Editor Pick
Mahavaton Ka Mohalla
- August 29, 2000
- Rated 4 of 5 by
Joel from Hasselt, Limburg, Belgium
Most places of interest are mainly located within the walled city. So we enter Mahavaton Ka Mohalla, the residential quarter of handicraftsmen and mahouts, elephant-drivers, through an impressive gateway. You often see that six or seven craftsmen or boys work together in one small room. They polish green and red stones. Some of them look like little green spacemen. Other men weave carpets. It's hard labour. We've been invited into houses, stables and gardens. Everyone wants to talk to us: 'Hello, hello, how are you? Where you from? Pen please?' and even sometimes 'Baksheesh, baksheesh?' but it's big fun to walk around in this area. Suddenly the sky turns grey and a storm is coming on. We have a feeling that we have to look for shelter. We go sit on the stairs of an empty house when rain comes pouring down. A man across the street makes a sign with his hand to his knee. And he's right. Within ten minutes the streets are completely inundated. The street has become a wild streaming river. The steps of the stairs we sit on disappear one by one. The watermark rises to 70 centimetres so we got caught. Three quarters of an hour later, the water is still high but the rain already stopped. Do we have to get wet to get out of here? And than I looked into another room and there's a window that looks into another alley. And guess what! It's a steep alley and there's no water in it. So we could escape all the time without knowing it.
From journal Jaipur, popularly known as the Pink City