Change In Plans

Pushkar - Rajasthan - India

This post is about our two days and two nights of camping in the desert near Pushkar, Rajasthan.  I will write about attending the Pushkar Camel Festival itself in a later post.

On Friday morning we drove roughly 200 km southwest from Jaipur to Pushkar.  Pushkar is an important pilgrimage destination for Hindus, because it has 400 shrines, including the only shrine to Brahma in all of India.  50 weeks out of the year, Pushkar is a quiet town with about 17,000 residents and a handful of religious visitors.  For 2 weeks in the Hindu month of Kartik (late October/early November) Pushkar hosts the biggest, loudest, most colorful, and dustiest cattle fair in the country.  The fair culminates with thousands of pilgrims converging on the town for a visit to the Brahma shrine and a ritual cleansing in Pushkar Lake.

We stayed in a quiet and orderly tent camp about 3 km from the fairgrounds.  Under the circumstances, the accommodations were very comfortable: twin-size army cots and blankets, mosquito nets, flush toilets, buckets to wash in, and a little outdoor area shaded from the sun.  The neat lines of khaki tents, with a large mess tent and dusty parade ground at one end gave a vaguely military feel to the camp.

The social dynamic in the camp was great: a little like being in a European youth hostel at age 19, but with much older people and less hooking up.  We befriended a couple in the tent across from ours.  He is the Chief Medical Officer for the U.S. Embassy in Delhi, and they had a 19-month-old girl who Tallulah adored. I spent an hour talking to two Canadian couples in their 70s, who had traveled to India together ten years earlier, and were making a return visit.  Two of the four had spent much of their childhoods here.  We found we had a scad of mutual friends with an Indian-American couple and their young daughter.  They had recently moved from New York to Singapore.  Overall, it was a remarkably open and friendly environment, so transient and so far off the beaten path that normal social strictures did not apply.  

On Friday afternoon we walked around the town, through the tourist-markets, down to the lake, and eventually to the famous Brahma shrine.   

The market streets were jammed with people, selling, hustling, shopping, and just hanging around.  An armless beggar followed us for several minutes, which I found unsettling.  Apparently the market is virtually empty for most of the year.  The shops open only for the festival weeks, and maybe for a few weeks after.  I was reminded of the short-term commercial intensity of the boardwalk towns in southern Maine, where the season is from mid-July to Labor Day.  Instead of fried dough, the air smelled of charcoal fires and people.

From the market, we walked down to Lake Pushkar, which was somehow very calming, despite also being thronged with people.  There are 52 sets of steps, all around the lake, leading down to the water.  Apparently each set of steps is used by different jatis, or sub-castes, of Hindus, as they make their way for the spiritual cleansing.  Strange set-up.  We were told that it gets very crowded in the last days of the camel festival, culminating on the night of the full moon, with many thousands of people in the water.  After bathing, the pilgrims float atonement candles on paper boats out into the center of the lake from all sides.  It must be an amazing sight.

Finally, we walked up to the bright-orange Brahma shrine.  We had to take our shoes off on the street, and walk the last 50 grimy yards to the temple in our bare feet.  Loudspeakers were blaring instructions to the pilgrims in Hindi, and dozens of police officers herded the masses through metal detectors and up the stairs.  Monkeys clambered overhead, and everywhere we were pushed gently along by the crowd. 

One of my favorite all-time Zola moments came when India (the person) made a reference to her mother, who is very neat and particular about germs.  India said, “Wow! Gramae would be having a heart attack right about now!”

Zola responded, “Mom, you don’t understand.  I’m having a heart attack right about now!”

We glimpsed the shrine, rang its bell, and threw flowers, before being swept away by the crowd and deposited back on the street.