Abandoned in the gold market

In the gold district of Udaipur this derelict house belongs to a very rich man who relocated and abandoned it 20 years ago allowing his former home to crumble. You can imagine the ornaments being displayed on the shelves or maybe folded clothes. The house is two rooms deep and the doorways have ornate shapes and even the corrugated iron roof to the extension roof top has a beautifully pierced and cut decorated edge. On the right hand side is the carved marble pillar and arch to a Jain Temple with a new addition being added above. To the left the house is occupied by a joint family and the open drain in front is currently being upgraded to a covered sewer. Lalit, the painter who works opposite told me the site is worth at least half a million pounds sterling but to rebuild a similar house would cost quite a lot less than that.  P.S. should have  added there was probably a roof terrace where the plant is growing upon which the two more stories were built.


Such a fun day – was invited into her house to share lunch by an old toothless lady who led me to her sparsely furnished room on the first floor of the typical haveli ( in this case a mansion round an inner courtyard). A tailor worked in one room on the ground floor but she indicated her extended family occupied the rest. On the floor beside her bed was a two ring gas burner and she carefully filled a saucepan with some cooked dal and heated it before spooning it into a small bowl. Then she took some dark spicy pickle out of a screw top jar and put that in another dish before removing two chapattis from a tiffin tin and placing them on the tray. We sat on the bed with the sun streaming through the window and ate together from the same dish. What a treat. She showed me a picture of her husband and daughter, both dead and her eyes filled with tears and she refused to smile for my camera because she had no teeth but I did capture one picture as she invited me up the stairs. See her here

In one square huge chapattis about 2' 6” diameter were being cooked on a dome covering a wood fire ready for a feast with mutton curry tonight. The man organising and paying for it is celebrating a religious festival and expects to feed at least 500 people! The chapattis are so huge that they are split and folded into parcels – to make enough little ones would be impossible.

Later on I took off my shoes to go up and investigate what I thought was a beautiful temple with large depiction of the elephant god Ganesha sitting on a lotus at the back of the entrance hall – it turned out to be the Shree Jagdish Mahal Heritage Hotel which the concierge was embarassed to tell me. You can't win 'em all!