There's no such thing as a free blessing
I hadn’t expected to be charged for the blessing. It was November 2013, the Hindu lunar month of Kartika Purnima, and the annual Pushkar Camel Fair had just begun. I’d hitched a lift to Pushkar from Jaipur with my friend, Hemant, passing along the way caravans of camels loping through the Rajasthani desert towards a setting sun. This was a postcard that told of incense and oases and marigolds and romance.
If I’d arrived by plane, or by hot air balloon – a method of transport that landed two tourists in prison, quite literally, when their balloon veered off course and into the grounds of a high security jail during this year’s festival – I would have been enchanted by the scene below: camels marching upon the city like armies of ants; the city rising from a camel-coloured, camel-teeming landscape; the landscape cradling at its centre a jade-coloured pool, the sacred Pushkar Lake; the lake bobbing with Hindu devotees – less numerous than camels but themselves inestimable in number – who had come here during Kartika Purnima to wash away their sins.
But I entered the city at street level, where romance can soon wear thin. Mounds of rubbish rose from the streets, providing sustenance for the emaciated cows and stray dogs and fat pigs nosing greedily through them. Shopkeepers chased ragged children, and the children in turn chased tourists, offering guided walks in exchange for rupees. Gypsies promised dances and henna tattoos for exorbitant fees and thieving langur monkeys bided their time on shop awnings.
Out on the fairground, stables and kitchens and shops were being erected from corrugated iron. Sleek thoroughbred horses were settling into their make-shift quarters and the animals for which this fair is named – India’s ubiquitous camel – were arriving en masse, on foot ahead of orange-turbaned masters, by truck from states too far off to permit a journey by foot.
I stood behind an ancient, rusted truck bearing two camels. It had come to a halt beside one of the many mounds of soil piled hereabouts by itinerant Pushkari labourers; the improvised platforms would ease disembarkation for the flimsy-limbed animals. The camels were tethered in place by ropes attached to their nose pegs. One camel’s nose peg had become subsumed within the bloody mass that now existed where the rope and peg had gnawed through his skin. I wondered how long his painful journey in a wheezing