The Fellowship of the Sirloin

It began with an afternoon spent wandering on sand dunes amidst a gathering of 40,000 camels.

It ended two days later on a hard wooden table in an Indian emergency room.

When I say I was amidst a gathering of 40,000 camels, this is exactly what I meant. I was planning to go to Rajasthan soon, but when I got stuck on a downtown Delhi street waiting for a tourist in belly-high shorts, a stupid hat and not one but two Harry Potter books tucked onto his utility belt like a superhero who never grew out of middle school to get his fucking elephant to move out of my way any faster, my mind was set: the Indian beasts of burden, led by the malevolent Cow, have united against me.

An Iron Curtain has fallen across India. The lentil-frying world has been divided into two camps: freedom and tyranny. On one side stands this resolute soldier of justice; on the other, livestock. From its shadowy mountain fortress the Cow directs his wicked armies...the ambling buffalo, the slack-jawed camel, and the heaving bullock...against me. But now we have uncovered the most terrible of the Cow's schemes...from the lost forests of the south he has deployed the mighty elephant against us. Our deflector shields cannot withstand firepower of this magnitude.

There is yet hope...in the desert town of Pushkar lies the lake where Bhrama created the world with the dropping of a lotus flower. It is here that the Cow's power was created, and here it is by casting a filet mignon medallion  into the sacred lake that it may be destroyed. This is a burden that I must carry alone.

Seizing the fortuitous scheduling of the Pushkar Camel Fair, which draws a great number of outsiders to this small town, I resolved to enter undetected and complete my noble quest. Though I was prepared to face innumerable of the Cow's camel pawns in open battle, I was not prepared for the Pushkar Camel Fair.

The Pushkar Camel Fair is in fact two fairs, one a religious festival celebrating the gathering of the Hindu pantheon after the creation of the world, and another held on the dunes outside the town in which a truly astounding number of camels are bought and sold. Whoever is responsible for aligning these two occasions is breakdancing on the fine line between genius and madness. The religious part of the fair is quite literally a freakshow. Of all the many people dressed up as deities and performing various bizarre dances, twirling metal rings and tossing fire around, by far the most unsettling are the young children painted blue from head to toe and trained to do a remarkably creepy impression of Krishna in full regalia. On top of all this, people come from far and wide to display deformed animals, and are somehow confused when one declines to pay for the privilege of holding a cow by the two bloody miniature limbs growing out the top of its spine.

Outside the town, the camel fair itself is a much more straightforward business: there are a shitload of camels. I don't know what to tell you besides that. There's a shitload of camels. 40,000 camels is just too many camels. I did however learn that the best way to deal with an uppity camel is to tie its front ankles to its knees (camel legs have three parts). They will not cease in their attempts at rebellion, but will do so while flailing around clumsily with the finesse of a grounded fish, although a fish which is not graced with a neck has much better reason to be constantly slapping its face in the dirt.

My reconnaisance complete I had some lunch and got back on the bus to Ajmer, where I lurk in preparation for my heroic deeds. This lunch was my undoing.

I soon found myself vomiting profusely, marking the second time in ten days such a fate has befallen me. (for those of you who keep track I am keeping a Scorecard of various statistics I come up with on the side of this blog. This statistic has been added.) Worse still were the other effects of this ailment, which I will leave implied because they are very easily guessed. Suffice to say, after a most fitful sleep I awoke unsure of whether my esophagus and my colon had booked the same hotel room. The profound discomfort of such sickness is made even worse by the fact that, if you will allow me to indulge my inner Victorian, the Indian methods of bathroom hygiene are utterly barbarous and an affront to civilized man. Some civilizations do not adopt the same customs as others. Most pre-Columbian cultures in the Americas did not possess the wheel, a fact that puzzles many. The bathroom customs of ancient Indian society must have somehow been formed without turning a curious eye towards, I don't know, a fucking leaf maybe???

Anyways after a great deal of this unpleasantness for some days confined to my hotel room and paying the local urchins to go buy me mineral water and bananas I mustered the strength to get to a real eatery and have a plate of plain rice. My misery clearly showed, and one very kind fellow offered to take me to his family doctor, who is widely reputed to be the best in Ajmer. When my turn came, the doctor asked me a few simple questions and was prepared to prescribe me some pills when he took my blood pressure, several times to make sure he was not imagining the reading, looked at me with great alarm and had me sent immediately to the hospital by motorbike.

I know this is the camels' doing.

When I got to the hospital, I discovered much to my surprise that hospitals in India do not carry "medical supplies". Instead there are rows of pharmacies across the street, where the sickly or preferably their relatives are expected to go and purchase whatever the hospital says you need. I should have known. Indians love nothing better than the shuttling of slips of paper.  Fortunately my companion stuck  with me through this whole process and I did not have to decipher this inane buearocracy on my own. After various slow shuffles between different doctors and highly critical paper-reading desks, I was finally whisked into a large hall of wailing people where I was deposited on a hard table made of a very special wood that is somehow even more uncomfortable than a second-class train bench and made to lie still for hours into the depths of night while the doctors administered a multitude of injections to various parts of my body and then hooked me up to not one but four IV's and left me to admire the various ways in which the paint was peeling from the ceiling.

All told my adventure in Indian medicine, which included a doctor's visit, 4 IV bags, 8 injections, a 5-day supply of pills, and a night in the emergency room set me back a paltry $18. More advanced treatments seem much harder to come by, as evidenced by the astounding number of paraplegics who crawl about the streets on their hands and asses. Unlike most Indian men, cripples are given the freedom to wear shorts, I guess so that they can show their atrophied legs and verify their begging credentials.

I've been recovering for about a day now. I'm medicated up to my eyeballs and I'm advancing quickly in my understanding of cricket, although I have learned that they deliberately keep multiple sets of rules. India just lost to Australia in a seemingly important game. This is a great distress to Indians, who have good reason to be upset because they somehow lose matches despite being one of the only countries that gives a fuck about cricket, having to rival such powerhouses as New Zealand and Trinidad and Tobago.

Tommorow I'm going to try and see the sights in Ajmer. The day after....Pushkar, I'm coming for you. I've seen your lake. It's a bigass hole with a puddle in it, and your mother's ugly too.  Camels, I'm onto your sorcery, you shan't cast a spell on me again. Cow, your end is nigh.

CORRECTION: The dropping of a lotus flower upon Pushkar did not create the world, only Pushkar. Pushkar's religious significance derives from its uniquely close association with Brahma, and with the conclave of gods that was held there.