Pushkar - Thoughts from the Mela

"I don't remember anything. I only remember ideas and emotions," said Buck Mulligan. That's a bit like what my experience in Pushkar was like, though not exclusively. I can't help but wonder, though, when I look back at all this travel if that won't become my summary statement on it all. On verra. Nocturnal I hadn't been sleeping. For two weeks it was the cough. I'd sleep for 40 minutes or so at a time, then rouse myself with a nasty coughing fit. Rob was losing his mind as much as I was: he's a rather light sleeper. Things like the power light from our speakers can keep him awake, so a high-decibel, constant, raw-sounding hack was enough to drive him into the living room. After the cough had mostly passed, there was a succession of birthdays that kept us up till early morning, never in bed till 5 or so. Great times, all around: people had fantastic birthdays, but I was damned annoyed to be functionally nocturnal again. It paid off on the day we left for Pushkar, though, because I just stayed up till 4, called the taxi-wallah to wake him up, then made tea and got everyone else up to get going. Heartland It was still dark as night as we pulled out of the station. I spent most of the journey with my iPod and sunglasses on, occasionally waking up to read Catch 22.

Side note: Catch-22 is brilliant. It's beautiful and dark and raw and poignant and funny. If I ever write something half as powerful, I will consider my life a success.

I dozed off and on, never for more than 10 minutes at a time, the whole way to Pushkar. That Saturday was Grandpa's birthday and he was very much on my mind (see entry). What a guy, my Grandpa. Everybody in my family is thankful that we've somehow got a bit of his genetic code. The dude is 90, now, and still is out there everyday, farming. FARMING! He's got two fake hips, but the last time I asked him about them he reported that "They feel about as well as they ever did. Darned fantastic things they can do these days." I hope I can get out there next summer to help with harvest. Ajmer The train stops rattled off, more exotic names and more arid land the farther from Delhi we got. It was early afternoon by the time we pulled in to Ajmer, where we got off for the ride to Pushkar. The first thing we noticed was the heat. We figured the desert would be cooling off to something akin to the gorgeously mild weather Delhi's experiencing right now: 70's and 80's during the day, dropping to a brisk sweater-weather at night. We were wrong. It was 85� in Pushkar when we got there at 11AM, and only increased as the day wore on.

Side note: Dilliwallas are wimps. The weather in Delhi right now is just gorgeous. Perfect, basically, except for the dust. Yet you talk to a Dilliwalla at night, just after you reluctantly put on a light sweater, and you don't hear anything because their parka is muffling their voices. They open up for just long enough to say "Aren't you freezing?" When you respond that you love this weather, especially in December, they say something about "crazy Americans" as they button back up their complicated coverings.

It's... clean. We took two big jeeps from Ajmer to Pushkar. To get there, we had to go up and over a sizable little desert mountain. The views, even in rattling jeep, were beautiful. Rolling plains extended to the horizon, slices of rocky mountains dividing the expanse into valleys. Coming down the other side, we caught a glimpse of the holy lake at Pushkar and a dust cloud off to the Northwest. I really do like the desert. I said this the whole weekend at Pushkar, and eventually someone said "You know, just because you like Lawrence of Arabia doesn't mean you need to act the part." Well, touch�, but the point holds: Rajasthan is just unrelentingly beautiful. T.E. Lawrence was right, in the movie, anyway, when Bentley asks him "What attracts you personally to the desert?" and Lawrence replies "It's... clean." Amen. The lines are rugged but close inspection shows them smooth and mobile. It's gorgeous. I can't wait to get out, someday, into the proper Thar Desert and then the Arabian. I heard a story, I think from Rob, about a German woman who comes to Egypt every summer and just takes 4 camels and supplies and heads out into the Sahara alone. I can totally see doing that, though I'd prefer horses. More on the horses v. camels debate later, but the solitude, the beauty, the stars at night, the silence, like you brushed up against eternity and it stared back at you... it'd be well worth it. Labor Replacement Everything in Rajasthan is camels. That's the most noticeable difference between Delhi and Rajasthan is the camels. In Delhi, bulls, donkeys and small horses are the mainstay small-freight delivery methods. In Rajasthan, camels of varying sizes and numbers take the place of all three. Just on the road into Pushkar, we saw much variety in camel usage. Pulling carts of varying sizes, serving as personal transportation, serving as shade generators. Interesting, really. The Zoo/Hotel Our hotel was called the Sunset Hotel and Caf�. The first thing I noticed was all the white people. It's still such a shock for me to see white people in India. I'm so used to billions of brown faces and brown eyes, that it's sort of weird to see white (or red, actually, as was the case with many of them) faces, blue and green eyes, and wildly varying accents. It was like being in a zoo. A Caucasian zoo. We were all pointing and staring, as if there were glass between the strange creatures and us. Throughout the next four days, the shock never totally went away, but we did find that the Caucasian Zoo only had two real species in it: young, faux-spiritual, unwashed, tan, hash-smoking hippies, and aging, tour-group-led, matching-hat-wearing, huge-camera-toting, sunburned, rich, hash-smoking retirees. The Holy Lake at Pushkar It's almost perfectly round. It's eerie, really, but certainly calming. It's the calm shared by all holy places, even crowded touristy ones: it's brain-quieting, like when Mom closed the door after kissing me goodnight when I was a kid, leaving just a crack of light to filter into the room. It's that kind of Pavlovian response, triggering some systems in me and shutting others down. Our hotel looked out on the lake from one of the Ghats (platforms for visiting the lake and performing a Pooja or holy dip) straight to the west. The result was a perfect look at, of course, the sunset, thus the hotel's name. Just sitting there on the terrace of the restaurant, looking out at the lake and the mountain and the sunset was just good for the soul, even if some of the actual "religious" activity surrounding the holy lake was less than savory. I was a stupid tourist when it came to actually visiting the lake, somehow forgetting in that beautiful, heavy, holy atmosphere, all the good instincts I've picked up traveling. Fleeced The temples at Pushkar have an ingenious method of acquiring pilgrims. At the start of one stretch of tourist heaven/hell half a block away from the lake, a peaceful-looking holy man in all white, wrinkles befitting sand dunes, hands tourists marigolds without saying a word. The charmed tourists take the marigolds and walk on. Another holy crony, this one in plain clothes, posing as a helpful passerby, says "You must hold it in your right hand!" The charmed tourists dutifully switch hands, the marigolds dampening from the residue of perspiring Pepsi bottles. A little further on, the tourists pass an opening between overpriced Rajasthani camel wear. Another man in white is standing there and picks out the smitten tourists from a mile away, looking for their clenched right fists. As they approach, he walks out into the foot traffic and says "I see you have an offering. Come this way to throw it in the lake and receive your blessing." Most charmed tourists march, lemming-like and giggling, down the alley, into the ghat. When the tourists are isolated, the pitch/ceremony begins. Impressive, and probably sincere, Sanskrit recitations start, which tourist-lemmings are supposed to repeat in small chunks, phonetically. This is followed by an English translation: "For mother," splash of water toward the lake, "for father," splash, "for sister", splash, "for brother"--"I don't have a brother," the lemming perks up. "Not in this life, of course, but in your previous life. Pray for his soul." "Oh, right, of course." "For myself," splash, "for success," splash, "for love." Rinse (literally) and repeat. In front of the tourist is the plate with water, the afore-mentioned marigold, and red dyes. The pitch starts in earnest:

"Some people come here, they give $50, $100, $200--wait, you're American?" "Yes." "$10,000, $15,000." "They just throw it in the lake?" "They give it to the temple." "Oh. What for?" "We are a holy charity." "Oh, well, I give--" "It will give you very good karma." "You can buy???" "You do not buy anything. Lord Brahma gives it to you." "In exchange for money." "In exchange for charity," the holy man says, and the pitch moves on. "How much do you have on you?" "Not much." "I think you can give... $200." "How bout 100 rupees?" "Oh, sir, you have many blessings in your life," he says, nailing a kernel of truth, "and your kindness shall be repaid to you in the future."

Searching through a drawn-out wallet, the lemming sees 70 rupees. Looking around at the other tourists, with large wads of cash being broken out, the lemming feels unnaturally guilty and borderline disrespectful, against all instincts. He grabs 270, all his better parts rebelling in a losing battle to unspoken, quasi-religious peer pressure. As soon as it is out, a miracle happens: the money has passed through some alternate quantum dimension, out of his hand and into the quickly buttoned pocket of the holy man in front of him. "Now, finally, I would like you to pray for me and my family." The tourist's eyes are itching to roll and forget the whole thing, yet enough of his mind is still taken with the peace within chaos that the lake itself provides. 100 rupees later, the tourist is standing alone, finally, at the edge of the lake with the silver dish in his hands, the prayerful debris of previous pilgrims and suckers floating idly towards the southern end of the lake. Thoughts flash through his head of the 1st Commandment, whether he is committing a serious act of blasphemy, about whether he was actually being disrespectful to Hinduism by doing this. He thinks about the words of the prayer he had just spoken, ostensibly to another God. For family, for friends, for me... In the end, he decides, in a simple and not entirely un-childish manner, that there must really be just one God, but he goes by different names and does different things depending on what culture he's seen in. This thought does what true religious experiences have always done: made him feel more connected to everyone around him, more entitled to be at this holy place, more at peace, more centered. It's the same feeling he got, intensely, at Mt. St. Michel, the same feeling he got standing, alone, outside the Jamma Masjid at evening prayers. He stands, barefoot, at the lowest step of the ghat, silver plate still in hand. In a smooth, under-handed motion, he swings the plate down, then up in a long arc. The flowers and powder leap from the plate and swing high towards the sun before bowing to earthly gravity. They make a long red and gold trail in the air that stays for a second before dissipating in a surprising gust of warm air that makes him shuffle his feet for balance. The universe had answered. Leaving the ghat, his guide on this fleecing yet still spiritual expedition stops him and puts a red theeka in the middle of his forehead, just above the separation of his eyebrows, then ties a red and gold string around his right wrist. This last step is what the locals call the "tourist passport," indicating that the tourist has already paid and paid his respects to Brahma. Out on the street again, the reunited groups of lemmings discuss the ritual:

"He was like, 'People come here, they give $200, $500, $10,000.' I was like, 'You can have 10 rupees and that's it.' Who the hell gives anything more than that to this place?" There is a chorus of "Not me"'s, then a lone voice that says, "Uh, I gave a bit more than that." Laughing, laughing, they ask, "How much?" "A lot." Laughing, laughing, they ask, "How much is a lot?" "270." Laughing, laughing, gasping for air. "Plus 100 for the guy," the voice says, trying to slip it into the cacophony. One recovers her breath long enough to say, "I thought you were Mr. Experienced Traveler over here, that you didn't fall for this crap?!" "Yea, usually," the voice grumbles.

Reports Vary... There are three circulating stories about why the Pushkar lake is holy:

1. My version that I read in two different places is that the lake is the tears of Brahma himself. They represent his compassion for the world, that's why when you do the Pooja (ceremony involving a dip in the water), your sins are cleansed.
2. That the lake is a remnant of a lotus petal dropped from heaven by Brahma as he was flying across the sky. Details vary wildly in this version, occasionally getting mixed up with story #3.
3. That Brahma was smiting a demon from the sky. He threw three fireballs, one somewhere I don't know, one at Ajmer, and the one that killed the demon which fell at Pushkar.

Who's to say? Even Hindus aren't totally straight on this score, so I don't think I'm just an ignorant tourist for not having figured it out. I was an ignorant tourist for having given up Rs 370, but this isn't that bad... The Mela We walked through the main market in Pushkar, took a right, and found 150,000 camels. The noise that 150,000 camels make is beyond description. No really, I'm just going to leave it at that. We walked through the dusty mela (Hindi for "gathering") just taking it all in. The camel traders stared us at, universally,, even while they were doing deals. (Perhaps they thought themselves at the Zoo, as well.) Over here a deal went awry and two old men started beating each other with big sticks. This was the first time I ever saw someone knock someone else's turban off, which I understand is a really serious thing to do. Moving on, a prospective buyer was conducting a dental exam on a sizable camel with the help of ten men with ropes and sticks. The camel was not such a big fan of this (I don't blame him) and was making that ragged sound that camels make when they're annoyed, which is always, though this was continuous and only interrupted when a particularly sharp swing of the stick struck. Walking further out, the compression of camels loosened a bit, enough to fit in a horse or 2000. With numbers so comparatively small, the horses were hardly noticeable or worth mentioning. The variation in size is enormous in the camel world. You think of camels as some sort of boring, monolithic species, though with their two famous branches: the Bactrian and the Dromedary. All the camels in Rajasthan are Dromedary, yet some camels are as tall as Clydesdales, and some were full-grown and only had humps up to the top of my head. Our first trip into the mela ended with us at the top of one of the hills in some VIP-looking joint, sipping cold Cokes (at a really good price!) to beat off the heat. We stayed there a long time, the view was so nice and surreal. Manu and Kaluram After walking through the camel mela two days in a row and generally soaking it in, Rob and I decided that we really wanted to go horseback riding. Brinda, who knows everyone in India, knew the owner of our hotel, of course, and knew that he also owned horses that he occasionally rented out to tourists. For Rs250 a piece ("Almost as much as your karma cost!"-Rob), we got 2 hours on the back of real horses doing, functionally, whatever we wanted. The stable was east of the lake, and we got there via two scooters that came for us. Almost unbelievably, it was the first time I'd been on a scooter in India, and it was rather a strange experience. It felt so unstable, and so perilous, as we drove through crowded Pushkar tourist heaven/hell. Our horses were beautiful. My girl's name was Manu, and neither Rob nor I remember his horse's name, though she was Manu's mother. She was light brown and white and her flanks shimmered like they'd been spun from gold in the afternoon light. Our guide was Kaluram, an old, old horseman who was dissatisfied with his job and boss, yet very much in love with the horses he took care of. With basically every camel and elephant-walla I'd yet met, the relationship between man and animal was of a vicious master-slave dynamic. Kaluram and his horses seemed to be genuinely affectionate for each other, and it showed to be a more effective relationship. Where elephant and camel-wallas beat and stab their charges to do what they want, Kaluram whistled and called and his horses obeyed. It was quite impressive. It took us a while to get out of Pushkar proper, and into more open territory. I was dying to see what Manu could do, and as soon as we were out of sight of the highway and I felt like I was properly riding out, Kaluram told me how to break into a fast trot. That initial burst of power is just an electric thing. Manu had strong legs and strong shoulders, unlike so many common horses that you see pulling carts everywhere but Rajasthan. Those horses have been kept a gallop from death their whole lives; Manu had been obviously well fed and well exercised and I felt that the second she went from a walk to a trot. She made this smooth forward motion with her legs and the world got blurry. It was exhilarating to fly through rough desert on horseback. We didn't have any particular destination in mind, so we three wandered into this valley and took some pictures, including one selfie that I love but everyone tells me looks "scary" or "intense." Bah. After a while, we decided to stop and take a break, just chill out and watch the stars fade in. We sat on a sandy hill with Kaluram and just talked for a while. Big K was a cool guy and his English was effective if a bit hard to decipher. While we were hanging out, Manu and the other horse happily grazed near us. I asked Kaluram why they didn't run away or even stray very far. He just pointed at himself and proudly said, "Never without me." It got dark really fast out there, as it is wont to do at this time of year. The desert is jaw-droppingly beautiful at night, but the highway we had to follow to get back was not. All the tourist buses and jeeps and guys on motorcycles passed us at high speed. Every time, Manu would shudder and move more off the road. I could never move her back. From Manu to Babu Oh, Babu. Babu was a bastard. I knew this immediately upon meeting him and was reticent to give him any of my business, but circumstances forced me to employ his services for an afternoon. It took nearly that whole time to get him under proper control, but it ended up all right. Babu was a camel. A bastard camel with even more attitude than your normal, prickly, Rajasthani camels. Babu was the biggest of the 9 camels we took on our afternoon trek, and acted like he had been the biggest bully in his camel schoolyard. He responded to every command with an angry, grunting roar. When descending and ascending, the most precarious of all positions with which to be on a camel in peacetime, he added a totally fragrant and uncalled-for lateral shaking movement. Bastard. Whenever we passed any kind of shrubbery, he would lean his long, square-bottomed neck down to try and grab a bite. A yank of his chain back up would result in that trademark, belched roar. The one time I had to walk in front of him while he was sitting on the ground, the bastard tried to bite me. The one time I went behind him while he was standing up, he nearly pissed on me. Bastard. Headware The first thing they said to us about the whole camel ride expedition was that we would absolutely need head coverings, "or you will die in the heat." Alrighty then. So all the guys fixed up turbans out of long-sleeved shirts, the girls put their shawls to good use, and we were off. We set off west in the early afternoon. It was difficult, at first, to get used to the lumbering, side-to-side motion of the camel. Not nearly as smooth as horse riding had been. We took it slow for an hour or so, passing around fields and small villages as the land became more open and more arid.

Side note: I'm convinced that this region is on top of some kind of auspicious aquifer. That's the only way you could get the lake and enough moisture to farm with.)

About an hour out, we took the opportunity to stop and stretch our legs in the middle of one nice, wide, open expanse. (This is when Babu tried to bite me. Bastard.) We soon continued on after some turban readjustment and some choice photographs. We stopped for chai in the village of one of the camel-wallas. His brother was the chai-wallah. As soon as we came into town, we were swarmed with small children there just to look at us. We made some rudimentary conversation, but mostly it was them looking at us and whispering in each other's ears and us doing the same. They were particularly fascinated by 1) Mira, and 2) digital cameras. I understand both fascinations. Mira's a very pretty Indian girl ("from Canada!" she would be quick to note) and is sort of the dream girl for most men on the sub-continent. The kids were totally taken. And when Jenn took their pictures and they could see themselves, they had precisely the same "gee-wiz" look that I got the first time I played with a digital camera. (Still such a cool thing. Thank God for digital cameras!) It was more so, of course, because it's more than likely that these kids had never had their picture taken before. They were ecstatic and jumpy to see themselves on the small screen. The Run From the village, we turned back towards Pushkar. The camel-wallahs were apparently worried about getting us back on time, or just wanted to screw with us, so we ran the whole way back. Interesting experience. The first thing you notice is how surprisingly smooth it is, compared to walking. The frequency is so much higher that you can barely feel the difference from crest to crest of each wave. Brian of Rajasthan About 2 miles out from Pushkar, at the edge of the Mela grounds, my camel-wallah helper guy left and said "You will be fine. Just follow them." My camel-wallah, of course, had been so distracted for the last 5 minutes that "them" were my friends as tiny specks way off in the distance. Now I was alone and had to catch up with them. Babu, the bastard, sensed that this was his moment to try and battle for supremacy and finally get his own way. He took off to the right, leaving the path. I kept going, but continued on to the right until we were facing back the way we should have been. He let out his angry, ugly roar in discontent. He tried again, but I dragged him back the right way, holding the reins tight in my hand. We passed by a tree with some low-hanging branches. I reached up to try and drag one off to make a stick for Babu-motivation, and got one just as Babu took off for the side of the road again, this time to start munching on plants. I gave him the 30 seconds I needed to strip the flexible branch of leaves and twigs, then laid into him like I'd seen the camel-wallahs do and yelled "TUT TUT TUT!!" Babu, perhaps out of shock, took off at an actual gallop. We were flying. We were going even faster than I'd gone the previous day with Manu. There I was, a white boy in a turban, alone, riding on a speeding camel across the desert. It must have looked cool (it certainly felt cool), because as I got closer to Pushkar and back in the orbit of normal tourists, they all started pointing and taking my picture. One Germanic-looking lot blinded me so bad with all their flashes that I nearly ran Babu into a hay cart. I eventually slowed him down to a nice trot ("TUT!") when I could see my friends again in the distance. I felt a bit like a conquering hero riding back into Pushkar. People were still taking my picture, Babu was listening to my every command, and I knew where I was going.

"What are you looking for? "Some way to annnounce myself." "Be patient with him God."

I had heard the two-part command to give to get the camels to kneel, then sit down so you can dismount. So, while the other camel-wallahs were taking care of my friends' camels, I said to Babu, "Jay!" He instantly took to his front knees, forcing me to lean back. I yelled the second part, "Jay!" And he sat down all the way with another nasty groan. I hopped off as the other camel-wallahs came over and patted me on the back, smiling. Babu craned his long neck around as we just looked at each other. "You're a bastard, Babu." He roared and turned away, putting his head on the ground. The Tears of Brahma India is good for humility. It's easy to be overwhelmed. It excels at challenging preconceptions. It's capable of making you so depressed, but in those darkest of moments, when your faith in humanity is shaken to the core, something will pop up that's subtly beautiful and inspirational. The holy lake in Pushkar, "the tears of Brahma," as it's called by my version, at night is black and shimmering with ambient light. On our last night there, these pilgrims lit candles in bowls of flowers and leaves and floated them out into the tears. I just thought it was so pretty at the time, but it now seems perfectly emblematic of the Indian experience. Bright lights, floating intrepidly in a lake of darkness, hoping against hope. Inspiration in black shine. I think that's a lesson I've learned here: when I think all hope is lost, it never really is. There's always another candle to light against the darkness. Note: There are tons of pictures up on Flickr. I'm eventually going to do the thumbnail thing with this entry, but not now. Feel free to check all of them out on flickr, comment on them there, etc. Second note: The original posting of this somehow forgot to include my conclusion. Sorry. There it is. Enjoy.