Udaipur: “We’re the only idiots here — and it’s great!”
India is a place where vacation itineraries come to die, or perhaps be reincarnated. Plans have a way of morphing and changing. Take ours, for example. We had initially planned on spending a great deal of time in Rajasthan, the Indian province that most first-time travelers visit. There are forts, mosques, palaces. And in May, searing heat up to 45 C (113 F) in the afternoons, the sort of heat that prevents you from doing anything between 10 and 5. (We also happened to be here in the hottest summer in a decade!) Even our auto-rickshaw driver, driving us into town from the train station, told us, “You picked a bad time to come here. Too hot for you!” So we had to think on our feet — our extended Rajasthan itinerary shrunk to just one stop: Udaipur.
While India can take with one hand, however, she gives with the other. Udaipur is lovely, my favorite of the Indian cities we visited. Situated around Lake Pichola and surrounded by the Aravalli Hills, the city looks almost Mediterranean, with white-washed havelis (mansions) ringing the lake. Two former royal hideaways are actually islands on the lake (one, the Lake Palace, is now a five-star resort). But the lake palaces were just for fun — the maharajas of Mewar actually lived in the City Palace up until the 1930s or 40s. The best part: the Mewar dynasty still exists, and it is rumored the royal family lives in a private wing of the Lake Palace.
And the best part, ironically, ended up being our visiting at the least desirable time of year. Udaipur, with its beautiful palaces and lovely meandering streets, is clearly a tourist mecca most of the time. But we had the place to ourselves, many of the tourist-oriented shops and cafes shuttered for the summer, giving us lots of small moments where we got to connect with Udaipur and its people.
We got an amazing room at Jaiwana Haveli with a view of the lake and Lake Palace, at less than half the price we would have paid in the winter — we were the only guests in the entire place most nights. We played with our guesthouse owner’s niece and nephew, Aditya and Aditi.
Come afternoon, we’d go have a chai with our chai-wallah, Ravi, and his family. We played carrom (sort of like a table-top billiards played with checkers) with the little cousins and a local artist-astrologer, while Ravi’s uncle gave us pepper-flavored candies and his auntie cooked us dal baati — a Rajasthani staple of lentils and wedges of hard bread that you crumble up and pour the lentils over (sort of the Indian version of beans and cornbread).
And we must have happened upon at least one wedding procession a day. And what procession would be complete without some pictures with the random white tourists?
We watched Hindi movies with Harsh and Yash, the two well-educated brothers who ran the guesthouse, them translating the jokes for us, while we talked about the difference between Western and Indian cultures. I suspected that they were from quite an old and prestigious family, as their sister (Aditi and Aditya’s mother) had been married to some maharaja-type who lived off of his estate and raced horses or something.
We explained crossword puzzles to a guy who worked at the hotel, who seemed less interested in the puzzle and more perplexed that we each had only one sister (“Such a small family!”). When I told him on my father’s side of the family I had only girl cousins he looked at me like I had blasphemed Lord Krishna. We have been told that one of the worst curses you can utter in India is: “May you have many daughters and may they all marry well.”
The hotel we stayed at had an excellent restaurant on the roof — usually booked up in the winter. But we could just walk up, get the choice corner seat, and feast on tandoori chicken, garlic naan, and bindi masala (yummy okra and tomatoes stewed in Indian spices) while we watched the sun set over the lake and the bats come out to play.
Udaipur was a real delight — proof that serendipity often ensues when things don’t quite go as planned.
