Pretty in pink

Author: By Christine Temin, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, June 30, 1996

Page: B13

Section: Travel

I'd started reading the autobiography of the now 77-year-old maharani, ``A Princess Remembers,'' to get something of the flavor of Jaipur, the Rajput kingdom her late husband once ruled. I was vaguely surprised and pleased to find that one of the Jaipur hotels where I stayed, the Rambagh Palace, had been her palace at one point, and that the other, the Jai Mahal Palace, had been the residence of her prime minister. And when I left Jaipur for Ranthambhore National Park, it turned out not only that the Sawai Madhopur Lodge where I was billeted had also belonged to her family -- but that she was actually staying in it. She's still a commanding presence, looking only slightly older than in her portrait on the cover of ``A Princess Remembers,'' painted by Pietro Annigoni, who is also portraitist to European royals including Britain's Elizabeth II.

The maharani, whose name is Gayatri Devi, was the third wife of the dashing, polo-playing Maharajah of Jaipur, known to her, and to international society, as Jai. This ``third wife'' business was, for me, just the start of the general strangeness of India in general and Jaipur in particular.

For starters, Jaipur is known as the ``Pink City,'' which was all I knew about it before my arrival. I'd vaguely assumed that it might be built of rosy rock, like Petra, the ruined red sandstone city in Jordan. But Jaipur's pink has a more prosaic source: It's just paint. When the Prince of Wales visited Jaipur in 1865, the whole city center was painted pink in his honor, and the color later became law. In a country where the few zoning ordinances are almost completely ignored, here is a city where you can't paint your building anything other than pink.

Why pink? Maybe it has something to do with different countries' versions of an all-purpose, basic color. The late fashion doyenne and veteran Vogue editor Diana Vreeland once observed that ``Pink is the navy blue of India.''

Driving from Delhi to Jaipur -- any driving in India at all, actually -- proved an adventure. The highway is chaos. Windshields of pickup trucks are outlined in the metallic fringe garlands Westerners would use on Christmas trees. Emaciated cows -- sacred cows -- hang out on the median strips of divided highways otherwise populated by people on bicycles or motor scooters, in buses and camel-drawn carts. Stop at a light and someone will press a skinny baby into your car window, appealing for money. If the window is open, someone will thrust a garland of spicy-smelling marigolds through it, with the same request.

Road signs are a study in black humor. ``Darkness Doubles the Danger,'' ``Drink, Drive, Death'' and ``Always Avoid Accidents'' are among the alliterative messages. Then there's ``Haste Is Life's Greatest Assassin,'' a more poetic alternative to ``No Speeding.'' Business signs along the road are noteworthy, too: ``Panicker's Travel: Recognized by Government of India Department of Tourism'' is a favorite.

Halfway to Jaipur, I stopped for lunch at the Neemrana Fort-Palace, now a hotel, which apparently is not connected to the Maharani of Jaipur. Its fantasy decor and design -- stepped palaces built right into a steep hillside -- made it the most delightful hotel I saw on the subcontinent. Its origins date to 1464. Its architecture is a maze of winding staircases, turrets, towers and a balcony where the resident maharajah used to sit to watch the women bathing in the oval pool below. Each of the 25 rooms is unique: One is actually a lavish tent tucked into the corner of a balcony. Lunch, served in a room where block-printed fabrics catch the breeze and billow through the open, scalloped archways, was a buffet. So were the majority of the meals I had in Indian hotels, and while there was a certain repetition after a while, at least the format meant no waiting for slow service.

Its hillside perch gives the Neemrana Fort-Palace fabulous views over the surrounding countryside -- and also the opportunity to specialize in what its management likes to call ``loos with views.'' Adorned with stained glass, pink marble or black granite, their various features include, in one case, a throne-like toilet up two steps from the rest of the bathroom, and, in another, a toilet open to the skies.

Distances that on the map look as though you could conquer them in an hour are likely to take four, road conditions being what they are. So it was dusk by the time I checked into the Jai Mahal Palace Hotel. In the twilight were dancers on the lawn, wearing what looked like brass tureens on their heads. Live fires burned in the tureens as the women dipped and swayed but never altered the angle of their heads.

By dawn the next morning, men were sweeping leaves off the lawns with bundles of reeds tied together. A giant outdoor chess set graces one lawn: The pieces all look like maharajahs. Like most of the other Indian hotels I stayed in, the Jai Mahal was slightly seedy but fascinating in its design. The place is huge, but the white marble floors and lacy pierced screens make it seem light and cool.

The next night, I moved to the nearby Rambagh Palace Hotel, where the maharani once lived in splendor, entertaining the likes of Queen Elizabeth and Jacqueline Kennedy. She has now moved to the Lillypool Palace, a contemporary structure built on the Rambagh grounds. The Rambagh itself is vast and, nowadays, seedy, fraying around the edges but still redolent of past glories. At night, the building and surrounding trees are lit with thousands of tiny white lights, giving the place an air of magic.

``Complaints about elephants to be made here,'' reads the sign at the bottom of the steep hill where the Amber Fort starts its long ramble. Jaipur only became the capital of the state of Rajasthan in 1727; Amber was its predecessor, and remains one of the area's main attractions. The laziest way to ascend to the fort is on the back of an elephant, sitting in a structure not unlike a playpen: It jiggles with every lurching step the elephant takes.

The Amber Fort is immense and ramshackle; it would take days to explore the whole thing. To a Westerner, its most remarkable feature is its openness -- all those walls that are pierced to allow air currents to pass through, all those rooms that are roofed and pillared but have no walls. A Hall of Mirrors is lined with a mosaic of mirror fragments. The octagonal bedroom of the maharajah has a mirrored ceiling: On guided tours, you're locked into the dark room and two guards light candles that they swing in unison, their sweeping, sempahoric gestures making the mirrors twinkle like a thousand stars. It's a primitive planetarium.

Man Singh, who reigned during1590-1614 and built the Amber Fort, had 12 maharanis, each with her own quarters; each apartment was connected to the maharajah's bedroom by a secret passageway. The idea of a ruler with a dozen wives seems right out of the dark ages to a Westerner, but contemporary marriage customs in India still startle. About 95 percent of marriages in Jaipur are arranged, according to my guide. Although outlawed, dowries are still common; so are fatal bride-burnings, for brides whose dowries are considered insufficient by their in-laws.

Jaipur is surrounded by a 22-foot-high wall with seven gates -- one still reserved for the maharajah. The main boulevard is 110 feet wide and nearly impossible to cross because of the congestion and traffic. There's no need to cross, really, because the shops on one side duplicate the offerings on the other: lots of 22-karat-gold jewelry, much of it set with precious or semiprecious stones. If you know your jewelry, it's a great place to shop. If you don't, stick to stuff so cheap you can't go wrong: For $2 to $3, you can pick up a garnet necklace.

Jaipur's architecture, with the details of those pink buildings picked out in white, is straight out of a fairy tale. Look up into the hills and there's the golden Temple of Lord Ganeesh, god of good luck. A domed, 18th-century Water Palace in the center of a still lake looks as if it's floating: Here the court repaired in summer, to escape the heat. A particularly elegant building that looks like a temple turns out to be the crematorium where, traditionally, maharanis were burned. The facade of the Palace of the Winds looks as if it's made of calcified lace: Royal ladies who weren't often allowed outside observed life from behind this pierced wall.

Half of Jaipur's City Palace is still home to the current maharajah, Gayatri Devi's stepson; half is a museum. Its collections include exotic musical instruments; opulent textiles embroidered in silver and gold threads, which will kill your interest in the more prosaic tourist textiles; and an armory with signs spelling out ``welcome'' in knives and ``goodbye'' in pistols. Among the armory's treasures is a ``katar,'' a gruesome variation on a knife: Pinch the handles after you stab someone and the blade will separate into two, causing extra agony.

The founder of Jaipur, Sawai Jai Singh II, was a great amateur astronomer who built observatories all over his state, including the Jantar Mantar Observatory in Jaipur. It looks like a sculpture garden, with huge stone abstractions that serve as sundials, or point to the North Star. Evidence that there is a well-trod tourist route in Jaipur: Miraculously, the folks who snapped my picture riding the elephant up to the Amber Fort, having failed to convince me to buy the snapshots then, turned up at the observatory, photos in hand. How did they know I'd be there?

Sawai Madhopur Lodge is the epitome of faded 1930s Art Deco chic. It has the rounded outline of a great steamship, plus porthole-shaped windows, utterly incongruous in its setting, the dry deciduous forest of the Ranthambhore National Park, where vegetation threatens to overtake ruined summer palaces, temples and shrines.

In the lodge's dining room, where breakfast and lunch are served, tiger heads roar out of the walls in all four directions. At night, dinner is served on the lawn, by candlelight, with musicians sitting on a huge cloth laid on the ground.

The lodge is filled with mementos of a past life that today seems sinfully luxurious. There's a 1961 photograph of the young Queen Elizabeth standing with the maharani -- my maharani. The group is flanked by elephants, with turbaned riders on top. A dead tiger is sprawled at the queen's feet, an image about as non-PC as you can get.

The same beautiful, dark-eyed woman who stands beside Elizabeth in the photo, the same woman who said ``Tourism is ruining India,'' concludes her memoirs with stinging observations on the state of the state that was once hers. When Gayatri Devi was born, a girl of her rank was likely to grow up to spend most of her life sequestered in the women's quarters of some 500-room palace. The tumult of 20th-century India meant that instead, Devi eventually became a political force -- an outspoken one. Consider her scathing evaluation of another, more powerful female Indian politician: ``People concerned with the diminishing population of wildlife, particularly the tigers, blame it on the poachers and shoots which used to take place over two decades ago, but never on the loss of habitat which took place during the prime ministership of Mrs. Gandhi,'' Devi writes. ``She is, strangely enough, credited with being instrumental in saving India's environment.''

The woman who wrote that sad summation could be seen a few months ago walking the grounds of the Sawai Madhopur Lodge at a stately pace, clad in green silk sari, petitioners trailing in her wake, treating her as if she were a ruler still. For a moment, an observer could be fooled into thinking that democracy hadn't come to India after all.

I flew on British Airways, Boston-London-Delhi and reverse, stopping between two overnight flights to sleep during the day at the Heathrow Hilton.

The number for BA is (800) AIRWAYS.