Let me tell you something about luxury hotels: You don’t expect them to feed you opium.

I certainly didn’t when I turned up at Rohet Garh, a luxury hotel in the wilderness of Western India’s Thar Desert. I’d traveled for hours through unceasing scrubland, on a frankly apocalyptic Rajasthani bus, to reach the hotel. By the time I arrived, my mind was occupied only with thoughts of showers and of deep unaddled sleep. Call me unimaginative, but opium simply wasn’t on the agenda.

Arriving at a hotel at night is always a sure-fire way of not taking anything in at all, and I duly went to bed without paying a modicum of attention to where I was. It didn’t take long the next morning, however, to figure out why Roget Garh is spoken of in fabled tones among India’s wealthy elite.

The hotel is set in a fort that has belonged to the area’s Thakur (land-owning hereditary Lord) since 1622. It is a dribble-inducing doozy of a place. Frescos festoon the fort’s grand, pastel white walls, which shelter breezy courtyards and lush cultivated gardens.

Elsewhere, a colonnaded swimming pool dazzles with Rajasthani grace, while the rooms look every bit as imperial. Rohet Garh is truly fit for a King.

Which is lucky, as the King (or the Lord) still lives here – and with his family too. Rohet Garh the fort splits its affinities down the middle between Rohet Garh the hotel and Rohet Garh the seat of ancestral power.

On one side of the central courtyard you find the guest accommodation; on the other the Thakur’s own living quarters. Come evening, the two parties meet, over aperitifs, dinner, digestifs, and possibly more. Staying here is a bit like being caught in a royal dolls’ house. This isn’t a bad thing.

The hotel has a similar, stately association with travel writers, which was my primary excuse for staying. Two of the very best travel books of the 20th Century were written from within Rohet Garh’s walls: The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin’s sensitive diary of travel in outback Australia; and The City of Djinns, William Dalrymple’s homage to the history of Delhi.

Like the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan and the Le Select Café in Paris, Rohet Garh has writerly form.

I spent the morning swanning around the fort’s grounds, pretending I was composing my own bravely researched, thesis-propounding, critic-astounding travel narrative (all my diary shows for the time is a limerick about a General Smythe who liked his soldiers young, dark, and lithe).

Afternoon trickled round in the way it does in this part of India: slowly, drunk on heat, and introduced only by a lunch so heavy that you sleep through most of the following hours anyway. And then it was time to do Rohet Garh’s village safari.

Rohet Garh’s brochures talk up its village safari as the hotel’s U.S.P., so I’d committed to do it despite harboring reservations. These things are frequently unedifying attempts to explain away the complete history of local tribesmen in the space of twenty smile-happy minutes; difficult meetings from the polar edges of the global village, filled more with the flutter of camera shutters than genuine interest or insight.

And so the first part of Rohet Garh’s safari proved to be. Alongside four other guests from the hotel, I was driven in a jeep to a local Bishnoi village. The Bishnois are a nature worshipping tribe native to Rajasthan, so quite what they made of our rampaging jeep is beyond me, but it didn’t seem to matter. As soon as we arrived, the tribespeople sat in a choreographed row on the ground and waited to be inspected. Led by an eager guide, we fulfilled our side of the deal, stopping here and there to take obligatory photos. The exercise was conducted to the tune of one of my fellow guests repeating the stupefying line “Isn’t India just so full of contradictions”, while the tribespeople sat on the floor and looked us back in the eye with equal stupefaction. Churlish of me to complain, I know, but I didn’t learn a thing.

Our guide called the ritual to an end. “Now we are going to drink opium”, he said, and then nimbly fled into a nearby jeep before my fellow guests could guffaw in his face.

Any number of jeep minutes later and we were clambering into a dark room, still not sure what was going on. Alongside one wall of the room, seven pink-turbaned men were tending to what looked to be a medieval weighing scale. Opposite them, five chairs awaited our five pampered behinds. We sat down.

“These men are Brahmin opium addicts”, explained the guide. “They grow opium in fields close to here, and take it twice a day. It’s a ceremony to build their strength. They will now take opium. Then you will”.

Without saying a word, the middle Brahmin began streaming water through a conical sieve that held a small glob of opium. The yellowish solution trickled into a shallow wooden porron beneath. My fellow guests shifted around, not knowing where to look – not one reached for their camera. Once the water had finished filtering, the Brahmin looked at it for a second, picked up the porron, poured the opium water into his right hand, and drank with loud slurps. It was the only sound he made while we were in the room.

The other Brahmins took their turns and then the porron was passed our way. My fellow guests reached the apogee of their discomfort. They made loud, awkward excuses littered with squeaking laughter. In a way, I understood their pain. The protocol at the first village had been easy. All we’d had to do was stare with tourist’s glee and take snaps.

Now, without warning, we were being asked to drink a substance stigmatized and hugely outlawed in our own countries (and, incidentally, India; the government just happen to make an exception in the case of this historically addicted tribe). Everyone was miles and countless country borders away from their comfort zone. But at least I was learning something.

I leaned forward and slurped the sauce.

An hour or so later we were back within the walls of Rohet Garh. I joined my fellow guests sitting by the hotel’s lily-padded lake and we started chatting. They were pleased with my actions, it seemed; by participating, I’d alleviated their embarrassment. ‘Did the Maharaja know?’ we wondered. Well, probably. ‘Did Bruce and Bill know?’ I wondered, ‘was this why they found their inspiration here?’ Well, probably not, was the unsalacious conclusion. All the same, at least I had something to add to my diary.

And what of taking opium, you ask? Honestly, I didn’t feel a thing. But then, you wouldn’t give a bunch of tourists your best stuff if you were an addict, would you?

JC

www.rohetgarh.com

Rohet Garh P.O. Rohet, Dist. Pali - 306 401