"... from the bastions of the Jodhpur Fort one hears as the Gods must hear from Olympus, the Gods to whom each separate word uttered in the innumerably peopled world below, comes up distinct and individual to be recorded in the books of omniscience."
Aldous Huxley

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Jodhpur, the Blue City cowering beneath the fort in the sky. Blue cubist homes create a maze of backstreets. Cows and crowds, desert tans on peasant faces. And camels, the ghosts of the city, their silent approach and elastic presence sliiping though the thickness of the traffic.

Pregnating the fort, a maharaja's paranoid extravaganza, cool rooms jumble with mirror mosaic bedrooms and secret corridors. The entrance betrays the terrible past: the maharaja's twenty wives who committed sathi (suicide) upon their husband's battlefield death, their imprinted hands a fateful reminder.

A prize winning kite master - with the t-shirt to prove it - promised to teach us to fly these fragile birds from the flat rooftops. It wasn't as easy as the local children made it look each evening.

A motivation for our passage to India came from a television documentary about the monkey tribes of Jodhpur. Unfortunately, the April heat had driven them, as it eventually drove us, out of this blue baked town.

We came in search for the primates but ultimately found the Art of the Siesta.