We caught an auto rickshaw and took a nice long trip through the city while I played tour guide for Kara. Rickshaw is really the best way to see India, and it was a wonderful day, wet and drizzly.
We finally came the Muslim section of the city, which has many great architectural sites including our destination. Imambare was a palace built by some ruler or another with an adjacent mosque. We passed under a massive arch and entered the first courtyard, which had a circular path leading around a garden. At the far end was yet another arch this one lined with shopkeepers trying to make us by cameras and little carved things.
Beyond this second arch was a second courtyard. To our right was a massive mosque sitting atop a very impressive flight of stairs. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to enter because we’re not Muslims.
In front of us was the main building. We took off our shoes and entered a series of massive halls painted a sort of lime green with a baby blue trim. If you’ve seem ancient Muslim architecture before you can pretty easily imagine what we saw. There were the usual carved alcoves, and leaf-like patterns in the columns.
The main reason we had gone to Imambare was to see some sort of Labyrinth and after asking around for a while we realized we’d have to buy tickets for that portion. It’s 300 rupees for foreigners (that’s about seven dollars Canadian) and only about 50 rupees for the locals (about one dollar). We shelled out the cash and paid another 75 rupees for a tourist guide who spoke English. Never enter a maze unless you have a guide or a ball of string.
I was imagining the usual kind of labyrinth that we associate with Theseus and the Minotaur – you know the one with grey stone, and right angles shoved into a dungeon. To my surprise we reached the labyrinth by climbing upstairs and it was a sort of functional labyrinth. It was less like some crazy inventor’s idea of a prison and more like some sadistic chamberlain had decided that no one should work in the palace unless he had an excellent memory. Some of the passages led onto terraces, one on to the roof, and another onto a narrow gallery above one of the main halls. The side passages that led to wrong turns or dead ends were usually narrow staircases spiralling downwards or upwards.
At one point in the maze the guide stopped us in front of a stone wall and told us it was a wireless telephone service. He then ran off down the halls and out of sight. We put our ears up to the stone and after a moment we could hear his voice, obviously whispering, saying, “hello, hello”. Then he told us to come to him, and we took a few turns to see him surprisingly far off. It’s amazing the stuff that people in past ages were capable of.
After seeing the labyrinth we had one more stop in the complex. We went through another archway and came to a large court, most of which was taken up by a very wide, very long stair case that descended to a locked metal gate. Along the side of this staircase were hallways at different levels that could be accessed by arches placed along the walls. We entered one hallway and moved to the area beyond the gate.
One of the men told us it was a sort of well. Essentially there was a circular building of four stories with a hallow centre that ran down to the bottom. There were many open archways that looked out over the centre. That was my favourite part of the whole trip because I felt as excited and energetic as a little kid as I dashed about finding narrow staircases hidden in shadow, or suddenly popping out of some passage and saying, “Oh, this is where I am!” It’s the sort of place you dream about playing hide and go seek, or laser tag in.
After that we hopped back in our rickshaw and once more enjoyed the sights of Lucknow. The thing about India is that it really gives you the sense that there are stories behind everything. You just don’t get that impression from Canada’s cookie-cutter homes, or the people who you know went to school, got a job, got a family and are now trying to figure out how to get a bigger television. But in India, you see stories in everything. What is the story of the little boy with adult muscles carrying two heavy jugs of water? What is the story of the dirty old man with the huge beard sitting on the sidewalk? What about that woman with soaking hair draped over her face washing something in a bucket? Why doesn’t she move the hair out of her face?
Maybe it’s the romanticism of a foreigner, but it sometimes feels like the people here live lives a thousand times more real then the ones we live in Canada.
3 comments:
It's funny that you mentioned playing hide and go seek in there Lua, because it so happens that I just came back from my time machine (after fluently learning many many languages of course), and it's just the darndest thing, you see, I spoke to the people constructing it, and it turns out that they were in fact making the most elaborate laser tag arena the world will ever see, it's only after it was completed that they remembered that they had no idea what laser tag actually was, so I'm glad their original purpose still shows.
I thought you said there was no touristy things to do in Lucknow.
Well that's the only one i had ever heard of. I mean sure there are some parks and a king's tomb somewhere else, but they're not really that interesting
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