That seemed to make sense, until I ran into a bibulous Indian guest at a diplomatic party in New York.
“Have you heard they're going to close the caves to visitors?” he asked. “Too many visitors. All that hot breath and tramping feet, causing damage to the paintings and sculptures. So they'll be closing them all to the general public.”
“When?” I asked, horrified.
“Next year, I believe.”
That did it. Monsoon or no monsoon, we were going to catch a glimpse of Ajanta and Ellora before the curtains came down on either place.
After recovering from our transcontinental jetlag with two days in Bombay, we flew 375 kilometers inland to the city of Aurangabad, northeast of Bombay, for our excursions to Ajanta and Ellora. Aurangabad, a manufacturing town of some 1.1 million people, has the nearest airport to the caves, as well as several fine hotels. We had a bit of a drama coming in: Kanishk, whose hospitability to visiting bugs is a source of family legend, threw up copiously and looked decidedly queasy. Our first hour after landing in Aurangabad was therefore spent driving in the gloom to every building that looked like a hospital. Aurangabad, a prosperous and spread-out town, green and dusty in equal measure, had several of these. After knocking fruitlessly at the doors of a couple of maternity clinics with a retching boy in tow, which rather confused the doctors in the labor wards, we took Kanishk to our hotel, the spanking new Taj Residency, whose in-house doctor promptly prescribed something that cured him in twenty-four hours.
As a concession to Kanishk's state, we reversed the traditional order of doing things and decided to go to Ellora first. (A leisurely start even allowed me to use the hotel's gym, which made a change from my usual form of exercise — jumping to conclusions.) The Residency equipped our rented car with packed lunches, chilled drinks, and even umbrellas to ward off the depredations of the monsoon, of which, to Minu's relief, we saw little evidence.
Our twenty-something tourist guide, Srikant Jadhav, had been in the business only four years, but he made up for inexperience with a fund of historical knowledge and a small stock of witticisms he tested on the boys (“Why is the number six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine.”) It also helped that he was slim enough to squeeze into the front seat of our air-conditioned Ambassador car with the driver, Mohammed Nissar, and me (which, given Kanishk's condition, was probably the safest place to be in the vehicle.)
Ellora is less than an hour's drive from Aurangabad, across lush farming country, on a good road. Even if Ishaan and Kanishk hadn't announced, at age seven, their desire to lead the Mongol hordes or, failing that, to become military historians, we would have made one stop on the way. This was at the Daulatabad Fort, a soaring citadel on a conical hill that commands the land approaches from both north and east. This thirteenth-century edifice was widely reputed to be invincible, so intricate was its pyramidal construction atop the hill. The rock-hewn fort had several layers of walls, iron gates with elephant-deterring spikes, a forty-foot-deep moat, and a narrow, twisting subterranean passage that could be blocked by the intense heat generated by a large brazier at one end. It is a bit of a hike to the top, and Minu soon gave up the climb, preferring to sit under a mango tree with a lazily solicitous Ishaan, while Kanishk, miraculously revived by the sight of cannon, trudged up with me.
The fort is well worth the effort. A medieval sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughlaq, was so impressed by its impregnability that he moved his capital to Daulatabad. (The experiment failed, however; Tughlaq and his displaced citizens marched back to Delhi, and he has gone down in history as the “mad monarch.”) Among the fort's incongruities is an ancient Hindu temple, its roof supported by a hundred and fifty pillars, that today houses a modern idol — a kitsch figure of “Mother India,” draped in a gaudy sari, her eight arms brandishing an assortment of implements, including a sword, a sharp-pointed trishul (the Hindu trident), and a somewhat startled-looking snake. No one seems to know who invented this deity, except that the statue is clearly of fairly recent provenance, a post-independence version of the powerful mother goddess (worshiped variously as Durga, Kali, and Shakti, but not, other than here, as “Bharat Mata,” Mother India).
Before leaving the fort's attractive setting, Ishaan pulled out our camera, and Minu and I looked expectantly at each other to produce a new roll of film. We had left seven at the hotel, but our condition immediately attracted a swarm of boys clutching Kodak packages. “A hundred and fifty rupees,” one said, offering a 35mm ISO 200 film with twenty-four exposures. Since the rupee's post-nuclear depreciation in 1998 (at that point it had fallen to forty to the dollar) meant that this was less than four dollars, we gladly bought two. Five minutes later another youth came by to sell us two more rolls at a hundred and twenty. Scarcely able to believe our good fortune, we bought them as well. We were almost back in our car when a sad-eyed teenager begged us to take at least one roll for a hundred; he was the only peddler who hadn't made us a sale. By this time Minu was convinced the film canisters would all turn out to be empty. They weren't, and the film was fine; what we found out later was that Kodak manufactures the film in India, where each roll normally retails for eighty to ninety rupees in photo stores.
On our way to Ellora, we also took in two contrasting graves. The first was that of the Emperor Aurangzeb, the last of the Great Mughals, after whom Aurangabad is named — a simple and austere slab of marble paid for by the sale of prayer caps the devout monarch had stitched himself. (He had forbidden any other expenditure on a tomb.) The second grave, the Bibi-ka-Maqbara, was that of his wife, Rabia Durani, a grand imitation Taj Mahal startlingly reminiscent of the original, but without the Taj's perfect proportions and majesty. In other circumstances it might have been an attractive resting place, but Minu didn't think so. “Wonder what it's like for her,” she said sympathetically, “to know she's buried in a travesty and her mother-in-law's tomb is where the real action is?”
Ellora itself was exquisite. In a little over four hours, we took in all thirty-four caves, sequentially admiring the work of artists of different faiths. This meant starting with the Buddhist (constructed 550–750 A.D.), then working our way through the Hindu caves (600–875 A.D.) to the Jain ones (800–1000 A.D.). The tour was not arduous, not even with Kanishk still a bit wobbly at the knees. The monsoon finally sprinkled us, but briefly and rather halfheartedly, as if it didn't really want to get in the way of our view. We took in the rolling hills, rock-laden and stately, all around; the golden gulmohur blossoms, flaming insolent and tender in every garden; and then, in the afternoon sun, the caves themselves, opening into the earth like a secret prayer.
The caves are numbered, logically enough, for visitors’ convenience. We walked through them in order, marveling at the paucity of people. The previous year we had taken the boys to Italy, where they had gotten accustomed to the throngs at every site; here, being able to enjoy the splendors without crowds, to sense the space available, made each cave, each carving, more approachable, our discovery of it more intimate. Remarkably, every pillar, alcove, and niche is carved from solid rock. We admired the contrast between Cave 5, in the Mahayana style (the more ostentatious “Great Vehicle” tradition of Buddhism), whose treasures include a magnificent “praying Buddha,” and the plain and austere lines of Caves 1 and 7, in the Hinayana (Little Vehicle) tradition, of which Aurangzeb might have approved (if only his Islamic fundamentalist bigotry had made it possible for him to approve of any other faith).