This is the city of the golden fort. A city which looks like
something out of the Arabian Nights when the sun goes down and the lights come
on.
Before two centuries it was an outpost on the Silk Route hosting
caravans of camels laden with silks and gold, then the world discovered the sea
route and the rest is modern history.
I found the ancient history even more fascinating.
A billion years ago, this land was under the sea. It was
raised by the Indian tectonic plate colliding with the Asian plate. Then it was
a verdant forest with tall trees and carnivorous dinosaurs.
And no-this is not a bed time story I used to tell the kids
(actually it was-I fed them lots of history and geography through bed time
stories before they started suspecting what I was doing); but this is a story
borne out by scientific evidence: footprints in the sand-literally and a
treasure trove of fossils.
Or rather, what once a treasure trove of fossils.
Now it is a sad story of neglect, of our disdain for
history.
“Yahan koi fossil park hai?”
The travel desk guy at our hotel was surprised as I insisted
that is where we wanted to go.
"Maybe, it’s closed down." Kid 1 quipped hopefully.
“Oh-Akal park. Wahan koi nahin jaata. Aap Sam dekh ke aayee
na..” The guard tried to help.
No, we wanted to go the fossil park. Didn’t he understand
how unique it was to walk through the evidence of a billion-year-old forest in
the middle of the Thar desert?
He was unimpressed and advised us to take an auto-because it
was close to the hotel.
The auto driver tried to talk us into a guided ‘city-tour’
instead.
My kids and husband looked at me with the unspoken “Where
are we going?” look, especially after directions for 'Child Beer.'
On reaching, we realized why everyone was giving us those
puzzled looks when we mentioned the fossil park.
Despite the battered board of grand intentions, it was just one desolate ruin.
When I had visited the place as a college student-we had
felt like geologists on a treasure hunt.
Unfortunately, so had all others who visited after us and
picked up the priceless evidence the way people cram their pockets with shells on
a beach, to sell them as trinkets to tourists, or just leave it in the hotel
trash bin once the novelty wears off.
A pair of disheveled, disgruntled Emus who greeted us where the closest
to the T-rex we got.
Some pieces of crumbling fossilized logs were
caged-too little done and too late to save them.
They would have been safe from
burglars anyway; exposed to the extreme elements of nature, they too wouldn’t be
around much longer.
The kids made up their own stories and clicked pictures to
help me get over my sheer disappointment.
On a trip to Europe, I had walked through glossily
marketed palaces displaying ceramics and lace turning up my nose in disdain. Back home we had more history in every street!
Now I was awed by how much effort and care they had put in to
preserve even the cutlery and linen. Here, we let the vandals just
walk away with something over a billion years old!
