Bundi - One of the city gates
Bundi is a small town of 100,000 people. The old walled city is typical with its narrow streets, minimal traffic and the usual array of animals wandering unhindered: dogs, cows, goats, pigs even sheep. The Bundi Palace towers over the small man-made lake of Nawal Sagar and above it is the Taragarh Fort; both to be visited tomorrow. Today, we spend the afternoon meandering through the old town with its bustling local bazaar. Tiny shops open directly onto the narrow lanes, their small interiors covered with white mattresses on which clients make themselves comfortable whilst they view the goods – jewellery, fabrics, housewares and so on. In others, men sit idly whiling away the hours as they wait patiently for customers. Others pass the time making goods to sell and tailors’ treadle sewing machines clatter away turning out bespoke Punjabi suits.
Pigs keeping cool in the sewer
This is one of the most rubbish strewn towns we’ve visited with little piles everywhere – some burning – and general litter everywhere. In India, littering is a way of life and everything is discarded wherever it is finished with. Rubbish is either burned or eaten by the animals (and vermin) that inhabit the streets. Anything not combustible or edible – and that usually means plastic – is trodden down into the earth. The roads are in poor condition and in some of the older streets the surface has disintegrated completely.
Ranij-ki-Baori step well
Ranij-ki-Baori step well
There are many impressive water tanks or Baoris in Bundi and we visit the most famous the Ranij-ki-Baori or Queen’s Baori, which is kept locked and is opened up specially for us by a man who seemingly appears from nowhere. We fill in our names and details in the visitors book and are allowed take our time to look around whilst the janitor waits for us. Inside the Baori is magnificently decorated with carvings which take elements from Jain, Moghul and Rajput architecture. It is a monumental structure with a series of stairways which descend 46 metres from street level to a meagre pool, the stagnant remnant of what once was a vast body of water, long sicne depleted as a result of the falling water table and lack of monsoon rains. Half-way down the stairs are surrounded by a gallery and archways span the width of the tank, home to a colony of bats. A stunningly beautiful piece of engineering so lovingly embellished.
The matching pair of step wells Nagar Sangar Kund are not as deep or as magnificently imposing and are enclosed by railings. There is no amenable janitor to give us access and we can only manage a glimpse of these rectangular wells with stairways disappearing into their depths at regular intervals around the periphery.
We have discovered that there is a direct overnight train that runs between Bundi and Delhi which has the benefit of not only saving us a night’s accommodation at Dehli’s over-inflated prices, but also sparing us the tedium of a convoluted route back to Dehli via Jodhpur. But booking the tickets turns out to a far more complicated task than we anticipated. The India Railways online booking system which has proved such a godsend up until now, has decided that it doesn’t like any of our payment cards and after inputting our booking for the umpteenth time without success we decide to head for the booking office at Bundi train station which is located 7kms out of town. But by the time we get there at 11.45 am it is closed for lunch until 12.30. Fortunately the tut-tut driver is happy to wait (at no extra cost – so he is clearly getting well paid at 100 rupees for the return journey) which is just well as there are no other tut-tuts to be seen around this out-of-the way station which seems to have no other train service but the Mewar Express from Udaipur which stops here on its way to Delhi.
Working on the railway
While we wait we watch the comings and goings of this quiet outpost with its one platform. Devoid of trains, it is nonetheless a hive of activity. A gang of 20 or so youngsters, male and female, are relocating concrete sleepers, bringing them from further down the line to deposit them at intervals alongside the platform. The whole back-breaking process is undertaken with the aid of nothing more than two sets of two-wheeled bogies and a crowbar. As there is no lifting equipment the sleepers have to be manhandled onto the bogies and precariously balanced are pushed along the track. They are then off-loaded with the aid of a crowbar, barely missing the rails to land with an almighty thud on the shingles. Finally they are manoeuvred into position and left in readiness for some future project.
The station shows some signs of a general facelift, although not to a particularly high standard. The platform has been recently laid with new paving flags the effect of which has been completely spoilt by a surfeit of mortar which has been smeared liberally across the surface in an attempt to fill the gaps. A lone man is running an ancient cleaner with rotating brushes across the surface in an forlorn attempt, with the aid of a little water, to wash off the mortar.
Eventually we obtain our tickets and make our way back to town passing several water buffalo submerged in a roadside pool and navigating our way round a cow suckling her calf in the middle of the road. As we approach the old town the street is suddenly filled with schoolgirls in the common blue and white shalwar kameez that is the uniform adopted by many schools in Rajasthan.