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Location: Jodhpur, North India
Walled, medieval and awash in blue paint, Jodhpur
resembles a town in Mykonos lost in a sea of golden sand.
In it’s meandering, cramped passageways, you come across
turquoise veiled women leading their kohl-eyed children to
the local school, wrinkled saddhus with tridents sitting under
Banyan trees, packs of dogs dozing in the shade, and massive
cows freely wandering about, accepting ‘donations’
from passer-bys who offer them leftover food. The occasional
roaring of motorbikes tearing through the alleys is about
the only indication of the time or date and you feel like
many centuries have vanished.
And high above the town, perched on a cliff, is the Fort,
just one in a string of defences that were built in Rajastan
by the Maharaja’s to protect themselves from attack.
Handprints at the spiked gates were made by all their wives
who committed suicide when their husbands died in battle,
and whole rooms are filled with three meter guns, swords and
daggers. The whole state is rich in feudal history, some bloody,
some amazing, and many of the towns there resemble something
you’ve read in Arabian Nights.
Just as I was thinking what a relief the town was to anywhere
I had been in India, and that the place resembled the safety
and security of a clockwork Swiss village, I heard a strange
rumbling and thumping approaching from up ahead of me in the
alley.
Suddenly four men appeared, all wearing Metallica and Marilyn
Manson t-shirts, running as fast as they could towards me,
shouting and yelling blue murder. One of the pointed at me
and screamed in a British accent, ‘Run man, run! You
with the black shirt, run!!!!’’
And right behind them were four huge irate bulls, running
as fast as they were, their heads bowed and sharp horns ready
to gore.
Looking down at my shirt, I remembered the Swiss man who
I had seen get his chest viciously butted by a massive steer
in Varanasi because he was wearing a black T-shirt.
The alley was too narrow to avoid the enraged bulls, there
were no doorways to hide in or any safe alleys to duck down
into. It was run, or be trampled by the 300 kilo beasts….shoving
my camera into my bag I turned and ran as fast as I could,
joining the four who were now nearly out of breath, and suddenly
the five of us, all dressed in black, eyes widened in acute
fear, were running down the twisting blue painted alleys of
Jodhpur, chased by some of the meanest angriest bulls I had
ever seen, in some sort of Indian Pamplona!
We ran as fast as we could for about 300 meters; dogs howled,
children screamed, and traffic stropped as we flew down the
alley, desperate for somewhere to hide. Fortunately the alley
widened, then split, and we were able to lose the behemoths
by ducking into the courtyard of a large house that doubled
as a restaurant. Panting, and wide eyed with terror, we watched
with relief as the bulls thundered past, no doubt searching
for other prey dressed in black.
‘This place is mad!’ said one of the four.
‘Bloody hell, ripped my jeans,’ said one of the
others.
They turned out to be cousins from the UK, visiting family
in Delhi and who had decided to come to Rajastan without them
to escape the suffocating rules and regulations put upon them
by their distant relatives. Between us there were two scraped
knees, a gashed elbow and a partially twisted ankle. As we
laughed off the experience, an old man shook his fist at us
and yelled, ‘You should never wear black in India!’
before slamming his window shut.
India Lesson #4,502 learned…
After that introduction to Rajastan, camel trekking was next
on my list, and I caught a night train to Jaislmer to start
one. In my compartment traveled a French photographer with
his niece, who happily flipped open his laptop to show me
his latest work, an exhibition on the burning ghats in Varanasi,
featuring revealing, and sometimes gruesome, scenes of peoples
last moments before their bodies were reduced to ash. As we
watched the slide show, a rich Indian man sleeping in the
next row sat up, furiously shoved on his shoes, and pointed
at the Frenchman:
‘I am disturbed!’
‘Yes, you seem to be,’ said the photographer a moment
later with a laugh, looking him up and down, smirking at his
enraged expression.
‘I am BEING disturbed!!!’ shouted the rich man,
his gold chains jangling around his neck. He lunged towards
the photographer, and poked him in the chest.
‘Turn off your machine! I sleep now!’
‘No, we are watching theez show. You can go to sleep
over there, without being, how you say, DISTURBED,’
the Frenchman shouted back, waving the man off with a Parisian
flick of his arms.
This set off the rich man like an open flame to a stick of
dynamite. He pushed closed the laptop, dragged the Frenchman
up to his feet, and began wagging his finger up at him, screaming
in Hindi, while the Frenchman started an irate string of French
swearing, brandishing his laptop like a shield. A pitched
battle ensued, and just as I was imagining filling out a police
report detailing how an Apple Power Book was used as a murder
weapon, along waddled in the conductor, who pushed the men
apart, snatched the rich man and the Frenchman’s tickets,
scrawled new berth numbers on them, banishing them to opposite
ends of the carriage, before killing the lights, sending everyone
to sleep.
In Jaislmer, I left with a couple of Austrians on
a pre-dawn jeep to Philoda, a village 45 kilometers
away, where I was matched up with a petulant, moody camel
named Raj. I was later to find out, Raj was horny as well.
He tried to buck me off immediately.
‘Oh, he don’t like smell, you know, soap,’
explained the guide. ‘No worry, it will be windy soon.’
We then took off, traipsing across sand dunes, walking across
rubbly cliffs, visiting remote water wells where women carried
brass pots on their heads back to their villages, and others
came to chat and exchange gossip. The mood was somber though,
there was a drought on, the monsoons had failed, and widespread
suffering was imminent.
We rested most of the middle part of the day at a dry creek
bed, where we watched peacocks forage for lunch, and hawks
circle the sky.
At sunset, we pitched camp on sand dunes that stretched to
the Pakistani border. When we unrolled our blankets, the guide
started to make strange finger motions with it.
‘Finger puppets?’ asked the unsmiling Austrian
with a hint of Schwarzenegger in his accent.
‘I think he means scorpions,’ I translated.
‘Yes. Scorpions. Cobras. Snakes, Spiders.’ The guide
smiled, and happily stowed away his finger.
What?!!” cried his girlfriend, a Swiss Miss look alike
with shoulder length blonde pigtails.
‘Scorpions. Cobras. Snakes, Spiders,’ he repeated,
making that finger gesture again.
Schwarzenegger and Swiss Miss exchanged pained looks and
began rapid fire exchanges in German that flew right over
the guides head like a hail of bullets.
‘Lets go up on the dunes,’ I ventured, hoping that
might be less of a risky spot to sleep. So the three of us
dragged our stuff to the top of the hill, and made a makeshift
Bedouin tent up there, that without a roof, was perfect for
watching the Milky Way spin and shooting stars streak across
the sky.
At about 3 AM I woke to dead silence. Except for some weird
thumping. Groans. More thumping. Louder groans. Swiss Miss
sat up, her pigtails sticking out sideways Pippi Longstocking-like
in the darkness. Schwarzenegger sat up too, and the pair rattled
off more worried German.
‘Don’t worry,’ came the guide’s voice
out of the darkness. ‘Its Raj, he likes to find new girlfriend.
He will be quiet soon.’
Schwarzenegger and Swiss Miss were unconvinced, and continued
to sit up, listening as the two camels bumped pelvises down
below us. At least their heavy hoofs would scare away the
cobras, spiders, snakes, and scorpions.
The next morning we found our guide cooking breakfast with
eggs that had been left out in the sun in a box that had baked
in the 120 degree heat for over a day. Was he forgetful, or
was he deliberately trying to poison us? Swiss Miss and Schwarzenegger
exchanged machine gun German again, and by the time the food
was ready, we had our story perfectly rehearsed.
‘Sorry, in our country, we don’t eat eggs,’
said Schwarzenegger.
Swiss Miss nodded her head sagely. ‘No eggs.’
The man looked at them strangely. ‘Australia, people
eat eggs. I know.’
‘AUSTRIA! We are not from Australia. Austria,’ growled
Schwarzenegger.
Swiss Miss threw back her pigtails and added,’ Yes, Austria,
no eggs.’ She made the sign of the cross for emphasis.
The guide turned to me, with a disappointed look on his face,
eager for me to eat. I smiled and said, ‘My country,
no eggs, too. Our religion.’
He shrugged and muttered some Hindi under his breath.
Turned out, the guide didn’t eat eggs either, and he
gave up and tossed them to the camels. Even they wouldn’t
touch them. Maybe it was against their religion, too.
(I ran into this couple again in Dharmsala, and told me when
they had gotten back to their hotel in Jaislmer, they had
asked that the vegetarian sandwich they had ordered be warmed
up again, because though toasted, it had been sent to them
stone cold. The staff smiled and took it away, and returned
15 minutes later with it, grilled, grinning broadly as they
watched them dig in. When Swiss Miss got suspicious, she peeled
back the bread and found pulverized cow dung mixed in with
the tomatoes and onions.)
The temperature got hotter as I moved around Rajastan, and
by the time I left Jaislmer, it was 40 degrees in the shade.
My bus to Bikaner was scheduled to leave at 4 PM, but
a breathless man came running to my room and pounded on my
door: the bus was now leaving at 2.30.
It was just past 2.20.
‘How far away is the station?’ I asked calmly, as
though I had been expecting it.
’20 minutes.’
The familiar head shake roll reared its head again and I
threw everything into my bag and hopped into the back of the
jeep that idled outside. By the time I got there, the bus
was pulling away, and the jeep pulled up next to it and the
driver hung out and slapped the side. The driver stopped,
I hopped out, and ran around to the door.
Suddenly Annie Lennox popped her head out of the window,
and screamed in a Swedish accent: ‘Don’t pay for
the bags! Whatever you do, don’t pay for the bags!!!”
Annie withdrew her head and I was left standing in front
of two touts, who with their turbaned heads and gold rings
in their earlobes, looked like extras from Pirates of the
Caribbean. They held the key to the baggage compartment and
shooed Annie’s comments away with their hands, like flies,
hoping for some fat baksheesh. I threw my bag in, refused
to pay them any money, and asked for a receipt. They laughed
ruefully, their stained teeth exposed, and said before spitting
out a torrent of betal nut juice, ‘No guarantee sir!
No guarantee!!’
I jumped on the bus, grateful there was a bus and not a dust
cloud as it tore off towards Bikaner without me, and found
my seat, but it was the one for the 4 PM bus. Turned out Annie
Lennox, her sister, two Dutch travelers and a lone Turk were
also supposed to be on the 4 PM bus as well, and this proved
to be the challenge of the ticket collectors career…
First, he took our white tickets away, and handed us a blue
one with the same seat number written on it. But then, chaos
reigned as passengers for the 2.30 bus began getting on, so
he reissued us with red tickets for the few empty seats remaining
on the bus. He sweated profusely as he furiously scribbled
new tickets, confiscated the old ones, and motioned us with
his fat hairy arms.
When even more people boarded, he threw up his hands, muttered
some hideous Hindi, kicked out the two scragglers sleeping
on the bus’ last row, and ordered all whiteys to the
back. So off the six of us went, filling the back row like
some comic dreadlocks-blonde-redhead police line-up, this
time without tickets at all, where the ticket collector could
keep an eye on us (except for a petite Korean girl who sat
near the front, who the conductor had overlooked; she sat
still and catlike, looking wild eyed with terror, back at
us, as though she were in some Iraqi hostage crisis).
Within 5 seconds the conversation turned towards what it
always did, the can-you-believe-this-is-happening-to-us-in-India-thread
that by now I was getting really tired of. But the mood quickly
changed when a ticket blew out of a woman’s hand, and
the ticket collector bent over to pick it up, revealing a
butt crack as wide as the subcontinent. This brought the house
down, with the Foreign Contingent roaring with laughter, right
along with the last four rows of the bus who had seen the
man’s ass up close and personal, and the mood swung towards
camaraderie and friendliness all the way to Bikaner. Babies
were happily loaned to sit on our laps, the Turk’s dreadlocks
were admired by all, and Annie Lennox’s blonde locks
were the subject of intense scrutiny by some grandmothers
with gnarled hands who tugged at it to see if it was real.
A half an hour outside of Bikaner, sits the Karni Mata
temple, a rodent’s Nirvana, Mecca, and Heaven all
rolled into one. If you’re a rat, and you’ve won
the lottery, this is Beverly Hills, too, and while most rats
around the world are battled with poison, traps, and cats,
these rats are sacred, so special in fact, that eating, or
drinking, any food or water chewed or slurped by the rodent’s
teeth and tongues is deemed to give luck and good health.
As soon as you enter the inner sanctuary of the temple, your
bare feet slide across the marble floor, as dozens and dozens
of scurrying rodents, their mangy tails dragging behind them,
run between your feet.
The entire temple is decked out to pamper and feed these
animals, and large aluminum tubs filled with milk and water
are placed along the walls, where huge wet, matted furred
rodents cling to the edges, their tongues furiously lapping
up the free food and drink. Small holes in the walls lead
to dens and burrows, and fierce fights break out all the time
as the rats wake up and come out to feed. Most of them are
so full of food they lie around unconscious, with women stooping
to kiss the floor where the rat is sleeping, motioning for
their children to do the same.
I hadn’t been at Karni Mata for more than ten minutes,
taking in all these animals, when I nearly dropped my camera:
a violent, involuntary shudder took over me, a massive, unstoppable
attack of the willies.
‘What happens to the dead rats?’ I asked a man
few minutes later when I had recovered a bit of my composure,
there with his wife and two daughters. ‘You know, the
ones that get old and die?”
I imagined some miniature burning ghats somewhere, like in
the Frenchman’s photos from Varanasi, solely for rats,
with tiny funeral pyres and midget garlands draped across
their furry bodies before they were cremated. Maybe there
also saddhus that rolled in the rat’s ashes, like the
ones that rolled in human ashes for enlightenment.
‘Die?” the man asked, his eyes widened. ‘Oh
no sir, these rats don’t die, when they get old, they
disappear in a puff of smoke, and are taken straight to heaven.’
The fact that I had seen several dead rats lying in a corner
didn’t seem to phase him.
’They are sleeping,’ he answered coolly, the subject
closed. ‘After enjoying too much food.’
All around us squirmed, squeaked, and scurried rats that
squeezed through tiny holes in the temple walls to where their
dens were.
‘These rats are very special, very special indeed,’
the man went on.
‘Can you feel the power?’ he slurred, his mouth
now full of betel nut, as we watched his wife bend over to
pet one, revealing generous folds of fat that oozed out of
her sari.
I nodded my head weakly, and resisted an urge to yell out:
a rat had just run over my foot, and I froze to the spot.
‘You are blessed, my good man!’ he said, slapping
my back as I stood as still as a block of marble. ‘You
will be rich!’
On my last day in Rajastan, I went to a museum housed in
the Majaraja’s palace, it was crammed with relics from
the Maharaja’s life: photos of him posed next to his
Cadillac in 1960, having dinner with Jackie Kennedy in Udiapur,
and lots of photos posing next to dead elephants, tigers and
rhinos he had killed.
As I walked around, looking at photos, and cabinets filled
with vintage motorcycle goggles, and business cards filled
in with ‘The Maharaja of Bikaner, and Member of Parliament,’
I got chills up my spine. I looked behind me, but there was
no one there.
Then, I went into Room Number 13, where three carved chairs
faced the deceased Maharaja’s throne. Huge portraits
of the dead man looked at me from three walls. The hairs on
my neck stood on end again, and suddenly one of the windows
slammed shut. Only, there was no wind.
It was time to go.
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Travel Writers: Diary of Daring Dave Pt 3: Pamplona, Rajastan
by Dave Lowe
