Holding fort

It was a three day long art camp at an old restored fort in Rajasthan that is now a heritage hotel. I was sent there to interview a group of artists for a website for a publishing group and was rather reluctant to do so, mainly because I found it very difficult to get up so early in the morning in those days. But I managed and handed over the keys to my car to be parked later on to the security guard, even as I unloaded my overnighter and joined the crowd in the gallery. There were people matching names I had only heard spoken aloud with awe and faces that looked as sleepy as mine, but with a more august (or July, as it was then, I think) presence. And as we piled into the bus to head out of the city for the home on the hill, I could feel the start of a resigned camaraderie that had to last us three days.

But as the drive wound on and the sun climbed hotly higher, the air-conditioning got fiercer, the mood lightened. There was laughter, some embarrassed because of the vaguely blue humour that elicited it, some hearty and full-bellied, some dutifully reactive. And there was, from one far corner of the large, long bus, a harmonic chorus of snores from a painter with a strong Bengali accent and a shy smile, but very little comprehensible English. I sat baking in the sunshine as my hands slowly froze into frigid claws, smiling vaguely and sleepily at an elderly bearded artist who, all through the duration of the camp, tried very hard to make suggestions that bordered on not just the indecent, but slid into the clichéd and deadly boring very fast.

The bus finally got to its destination, the base of the low hill on which the old fort of Neemrana perched. The yellow stones merged gently into the arid landscape, dotted with glints of glass and flagged with a single scarlet banner defiantly streaming from the highest tower. Parapets interrupted the line of the building that strained up towards the sky and birds twitched in lazy arcs overhead. A convoy of flat carts trundled towards us, pulled by large and bell-draped camels, the one that I looked at staring back at me with a decidedly wicked gleam in its eye. We all clambered on, then jerked and jolted our way along the narrow winding path to the fort, getting off at the enormous wooden doors studded with metal black and shining with the touch of time and a hundred invading and homecoming hands.

Inside, the old structure had been carefully restored, its ancient interiors now a series of comfortable and modern guest rooms. Mine was on the highest terrace, tiny but exquisite, with all the mod-cons in a compact space. I had to negotiate various sets of steps, cross an open and frightening parapet and hop across a gap in the wall that, to my vertigo-sensitive mind, was as wide as the Rift Valley. And when I got there, the wind blew my hair into wild corkscrews and the sun kissed my nose, leaving behind a new freckle. Never mind Yusuf and Sunil and Paresh and Anjolie waiting to be interviewed as they worked magic on canvas. The place to be was here, right here, only here…