After free, quick, cold showers compliments of Pradeep, the owner, and one last plate of Italian food at the Desert Boys Guest House, we joined the Germans and the Brazilian for a beer on a rooftop at a café with an amazing view of the city lights below. Then we left the magical honey colored fort and found an auto-rickshaw to the train station to catch the overnight train to Jodhpur – 2nd class AC. I must have slept well, for it seemed I only closed my eyes and we were there. We waited forty-five minutes in separate resting rooms at the station – one for men and one for women – and then set off to explore Jodhpur, the blue city. It was just awakening with the daylight as we

crossed the street to find a restaurant opening for coffee and breakfast. And the gentle smiling man at the Midtown Café and Hotel kept our luggage safe and secure behind the front desk all day and repeatedly refused to let us pay him for the service.

From there we left for Meherangarh Fort, the pride of Jodhpur. Described as formidable by the guide book, it was truly that, a man’s fort of stone walls and many blocking gates, multiple old iron cannons still set to defend against any oncoming invaders. This was a military fort of value without question. In the sanctity of the peaceful inner courtyard, the home of gardens and old palaces, I could imagine that I could hear the opposing army clamoring at the stone walls outside, cannonballs leaving the imprints that I had seen on the way in. How scary it must have been, not knowing if they would penetrate her armor, the marauders, working their way in to kill, to rape, to destroy a young princess’s way of life.

The fort held strong throughout the centuries, impenetrable, but there were other disasters for the royal women. Behind Lohapol Gate is a testament to that, left in 1843. About twenty handprints of wives are molded into the plaster there, preserving some small piece of their individual identity, arranged as a group testament to cultural sadness. These were satis – women in this country who were expected to throw themselves on the burning funeral pyre of their husbands, a suicide by flames rather than live with the scalding shame of the failure to do so. Beyond the cultural tradition of those times was the reality, especially for women of less wealthy backgrounds. After all, women couldn’t own property, couldn’t find work, couldn’t find means to eat and were reduced to begging and prostitution, sleeping in the streets without a man to marry them.

Through the fort to the south point we went. There stood an immaculate quiet temple of the most simple elegance perched so high on the fort above the blue city below. A gazebo like entrance of stone before the altar had a few men and women immersed in prayer. Steve and I sat down crossed-legged, meditating, respecting their honorable space for several minutes. A woman stood next to me, hands clasped in front, eyes closed, her mouth moving feverishly in silent Hindu prayer. Then around the outside of the altar she went in clockwise fashion before taking her seat crossed-legged beside me again. A gentleman went up to clang the brass bell hanging from the ceiling, said a short prayer in front of the altar draped with a flag with Om in the center and then quickly took his place on the stone floor. The atmosphere was very peaceful and inviting, like being in an outdoor church. We had read that the temple is dedicated to Durga but didn’t know what that meant exactly as Hinduism is such a complicated religion of multiple Gods. Later we were told by a shopkeeper that Durga is the goddess of feminine power. Interesting in retrospect that I liked this temple as much or more than any I had seen, felt the most comfortable there, felt the enveloping warmth and receptiveness of female energy.

Before leaving Meherangarh we stood awhile taking in the mesmerizing maze of blue below. All of the houses of the city are painted that color, once only allowed for the Brahmin caste. It’s rumored that the indigo hue is an effective mosquito repellent. In the distance we could see the Umaid Bhawan Palace, the Chittar Palace as it is called because of the local sandstone used. It was built in 1929 as a work relief project during a time of severe drought. One of the good-looking Brahmin boys we had met at the Shavriti Temple that night in Pushkar had said that his father owned the mines from which the sandstone of that palace was quarried. We headed that way by taxi to the opulent historical residential place turned five star hotel for expensive ice cream on the back veranda overlooking the most beautiful of gardens, then with the Meherangarh Fort outlined imperially in the haze of the distance.