Deeg (2015)
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Little town, ancient fort ...
Probably fearing for her source of income (I’ve been the only guest at the Spoonbill in Bharatpur for four days now, and I’ve always just signaled that I don’t know exactly when I’ll be leaving), Madame proposes a trip to Deeg (“nice fort, just one hour by bus…”) and is delighted when, after consulting the guide and after the usual breakfast (four narrow slices of toast with butter, omelette and a pot of Nescafés that’s getting weaker every day), ask for more detailed travel information. From the junction next to the guest house, I take a motor rickshaw to the bus station, also with the thought of familiarizing myself with the onward journey to Jaipur and Pushkar (I will have to be at the bus station early, no later than 8:00, in case I do not stay in Jaipur overnight… no plans beyond each next step…). It turns out to be quite some distance to the bus stand – walking wouldn’t have been an option.
The bus is already waiting, and there is just enough time for a quick beedie after I have paid the 35 Rs. for the ticket. I look for a double seat as always and stay in the aisle seat, the backpack with camera and water in the luggage rack… As soon as we leave Bharatpur the scenery turns completely rural – only farms and very small villages where the bus continues to pick up passengers or drop someone off. Less than an hour later we are already in Deeg, a small town that seems to be dominated mainly by the somewhat unspectacular palace, which we drive halfway around before I get off at the bus stand and let the bus continue without me. As in Agra, the light is harsh and diffused by haze, which at least appears less saturated with dust here. I hope that the palace is interesting enough for a day trip and justifies a longer stay, so that I have a chance for slightly better light in the afternoon. I ask for the way to the palace entrance and once I can guess its location a few hundred meters down the narrow and little-used main road, I take the path along the Ghats past a few pigs, as the small, brightly colored shrines I have spotted tempt me to take a photo.
Opposite the entrance to the palace, I drink a chai and buy biscuits and a bottle of water, so that I am supplied for the next hour. Admission is Rs. 100 for foreigners and entitles to visit the two museum rooms. The whole place looks somewhat dusty and not particularly large, which makes me fear boredom, especially since the light is really not nice. I slowly amble to the left around a building that is currently being restored and intend to take each and every one of the paths that lead through the garden with its waterless fountains (which seem to be the really special thing about this palace)…
Apart from several Indian tourists (mostly young men and a few couples strolling through the garden or sitting on the lawn in the sun), male and female gardeners are busy weeding or piling new soil around the roots of the bushes in various places – all at a pace that seems to me to dictate my own pace for the palace visit. Time – it seems – in rural India, despite smartphones and the Internet, still has another, slow, flow, seems almost eternal, if one were able to just float along …
On a bench above the tank on the palace’s ‘left’ side sits a young man reading a newspaper. The water is green with algae, the bank is dotted with rubbish, a dog sneaks along the steps, in the background geometry, colors, silence…
A young man in middle-class clothes comes up to me as I’m taking some photos of the tank and introduces himself as the manager of the gardens. When I ask whether the palace wall could be walked on, he unfortunately sais ‘no’, pointing out the danger of crumbling parts of the wall. He explains how the fountain system and the gigantic water reservoir work and how the fountains and water features are put into operation on two public holidays a year, in autumn and spring, via countless canals and pipes. In his office in a part of the old workshops on the edge of the tank (old walls, Rajasthani arch design, certainly reasonably cool even in summer or at least sufficiently cool with the help of the now silent ceiling fan) he shows me the photos of the last festivals on his laptop, the colorful fountains and also how men dive into the water reservoir to attach cloth bags with colored powder in the more than thousand drainage holes to make the colorful water play possible… After showing me his private pictures from the last Holi festival in Jaipur, I say goodbye and continue walking. I leave out the museum’s first room, the Durbar Hall, saving it for later, and explore the many small rooms built from marble, each open to the courtyard, which have a peculiar charm in their simplicity and coolness, only disturbed by the fact that almost every hidden corner in the dark has been used by someone to pee, although there is a latrine house just behind the entrance to the palace…
As if lined up on an axis, the more relevant of the interconnected rooms have a view of a fountain that in earlier times must have offered refreshment for the eyes and ears and coolness for the whole body all year round.
At a distance, I follow a worker through a somewhat shabby corridor that looks like it’s closed to visitors and end up in a garden behind the actual palace, which is separated from the street by an outer wall, the separation being rather hypothetical, as the gaps in the wall are only secured by a few strands of barbed wire and would allow easy access from the road.
A couple of young men who are busy shoveling sand wave me over. The show me the covered outdoor stables for the horses and then the vaulted passages under the large water reservoir, which I probably would not have dared to enter without them. ..
In one of the high corridors, at the back, where the sun never reaches, the Maharaja had his own personal mosque, which he used only. I sense narrower, secret corridors that are no longer used in the dark, and in the back corridors there is a strong smell of bats, some of which fly up squeaking in the light of my flashlight…
I descend the narrow steps to the tank on the other side of the pavilion overlooking the water reservoir… It stinks, of urine, of feces, I have to watch where I step. A young man, who has just relieved himself in a corner, leisurely disappears, zipping his fly as he walks. The water in the tank is bright green with algae, rubbish is floating in between, and opposite is the ghat where I photographed in the morning. Crowned by a crow, a pig eats a whole bundle of chapattis that someone has put down on the steps, a few men are sitting further to the left by a small pavilion, women are washing laundry in the broth…
Outside the palace, I have another cup of tea while watching a family of western tourists who appear several times in front of the chai stall seemingly at a loss what to do … It’s only two-thirty and the walls of the fort look interesting. I ask the cashier at the palace entrance if a visit is possible.. Yes, no problem, no entrance fee, just down the street, then right…
A row of car and motorcycle repair shops, mainly young men, one waves me over, wants to be photographed – Why not …, in front of the moat a few small, rickety stalls, garbage, behind them the castle wall towers defiantly. Massive, yellow-gray rock, imposing, the street further on the left side brightly painted house facades, a few children, women in saris, little traffic …
Over a small bridge I go to the right across the moat into the fortifications through the fine yellow sand, which is ubiquitous here. Across another bridge that spans the water-filled ditch, which forms a small lake here, through a mighty gate in which the old wooden doors are still hanging, maybe even locked at night (a heavy padlock and a piece of iron chain are hanging on one of the gate’s wings); at the height of a large elephant’s forehead there are the square iron nails, perhaps 15 centimeters long and common here in Rajasthan, which should prevent unwanted guests from simply ramming into the gate with their fighting elephants and being able to break it open… The first ‘yard’ or better forecourt, measuring perhaps 150 x 150 metres, is completely empty and sandy. A few children and teenagers are playing a simplified version of cricket, and on the left wall a few workers are busy pouring sand from the wall into the courtyard with a large metal bowl, each time creating a gigantic cloud of dust…
Inside of the actual fort, the comparatively small palace is currently being renovated under the aegis of the Archeological Survey of India; more sand, a few smaller construction machines, bricks and field stones, cement mixers, shovels, somewhere near a small temple a radio or cassette recorder blares Indian pop; the palace itself scaffolded in a bamboo frame with a few workers busy, and in front of it a smaller mid-range car or two that probably belong to the officers of the ASI…
I decide to ignore the sign prohibiting entering – in principle the whole fort is currently a construction site and ‘off limits’ – and to explore the fortifications as best I can, if possible, to get up on the wall and gain an overview of the fort and city. I inconspicuously pass the small palace (which architecturally is very similar to the city palace, just much smaller) as the probability of being stopped there seems too great and the walls do look very dilapidated. Behind the palace on a small hill I climb up to a partially intact small temple, to look for a path through the thick, fine sand and the thorn bushes growing in between, walking very carefully so as not to stir up too much dust, nor step into one of the many heaps of excrement of animal of human origin. Two boys, around 10 or 12, follow me, start begging, get really annoying, aggressive. When one of the two starts kicking his feet in the sand and producing a thick cloud of dust in my direction, Before the situation escalates, I am luckily rescued by the workers repairing the rear castle wall. They apparently threaten the boys sufficiently to not trouble me anymore and wave me over to the wall, pointing out the easiest way.
Up on the wall I have a fabulous overview of the city, albeit hazy, and of the entire fort complex. The top of the wall is currently being repaired, straightened, re-paved and certainly at some point also provided with some railing to the moat, since one could otherwise easily fall 10-15 meters into the muck below. Also the wells reaching down to the groundwater, of which there are certainly ten along the entire castle wall, are not all yet repaired and provided with sufficiently high walls …
The ASI employee comes up to me and without greeting tells me that I shouldn’t be here at all. Cell phone in hand, he is a young man, dressed considerably better than the workers he occasionally gives instructions to – but he appears uncertain and when I greet him and ask a few questions about the renovation work he is quite friendly. But his English is so rudimentary that after a few minutes he decides to just let me go on after I’ve snapped a few photos of the workers.
In places the wall is so difficult to walk on that I must climb down and continue below the wall before I come to a section that is already finished and climb the stone steps back up to the top of the wall. On the corner near the entrance to the fort, a small tower has already been fully restored and is apparently used for late night drinking, but overall, the site appears unfrequented. I see only a few teenagers strolling around and children playing, a girl tending some goats, and a woman who has picked up some twigs for a cooking fire around here somewhere…
Once again, I go through the gate, across the bridges, then turn left at the fork in front of the wall, the road should then go around the palace on the right-hand side and thus lead me to the bus station; there is still enough time until sunset…
I mistake a passage through a gate and the inner courtyard behind it as a further access to the palace, since the walls enclosing the ‘court’ are built in the same style. The explanations offered by the men sitting there don’t make any sense to me – they just repeat ‘cour’, court court, waving around. A younger man is sitting at a small table in the passageway with his laptop. He invites me to sit down with him, but I can’t make sense of his explanations either. It’s only when I’m standing in the courtyard, where formally dressed gentlemen are sitting at small tables everywhere, many with typewriters and signs in Hindi, that I realize that ‘court’ means ‘court’ here, not ‘courtyard’, and that the gentlemen sitting around are lawyers, writers and clerks. The court in Deeg sits within historical walls, a scene I recognize from Indian novels… But I don’t feel comfortable here, I feel like the intruder that I am, but think I might come back some time …
A few hundred meters further I pass the place where the palace wall is interrupted by a few strands of barbed wire, then I am at the bus station, where I eat a few kachoris and wait for the bus to Bharatpur…