The Other Side of the Palace
There’s a peculiar kind of jet lag that comes from going to bed a commoner and waking up next door to a maharaja. That’s the situation in Jodhpur: we’re staying at Umaid Bhawan Palace, where the royal family occupies one wing, and we occupy a suite on the other side, separated by what I can only assume is several acres of marble and centuries of social hierarchy.
A Welcome Fit for People We Are Not
We arrived to the kind of welcome usually reserved for visiting heads of state. Drums beat. Trumpets blared. I checked behind me twice to see who they were actually here for. It was, in fact, us — two people whose most recent formal reception was a “Welcome” doormat.
Then we stepped inside and things escalated. Garlands went around our necks before we’d fully cleared the doorway. Champagne appeared. A music troupe struck up a welcome song, and somewhere in there I remember thinking: I really should have worn nicer shoes.
The music troupe’s welcome song was the same one my husband sang to me at our wedding — “Hamein To Loot Liya.” At the time, with zero Hindi in my vocabulary, I assumed he was reciting a fairly thorough job description of my upcoming wifely duties, sung with great confidence and zero irony. I have since acquired Google Translate and the ability to look things up, and it turns out the song is actually romantic. Years of marriage, and I’m only now finding out I was not getting conscripted.
Birthday, Round Two
My birthday was a few weeks ago, but apparently palace hospitality does not believe in expiry dates. We walked into our room to find it decorated with balloons and a birthday sign spelled out in rose petals — someone had clearly cross-referenced dates and briefed a florist on my behalf, and I wasn’t about to mention the date discrepancy.
Just when I thought the birthday theatrics had peaked, an entourage arrived at our door. Out came a bandhini silk shawl for me and a lehriya silk turban for my husband, followed by an eggless chocolate cake and a card. Then someone produced a sword. Not a letter opener styled to look impressive, not a ceremonial prop — a real sword, which I was then invited to use to cut my birthday cake, as one does. I have cut approximately forty birthday cakes in my lifetime, all with the same butter knife energy, and none of them required me to reconsider my grip on a weapon. New personal record for “most alarming way to serve dessert.”
My husband, meanwhile, is now the proud owner of a regal turban.
I’ve decided not to mention it to him, but the moment they tied it on, he stopped looking regal and started looking uncannily like the Air India Maharajah, mid-bow, slight incline and all. I keep expecting him to offer me a hot towel.
Posing Our Way Through the Palace
That evening at 6:30, we got a private tour of the palace, which felt like a wildly generous offer for guests who had already been serenaded, garlanded, and rose-petaled into a full identity crisis about our own importance. I took it anyway. When else does one get to nose around a maharaja’s house and call it an itinerary item?
The palace tour itself was less a tour and more a photo shoot with historical commentary attached. Our guide had us pose at every archway, every window, every strategically placed antique, until I was exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with walking. At one point, I found myself mentally reviving my old modeling rate card: 150 rupees for black-and-white, 400 if approved, 600 for color, 1200 if approved. I very nearly presented an invoice.
The maharani’s bathroom, meanwhile, deserves its own paragraph and possibly its own postal code since it is larger than my entire house. I walked in expecting a bathroom and got a floor plan — marble underfoot, a tub that could double as a small swimming pool, and enough square footage to fit a living room, a guest room, and whatever else a queen requires at 2 a.m. I did the math on the walkout: my entire home, garage included, would fit inside it with room to spare for a second garage. I have made peace with the fact that my bathroom will never recover from this comparison, and neither, frankly, will I.
Day Two: Forts, Opium, and a Lot of Bandhini
This morning, after a breakfast fit for a king (a phrase I no longer use loosely), our guide Suresh Kumar walked us through the famous Mehrangarh Fort. Along the way, we learned that traditional Rajasthani homes welcome guests with an offering of opium, which feels like a hospitality standard the rest of the world quietly abandoned somewhere around the invention of liability insurance. Nobody offered us any, opium or otherwise, so we bought our own salt lime sodas and called it even. We also picked up the etymology of “Jodhpurs” along the way, and walked past yards and yards of bandhini in every color the fort walls have ever seen.
The road back to the palace came with the obligatory wayside gauntlet of vendors trying, and failing, to convince us we needed one more bedspread or one more shawl. We did not. We made it back empty-handed except for our dignity, where Sukhindar met us with the key to the suite — and, more importantly, to blissful air conditioning
Not the Bharatpur Sequel
All of this, I should say, is landing a little differently because of Bharatpur. A couple of years ago I stayed at a certain other Rajasthan “palace” that had promised royalty and delivered a faucet handle that came off in my hand mid-shower, hot water on a strict few-hours-a-day schedule, and Wi-Fi that was theoretical at best. Umaid Bhawan is, so far, the anti-Bharatpur in every measurable way — hot water on demand, Wi-Fi that works, and thresholds I have crossed without incident.
Gita Iyer – Commoner at Large
Assorted Evidence
