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India: the inside story The Observer, 7 September 2008
Gethin Chamberlain THE last time I stayed in a guesthouse in the UK, it was remarkable only for the fact that it was painted pink. The first guesthouse I visited in India was in the pink-painted city of Jaipur. Fortunately, the similarities ended there. Whereas Dreary-on-Sea featured a slightly camp host whose interior design skills defied stereotypes and accommodation that exuded defeat, the Jaipur flagship of a new wave of Indian B&Bs offered a glimpse of a world no ordinary hotel chain could hope to provide. We are sitting on wicker chairs in a small, open-sided structure at the edge of an immaculate lawn as dusk falls. What appears to be a one-legged bird is hopping clumsily across the grass, pecking industriously at the grass. Away to the east, the elephants that plough up and down the shore of the lake that surrounds the Jai Mahal palace are nearing the end of their working day. As the light fails, the city - originally painted yellow, but now repainted a deep, almost orange shade of pink - glows in the twilight. The lawn is bounded on two sides by the balconied wings of an imposing, beautifully decorated house, the Madhu Pushp Bhawan. Overhead, a fan is throwing mosquitoes off course. We are in the state of Rajasthan, which the Rough Guide warns is notoriously unwelcoming to drinkers, yet the remains of a bottle of chilled Kingfisher beer stands on the table. Half of it is in my glass, the rest in that of Madhavendra Singh Chauhan, former chief conservator of wildlife in Rajasthan’s forestry department. Mr Chauhan is a man of means, a Rajput; a member of the warrior class, he explains. The house has always been the family home - and it still is, even though Mr Chauhan’s son, Jaideep, who recently left the employ of the luxury Oberoi hotel chain, has put his experience to work by opening it up as a guesthouse - with his father’s blessing. The house is one of a growing chain run by the powerful Mahindra family, which also makes cars and owns a bank. It offers home stays which combine, according to the company, ‘the comfort and distinction of a boutique hotel with the personal hospitality, informality and local knowledge enjoyed when staying with family friends’. The big selling point is the insight into Indian family life. Some people just visit the Chauhans for the afternoon, to take tea or dinner with the family, crowding into the kitchen to watch Mr Chauhan’s wife, Bushbendra, and her daughter-in-law, Madhu, work their magic with spices and to pepper them with questions; others stay the night in one of the seven guest bedrooms. Inside, the wings head off from a vast main room. An open door reveals Jaideep’s eight-year-old son sprawled on a bed watching television, while the head of a rather startled tiger pokes out from the wall above the family prayer room. ‘Shot by my grandfather sometime before 1920,’ Chauhan senior explains. The rooms are furnished exquisitely, finely carved furniture vying with delicate pieces of silver. Dinner is served upstairs. Jaideep sits across from me while Madhu hovers. She prefers to eat a little later, but sits anyway and takes a bowl of dal. Parathas arrive, warm and flaky. I watch carefully to see what order Jaideep takes the food in (a day earlier, I disgraced myself in a Delhi restaurant by dipping my bread into a bowl of tapioca which was meant to be the dessert element of a thali). After dinner, I retire to a room that is not extravagantly furnished but is on the right side of comfortable. I cannot find a top sheet, but the room is warm and I can’t be bothered to disturb anyone to find me one. I lie down and start to fall asleep, only to be woken by an icy blast from the air-conditioning unit. I reset it, switch off the light - and 20 minutes later I’m blasted again. I give up, switch it off and opt for the ceiling fan, which does an admirable and remarkably silent job. It is my only real grumble. Oddly, in a hotel this would have driven me crazy. I would have been on the phone, demanding to move rooms. But here it would have seemed bad manners, like staying at a friend’s house and asking to swap bedrooms because you didn’t like the colour of the wallpaper. Mahindra has been signing up guesthouses across India; from havellis (large houses with an enclosed courtyard) in the north, to plantation mansions in the south. A week later, I sample what sort of experience they have to offer in the nation’s capital. My taxi pulls up outside a rather unwelcoming gate in the lively (read noisy and polluted) Delhi suburb of South Extension II. A man in a vest shambles out. I’m about to tell the driver to forget it when we glean from Man A that we have found the back door. At the front, a slightly better attired gentleman eyes me cautiously and tells me he has no rooms. After some effort, we establish that I do indeed have a reservation and he shows me to an unprepossessing room with twin single beds. Someone has gone to fetch the owner. In the meantime, Man B stands in the doorway, trapping me in the room. I feel the urge to go home (not so far-fetched: I live about a 10-minute taxi ride away), but my escape is foiled by the owner, Sunil Saigal, who greets me with an outstretched hand. We sit down, I start to say hello and Man B interrupts to demand my passport. Then my name. Then my address in the UK. Then a signature. Mr Saigal shows me around and I note that everyone else has nicer rooms than I do. Downstairs, he explains that the guests come and go in the evenings but there is usually someone in the main living room. I seize the opportunity to escape for a few hours to take a stroll in the nearby Deer Park and the craft shops of Hauz Khas village, but it is apparently Lord Shiva’s birthday and half of them are closed. Muttering darkly about this being just the sort of local knowledge the Mahindra hosts are supposed to have at their fingertips, I return to my room, eyeing the narrow single beds balefully and planning to hunker down until I can escape at dawn. I call my wife. ‘Don’t be stupid. Go out and see who is there. You’ll enjoy it,’ she tells me crossly. Reluctantly, I venture out. Mr Saigal is sitting in an armchair against the wall with a cigarette in one hand and a tumbler of whisky in the other. A bottle is fetched and a glass for me. More people appear, including a Norwegian woman dressed in a salwar kameez and Sunil’s brother, Raman. Then Mrs Saigal - Rashmi - ambles in. At some point, a businessman arrives; he does something in television. More whisky appears. They are all lovely. I learn many things, then promptly forget them. If the idea is to give guests a flavour of the real India, it is working - the flavour is whisky. It is gone 1.30am when I grope blearily for the door handle and discover that I am physically incapable of forming letters on the page of my notebook. All I can remember is that at some point in the evening I agreed to buy a car. I have no idea what sort though, if pushed, I would guess that it was probably pink.
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