Udaipur: The City of Lakes and Other Unexpected Adventures.
Udaipur sits in Rajasthan and carries the nickname “Venice of the East,” a comparison that holds up best from the water. Lake Pichola runs through the middle of the city, and on a clear morning the surface carries the sky and the palace walls at once. The Taj Lake Palace occupies its own island out on the lake, a white marble building that housed royalty before it housed guests. Most visitors see it from a boat rather than a bed, and that ride passes close enough to count the windows. Parts of Octopussy were filmed here, which explains the occasional tourist doing a bad impression of a spy. I’m not certain the nickname flatters either city, though the light at six in the evening makes a fair argument. The City Palace is the other anchor, a complex of halls and courtyards that keeps opening onto terraces and then onto another view of the water. I spent three hours inside without finding the exit, which is either a design flaw or the whole point. Somewhere around the second courtyard I stopped trying to follow the arrows and let the corridors do the navigating.
Food here deserves its own paragraph. A traditional Rajasthani thali arrives looking modest, a row of small bowls on a steel tray, and then the dal turns out to be the mildest thing on it. The laal maas, a mutton curry, brings heat that builds slowly and then all at once. Keep a glass of lassi within reach. That’s the local remedy. Rooftop restaurants look out over the lake, and dinner on one of them, with a sitar player working through a raga near the railing, runs long past the point where anyone checks the time. The breeze off the water does most of the work. On the way back through the old city, the streets narrow to the width of a single cow, and the shops along them sell block-printed textiles, miniature paintings on silk, and silver jewellery by the gram. I bought a small painting of a doorway for 400 rupees and haven’t decided where to hang it. Cows stand in the road with the calm of longtime residents. Motorbikes weave around them at speeds that suggest a private arrangement with physics. It’s loud and crowded, and after a day or two the noise starts to sound like a rhythm rather than a disturbance. Near the Jagdish Temple a shopkeeper named Ravi poured me a second cup of chai without being asked and waved off the payment. I never did learn his last name. By the last morning my shoulders had burned pink from two afternoons on the water, my phone held forty-one photographs of doorways, and I still hadn’t seen the Monsoon Palace. That one stays on the list for next time.