The Black Hole of Chattra Sagar
I happened upon the Black Hole when out for a post dinner stroll in the dark under a skyful of stars. Chattra Sagar was an oasis of rural peace between the kaleidoscopic assaults on the senses which are Indian cities: we had marvelled at the circus of Old Delhi on a rickshaw ride which somehow made its way like a stop-start tortoise which has wound off track and now picks its way through quicksand and against a tide of humanity. We had walked round Jaipur, our heads made giddy and our nostrils keened by the smells and spice, inhaling the noise and smiling away the constant attentions of the press of locals who seemed simply to want to interact rather than to profit; only the cows are untroubled here. Jodhpur’s blue houses and great fort would come next. That these few days in Rajasthan followed our time in Ladakh in the Indian Himalayas in the thin mountain air under high blue skies – our spirits salved by the tranquility and beauty of it all and by the unquenchable good-naturedness of the Buddhist people and the resonances of their ancient monasteries – made the transition back to the Indian cities seem like a flight to another planet.
But Chattra Sagar was an oasis, another change of planet. In Ladakh we had camped and washed in freezing mountain streams and wheezed as we trekked; here we stayed in the most luxurious tented camp, eating aromatic and craftily spiced vegetarian food, and swam in the warm waters of the reservoir-lake down a flight of stone stairs from the tents and surrounded by a Jurassic Park full of bird life and bird sound and a golden haze.
We had spent the day swimming and strolling round the the nearby village and its fields, our senses dulled by the sultry heat and by the fly-swotting indolence of it all. Here a turbaned old man in white reclining on a barrow with one knee raised as he lived out his time thinking who knows what thoughts; there two barefooted children playing with a home made spinning top; a young girl carrying a giant pitcher on her head turning to give a huge gap-toothed smile; the flies meandering as if their fly-hearts weren’t really in it round white cows wandering droolingly down the empty dusty street. Even the odd monkey here is enervated by this dusty Raj-heat – such a contrast to their city cousins clambering over the hotchpotch of wires and cabling between the buildings of the narrow Delhi streets, screeching and hyperactive, their tempo mirroring that of their more distant human cousins in the crowds below. In the fields women in stunningly colourful saris, looking like they must be dressed for a night out on the town – in orange and purple, blues, reds and bright green – bend and squat with their hand sickles to quietly fell and gather and stack the golden sheaves and tug their bright headscarves over their heads to ward off the sun. At dawn the sun had risen huge and hot over the jagged hills beyond the reservoir: the biggest sun I have ever seen and filling the sky with orange.
We had eaten wonderfully: gently spiced potatoes that tasted of potato, tomatoes cooked with star anise, delicate lentil and bean curries in which individual spices stood out and washed down with a couple of cool beers. The night was densely black and balmy, warm but comfortably so and the moonless sky was a stunner. So we strolled at the sauntering pace of the place after supper, necks craning up to the turning heavens. I heard my daughter Tess, who had walked this way earlier in the light, begin to say: “Watch out for the….”
And I plummeted into blackness. It seemed quite a long way down as the thorned plants that grow everywhere and bigger and sharper in the tropics slashed away.
I recall letting out a remarkably mild expression of surprise on my way down, rather than the expletives I would have expected of myself, and thinking that was a funny thing to have said, even in my nonplussed state at the time of my continuing descent. Something along the lines of “Well I never” but not that; I wish I could remember now exactly what it was. My family – someone had dug out a torch by now – were in hysterics of course. They formed a human chain to help me out of the Black Hole, which fortunately hadn’t been quite as bottomless as it had seemed on the way down, barely able to hold onto one another’s hands, so helplessly convulsed by laughter were they all. I came out blooded and scathed but, I like to think, dignity intact. The merest mention of the Black Hole of Chattra Sagar, even these years later, will set them off again.
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