A short stay in Pakistan

My family along with others like us who are lucky enough to have travelled beyond the confines of the school ski trip, the summer seaside rental, or the educational tours of European capitals, have nevertheless been affected by fear of the bogey man.  Once it was old Boney, now it is 'Islam'. Well of course it isn't but a fear of terrorism in the name of religion that has whole populations risking loss of home, livelihood, nationality, or, most desperately and tragically, nothing more than an alternative and no less final way of death than the bomb blast, the shooting or the beheading, has infected the world. As global the distances are shrunk by quicker communications that link peoples ever more closely and immediately, fear of the unknown other drags us apart again.  Reason and common sense are being torn from us and, most shamingly, our humanity.  We are avoiding other countries and nationalities, pulling up drawbridges and building walls.  In the case of the UK we are currently engaged in a political battle to break ties with our nearest neighbours - the most emotive argument for Brexit involves the hungry hordes of migrants, in brackets, muslim migrants, waiting across the British Channel to overrun our green hills. We are becoming frightened of our own shadows and forgetful of the lessons of history. Our fear of ungoverned humankind let loose may help to create the conditions for Hobbes 'war of all against all' when proper government and political community break down altogether.

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things are require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is the worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short

So, to Pakistan for me for a bare ten days; the merest taste and snapshot of a complicated and contradictory country. The dreams of its remarkable founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah seem as lost as the recordings of his speeches of nearly seventy years ago, his vision for the country, narrowed in his brief and dying months in power, then quickly turned aside by successors with harder line or more acquisitive agendas. Now Pakistan struggles to break out of the domestic stranglehold of political corruption, overweening military power and dictatorship and to change its international reputation, ambiguous to say the least, for its attitude towards Islamic extremism and state-sponsored terrorism. 

Other battles are afoot as the country tries to build its economy through closer ties with China and encouragement of other foreign investors. Meanwhile almost half of Pakistan's GDP is still derived from agriculture. A few thousand families have hold most of land and political power in the country in a hereditary feudal system that was reinforced if not wholly invented by the British and maintains until today. The poor remain poor, the tax system is mired in fraud, and religion, ruling life, regularly and publicly observed, might well be said to be the opium of the masses. Purdah is observed to a greater or lesser extent, particularly in traditional areas, while better off urban Pakistani women are known for their sense of fashion. Women under forty are becoming a new force in parliament through reserved women's seats. Drawn in general from the landed families who have traditionally held political power in Pakistan, these energetic young women are seen by some as little more than a contemporary gloss on the same old problems.

I arrived in Lahore by air from Delhi - a mistake but Indian friends are convinced the land border is a dangerous route.  It isn't, well no one in Pakistan thinks so. Whether or not there is time saved in crossing the Wagah border from Amritsar almost into Lahore rather than sitting on the tarmac at Delhi airport awaiting the pleasure of air traffic control to allow a Pakistani flight to take off is questionable.  Certainly the overland route would be of greater interest especially for the first time traveller. That misconceptions over security abound between India and Pakistan is perhaps less surprising in the light of recent history than the misconceptions of the rest of the world. Some cross border misunderstandings are more entertaining than otherwise.  

My official guide in Lahore was a true patriot whose views on India may have been toned down somewhat out of politeness to a visitor recently arrived from that side of the border. 'All Indians are vegetarian'. 'All Indians are dirty'. 'All Indians are HIndu.' Not quite direct quotes but very nearly. He was competitive to the point of ridicule on behalf of his country. During a discussion on fizzy drinks 'Imran, do you have a lot of diabetes here like India?', 'O here we have much worse diabetes.' 

'Imran, this looks like the something or other fort/palace/tomb in Lucknow/Jaipur/Bhopal'. - 'No this is older, bigger, better, more important in every way....'

And so on.....stopping the flow of information was not appreciated, Imran is on permanent transmit in his efforts properly to educate the visitor, but he made life a lot easier in the bazaars of old Lahore although the only real danger seemed possible death by motorcycle. The walled city is a maze of small streets and gullies running between its remaining six gates and foreign tourists are to say the least thin on the ground. I did not see another foreign face during my whole time in Pakistan although this short stay was only in one province and I believe things would be different in the capital, Islamabad

My goal and inspiration for this journey was the spectacular Derawar Fort in the Cholistan desert of the Southern Punjab. It is just one astonishing example of the chain of forts built along the path of the lost Sarasvati river to guard the invasion route to India from Central Asia.  Ultimately it became part of Bahawalpur State, now part of Punjab province,and once described by its ruler as having its front door opening on Pakistan and its back door to India. Like the charming Italianate palaces of Bahawalpur city, Derawar, which should be a hugely important heritage site, has suffered from the attentions of the Pakistan army compounded by lack of any interest in or care for the culture and history of the country by successive Pakistani governments.  

The visitor rapidly understands the power of the army in Pakistan that has given it free rein to pillage the movable whatever its true ownership and to vandalise the immovable. Thus the interior of Derawar Fort has been destroyed well within living memory, it's preservation not helped by legends of buried gold that have encouraged treasure hunters, including 1970s President and Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to dig for it. It is said that the latest Commander in Chief does not suffer from the corruption that has infected the army like a cancer and has transformed the security situation in Pakistan in his tenure since 2013. Unfortunately it is hard to imagine that restitution for previous army crimes is likely to be high on his list of priorities in the present nervous climate. 

Other forts further out in the desert are being allowed to crumble into the sand - they were built by Hindu princes once upon a time and apparently have no relevance to a contemporary Islamic State where tourism has long since lost out to internal disinterest, army grabs and external fear. Bahawalpur is an attractive, well-planned provincial city of wide avenues, trees, palaces and the huge campus of the Sadiq Public School. Founded by Nawab Bahawal Khan Abbasi I in the mid-18th century, Bahawalpur City was added to progressively by his successors.  Today it should be full of visitors, its palaces preserved as museums or heritage hotels if not still as the homes of their original owners.  Instead the army has taken over, the cantonment pushes, bullies its way almost into the garden of the Sadiq Garh Palace at Dera Nawab Sahib; the Noor Mahal Palace is now army offices; other royal buildings are lost behind high walls and army security posts; the doors even of the glorious library, a public building, were firmly closed when I visited. Loss and waste.

When Mary Minto visited Lahore on a viceregal tour in 1909 she described the drive ‘through the most lovely palm avenues to the Shahdera, where Jahangir’s tomb rests in a beautiful garden’ and goes on ‘the white marble is inlaid with many coloured stones and agates and remains in wonderful repair…..Nur Jahan is also buried in the garden.  Her brother who assisted her in the government has also a mausoleum, the dome of which was covered with brilliant yellow tiles but most of them have fallen off and the Government finds it is too expensive to replace them while the art of producing these vivid colours has been lost. 

Not surprisingly over one hundred years later only a very few tiles remain on Asif Khan’s tomb to remind the viewer of past glory.  The worst damage to the tombs is not, however, due to recent neglect.  When the Sikhs conquered Lahore in 1799, Ranjit Singh removed much of their decoration to the Golden Temple at Amritsar and the memorial complex was used as a residence and barracks.  The proportions of the building are now its major attraction, the marble tomb itself centred under a dome that rests lightly on the arched walls of the great brick octagonal building, highlighted by the colours here and there of a patch of clinging tiles or decorative plaster work.

The ‘beautiful’ gardens are now, to all intents and purposes, a municipal park, full of picnickers and cricket players on a Sunday afternoon who might have been exchanged unnoticeably with almost identical crowds from Lodi gardens in Delhi a week earlier.  Mary described Jahangir’s tomb remaining in ‘wonderful repair’ and so it still appears although a conservation project begun over ten years ago is dwindling as badly paid skilled stonemasons leave for better paid unskilled jobs. Their traditional family skills are disappearing like the art of making coloured tiles, lost to lack of respect for heritage crafts and disinterest among younger generations in jobs that require long apprenticeships for little reward.  A work force in this case of two hundred has shrunk in a few years to only eight and they are muttering dissent.

Jahangir’s wife, Noor Jahan’s adjacent tomb is currently a building site which may augur well for its future if the necessary skills for its conservation do still exist. In the Old Town of Lahore a joint effort by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, the Walled City Authority, Government of the Punjab and the Norwegian Embassy shows what is possible with its truly wonderful restoration of the Shahi Hamam public baths. The work has extended even to immaculate visitor loos.  Further work is planned including preservation of the splendidly tiled Wazir Khan mosque whose builder was a native of Chiniot, known for the extraordinary skills of its traditional woodcarvers.

The Walled City is irresistible like all such ancient market and dwelling places where antique monuments have been surrounded and overtaken by daily life. A beautifully preserved haveli is hidden in plain sight like a Florentine Palazzo behind its anonymous façade, overlooked by the rush of life a busy street.  Inside a different world of decorated courtyards, peaceful gardens and elegant drawing.  The academic and artistic calm of the Naqsh art school is just round the corner of a tiny alley off a crowded thoroughfare. Here students of all ages and varieties can study subjects from calligraphy and miniature painting to graphic design on short or long courses up to degree level   Other old houses, less well-served, are now used as schools and offices, coloured tiles and painted plaster clinging here and there above the dirt and daily bustle.

Piles of rubbish are moved this way and that by energetic sweepers and cleaners but are seldom diminished for long. Toothbrush tree stick sellers stand by Delhi Gate; bakers, tea stalls, butchers; food stalls selling rations of boiled mutton for breakfast from huge pots; rows of shops full of sparkling wedding clothes; jewellery, real and fake; huge antique water pipes and loops of electricity cable like tangled hair held up with grips and clips and any old tie; carts loaded with dates; donkeys; endless motorcycles somehow missing the middle of the road pedestrian and everywhere the smell of roses, deep red petals drifting down streets overtaking the smells of food, drains and humanity en masse. It is reminiscent of much smaller Bhopal and far larger Cairo and equally enticing. (Bhopal like Bahawalpur was a Muslim ruled state whose Nawabs, mostly female in that matriarchal line, were advanced thinkers and developers of education for both sexes, transport systems, water supply, postal services and state administration)

Contemporary living is rarely so seductive although the passion for pigeons that embellishes the skyline of the old city with tiered bamboo pigeon lofts that soar from the rooftops of havelis and tenement buildings like scaffolding for miniature high rises, is unabated in the gardens of recently built residential areas like DHA, the Defence Housing Authority. This is a wealthy place of comfortable modern houses, security men patrolling outside the locked gates into gardens where feather footed fantail doves strut and coo, occasionally taking flight in choreographed groups that soon return to the safety of their dovecotes.  Pigeons and doves are everywhere, circling the tiled domes of the great mausoleums of Multan where the lofts appear more like rooftop hutches, wheeling out across the skies of Lahore or over any small village across the flat, fertile land of the Punjab, adding a particular romance and poignancy to most views.

Nowadays there is romance too in the old white colonial buildings from the same mould as Connaught Place in Delhi, shops along the Mall, the Gymkhana Club in Lawrence Gardens recognisable as such anywhere in the sub-continent.  Kim’s wonder house, the Lahore Museum on the Mall where John Lockwood Kipling was curator is closed on Mondays unfortunately for me.  The great gun, the Zam Zama stands outside the gates, marooned on its island between lanes of traffic; ubiquitous ‘Green Punjab’ tuk tuks flying by; imported cars, Japanese and German; donkey carts, their drivers standing at the reins like hopeful charioteers, buses and more cars….past monumental red brick Victorian buildings; the High Court; GPO, Punjab University and the Anglican Cathedral surrounded by old walls and new barbed wire. On then to famous Aitchison College founded on the British public school model or back to the older city where roads and flyovers criss cross by the 1960s ugly Minar-e-Pakistan against a longer view of the Lahore Fort with the three glowing bulbs of the domes of the Badshahi mosque rising above its walls.

In the modern city KFC, Pizza Hut and Macdonalds are as ubiquitous as coffee shops and ATMs and advertisements for well-known US and European chain stores are on every hoarding. The government has an open arms approach to foreign investors that may be responsible for remarkably straightforward money exchange with no form filling or passport scrutiny required.  Which international visitors might be staying in the big Lahore hotels, like the refurbished Faletti’s, built in the 1880s, all clustered together behind high security walls in the centre of the city , it is hard to tell. Business may be booming with business visitors moving from office to office in dark windowed Mercedes.  They are not in evidence elsewhere even at the airport where the greatest weight of arrivals and departures is of pilgrims to the important shrines of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq. I am not sure whether travelling alone in Pakistan, staying in hotels however grand,  would or would not be a happy experience - the general view is probably not although I suspect the great tradition of hospitality in Pakistani culture does in fact encompass even so odd a creature as the single woman traveller.

I regret not visiting the splendidly castellated Lahore Railway station on the old Great Trunk Road although it holds tragic memories of Partition.  Pizza Hut and Macdonalds have apparently colonised its platforms as they have the excellent highways out of Lahore. They run between canals, tanneries and other industrial sites giving way to miles of commercial gardens, their produce on show on the road side and, further into the Punjab farmland, to fruit growers, acres of old and beautiful mango trees, turnip, potato, bright green wheat fields and herds of grazing cattle and buffalo.

The road to the Hiran Minar, Jahangir’s monument to his favourite pet antelope travels through less than picturesque industrial areas surrounding the town of Sheikhapura.  The minaret itself, the antelope’s grave by its side now hidden from view is part of a park complex with a pavilion or baradari at the centre of a large tank where deer once came to water. The fact that this is site has been on the ‘tentative list’ for UNESCO World Heritage Site status since 1993 has not saved the area from its fate as a local amenity, the small corner pavilions of the tank  are scrawled with graffiti and rubbish pollutes its water.

Lunch on the return journey to Lahore was, I gathered from my guide, a sine qua non for fish eaten on the banks of the Kanpur Canal. Rohu a member of the carp family and possibly other varieties of similar freshwater fish cut into rough slabs are fried in huge quantities and served with piles of spongy nan and cumin flavoured yoghurt/raita which is delicious.  I must admit, spoiled by island living, to being a moderate fan only of somewhat bony and muddy tasting carp and their coarser relations. The incredibly generous hospitality in Pakistan however naturally implies a lot of seriously good food, although I am not sure I appreciated either the fish or a local Multan delicacy of goat leg and head boiled for 12 hours quite as much as I should have done.  It would, on the other hand, be extremely easy to overeat without recourse to the dreaded Macdonalds.  For the time being people in the streets of Lahore look a lot leaner and fitter than their Indian cousins and certainly than our obese fast food loving Western populations, regardless of that diabetes and an endemic taste for very sweet sweets. Regretfully one must suppose that absence of alcohol is an additional health factor.

Much of the rich agricultural land round the ancient city of Multan, huge tracts, measured out in bighas, kanaals and squares and previously held by great landowning families, has been broken up into smaller parcels in recent years for industrial use . Those old enough to remember describe their father's and grandfather's estates, huge forested areas once private hunting preserves that have now been sold off to maintain their expected style of living and allotted in parcels, sized according to rank, to various army generals and more junior officers. The city of Multan itself is recorded in the time of Alexander the Great. Its continuing development as an industrial centre has not yet, for the visitor at least, overtaken its historic and religious atmosphere and the charm of its old bazaars but Multan is moving fast; a metro is being built, spoken of as a money making scam by locals who reasonably consider such mass transit systems unnecessary in this still relatively small city. 

Local crafts include traditional embroidered slippers, Khussa, that fit the feet literally like gloves and the famous Multan pottery in the blues and luminescent turquoise of the tiles that illuminate the city's spectacular shrines and those of Uch Sharif. In the cloth market, men bend over frames, creating magical zari embroidery, needles loaded with miniscule beads creating perfect glittering patterns with staggering speed.  Less sparkly embroidery, more to my taste, is displayed on delectable jewel coloured velvets and intricately woven silks.Multan is also well-known for its jewellery making. Once the preserve of HIndu craftsmen, local jewellers are now almost exclusively Ismaili Muslims.  

Such delights are of course a mere filip to Multan's true treasure, its unique heritage as the 'City of Saints' expressed in buildings, the massive domed shrines,  that are instantly recognisable from antique watercolours and prints if less well known by name. The architectural wealth is so great and time in my case so short that kind and informative friends could, in only a day, give me just a taste of the glories to be seen, the finest and best preserved whetting the appetite for future, longer visits.  The 14th century Shrine of Shah Rukh-E-Alam is probably the best known of the Multan tombs.  Pigeons fly round its white painted dome high above the city hubbub in the fort area; its walls and bastions of red brick woven with glorious blue and turquoise tiles are like great rich rolls of persian carpet . Inside the same turquoise spreads across the floor, the tiles gleaming in sunlit doorways smoothed to silken finish by the tread of thousands of feet. 

The shrines are tardis like, their interiors unexpectedly huge fields of white painted or blue tiled graves. Pilgrims lay tinselled covers on the canopied graves of the saints, whole families gather and pray.  The always unexpected note to eyes more used to monuments of icy stone and marble comes with glittery paper chains and a line in appalling kitsch plastic clocks. I have seen these clocks spreading like carbuncles across Africa and Asia, in places as diverse as dentists' waiting rooms, mosques, churches and cafes and it is hard to believe that someone in a a factory in China isn't having a laugh as they offload such horrors. The markets in Multan are in any case full of Chinese goods. The tomb of Shah Rukh-E-Alam, is on the UNESCO tentative World Heritage List. Historic damage to the area was caused by the armies of Ranjit Singh during the siege of Multan in the early 19th century, later compounded by the British in a punitive expedition against Mulraj, recalcitrant ruler of Multan in 1849. 

Staying in an art deco style modern farm house outside the city surrounded by fields and orchards,  there is duck shooting on offer - I have shot partridges in the Indian Punjab in such extreme winter cold that I set fire to a chimney stoking up the fire in that other farmhouse.  Electricity here is on and off and as in India generators are de riguer throughout Pakistan for those who can afford them.  On this occasion reverse air conditioning held up well enough to remove the requirement for dangerous conflagration. Fishing was for more enormous carp in a pond in front of the house where we sat on the verandah to eat huge breakfasts of puri, eggs, halwa and delicious local fruit in the early morning sun. The famous Multan mangoes, several dozen varieties, sadly not in season for months yet.

I spent an unexpected morning well outside the usual remit of  the tourist at the Police Training Institute in Multan.  The Punjab police force has a local reputation for honesty rare in this part of the world that may be explained by this astonishing educational establishment. On a campus that would do credit to a famous public school or army officer training college in this country, recruits, ranging from those with masters' degrees to young men from villages with no electricity or running water, are taught first of all to live and work together and then to serve their people over and  above any other consideration. I have to say, observing the tall and imposing instructors teaching courses course, that I would certainly ask how high if they told me to jump.  I was highly relieved when the female officer detailed to look after me finally relaxed enough to smile - as usual the female of the species is more deadly than the male. Courses originally running for 6 months now have an extra 10 week anti-terrorist training. 

The campus is immaculate, classes from the academic and theoretical to deafening rifle practice and physical fitness taking place on wide fields fringed by spotless dormitories, messes, a medical facility, laundry, barber and even a photographic shop producing souvenir items - my favourite the black mug that reveals a photograph when filled with hot liquid. Food is cooked by professional cooks in a row of vast tandoors by the dining hall and is delicious. All this to the credit of a Principal who, in spite of an army background, looks, in his tweed coat, sounds and behaves more like a thoughtful academic at any of the great universities of the world than someone who has spent most of his life in uniform including serving with the UN in Bosnia. He carries an air of humanity and serious educational intent that seems to pervade his domain. With our own famous police college at Hendon now closed and our policing standards, judging by recent scandals, consequently reduced, it is hard not to think that we could learn a thing or two from so impressive an establishment.  

A twilight drive to visit the Shrine of Hazrat Sher Shah to the south of Multan, brought us further to the old British railway bridge over the wide sweep of the Chenab river, one of the major water ways of the sub-continent  that flows from Himachal Pradesh through Jammu and Kashmir into the Punjab. Its waters currently allocated to Pakistan under the controversial Indus Waters Treaty, Alexander the Great is believed to have been responsible for the founding of the city of Uch Sharif at the Chenab's confluence with the Indus river.  Now 100 km distant from the remains of the city, flooding of the river in the early 19th century caused greater damage to its shrines than Sikh and British armies achieved at a similar time in Multan. The shrines, built a century or so after that of Shah Rukh-E-Alam are, perhaps because of their fragility, highly atmospheric and considerable conservation work is now being carried out on the area, not least to remove earlier ill-thought repairs that had served to damage their structures further.  

Uch Sharif is within touching distance of Bahawalpur where I finished this brief journey of exploration among the beautiful tombs and shrines of the Abbasi family, formerly Nawabs of the state of Bahawalpur.  They lie, still sacrosanct and peaceful in a private cemetery just to the east of the broken bones of Fort Derawar. The secrets of its subterranean chambers, hidden tunnels that may stretch all the way back to the palace at Dera Nawab Sahib, lost treasure, djinns, old history and older magic may be buried with the dead in this calm and quiet space. 

Jaipur Literature

It is the India time of year again when a flood of post-Christmas tourists abandon the gloom and January sales that will continue until April to rush towards the chilly north Indian winter.I would often rather sweat it out in summer heat than freeze in unheated heritage hotel rooms at this time of year but, most people appear to disagree.  First time visitors are often taken unawares by the bone deep cold at night and the need for more hot water bottles in bed.  In Jaipur for this year's Literature Festival the weather was glorious until nightfall when my bedroom heater lit the whole room with a welcoming glow that produced enough heat only to dry socks draped as a fire risk over its frame.  Luckily I have been cold enough times in India and other so-called hot countries in winter to carry socks, shawls, jerseys and endless layers of Uniqlo down, the cold weather travellers' friend, and to know that vests were invented for a reason.

I was in Jaipur to launch, after years in gestation, the edited version of Mary Minto's Indian Journal under the title Vicereine. Mary's husband Rolly, 4th Earl of Minto and Viceroy 1905-10 shared the honours with John Morley, Secretary of State for India, for the introduction of the Morley/Minto reforms that were one of the first pebbles thrown into the pond of imperial rule in India,legitimising the election of Indians to legislative councils. Mary herself was an imperialist to her bootstraps and her views were those of a woman of her time and class but her sense of humour, sharp eye for place and person and ear for dialogue make her irresistible nonetheless. The people she saw and met from a ringside position included the glamorous Maharajas who she greatly admired, especially the remarkable Ganga Singh of Bikaner and other well known historical characters like Lord Kitchener, described unexpectedly playing parlour games at Simla as well as in more conventional style .

There are details of tours all over the country including the NW Frontier and Burma and a wealth of photographs covering five years including Mary's own 'kodaks'; unique images of Habibullah, the Amir of Afghanistan learning to play croquet in the gardens at Barrackpore near Calcutta; Dandy, Rolly's pet Dandy Dinmont, being carried in his own litter on the frontier; an ADC playing with a diabolo on a railway station platform where the viceregal train had stopped. The book is beautiful if not quite an ideal size for bedtime reading  - I hope the paperback version with fewer photographs will eventually appear for easier reading rather than just looking.  Mary's opinions may shock our PC sensibilities but they make excellent entertainment.

And so to the extraordinary Literature Festival where nearly 400 speakers from India and the rest of the World, led by Margaret Atwood, spoke to audiences from six different stages in the grounds of the Diggi Palace, a miraculous venue which somehow stretches to accommodate over a third of a million visitors during the five days of the Festival and somehow recover to do it all over again a year later. The biggest treat of course is to have access to the writers' room where the starstruck, most definitely me included, rub shoulders with writers who include well-known journalists, historians, novelists, biographers, actors with plenty to say, politicians likewise, the informed, the informative and those enjoying their fifteen minutes in the spotlight. This is a truly democratic affair where getting a cup of coffee or a glass of whisky, a whisky company is a major Festival sponsor, may mean a conversation with anyone from Stephen Fry to a 15 year old first time novelist completely undaunted by the company he is keeping.  At the opening night party, a massive event where the gardens of the Rambagh Palace are turned into a sort of literary fairy land, everyone talks to everyone and I talked, yippee, to my delight to Alexander McCall Smith, inventor of remarkable characters especially the glorious 'traditionally built' Precious Ramotswe with her Botswana Ladies' Detective Agency. He must get very fed up with besotted readers quoting his people back to him but he puts a very good face on it as does his wife who must have heard it all before ad infinitum.

The fears of sitting on a stage myself for an hour on the opening day of the Festival to discuss Mary Minto were quickly alleviated by an amazing event at the Jaipur City Palace which may have been less of a pleasure for those without their vests on underneath their finery.  Imagine, a great lit court of white marble, arches on one side leading to summer drawing rooms, on the other the view over the pink city, approached by a winding staircase from an inner entrance reached by carriage from the outer gate and guarded by two elephants in all their finery and a platoon of tasseled camels.  On top of that, a delicious dinner, plenty to drink to keep the cold at bay and an impossible choice to make of which conversation to join.

During the weekend of the Festival numbers attending become extreme as children and schoolchildren join others for whom week day visits are impossible. Still people are patient and polite in general and somehow it all works without a riot although with artist friends in town in search of hidden villages and new scenes I absented myself for much of Saturday and Sunday, rather mistakenly I suspect as I missed evening events taking place in the splendour of the Amber Fort that stretches along part of the Aravalli range of hills on the outskirts of Jaipur. During Sunday daytime opening hours the Fort is to be avoided, it is treated quite reasonably as a local leisure amenity meaning that it is crammed with people, mostly busy taking selfies or group photographs against every square inch of view or decorated pillar. My old memories of the massive complex include my youngest son falling and slicing his head open on a marble step

Our weekend magical mystery artist in search of a subject tour out of Jaipur had originally included Bundi or Kota via Tonk, a place I have an unwarranted desire to visit due to Mary Minto's description of its then ruler who took her bear shooting. Bundi is known in particular for its stepwells but idleness encouraged a visit instead to a suprisingly sparsely visited stepwell in Amer, close to the Amber Fort and to the Anokhi Museum of Handprinting, its cafe the purveyor of delicious fresh lemon and ginger drinks and homemade cookies.

Salt lakes being good in theory for painting we drove further out of town to the Sambhar Lake, a huge area dotted with not particularly scenic salt workings but fringed by little visited villages of considerable attraction. The lake is said to have been a gift by the goddess Shakambari to the local population.Originally made of silver the people feared battles over the precious metal and asked her to removed the gift which she instead changed to the salt that has been been worked here for over a thousand years.The settlement round the temple of Devyani.where the beautiful holy tank was refilled in 2012 due to a local youth initiative to divert flood water from the lake after 25 dry years is like a miniature Pushkar and is a highly important pilgrimage site.  We hit off a festival day, How many festival days there are heaven knows but we found mainly women, mostly of a certain age, engaged in energetic ablutions followed by prayers in the temple.  On a roof top nearby, the ground was being thrashed with great force by both men and women beating out devils - Devyani was the daughter of a Rishi who had a fall out with her friend, the daughter of a demon who by divine intervention became her slave. Who needs to beat the demons today and to what precise end I have not yet discovered but it's probably better to keep them in their place well all's said and done.

Onwards, attracted by a distant view of a hill fort, to Bichun Village also possibly called Dudu, at least it is in Dudu tehsil but.....The village is traditional, unvisited and very friendly.  To our surprise on arrival drummers immediately appeared and started drumming in the village street but we never quite discovered their purpose - weddings were out, practice possibly or just a most unexpected greeting. A short walk up to the fort ended in rather ignominious retreat although I maintain I would have got there but might not have survived the thorn bushes and rocks so successfully on the way down.  Thereafter I think we met the whole population, several generations of village families and most particularly the newest baby who, once gathered up in foreign arms, instantly peed into foreign handbag and everywhere else besides to much general hilarity.

After this, to Delhi for the Delhi Art Fair and then a flight into the unknown to Lahore - for like-minded travellers, I would recommend instead the Wagah border crossing to Pakistan via Amritsar in spite of the Indian view that it is a hazardous route which is quite clearly not the case but the sort of standard rumour the builds on habitual mistrust and fear of the next door neighbour. In similar vein Indian air traffic control apparently takes an inevitable delight in keeping Pakistan Airways flights waiting for some hours on the runway.  Mind you, Pakistan Airways were on strike for most of the rest of the time I was in the country so I suppose I should think myself lucky to have got there at all.