Moonlight Mafia, Khetri Fort, October 2009: part 2

My most surreal / memorable travel experiences: #8 See full map

Pilani and its surroundings are scorchingly hot during the day, but the desert quickly gives back its heat when the sun goes down. The night was becoming quite cool. Wearing a borrowed hooded sweatshirt cinched tight around my head, I laid flat on my back on the cold stone roof, watching the sky. The lateness of the hour and unfamiliar surroundings amplified the weirdness of it all. I could hear students milling around me talking, and eventually sufficient momentum built up for - of all things - a game of mafia. As cultural experiences go, I wasn't quite sure how this late-night staple of school retreats would translate.

And it was exactly as you would expect the game to be, anywhere in America. (Those with loftier sociological aspirations can comment on how globalization is standardizing even the games of the world's youth.) This was classic mafia, replete with reckless gambits, ludicrous strategizing, impassioned pleas, endless post-mortems. I was suddenly quite awake, watching the students with their easy rapport as we fell into stereotypical roles - the intense, silent observers, the shrinking novices who always get railroaded, the guy who doesn't quite understand the rules or the implications of what he says and consequently makes utterly inexplicable moves - it was all there.

After a few iterations the game died down, and students wandered off in various groups, the fort once again falling quiet. Some dozed, others hunkered down against the cold and waited for the sun. In the pre-dawn hours we roamed the fort languidly, eating what remained of the food, with people on various levels above and below silhouetted against a lightening sky. When morning broke we made our way down, watched disinterestedly by several monkeys that were perched high up on the walls of the fort.

When traveling, I've found it often pays to say yes in implausible situations. In a countdown of travel experiences this is surely one of the more unique ones - playing intense games of mafia at three in the morning on the roof of an abandoned 300-year old Rajasthani palace with a group of near-total strangers under a beautiful, star-dusted sky: check.

The view from the fort as dawn breaks

Standing on the roof

Next: a midnight ride to Oxford

Moonlight Mafia, Khetri Fort, October 2009: part 1

My most surreal / memorable travel experiences: #8 See full map

I was in Delhi, close enough to a friend's university that I could finally take up his invitation to address a student group there. I headed off to BITS-Pilani, located in the eponymous village in an extremely rural part of the state. My non-existent Hindi coupled with the minivan driver's similarly advanced English made for a rather silent ride through the increasing bare landscape of Rajasthan (save for the driver's Hindu devotional music, which may have been playing on repeat).

The talk itself was thoroughly enjoyable; the night to come would be memorable in a very different way. Now Indian engineering schools are known for their intense cultures - overwhelmingly male, highly technical, brutally competitive (at least at the entry phase) - and BITS was no exception. In this hermetic environment, a walled-off enclave in the desert, the students had developed their own lingo, with highly specialized slang and shorthand requiring frequent translation for bemused outsiders like myself.

That evening, word got to me that a group of students were planning to slip out of the campus close to midnight to head to a fort in the hills. (Some universities in India haven't abandoned in loco parentis, so unexplained late night excursions would be frowned upon - hence the need for discretion.) After getting past the wall that encircled the campus we rendezvoused a short distance away in the market area of the town, where two standard-issue Mahindra vehicles were waiting for us.

And that was how I found myself at midnight with a group of 13 Indian students - all but one of whom were perfect strangers to me - jammed into the backseats of two jeeps bouncing their way in the pitch darkness to a place that I had never heard of before. I didn't know what this place was, or what exactly we would do when we got there.

After a ride of roughly an hour spent trying not to knock my head on the metal roof crossbar while the jeep jostled up and down, we got out and started to hike up. By this time it was deep night, and the lights of villages were visible down in the distance. We eventually reached the ruins of Khetri Fort, an abandoned palace that had been left to the elements and vandals (and inquisitive students) for untold years. Rajasthan is dotted with ancient forts, so within the region Khetri is unremarkable. There were no barriers or guards, so we wandered in through the overgrown entrance, wound our way through darkened stone passageways and eventually popped up on the solid stone roof of the fort, under the stars.