The great red sandstone forts at Delhi and Agra both lie on the banks of the River Yamuna. At Agra, the riverside battlements offer a splendid vista across the huge waters winding among the blank sandy banks to the distant Taj Mahal. In the Red Fort at Delhi, you are hardly aware the river is there. From place to place India's attitude to water varies so.
Its availability seems to be taken for granted. Which is strange in a nation which receives little rain outside the monsoon. Perhaps the government has been particularly efficient in digging wells. In the countryside, irrigated fields are ablaze with a rich, dark verdancy. In the towns, public gardens are watered endlessly. Especially in Delhi, where the extensive lawns around India Gate and Parliament building are maintained as lushly as any Home Counties gardener could wish. And in the old part of the town, people who live on the streets take turns to bathe at their local standpipe, holding a cloth around themselves like coy holidaymakers changing on a Cornish beach. As they wash themselves in the running water, they make no effort to be frugal. Perhaps such profligacy with free water is the one luxury they can afford.
Rivers have helped shape much of the sub-continent: the Indus gave the land its name, and the Ganges remains a holy symbol. But it is the lakes that are special in India, partly because of their rarity. One of the main attractions of other-worldly Kashmir is its dreaming lakes, typified by Srinagar's Dal Lake. The contrast between the flat dull land of the Indian plains, and this mobile film of water mirroring the encircling mountains and the soft blue of the sky could hardly be greater.
The tranquillity that water engenders has even moved some to create new lakes. The Pichola Lake at Udaipur is a masterpiece of this kind. In its present form, the lake now reaches out to the surrounding soft-contoured hills, like Lake Dal on a more intimate scale. It provides the perfect setting for the palace which occupies Jagniwas island. And its example spurred others to create Lake Fateh Sagar behind it, whose waters answer the complex of lake and reflected land with a further reflection of the whole design like some huge artifice of mirrors.
But the grand ensemble of Udaipur is an exception; Indian architects have mostly been content to use water as a just another decorative element, like an occasional semi-precious stone set as an inlay among the main expanse of marble. For example, the deserted palace at Fatehpur Sikri has a number of small pools with decorative bridges. But water here is no more central to the overall design than the courtyard-sized chessboard nearby, or the small palace built for games of hide-and-seek. For real architectural sensitivity to the magic of water, you must travel to Agra.
The Itmad-ud-Daulah is a modest tomb for the grandfather of the Lady of the Taj. A narrow pool leads the eye naturally to the exquisite pietra dura of the mausoleum, as delicate as lace. The Taj Mahal takes the same idea but realises it on the grandest scale. The long watercourse points like a gleaming arrow to the distant tomb. A marble wraith, it stands silhouetted against the sky, brooding over the slow, silent Yamuna below.
A Partial India A to Z
From the air, the flat Indian landscape looks like a huge dusty carpet. The monotonously regular fields form a huge patchwork where each square is a variation on the fundamental hue. Tan, dun, tawny, beige; fawn, bronze, khaki; bistre, sienna, umber, ochre: India exhausts them all in the infinite varieties of dull brown its earth assumes.
Nor does the sky offer any relief to this pitiless landscape. During the long summer it is an unbroken dome the colour of faded blue Wedgwood. There are no swirling cloudscapes to captivate the eye, no gradations of mist and vapour to provide variety. Apart from the occasional bird of prey wheeling in the sky, there is not a single breath or movement to break the mutual stare of the earth and heavens.
To this bleached-out brown and burnt-out blue is added a third element which seems another product born of the sun's furnace. The rocks of northern India, and hence the great forts built from them, glow with a dull hot redness which wearies the view like the land and the sky. To visit the empty palace of Fatehpur Sikri is to enter an oven for the eye as the stone throbs redly around you. Only the lush green grass of the abandoned courtyards provides any respite or offers any balm.
Perhaps as a defence against this stultifyingly narrow natural palette, the Indians love bright and varied colours. The saris ot the women are a blaze of impossible shades; the more they clash, the better. The moped rickshaws are often gaily painted with intertwined flowers and coloured patterns. And the cheap pictures of Krishna, the Indianised Christs, the saccharine-sweet images of chubby children - all are tricked out in the most garish and cloying combination of hues. Likewise the huge cinema hoardings everywhere, which seem to promise plots just as colourful and as unfettered by the constraints of subtlety.
The Kashmir valley is less afflicted by the sense of monochrome found on the plains. Partly this reflects the fact that it is the expansiveness of the colour which makes the brown plain or blue sky so exhausting, The essence of Kashmir is that the scale has been reduced and humanised. The valley is only a few tens of kilometres long, and even the sky's extent is bounded by the mountain peaks which rear up on all sides.
It is not only the fields which spawn brown: the Kashmiri houses, with their timber frames and mud-coloured bricks, contribute as well. And yet though the colour may permeate the region, it does not overwhelm. The landscape is saved by the trees, which stand like great fountains and torches of colour. Unlike those on the plain, they are deciduous. As a result, their myriad autumnal hues echo, extend and finally redeem the surrounding countryside. The gamut of scarlets, vermilions, russets and golds justify their staider setting.
Ultimately, the difference is that Kashmir's hues are those of an English landscape; with the trees in their full dismantling glory, it is easy to relate to the ensemble. The ochres of the plain are alien. They make no concessions to previous experience. They are the true colour of India.
A Partial India A to Z
The most notable thing about smells in India is that there are so few of them. Westerners pre-conceptions about third-world countries might lead them to expect a rich melange of noisome smells constantly assaulting the nose, just as the hectic collage of sights and sounds will hit the eyes and ears. But there is no equivalent cacophony of odours.
It is certainly possible to find smells, hunting them out like exotic truffles. But the best smells are those which ambush you in unlikely places, striking your consciousness like the sound of a tiny distant bell.
For instance, there is the incense. Not from the temples, of which there are few in northern India, nor from the mosques which are open to the sky and smell only of the what the wind carries. This incense is from the slow-burning sticks found on stalls in the markets everywhere. Its purpose is purely functional: to ward off the flies from the food. But far more than any smell of cooking it remains as the defining smell of the bazaars. Its cloying richness seems particularly appropriate for the huge, sprawling congregation of shouting people, garish colours and endless, fecund confusion.
More elusive is the smell of the old forts and palaces. A rare conjunction of conditions is needed to catch it, just as if it were some marvellous nocturnal bird, seen only by autumn moonlight in leap years. The rooms where it can be found must be dark and secluded from the sun; they must be high yet draughtless; and their peace must be broken by intrusive visitors only rarely. If these three requirements are met, as at the deserted palaces of Fatehpur Sikri, you can catch a whiff of the rarefied exhalation of old stone. It is cold and dank and a very ancient smell, the smell of history.
The third smell is perhaps the hardest to recognise, because it is at once so subtle and so trivial. It is ubiquitous, but easiest to detect towards twilight. A high vantage point helps to spot it. There you can watch it form over the whole city, and colour the air itself.
It is the smoke from domestic fires. Sitting atop a minaret of the Jami Masjid in Delhi, you can see the city wreathed in its mists and vapours. As dusk falls, the smell seems to concentrate itself as the more workaday odours pack up and go home. It is less a smell than a small sensation at the back of the throat, a slight acidity.
The Kashmir valley offers the experience in its purest form. From the high vantage point of the Shankaracharya Hill behind Srinagar, you can watch the rich woodsmoke curl out of the chimneys on the houseboats and houses. As the lower air thickens, the view turns into some crazy industrial landscape, with tall wiry silver birches for smokestacks. Walking back down into the city you lose sight of the thin pall of smoke in the darkening air, but gain, step by step, its gently choking smell. It smells of the fire which awaits you on your houseboat. It smells of home, as it does for everyone in India. Which is why it is so hard for the westerner to detect, and so worth detecting.
A Partial India A to Z
As you would expect from an institution largely created for the military, the Agra Cantonment station is neatly laid out on broad lines. It is carefully structured with separate offices for stationmasters and under-stationmasters, and has numerous bilingual charts and diagrams detailing trains, times and platforms. The town's ldgah bus station, on the other hand, is a pokey hole in a row of undistinguished shops, The battered buses are parked anyhow, and with its drab crumbling walls and stout window-grilles, the ticket office looks more like the entrance to a prison. Yet buses are cheap, uncomplicated and popular, a vital link between cities and the outlying villages. They are a good way to see India the way most Indians do.
From Agra to the village of Fatehpur Sikri by bus costs just Rs 4.60; it takes about an hour to cover the 40 km distance. For all the bus's bone-shaking lurches and leaps, and despite the continual protestations of the grinding gearbox, this turns out to be considerably faster than most trains. Along the way you pass through fields and villages which seem remarkably similar. The fields have the same toiling bullocks, looked after by the same small boy watching you watching him; the villages display the same wares in the same shops, with the same women carrying small snivelling children on their hips as well as miraculously-balanced bundles on their heads. Occasionally a small hill in the distance emerges then disappears in the dusty heat haze.
Fatehpur Sikri is like and totally unlike all these villages. Like in that it has the same shops and the same women; unlike in the massive red sandstone wall which girdles it some kilometres distant. Amidst this inexplicable grandeur, the thin strip of the town's single fly-blown street lies like the shrivelled innards of a giant tortoise, dwarfed now by the massive shell which rests baking but intact in the sun. When the wall was built, Fatehpur Sikri was worthy of it, a mighty city, capital of the Moghul Empire of North India. Today it only draws attention to the vanity of human achievements, a monument to an Indian Ozymandias.
Not only the wall remains. Beside the village is one of the region's rare hills; on it was built the great Jami Masjid mosque, reached by a giant's causeway of red stone, and an extensive complex of palace buildings. These buildings remain to this day, as perfectly preserved as when they were abandoned some four hundred years ago, shortly after being completed. Lack of sufficient water supplies is thought to be the reason.
Whatever the cause, be grateful. Fatehpur Sikri is everyone's coffee table image of India. The silent brooding sandstone buildings, their dull redness glowing in the midday sun; the deep shadows of the rooms and corridors, starkly contrasted with the glare of the empty courtyards. The architecture, intricate with luxuriant stone swags and minutely-carved columns, the piling up of storeys and towers. The stillness of the pools, and the silence of the open spaces. And around it all, the unending flatness of the Indian plain. Watching from the topmost tower of the palace, you can see a bus's tiny dust cloud bowling towards you along the ribbon of empty road. It is late.
A Partial India A to Z
