35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
9
‘Many Ghost Here’
JAISALMER, 1990
‘The wives of Rajput warriors often chose jauhar and leapt into the fire when
defeat for their men seemed imminent. At the jauhar before the fall of Jaisalmer
in 1295 . . . no less than 24,000 women are said to have been burned to
death.’
– From Sati, by Sakuntala Narasimhan
One hundred years before Marco Polo passed through this area,
travelling the Great Silk Route from Europe to China, they called
it the Golden City. Indeed, in the late afternoon sunlight, it did
seem to be a deeper yellow than the bleached and arid desert through
which I’d been driving for several hours with another photographer
friend, John Bentley. Bentley had not been to India before, and was
suffering badly from culture shock, jet lag, and the apocalyptic
hangover we both shared after a night of duty-free to reduce the
weight of our luggage. He lolled beside the driver, groaning
occasionally, in too much pain to open his eyes, let alone take
photographs.
It was a monotonous landscape. A monochromatic one, too: flat
sand and sparse bushes, broken every now and then by a hectic,
ramshackle one-street town, or by small, almost African villages of
mud and thatch huts upon which wild peacocks perched, the beauty
of their plumage confounded by the screeching ugliness of their cries.
Moghul emperors had once used them instead of guard dogs for these
very cries, and for their extreme aversion to strangers. All I’d seen
for most of the day were stray camels nibbling at what few minuscule
leaves the desert could produce, wiry black goats with crazed eyes
hopping daintily among the rocks, ragged gangs of women and
children singing happily as they broke stones in a futile attempt to
repair the narrow, snaking hardtop that often disappeared entirely
beneath desert sands. It came as a mighty relief to see in the quivering
distance the imposing outline of the Golden City’s great fort, set
250