Royal Rajasthan by Night Train

The Fort at First Light

The approach to Amber Fort at dawn is an act of theatre that Rajasthan has been rehearsing for five centuries. The road climbs through scrubland and thorn trees, the air still cool from the desert night, and then the hillside turns a corner and the fort appears — massive, honey-coloured, draped across the ridge like something built by a civilisation that considered modesty a character flaw. The walls run for eleven kilometres. The gates are studded with iron spikes to repel war elephants. The Mirror Palace inside contains so many fragments of convex glass that a single candle, placed at the centre of the room, produces the effect of a thousand stars.

I had arrived the evening before in Jaipur, the Pink City, and had spent the night in a haveli — a merchant's townhouse three hundred years old, with walls painted in faded frescoes and a courtyard where a fountain still ran, the water catching lamplight and throwing patterns on the sandstone. The owner served chai on the rooftop at ten p.m. and pointed out the illuminated walls of Nahargarh Fort on the ridge above the city. "Every king needed a fort on a hill," he said. "In Rajasthan, every hill has one."

The Night Train

The overnight sleeper from Jaipur to Udaipur departs at nine in the evening and arrives, in theory, at seven the following morning. In practice, Indian Railways operates on a timeline that is more philosophical than mechanical, and we pulled into Udaipur at nine-thirty, two and a half hours late, which the chai vendor who walked the corridor every forty minutes described as "on time, sir."

The journey itself was extraordinary. The berths in second-class AC are narrow and curtained, stacked three high, and the sound of the train on Indian tracks is a lullaby of specific qualities — a deep rhythmic clatter punctuated by the shriek of metal on curves and the regular cry of vendors calling "chai-chai-chai" through the cars. I lay on my berth and watched the Rajasthan desert slide past the window in the last light — flat, immense, scattered with thorn trees whose silhouettes looked like ink drawings against a sky turning from copper to violet. Somewhere around midnight the train stopped at a station I could not identify, and through the window I watched a family of four asleep on the platform, wrapped in shawls, their faces lit by the orange glow of a tea stall. Then the train lurched forward and the platform slid away and there was only the dark and the rhythm and the distant sound of chai.

The Blue City from Above

Jodhpur is two cities. There is the modern sprawl of concrete and traffic that surrounds it, and then there is the old city, which is blue. Not metaphorically blue — literally, physically, comprehensively blue. The buildings of the Brahmin quarter were traditionally painted with a mixture of limestone and copper sulphate to keep them cool and repel insects, and the result is a cascade of indigo and cobalt and cerulean that spills down the hillside below Mehrangarh Fort like a waterfall frozen mid-pour.

I spent an afternoon wandering the old city's lanes with no map and no guide, which is the only honest way to encounter it. The alleys are barely wide enough for a motorcycle. Laundry hangs between buildings in lines of colour — saffron, magenta, white — that look deliberate against the blue walls but are simply the byproduct of daily life in a place where every surface is a canvas. I turned a corner and found a peacock sitting on a wall, its tail fanned, iridescent against the blue plaster behind it. No one around me looked twice. In Jodhpur, beauty is wallpaper.

On a rooftop restaurant that evening, I ate dal baati churma — the Rajasthani dish of baked wheat balls crushed into lentils with clarified butter and sugar — while the sun set behind Mehrangarh and the blue city below turned from bright to deep to almost black. The fort was floodlit from below, a warm gold against the darkening sky, and its walls seemed to grow taller as the light faded, as though the darkness were pushing the rock upward. A waiter brought more chai without being asked. Peacocks called from somewhere in the blue maze below. The food was extraordinary and cost less than the chai I had bought at the train station in Jaipur.

Stars Over the Sand

The Thar Desert begins where Rajasthan's cities end, which is to say abruptly. One hour outside Jaisalmer — itself a golden fortress city that rises from the sand like a mirage — the road gives way to dunes, and the dunes give way to a silence so complete you can hear your own blood moving.

I spent the night at a desert camp near the Sam Sand Dunes, sleeping on a charpoy — a rope-strung cot — under a sky that I am not capable of describing accurately. The Milky Way was not a suggestion. It was a structure — a visible, three-dimensional arch of light that stretched from horizon to horizon with a density and brightness that made the word "stars" feel inadequate, the way the word "water" feels inadequate when you are standing at the edge of an ocean. I lay on my back and watched satellites cross the field of stars at intervals, tiny points of light moving with a purpose that contrasted with the extravagant purposelessness of everything around them — the dunes, the silence, the camels sleeping somewhere in the dark.

In the morning, the camp staff served breakfast on a dune — chai, of course, and parathas with curd and pickle — and I watched the sun rise over the Thar and turn the sand from grey to gold to white. A camel driver named Hamid told me his family had lived in the desert for nine generations. "The sand moves," he said, "but the people stay." I thought about that sentence for the rest of the trip, on every night train and in every fort and palace and blue-walled alley. Rajasthan moves — it has been conquered and reconquered, built and rebuilt, painted and repainted in a thousand colours. But something at its centre stays. Some essential extravagance, some refusal to be ordinary, some conviction that if you are going to build a fort you might as well build it with a room full of mirrors that turns one candle into a thousand stars.