The grace of India

What I remember most about India was what I expected least.

We were driving across northern India, from Jodhpur to Jaipur, and suddenly the fields were punctuated by pops of candy colors. At first I thought it was an optical illusion or a reflection in the van's windows, but then I saw the women, moving slowly through the long stalks of wheat, harvesting the crops. Draped in saffron, turquoise and coral saris, balancing terra cotta pots on their heads, they moved with an assured grace, turning the harvest into an understated Bollywood ballet, something lyrical and elegantly serene.

The serenity wasn't what I had anticipated. In fact it was the opposite of what everyone said I should expect when I told them I was going to India.

What I should prepare for, conventional wisdom had it, was the press of crowds, the din of street noise, the sensory overload that would short-circuit every last nerve and lead to some kind of cognitive implosion.

I would, everyone told me, be dizzy, wandering as aimlessly as a sacred cow under the searing sun, and my two-day pit-stop in Delhi after landing seemed to justify all the alarmist warnings.

The combination high and low-point: a rickshaw ride through Old Delhi that felt like a jolting carnival ride, the kind you wouldn't repeat after that second corn-dog. Bumping down the back streets, under a festive tangle of electrical wiring, we raced past boys hoisting trays of sliced coconuts and vendors hawking garlands of plastic flowers. There was the glint of gold jewelry in shop windows and day-glo saris draped on headless mannequins, looking too flashy and too bright.

But when I left Delhi behind, everything changed. That's partly because I wasn't facing India on my own. Having long resisted the idea of a tour group, I had wisely decided India was the place to relinquish old prejudices. I had only 10 days to cover a lot of ground. And I realized that the only way I could sample any stretch of this massive, complex country -- without sacrificing my trip to logistical nightmares, missed connections and way too much train-hopping -- was by conceding to a tour led by escorts who knew exactly where they were going.

That's how I ended up on one of Cox & Kings' tours of northern India. I could have chosen other outfits. Gap Adventures offers bargain-priced tours, and a range of experienced tour groups specialize in India, including Greaves India. But Cox & Kings promises its own legacy (it was founded in 1758), an intimate understanding of India that allows for real cultural immersion, overnights in maharaja-worthy hotels and an efficiency that lets you focus on the scenery instead of your luggage. (Typical of these tours, everything from hotels to internal rail fares, private van transportation, most meals, local guides, entrance fees, baggage handling and airport transfers are all-inclusive.)

It was the efficiency that assured I would quickly, smoothly barrel out of Delhi into a different, calmer India. While Delhi and Mumbai bookended the tour with whiffs of city life, the heart of the trip was Rajasthan. The large northwestern India state, half desert and half farmland, is dense with the kind of gorgeous precolonial towns and temples that define our -- or at least my -- romantic view of India. And while our first stop at Agra's Taj Mahal was an expected anticlimax (true, the luminous marble monument seems to levitate in the light, but the crowds, which average 10,000 a day, get in the way), our next stop was worth the tour in itself.

This was the town of Udaipur, a monument in its own right, and if I ever return to India this is the place I would return to, and for.

Treasure-box of a town

A relatively small city, Udaipur sits on Lake Pichola and dates to the 16th century. The old walled town, framed by five main gates, still has a cohesive feel (one missing from so many of India's other cities, ruined by too much contemporary urban anti-planning). Wandering through its twisting, hilly streets is like walking straight into a miniature Indian painting. Among the attractions that kept drawing me back: shops stocked with silver jewelry, hand-blocked textiles and wooden marionettes supplied by the surrounding craft villages; herds of sacred cows lounging in front of temples and fountains with an unerringly refined sense of bovine aesthetics, and the sprawling City Palace decked out with towers and cupolas and featuring a museum crammed with glittering Indian decorative arts.

At night the spotlit palace ramparts gaze down at their rippling reflection in Lake Pichola, and if you're lucky enough to be staying at the Lake Palace Hotel in the middle of that lake (given Cox & Kings' preference for iconic properties, we were), you can scan the shimmering shore from your guest room. Originally a maharana's 18th-century summer folly, the Lake Palace (featured in many films, including the James Bond thriller "Octopussy") underscores Udaipur's dreamy effect. Forget minimalism or any sense of understatement. The baroque bedrooms are dressed up with silver swings, glass chandeliers, four-poster beds and, at least in my room, a window alcove perched over the water.

In the evening the parlor fills with astrologers giving readings (mine predicted a bumpy road) and tribal dancers gripping lethal-looking silver swords between their teeth. The best entertainment, though, may be the kitchen's sublime curries, the kind you won't find at your local strip mall's Indian restaurant.

An ethereal temple

It was on the way to Jodhpur that even Udaipur's heaped treasure box was surpassed. When we stopped at Ranakpur's Jain Temple, a 15th- century (most probably) marble landmark crowning a hill, I finally felt the kind of sensory meltdown that everyone had predicted. The Jains are a Hindu sect famous for their devotion to nonviolence and austere asceticism. Their marble temple is open to the elements, so natural daylight plays off the monument's domed ceilings and 1,444 pillars, elaborately carved with dancing girls, snakes, gods and lotus flowers. It was raining the afternoon we arrived and the sound of the water gushing off the temple's turrets, and the bluish light flickering over the sculpted forest of white marble columns, turned the landmark into something ethereal. Call it a sacred grove, lit up by a kind of radiance (OK, maybe spirituality) I've never felt even in the grandest, earthbound cathedral.

Tea with a maharana

It was a quieter, distinctly human sort of radiance that buoyed our next stops, at two villages along the road to Jaipur.

Among the things that define a Cox & Kings tour are the informed native guides and the meetings with locals that give voice to a place. In Udaipur we had tea with the Maharana of Udaipur in his palace. ("Fancy hotels and spas are taken for granted now by tourists," he said, sitting on a settee carved with golden cherubs. "We want Udaipur to be known for its culture.") In Delhi, we dined with a socialite. In Jodhpur we got a different kind of surprise. After a day touring the city, we piled into two Jeeps and headed for the brush.

Our first destination was a 10-hut village where we took part in an opium ceremony with village elders, their heads swaddled in orange, yellow, pink and red turbans, as bright and round as lollipops. Too diluted to have any real impact (or replace my own sleepy-time cocktail of Ambien and Xanax), the opium was mixed with water and then slurped out of the host's palm in a simulation of a ceremony that Indian warriors once performed to calm nerves before battle and that now helps defuse village conflicts.

Then we stopped at an even smaller Bishnoi village, where the whole town seemed to have assembled in front of their round thatched huts. As travelers we see, of course, what we want to see, but the Bishnoi sect is known for its environmentalism and respect for nature, and the sense of communal peace I hoped to glimpse seemed real enough. The women sitting on the ground, their nose rings glinting through the filmy veils of their saris, smiled up at us, cradling babies whose eyes were rimmed with kohl. When we left we passed herds of antelopes and gazelles. "You can always tell a Bishnoi village," our guide told us, "because all the animals collect there, knowing they won't be harmed."

That little glimpse of an Indian Eden, the fat babies and gazelles all lying down together, was quickly displaced by our final urban jolt of the tour. Jaipur, known as the pink city, was a whir of bazaars, palaces, forts (including the epic 16th-century Amber Fort) and another Indian fantasia of a hotel, this time the Rambagh Palace, where Katy Perry and Russell Brand recently held their wedding ceremony.

Then we flew to Mumbai for a glimpse of the new India. A more progressive city than Delhi, partly because it is the center of India's information technology industry and the home of Bollywood, Mumbai is where India races toward its future. That means you can wander the zealously stylish restaurants, clubs and shops of the gentrified Worli district and glimpse a world that would be science fiction to the Bishnoi villagers. Waiting with the crowds to cross a jammed Mumbai street, I realized I felt disoriented, too.

After Rajasthan's lakes and hushed temples, the thatched huts and the women loping through the fields, the honking cars seemed both familiar and utterly foreign. And for a moment, as the light changed to green and the mob pushed forward, India's pulsing future looked much more primitive than the transcendent world it was leaving behind.

Raphael Kadushin is literary editor at the University of Wisconsin Press in Madison. His work has appeared in Bon Appetit, Conde Nast Traveler and other magazines.