The following day we had tea with the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, and got another surprise: he was a Sikh, the first non-Hindu Prime Minister of India. Sikhs are an even smaller religious minority than the Muslims and it was a Sikh who had assassinated Mrs Gandhi. I didn’t speak to the Prime Minister much – it was well above my pay grade – and left most of the talking to Ólafur, but I did reflect on the strides India had taken in religious tolerance since Independence – the leader of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, is an Italian Catholic by birth, the President of India is a Muslim and the Prime Minister is a Sikh. And all this in a country where eighty per cent of the population is Hindu.
One of the most remarkable days we spent in New Delhi was being shown round the former home of Mrs Indira Gandhi, who had been killed by her own Sikh guards in her back garden. The house and garden, which are relatively modest, have been kept exactly as they were on the day she died, as a monument to her. Only two items on display relate to the tragedy of the Gandhi family: the clothes Mrs Gandhi was wearing when she was assassinated, and the clothes worn by her son, Rajiv, when he was blown up by a female suicide bomber as she knelt down to kiss his feet in a gesture of respect. After we had been round the house, we were taken out into the garden. The guide led us along a path and then stopped, pointing down to a small bridge with water running underneath it. At his feet there was a fresh flower. ‘This’, he said, ‘is the spot where Mrs Gandhi was shot.’ And then we walked another twenty or thirty paces further along the path and he said, ‘And this is where Mr Peter Ustinov was standing.’ Peter? None of us had ever heard that Peter Ustinov had been there. ‘What was he doing there?’ I asked, completely confused. ‘He was interviewing her for the BBC,’ said the guide. ‘That was why Mrs Gandhi had come out to the garden in the first place.’ A complete surprise to me.
My next surprise was the following day. We were visiting the gardens of a temple when a monkey leapt out of a tree and stole the glasses right off my nose. It’s a big shock, I can tell you, having your glasses stolen by a monkey, but now I always carry a spare pair just in case there are monkeys around.
After Delhi, we travelled to Agra by car. It took six long hours, but it was extraordinary to see the other side of India gradually unfold in front of our eyes as we left the city behind. We did indeed have to drive round a cow that had decided to sit in the middle of the road and we also had to stop at a railway crossing for a train to go by and, yes, people really did travel on the roof and cling on to the sides of the carriages. But all this was just preparation for something I had been looking forward to ever since my father – who had been a soldier in India – had told me tales of it: the Taj Mahal. We were staying in a beautiful hotel, Amar Vilas, which boasts that you can see the Taj Mahal from every room. I can vouch for this, although I would have preferred not to. I had obviously eaten something that disagreed with me (not, I hasten to add, from the hotel restaurant) and found myself confined to the toilet one afternoon. And, yes, you could even see the Taj Mahal from there…
That evening, Shakira and I strolled out onto the lawn for a first look at the Taj Mahal by moonlight. It really was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen – and certainly the most romantic. To add to the magic, along a road by the side of the hotel came a wedding celebration, singing beautifully as they proceeded with a full band, and illuminated by a thousand bright electric lights. Having had some experience with lighting problems back in my first job at Frieze Films, I immediately looked for the source of the electricity and eventually along it came, right at the end of the procession – an elephant pulling a huge electric generator. We were loving India!
The following morning we made our first visit to the Taj Mahal. You think you know what to expect – after all, it must be the most photographed building in the world – but nothing can prepare you for your first close-up sight of this monument. It is more breathtaking than any picture could ever capture. For the ladies of the party, Dorrit, Irina and Shakira, there was one place of pilgrimage they were determined to visit: what is now known as ‘Diana’s bench’ – the bench on which the troubled Diana sat during her last official visit as Princess of Wales. Each of them sat on it in turn while I took a picture of them, then one of the three of them together and then a passer-by took one of all of us. Honour being satisfied, we then walked through the beautiful garden and into the building itself. Its sombre atmosphere comes as a surprise, but of course the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum to Mumtaz Mahal – the most loved wife of Shah Jahan – who died in childbirth with their fourteenth child. It was an unforgettable experience.
From Agra, we went on to Jaipur, stopping off at temples every now and again. While the others admired the carvings, I used the opportunity to say prayers of thanks for surviving the journey to the temple and to ask for protection as we travelled on to the next. Riding in a car in India can be a shattering experience for a European…
Jaipur seems to me to be exactly what India should look like: a big fortress, a grand palace and streets teeming with women in bright multi-coloured clothes and elephants everywhere. We were invited to dinner by the then chief minister of Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, a charming woman who invited us to call her ‘Vasu’, much to my relief. She played us a gramophone record of a chant to keep you calm in stressful situations, which consisted of a deep-voiced male singer chanting ‘Ooooooommmm’ over and over again. If you do it right, it vibrates right through your body and calms you right down. Shakira was very interested in it and seems keen for me to practise…
As if learning a chant that could lower my blood pressure wasn’t impressive enough, the following evening was an even more memorable experience. The former Maharaja of Jaipur had invited us to dinner. When we arrived at the palace, we were dropped at the start of the drive up to the front door and got out of the car to find the entire drive lined with a band mounted on elephants and camels decorated with exotic livery and playing the most beautiful music. As we walked through the ancient arch at the end of the drive, we were showered with rose petals by young girls who were seated on the top. It felt as if we were walking through some ancient fable. The dinner was delicious and afterwards we were treated to an extraordinary display of folk dancing in which dancers from all over Rajasthan entertained us – culminating in a finale by a group of tiny women from the mountains who had never before been outside their distant villages. Like most things about India it managed to be both breathtaking and mesmerising.
Although so much of our time was spent being entertained by the great and the good, I also wanted to get a sense of ordinary lives and the way they were changing in the world’s greatest secular democracy. Of course much remains the same. I had been struck by the decorated cart, a bit like a wheelbarrow, I had seen in one of the palaces I had visited, which was, so the tour guide told me, for the late Maharani to be wheeled about the house in. ‘Was she disabled?’ I asked. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘She wore so much jewellery she couldn’t stand up.’ I thought of this the following day when I paid three little girls of five or six to see me safely across a road through what was, to a westerner, simply terrifying traffic. Technological advancement is rushing through India, but it will be a long time coming to most of its population – one wealthy woman I met told me that her electrician didn’t have electricity and her plumber didn’t have plumbing. In the meantime ordinary Indians muddle through with the enterprise and ingenuity that is on display everywhere. As one person I met there said, ‘India is living proof that chaos works.’ It certainly did for me.