without doors for census workers to knock on. City where uncounted people support the economy by working in what is oh so euphemistically called the “informal sector”, support it by not being counted. City of oh so many uncounted people doing the jobs that uncounted people in India do: sweeping, begging, picking rags, driving rickshaws, carrying things. City where the governments of India and Rajasthan, both incompetent in their own ways, both founded on different traditions of bureaucracy than the one I know, have counted only about half of the population.
Jaipur: city of polo, that bizarre combination of croquet and horse racing that was actually invented in India. City where the children of minor ex-royalty own lots of horse and play polo as a full time sport. City where someone will tell you with all seriousness how they have dedicated their life to polo, as if they were telling you about their charity work with the lepers. City where you can sit in the stands next to the families of minor ex-royalty and their admirers at the polo fields and listen to an announcer exclaim “and Major Rathore is driving for the goal! And there, he makes no mistake about it, goal for Major Sukdhev Rathore!” City of deposed Rajput royalty and their polo-playing children.
Jaipur: north Indian city of typical post-modernity. City where typical post-modern Indian architecture, full of shiny glass and corporate names, competes with crumbling concrete and old havelis that have become old hotels. City where airconditioned supermarkets hope to one day overtake bazaars. City where the mall at Gaurav Tower is "the only happening place in town" for the kids. City where young entrepeneurs and young ex-Rajput royalty and uncounted people and Western tourists in their embarassing outfits and students studying Indian culture all mix and match in the interactions and exclamations of today, Hindi dotted with English or English dotted with Hindi or English dotted with Indianisms or my English dotted with reproduced Indianisms.
Jaipur: city that exceeds its own names. City where regret or nostalgia or outrage or romanticization or infatuation are all slightly out of place. City that apart from all of the angles and the assessments and the sweeping forces of history and the slow aging of time, is just happening, one day at a time. City that is hosting me, for no apparent reason and with no foreseen results, as part of its irresistible happening.
