We pass huts with special tables outside selling multicoloured packets of sweets and firecrackers. People are out on the streets on the Indian equivalent of the Christmas Eve shopping spree. Kids kick around in the dust after them. Further down the road, towards the rice mill, men half-dressed, sun beating down on their sweaty backs, lug huge sacks of grain down the road. Scrawny dogs run after them.
And then we turn a corner and the chlorophyll-green, manicured vista of the Manipur Polo Club spreads out before us. Groomed, shiny-maned horses gallop through clean space. Bright white pavilions shade the clinking of wine glasses. When we get out of the car, the smell of fresh lillies greets us. We’ve been invited by the boys we met in the first week at the Taj Mahal Hotel (still memorable for its $12 shots of Jack Daniels). They are playing today, for the Jaipur Polo Club, and we can see them at a distance in striped shirts and jodphurs, bobbing up and down atop their horses.
A man in sunglasses with a well-maintained quiff moves in to pass over his business card, taking me by the arm. He reassures me within the first five minutes of conversation that his parents are very liberal and wouldn’t mind him marrying a white woman. Someone whispers that there is a Bollywood star in the corner and I use it as an excuse to slip away. Five British women stand together and giggle, wearing day dresses. They’s here working for marketing agencies and advertising agencies; one sells private jets. There is a woman working for a bridal magazine sipping chardonnay in the corner, and a man who works for the jewellery company who sponsor the event, who tells me that they sponsor it’s sister tournament in Windsor. They even have photos on hand to show us, and it’s almost embarrassing to make out the pink faces and oversize hats of South East England.
Polo is often thought of as the sport Eton-bred British foisted upon India. In fact, the first polo match was between Turks and Persians in 600BC, players riding on the back of camels. It was brought to India in the 16th century. British tea planters didn’t discover it until the mid-19th century, in the plantations of Manipur, and then adopted it as their own (presumably using Indian labour to keep their horses and bring their gin and tonics on silver trays). Before this it was the sport of ordinary athletes. Even now polo is played in the army: a tougher, faster, more muscular sport. Though a soldier and his pony would never set foot nor hoof on the lawns of the Manipur Polo Club. This place is for cleaner stirrups. Like many things in India – tea, gin, chicken tikka - Polo is something the British took, modified, pretended it was theirs, and gave it back irrevocably spoiled. Polo, like tea in the afternoon, will forever smack of the Raj.
At the event’s closing ceremony, the triumphant team are pocketing their prize cufflinks, and necking champagne out of a silver trophy. They come over to the table later. One tells me what a pity it is that there isn’t more polo this season – an epidemic of horse flu has laid most of the equine population low. “I’m not even riding my usual horse,” laments one of the referees, as if he was explaining the reason for the amputation of his hand.
Plates of cucumber sandwiches and petit fours are being ferried from the buffet. Every so often I slip away to avoid the coiffed man, who comes over, oozing hair gel and charm. The bridal magazine journalist is sitting at a table alone, looking more than a little tipsy. There is very little about this montage that could be reconciled with the street scenes on the dirt roads all around. But I realise now why this whole scene looks so familiar: remove the jodphurs and the horses, and with the white trestled tables, and the women in floral dresses, you would be forgiven for mistaking the scene for a - slightly sunnier - British wedding.
No comments:
Post a Comment