be so open here, at least not after the mayhem that dominated the city of Bangalore.
Their itinerary allowed for only two weeks in India, and they had decided to hit the major cities and travel between them by train and plane. Though Bangalore wasn’t on the circuit of many tourists, Ian’s former company employed four workers who lived in the area. Feeling compelled to express his gratitude for the Indians’ hard work, he had met with them two days earlier.
Now, as Mattie sat on the cracked leather seat of the old taxi, she watched the rolling hills outside the city of Mysore, which was a three-hour train ride from Bangalore. The hills were void of tall trees and were green, but not lush. They’d been told of a drought affecting the area, so Mattie wasn’t surprised. Much of the land they passed had been sculpted to accommodate rice and wheat fields. Teams of oxen pulled plows in the fields or wooden carts on the street. The carts seemed to overflow with bursting burlap sacks or bales of hay or disheveled workers, and shared the pavement with buses, trucks, rickshaws, cars, and people.
Their taxi driver was small and impatient. Whenever something slowed him down, he honked at the culprit and muttered to himself. Unfortunately for Mattie and Ian, perhaps one out of four times that he honked, the horn stuck, continuing to sound as he drove on and pounded at it. The man would strike the horn with his right fist, cursing, wiping sweat from his brow. Sometimes the horn quieted, though more often than not it continued to sound until the man stopped the car, put up the hood, and temporarily disengaged the wiring. Despite the fact that this process took several minutes, the driver honked the horn at almost everything they passed.
Soon Mattie was able to predict what he would honk at. A trio of Hindu monks on bicycles was overtaken in silence. A farmer and his water buffalo received a furious barrage of beeps, as did a disabled ambulance, a group of schoolchildren, a sari-clad woman picking up a spilled crate of apples, and a three-wheeled motorcycle that looked to have been assembled from a dozen different vehicles.
Mattie smiled as the man continued to honk, pound the wheel, and pull over to fix the screeching sound. She wondered why he just didn’t drive in silence. Certainly all of the stopping and starting wasted more time than simply waiting to pass people. And surely he’d be happier if he didn’t have to pound his horn every minute or two. She came to realize, however, that most of the drivers honked as much as he did. They all seemed to have a love-hate relationship with their horns.
The taxi continued to climb the gentle hills outside Mysore. Their driver turned off the main thoroughfare, following a well-maintained road that was almost devoid of traffic. Soon landscaped gardens replaced the endless farms. The gardens were ornate and geometrical in nature, rows of cypress trees flanking rectangular reflecting pools.
Mattie looked ahead as a beautiful white building came into view. The two-storied building was dominated by a pale dome, which rose from the center of the structure. Stretching from either side of the dome was a series of columns that ran from the ground to the roof. Mattie had visited the U.S. Capitol once and thought that the two buildings resembled each other.
“Where are we?” she asked, as the taxi came to an abrupt stop beneath a covered roundabout.
Ian thanked their driver and handed him a short stack of rupee notes, the amount of which they had previously agreed upon. “Your mum and I stumbled onto this place,” he answered. “And now I want you to enjoy it.”
A man wearing a green suit said hello while opening an oversized door. Mattie stepped inside the building, stopping as a new world blossomed before her. She’d never seen such opulence. The walls and floor were white marble, highlighted by mosaics made of semiprecious stones. Gilded and massive frames held paintings of turbaned men firing guns at British soldiers. Silver and golden chandeliers hung from the vaulted ceiling. Arrangements of fresh-cut violet irises sprouted from immense porcelain vases.
Ian led Mattie forward. “Mysore used to have a king,” he said. “This was his summer palace. And now it’s a hotel.”
“A hotel?”
“Fancy that, luv. And we’re going to have lunch here. In the room where the king and queen used to eat. That’s why I asked you to wear