Pushkar, Aapka Pani Kahaa Hai?

Hello All.

I hope all has been well with you all since we last rapped at one another, or rather I rapped at you and you read about it, but whatever, you know how it goes and again, I hope it goes well. Things flow here like the river, and life washes, studies take up the lions share of my time, and the (true) Indian Summer is bearing down on us with a vengeance. The good news is that the monsoon has broken, and the rains are starting to come in sporadically. When they do arrive, the sigh of relief from the slowly roasting city is almost palpable. Sometimes in the afternoons, we can see the clouds rolling in across the western hills from our seventh-floor windows, and the whole spread of the town slowly goes blueish-grey as the clouds block out the sun, and the dust blows in our open doors and windows and swirls around in the corners of the room. From our high vantage point, nestled as we are in the eaves of our high perch over the city, it is an amazing sight. The rain's arrival also usually drops the temperature by about 10-20 degress, which is an added bonus to the visual panorama.

April and I went to Pushkar last weekend, had some laughs, took in the sights, etc, etc. Pushkar is a tiny little town west of Jaipur by a few hours bus ride. By the time you get there, the land has begun to dissolve into the scratch and dirt of the Thar, and the scrub-brush does a poor job of keeping the dust from just floating about in the air. This overall geographic disposition, coupled with the extreme lack of rain in Rajasthan generally, keeps the smell of dirt constantly in one's nostrils, but (most of the time) it is a good, earthen, clean smell. But Pushkar, right?

We hopped the bus to the holy city here in Jaipur after some terse monetary conversation with a fare-hiking rickshaw driver; to no matter, though, we got to the bus stand only to have our bus run about 3 hours late. So we found a small AC restaurant with some pretty decent dosas and pao bhaji (well, the pao was less decent), and waited around for the bus to get there already. Finally, the bus showed up and we scampered on. For the bus ride from here to Pushkar, roughly the same as a drive from, say, Austin to Houston, the fare ran us 235 rps for the both of us on a nicer AC bus, which converts to about $2 and some change a piece. Nice; prices in India can't be beat unless you're spending Euros over here: the folks from the Continent have it criminally easy in a place like this.

The bus dropped us in Ajmer, the Indian equivalent of a glorified cow-town on the other side of the mountain from Pushkar. For some reason I don't particularly care for Ajmer; there's a strange, chaotic energy to the place that doesn't jive for whatever reason. I went last year to the 1000 year old Dargah (Sufi Shrine) there, and that was quite impressive, but aside from it the town is a dessicated blip on a larger map to more interesting enviorns. Anyhow, we landed in Ajmer at the bus stand right at the evening rush hour and the place went wild, and we were the main attraction. Aliens touched down in a strange land; we might as well have had four arms and been breathing fire. Foreigners are interesting enough to the local populace in a place like this, but foreigners dressed like Indians who can speak some Hindi are cause for collapse of local transportation grids due to extreme rubber-necking--i.e., we get mobbed and stared at a lot. We waited for about 30 minutes or so, and by the time the local bus came clunking into view we had spoken, I'm pretty sure, to every one of the 5000 people in the place at least once, and every last one of them had asked roughly the same questions: "What is your country?", "You know Hindi?", and "You are married?". The secondary part to question #3 is "How many children you are having?", which of course elicits different answers depending on mood; I might start telling people we have 18 kids, just to practice using my numbers in the language.

Oh yeah, the second bus. We took the 7 rupee local bus over the hill, and it was real India in every way. We had to literally push our way onto the crowded bus; it was all din and clomor and heat but we got on and took the ride over, arms and legs and bags and bodies piled onto one another, along for the ride so to speak.

So we took the bus over the mountain, and arrived. Pushkar is considered a holy place in the Hindu cosmology. The tiny town surrounds a small lake, the waters of which are held to be purificatory in nature and divinely created and maintained. Legend has it that Brahma, the four-headed god of the so-called Hindu "trinity" (alongside Vishnu and Shiva), dropped three lotus flowers from heaven, all of which created lakes in otherwise inhospitable places in the western desert-like scrub of North India. There is of course a long list of other noteworthy theological events that have occured there as well, and I think the number of temples and cows in the town far outnumbers people and other building combined. But Pushkar is exactly how I envisioned North India to be before I actually came here. It's small, cramped, dirty and loud, filled to the brim with cows plunked down in the middle of every street and alley, monkeys on every rooftop, camels pulling carts full of turbaned men, religious pilgrims coming and going in a huge procession of color, brahmins perched in the doorways of centuries-old temples with their faces smeared with ash and saffron, and the painted sadhus sitting together on shady street corners smoking hash and begging for change with their silver bowls. Pushkar has it's drawbacks, such as the over-confluence of empty-headed, bhang-guzzling Euro-trash backpackers who walk around like they own the place; hence the glut of places named the "Pink Floyd Guesthouse" and the over-use of bad English slang by the locals. But overall it's a great place, and highly worth visiting. Crazy thing is, that when we arrived, we had no idea that the lake would be drained of water. Turns out, there is some sort of enviornmental clean-up project underway and the lake is being cleaned out from the downside up, and so the main attraction of the town is curently not in service. This makes for rough puja when the lake water is required to consecrate the ceremony. It did make for a lot less tourists though, and I for one was glad for the dearth of human trafic on the normally congested streets.

We arrived in Pushkar late, posted up at our hotel and went to get some food, which was to date the worst meal I've ever eaten in this part of the world. The problem is that we strayed too far into unfamiliar territory, and opted for enchiladas (right?) and mo-mos, which are a veggie dumpling type dish from extreme north-east India, Nepal, Tibet, etc. The enchiladas resembled some sort of stale pizza made out of dirty "bread" and wrapped around oil-slick chunks that used to be vegetables, and the mo-mos were pretty awful as well. I smuggled them out and fed them to some stray cows laying in the street, which is a very auspicious thing to do in Pushkar, so it wasn't a total loss. The next day we did a good bit of shopping and swam in an actual pool, which was too decadent to explain properly unless one has spent time in places like India. We had some adventures, nearly got trampled by a herd of stampeding cattle (literally), and argued with many people over the price of many things. Ah, but the hour grows late. More soon, classes are getting underway, and there's always another story to tell. Stay tuned.