Living on the rooftops

Out here on the plains at the edge of the Great Thar Desert, it is hot. Warm during the night, hot at dawn and dusk and sweat inducingly hot around midday. In humid conditions, your body's water feels the urge to ooze out through your pores and joins its kin. While here, the heat just abducts the water without you knowing! Here dehydration is a subtly violent act!

The most interesting part of "The Blue City" of Jodhpur lies within its old city walls that surround the fort. The massive fort is like a mountain on the plains here. It has the nickname of "the Mountain of Birds" and beneath it, in its shadows and stretching to the city walls, lies the old city. The old city has the feel of some giant having played a game of Letraset - you know the one where you have to get the shapes in the right places, in the right orientation, etc? - Only he didn't do such a good job. At street level, the sunlight is crowded out by the buildings seemingly leaning in towards each other watching the streams of human, motorbike and rickshaw traffic buzzing below; flowing like blood through the veins. Here the cows happily walk the streets and soon become part of the background. After a while walking around a cow is the most normal thing in the world here! So too, is missing all the s*** on the ground!

What light makes it down there could be reflected off the sheets of clothe providing some shade and cool. But mostly it is shops selling whatever you want or need. The sari selling shops are a riot of brilliant colour! Business is life here, so the street facing room is the store front, while behind and above is the living space.

It is when you either watch the sun rise or set that you notice that most of the desert dwellers life is lived on the rooftops. At dawn you notice all the sleeping figures curled up under blankets and people begin their daily ablutions and salutations with a yawn, a stretch and for the blokes, a scratch, a croak and a spit! The old city begins to stir and disappear below before it gets too hot to be up here. Long before that happens, from far below on the street comes the cry of the milk seller, his call bouncing off the maze of walls and echoing through the houses. Over there a mother chides a reluctant child out of bed with her pointed toe, below us a woman is putting away the bedding and there are two little children are already playing. Some families are having breakfast and other people are going through their religious morning rituals of greeting the sun.

Come dusk and the roofs become alive again. The day's heat is dissipating and the wind is now a cooling breeze. Overhead the parrots and pigeons swoosh by looking for their nightly roosts. As darkness descends and the stars come out, the dark lordly, otherworldly silhouettes of big bats go slowly, silently flying by. Men come and sit and relax. Either watching young ones play or gossiping with nearby neighbours. Children play on every rooftop. With homework and chores finished, it is play time. Girls sit together and gossip amongst themselves. In the few open patches of ground and in the few straight quiet streets, games of cricket are played. Each boy imagining himself to lead this cricket-mad nation to victory at some distant World Cup!

Whereas in the morning, the men seemed to be absent, at the dusk and night it is the women. Perhaps they are making the supper within the house below.

Space is a premium and so each house touches the other. You could literally walk the entire old city and never once touch the ground. Privacy is a very foreign concept here; especially when the city practically lives on top of each other and just over the wall! Plus India seems to be one big family. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody! Nothing is secret for long here.

When the giant placed the buildings, he did nothing for the roofs. He left that to the artists. Looking out over the rooftops, it seems as if the space has been deconstructed into its elements and put back together again. A little like a Picasso cubist period painting. It is all short lines, harsh angles and little flat spaces.

What is surprising perhaps, is that this old city and the ways its occupants live their lives on the rooftops is not that much different from those in hot Arab countries. Right the way from Morocco and Moorish Spain through to the Indus Valley. If it was not Hindi, of Raj, being spoken then you might have been in one of these countries!

But what sets it apart, and is perhaps its most striking aspect of the old city is not the density of people or buildings or the noise and smells, but rather the colour. It is called the Blue City because so many houses have been painted a sky powder blue. In times past, it was a means of identifying the occupants of the house as Brahms. Brahms were part of the highest caste in Hindu culture and so were entitled to certain privileges excluded from the lower castes. But, apparently, according to some sources, it has everything to do with the colour keeping the house cool in the heat of the day. Whichever it is, plenty of house occupants got in on the act and painted their houses blue.

If you can't beat them, join them!