Yesterday we had a slow start to the morning and then jumped in an auto rickshaw to dart across town for lunch in a hotel restaurant that had a big buffet assortment of North and South Indian dishes. Since Indian food is tied with sushi as my favorite, an Indian buffet in India is pretty much a dream. The char grilled paneer with mint and cilantro chutney stole the show.
Traffic in India is a dervish of excitement or terror, depending on your perspective. The roads are a river of vehicles of all types, and traffic lights are mere suggestions. Traffic cops must get good insurance - their primary job seems to be to shepherd small groups of people through the constant flow of traffic. Otherwise no one would ever cross some intersections. Most intersections are rotaries rather than four way stops, but the traffic seems to go around the rotary in BOTH directions. So once in awhile you get a stream of vehicles going one direction and a stream of vehicles going another, and you find yourself looking through the open door of the rickshaw at the flat face of a bus just inches away. Somehow everyone manages to wiggle through the chaos with horns ablaze, as if that will do anything to move the traffic faster. I am always tempted to reach out and shake the hand of someone in the vehicle next to us, just because I can.
After lunch, we took a car across town to the fort and tombs of the Quli Qutb Shah dynasty. The tombs are beautiful Indo-Persian design with minarets, intricate carvings, and giant open domes. The acoustics are perfect, a theme of the day. The echo inside the enclosed space of one of the tombs of the queen carries longer than any echo I've heard. The outer columns and supports of the tomb are giant pieces of granite carved into perfectly interlocking slabs. The tomb itself was constructed of brick overlaid with 2 inches of composite plaster and then a layer of smooth limestone plaster. They're all in reasonably good condition but blackened with mold and with some deterioration of the facade and adornments, but they're in the process of restoration and will once again be totally spectacular.
We didn't have much time left before the official close to see the Golkonda fort high on the hill above the tombs, but we got lucky that security allows guests with a guide to stay until dark, so we hired a guide. The fort grounds are enormous and stretch up the side of a large granite hill, hugging huge boulders to crown the top. It must have been spectacular in its prime of the 1500s. The entire fort was built in 62 years to house the Qutb Shah dynastic capital. I can't do it justice by explanation, so I'll pick a couple of key highlights. The treasury was once converted to a prison to house the treasurer who had taken a "loan" to build a Hindu temple in a nearby city. The shahs were Muslims from Persia, so the current shah was less than pleased when he found his money had been taken for this purpose, and he imprisoned the treasurer until the debt could be repaid...for 12 years. Many of the people who worked for the Qutb shah were Hindu, including this devout treasurer. For 12 years he carved a shrine to Hanuman, the devotee of the Hindu Lord Rama, with nothing but his hands. I didn't want to take a picture, so I found one here online.
The sounds of Golkonda fort are spectacular. It was designed to be acoustically perfect for communicating over very long distances. Our guide clapped in several places to show us how the sound moves through the fort. I think that the craziest was one place where he clapped, and the echo was returned from a perpendicular direction, and it doubled. Two claps could be heard returning from the left of wherever the faced while clapping. And this was all designed in the 1500s.
The other spectacular sound took me back to the early morning waking in Jordan to the sounds of Muslim call to prayer. There are more than a dozen mosques encircling the hillside of the fort, and we could hear all of them start, slightly off timing from one another, in a haunting call that reaches into the soul of even someone who isn't a follower of Islam. As the sun set and the lights flickered on all around the vast expanse of Hyderabad, I stood entranced at the remains of the shah queen's roof top garden. I'm not sure when I'll hear that many calls all together again. It's beautiful and once again very mediative.
We finally made our way back down the hill and down a long corridor that ran next to a series of chambers alive with the squeaks of thousands of bats and into a courtyard set for the light and sound show. The fort is lit with dozens of colored lights that are controlled in synch with a story of the history of the fort. It's really a beautiful show and pulled together everything that our guide had told us as we wound through its steps. If only there weren't other people disobeying the request to put their phones away and not try to videotape the show...which wouldn't turn out well and would probably be stored somewhere and never watched again. And then it started to rain, and everyone rushed away. That made the show an order of magnitude better. Adi and I sat through the sprinkles for a little while until we realized that the "mist" gathering around the top of the fort was actually heavier rain cresting the hill, and we rushed for cover under a walkway. But the show must go on even with no seated audience. From a large arched window where I was protected from most of the downpour, we watched the end of the light display with the few remaining people. And the rain stopped just in time for us to make it back to the waiting car to return home to another huge spread of Adi's mothers curries.
Traffic in India is a dervish of excitement or terror, depending on your perspective. The roads are a river of vehicles of all types, and traffic lights are mere suggestions. Traffic cops must get good insurance - their primary job seems to be to shepherd small groups of people through the constant flow of traffic. Otherwise no one would ever cross some intersections. Most intersections are rotaries rather than four way stops, but the traffic seems to go around the rotary in BOTH directions. So once in awhile you get a stream of vehicles going one direction and a stream of vehicles going another, and you find yourself looking through the open door of the rickshaw at the flat face of a bus just inches away. Somehow everyone manages to wiggle through the chaos with horns ablaze, as if that will do anything to move the traffic faster. I am always tempted to reach out and shake the hand of someone in the vehicle next to us, just because I can.
After lunch, we took a car across town to the fort and tombs of the Quli Qutb Shah dynasty. The tombs are beautiful Indo-Persian design with minarets, intricate carvings, and giant open domes. The acoustics are perfect, a theme of the day. The echo inside the enclosed space of one of the tombs of the queen carries longer than any echo I've heard. The outer columns and supports of the tomb are giant pieces of granite carved into perfectly interlocking slabs. The tomb itself was constructed of brick overlaid with 2 inches of composite plaster and then a layer of smooth limestone plaster. They're all in reasonably good condition but blackened with mold and with some deterioration of the facade and adornments, but they're in the process of restoration and will once again be totally spectacular.
We didn't have much time left before the official close to see the Golkonda fort high on the hill above the tombs, but we got lucky that security allows guests with a guide to stay until dark, so we hired a guide. The fort grounds are enormous and stretch up the side of a large granite hill, hugging huge boulders to crown the top. It must have been spectacular in its prime of the 1500s. The entire fort was built in 62 years to house the Qutb Shah dynastic capital. I can't do it justice by explanation, so I'll pick a couple of key highlights. The treasury was once converted to a prison to house the treasurer who had taken a "loan" to build a Hindu temple in a nearby city. The shahs were Muslims from Persia, so the current shah was less than pleased when he found his money had been taken for this purpose, and he imprisoned the treasurer until the debt could be repaid...for 12 years. Many of the people who worked for the Qutb shah were Hindu, including this devout treasurer. For 12 years he carved a shrine to Hanuman, the devotee of the Hindu Lord Rama, with nothing but his hands. I didn't want to take a picture, so I found one here online.
The other spectacular sound took me back to the early morning waking in Jordan to the sounds of Muslim call to prayer. There are more than a dozen mosques encircling the hillside of the fort, and we could hear all of them start, slightly off timing from one another, in a haunting call that reaches into the soul of even someone who isn't a follower of Islam. As the sun set and the lights flickered on all around the vast expanse of Hyderabad, I stood entranced at the remains of the shah queen's roof top garden. I'm not sure when I'll hear that many calls all together again. It's beautiful and once again very mediative.
We finally made our way back down the hill and down a long corridor that ran next to a series of chambers alive with the squeaks of thousands of bats and into a courtyard set for the light and sound show. The fort is lit with dozens of colored lights that are controlled in synch with a story of the history of the fort. It's really a beautiful show and pulled together everything that our guide had told us as we wound through its steps. If only there weren't other people disobeying the request to put their phones away and not try to videotape the show...which wouldn't turn out well and would probably be stored somewhere and never watched again. And then it started to rain, and everyone rushed away. That made the show an order of magnitude better. Adi and I sat through the sprinkles for a little while until we realized that the "mist" gathering around the top of the fort was actually heavier rain cresting the hill, and we rushed for cover under a walkway. But the show must go on even with no seated audience. From a large arched window where I was protected from most of the downpour, we watched the end of the light display with the few remaining people. And the rain stopped just in time for us to make it back to the waiting car to return home to another huge spread of Adi's mothers curries.
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