This tour - the Palace On Wheels - is a wonderful recreation of a bygone era. Yet not so bygone. Just now we sit on a side-track on the outskirts of Jaipur - "The Pink City" - and I reflect on our reception aboard the train. We rush from cab to train-side. We're the last ones to board because our cab driver helped us to buy some silver and this delayed our arrival. Two petite Indian women in saris greet us. They don't know any English. But their smiles throw us a welcome. One places a dot carefully on our foreheads. The second bestows us with a garland of marigolds. What a delicious smell. I'm adorned with the scarf-wrapped headdress of the Maharajah while the ladies get a deep burgundy and gold scarf over their hair. On board, we meet our salon captain Umesh and his Sikh assistant, Kalyan Singh. Both wear a seriously macho black mustache and a silk wrapped turban which extends down their backs. We enter our sleeper car. Delicious cotton sheets, private WC and priceless hand-painted pictures of Maharani women done with single-hair brushes. Umesh offers us rose water and lime drinks to refresh dusty throats chased by a single malt scotch. I think Prabhakar and I will be OK here.
India is an amalgam of ancient and new. All the peace, love and generosity is real. But every personal interaction is accompanied with an expectant reward from the better to the lesser. The caste system - outlawed by Parliament - is still ever present everywhere. We are the rich, they are the poor. They will serve absolutely and we will pay. The great wheel of life continues to turn.
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