What the stars told us

Jaipur was a relief after three hours of our arses being ground to a pulp on a hot sweaty bus that made us feel every bump in the road, and as John Major would have said, there were a not inconsiderable amount of bumps, potholes, off-road excursions, stops, screeches, cow-avoidance measures and face-offs with oncoming traffic. The pale red wash on many of the houses (Jaipur is said to be the pink city but I must be colour blind) seemed to give a sense of identity that was welcome after the characterless sprawl of Delhi.

This was somewhat deceptive. Most of the outer part of the city was in fact fairly dull, but the very centre, which we visited the next day, was special. We passed by a number of holy trees on the main street, but this was the most interesting example. I'm assuming it was holy and not just the work of a fanatic traffic policeman on acid.

Best of all was this palace, the Palace of the Winds, which was built by the ruler of Jaipur in 1799 so that ladies of the court (then in strict purdah) could sit at the tiny windows and look out onto the street below, especially during festivals and processions. It is actually only a thin wafer of a building, only a couple of metres deep at the top levels. Here Katya is sitting gracefully in the tiny space.

Then we did a tour through the City Palace, seen in the picture (left), where the highlights were the clothes of the various maharajas, including the massive dressing gown of the tall fat one K. spoke about earlier, and a very natty black and gold 1920's eight-piece costume solely for one of his descendants to play billiards in. In the foreground, you can see the quirky Jantar Mantar, which we also visited. It is a set of giant open-air astrological instruments, including the largest sundial in the world, on which we are standing to take the picture. Katya then went and had her palm read by an astrologer. She is going to have one boy and one girl, and will one day live in a country in the north east. The astrologer thought this might be Japan, which makes sense measuring from India...but measuring from London, it could be Tallinn or Newcastle. I'm not sure where of the three I'd prefer to be dragged for my next expatriate outing.