A town that’s yet to turn into a tourist circus, Jaisalmer offers an idyllic refuge

The best part about Jaisalmer is that it does not have its own airport as yet. Once it does, plane-loads of exotica-seeking tourists will swarm its golden deserts and yet another destination will have turned into a circus. Right now, Jaisalmer may be perceived to be small town in the midst of the desert, with a single roundabout which is its sole claim to fame, but its golden fort and the changing face of the desert around it is what makes Jaisalmer so unique. Our drive to Jaisalmer started at Jodhpur, the nearest airport, a four-hour drive away. The road from there is long and straight. It is desert on either side for as far as the eye can stretch. In Jodhpur, rose pink is the colour of the sandstone and the earth itself. Then somewhere before Pokaran, you notice that the earth has somehow turned golden yellow. By the time you reach Jaisalmer, you notice the difference in the colour of the fort, compared with the Jodhpur fort. We were staying at Suryagarh Hotel, a short distance from the town. That was the chief advantage, because the silence in the sprawling resort was like a healing balm for the soul. Every now and then the all-encompassing silence would be broken by a wind that rustled through the ancient stones and sand of the desert, and then, quite as suddenly, it would stop, and you would hear the silence again. Suryagarh may have been brand new but it had already acquired a patina of timelessness. Made of the same soft golden stone that defines the rest of the town, its various nooks and corners gave it the air of a fort that had stood mute in the desert for aeons. There are few who have not heard of Marryam H. Reshii. Reshii is a well-known restaurant critic and gastronomy writer, a relentless traveller, and a woman slightly obsessed with olive oil, Kashmiri recipes, Indian heritage foods, French patisserie and fine chocolate... well, her list is long. A keen photographer, Reshii lives in Delhi with her husband and two children There was, for example, the courtyard where Imran, the youthful magician, is a permanent fixture (his simple tricks delighted every guest, no matter what their age). The courtyard was home to a flock of fantail pigeons and half a dozen peacocks, while at the entrance sat a Pandit who performed aarti at the temple, a family of Mangniyar folk singers with a dancer and two ballad singers. Suryagarh was like a non-hotel: there was no impersonal basket of fruit in your room: instead, an unseen halwai made the most delicious array of mithai that was artfully arranged in our room, morning and evening. In place of piped music (no Kenny G, thankfully) there was folk music everywhere. Because of the all-enveloping silence of the surroundings, we could frequently hear the musicians without being able to see them. In a sense, it became the soundtrack of our holiday in the desert. Our forays into the desert led us to discover that the word ‘desert’ is far removed indeed from the one-size- fits-all feature that I always assumed it to be. It was more or less flat, it was true, but the different perspectives that came into view were astonishing in their variety. Most of it was variously coloured scrub: the palest pinks, golds and greens tinted the land and here and there were cacti growing on either side of the road. Suddenly, after a few miles, there would be rocky outcrops dotting the landscape—tortured rocks from god knows what distant age, how many millennia ago. And in the midst of it all, you would suddenly find a deserted village. Made from the stone of the land, it looked like a natural structure rather than something built with the human hand. “Nobody knows why they left or where they have gone to,” said our driver, Bhanwar Singh, with a tone of hushed awe. According to him, the Paliwals were a Brahmin community whose womenfolk were reputed to be exceptionally beautiful. After having lived in over 80 villages in the region, they disappeared en masse one night and have never been seen since. “People say that a ruler wanted to marry a Paliwal lady against her will. One thing I do know is that these villages are cursed,” said Bhanwar with a hasty look over his shoulder, as he dived behind the wheel of his Fortuner. The reason, according to Bhanwar, who was a local, was that the fleeing tribe cursed anyone who tried to occupy their villages or even carry away stones from the tumble-down houses. Given the scanty rainfall in the region, the Paliwal villages are, centuries later, in a chillingly good state of repair. Khaba Fort—no relation to the famous Jaisalmer Fort in the centre of town—was a tiny pimple in the middle of the desert, this time near an oasis. Of no great architectural merit, it was the venue for our breakfast early one morning. Waking up before dawn, that too on a holiday, is hardly a propitious start to a day, but once we had hauled ourselves up over the steep steps of the fort, an extraordinary sight awaited us. As dawn slowly broke on the horizon and smudged navy blue gradually metamorphosed into emerald and rose, dozens, if not hundreds of peacocks scrambled up the little fort. Manvendra Singh, the owner of Suryagarh who had urged us to reach the fort before dawn, told us that the local administration donates a sack of grain daily to the peacocks in the area. Just seeing a particle of humanity in the government made the pre-dawn trip worthwhile. And the crowning glory was the spectacle of more peacocks than I have seen in my life, strutting around the ramparts of the disused fort. There are sand dunes—we had a memorable dinner there on our last night, with live music by the Mangniyar family—and camel rides, frankincense trees, pre-historic rocks, small lakes where herds of wild bluebull (nilgai) come to drink and the ghosts of the spirits who have lived in Jaisalmer, been burnt at the funeral pyre of their husbands and been chased out en masse, within a few hours. Oh yes! And there is quiet and colour too.