This story is part of the August 18 edition of Sunday Life. See all 15 stories . I’m lost.
I’ve wandered into a part of Jodhpur just below the city’s hilltop fort, and now I’m drifting through a tangled maze of narrow corridors winding between houses joined wall-to-wall, all painted blue to echo the cloudless sky above this Indian desert city. For the second time I’m passing the same tiny square where a man is pressing laundry using a heavy iron filled with hot coals. He nods in the direction of a downward alleyway, I follow and in five minutes I’m back on the city’s chaotic ground floor.
Subtitled “India’s Blue City” for this dense, cubist quarter where the city’s high-caste Brahmins have painted their houses with indigo wash since time immemorial, Jodhpur is the seat of the Rathore royal family and one of India’s most likeable and manageable cities. Dominating the city from its flat-topped hill, Mehrangarh Fort is among the most impressive in India, its ochre walls radiating military might and majesty. Contrasting with the cliff-like exterior, the interior is a jewel box, a succession of palaces overlooking cloistered courtyards from where the women of the former harem observed the world from behind honeycombed windows.
Jodhpur or “India’s Blue City” where the city’s high-caste Brahmins have painted their houses with indigo wash . Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto Mehrangarh is one of the few forts in Rajasthan still in the hands of the ancest.