Return To The 300 Temples (The Dirty Version)

News story of the day: a study has revealed that prisoners in the jails of Tamil Nadu state almost all gain weight in prison where they are given a balanced and nutritious diet. It's official: living in India is worse than living in an Indian prison.

Quote of the day: "Our cities are the dirtiest in the world. If there is a Nobel Prize for dirt and filth, India would get it." - Jairam Ramesh, Minister of the Environment, my homie.

Moving on from Jodhpur my nexy destination was Bundi, located far away in the corner of Rajasthan. The direct bus was a 10-hour slog and I had little desire to spend an entire day confined within one of these four-wheeled slaughter cans. So, I decided to instead risk dismemberment on two separate 5-hour bus rides over two days. I was to transfer in Ajmer and stay a night again in that fetid hole, where, if you will recall, my most vivid mermories were of lying on a hospital table and receiving a series of unidentified IV's labeled in coded shorthand and languages in other alphabets.

I was somewhat uneasy about returning to Ajmer. I do after all have a stalker who resides there. He has called me several times over the past month, showing that my ice-cold shoulder has done nothing to chill the heat of his passionate pursuit. I therefore studiously avoided my old haunts, which included the only affordable sanitary hotel in town. The result was that I stayed in an overpriced and scum-infested flophouse and navigated the city through a collection of bazaars and back streets that got me comically lost every time I stepped out the door. The hotel was simply atrocious, as they tend to be in Ajmer, charging the price I would usually pay at a respectable guesthouse for a room that did not even have a shower and was graced by only half a coat of paint. The manager was a sour cow of a woman who demanded I pay many spurious charges on my account and clearly was less concerned with earning the hotel money than in making me lose it.

After settling my business in this glorified beetle-hostel and making the necessary inquiries around town for my escape to Bundi, I set off for an afternoon in Pushkar. This of course involved a bus ride over a geological formation known as Snake Mountain, whose winding, switchbacked mountain road seemed custom-built for sending the bus's already questionable crude steel gearshift into morbid throes and convulsions on the uphill, and turning the bus into a careening ten-tonne bobsled on the downhill. Bicyclists swerved off the road at our coming; monkeys scattered down the rocks.

Last time I was in Pushkar I caught only a brief glimpse, in the full swing of its absurd religious festival. I passed through quickly on my way to the epic camel market, not knowing that my dehydrated delirium was but a precursor to my bout with complete biological deconstruction that would render me unable to see the rest of the fair. I do recall that it was a tourist-infested madhouse full of religious loonies, freaks, priests, and esoteric street performers. I expected that this return would see a more tranquil side of Pushkar, a small town in the desery with countless temples, an air of devotion, and joyful groups of pilgrims.

When I got off the bus I was immediately accosted by three drug dealers cackling while they offered me hashish and opium, clearly breaking the cardinal rule of pushing. ("Don't get high on your own supply." Act like you know something.) Though the hordes were gone and the insanity had greatly diminished, I did not find Pushkar a very pleasing place. Though it is said to be the 2nd-most pilgrimed place in the world, beating out Rome and only losing to Mecca, the environment was unquestionably one dominated by the dollars of secular foreign tourists. Though many reverential pilgrims were there, the holy atmosphere was unimpressive. Pushkar, they boast, has over 300 temples. Big. Deal. This isn't like saying a city has 300 churches or mosques. In the Hindu world any town worth naming has at least a couple dozen if not a couple hundred temples for myriad sects and deities. many of the temples ring its "lake", a cavity formerly occupied by a sacred lake. Brahma would have done well not to create the world and convene the universe's deities around a body of water in a place where it routinely goes years without raining. Around this dusty hole are a number of very holy ghats, including the one where Brahma himself bathed, the one where Vishnu incarnated himself as a boar (don't ask me why), and the one where Mahatma Gandhi's ashes were sprinkled after his murder. The temples aren't much to look at, except the Vishnu temple which looks magnificent from outside but won't let you in.

Pushkar has a Brahma temple, one of the only Brahma temples in the entire world because according to legend his pissed-off wife cursed him and decreed that he would never be worshiped anywhere but Pushkar. Strangely, though he is one of the "big three" along with Shiva and Vishnu, pretty much nobody bothers worshiping him that much. Whether this is because there are no Brahma temples around or vice versa is very much a chicken-and-egg question. I went to the Brahma temple - essentially the one and only temple to the creator of the universe - and found it quite mediocre. Hinduism is a very strange, self-admittedly a profoundly disorganized religion that nonetheless seeks to stringently organize the whole of society while leaving its own practice open to an infinite triage of devotional priorities, personal needs, and popular favorites.

Pushkar is a weird place, where donkeys are painted pink, camels are adorned in feathers, and the cows think nothing of outright thuggery, mimicing the priests and saddhus who get up in your face and plead "baaaabuu, baaabu, money for food" as if you can't see their half-clad potbellies jiggling to and fro like those of their bovine co-extortionists.

The most dominant presence in town though are the tourists, not the waddling Americans or the platoons of culturally oblivious retired French people who look like they've just stumbled tank-topped and floppy-hatted out of a baguette shop in Cannes, but legions of equally oblivious backpackers. These throngs of contemporary pseudo-bohemians, found in concentrated colonies throughout India, are catered to by a plethora of merchants dealing in pashmina shawls, Om t-shirts, sloppily-printed baggy trousers, and a slew of other hippie-shit "Indian" goods that no Indian has ever worn but can be traced around the Subcontinent like uranium waste deposits by a Geiger meter upon the bodies of Israeli, Spanish, Chilean, Australian, American, French, and other neo-hippies who've traded patchouli oil for iPods and "environmentally freindly" canteens that they fill with bottled water. Hot spots of this activity such as Pushkar and Delhi's Pahar Ganj are veritable Chernobyls emitting toxic levels of self-absorption from "alternative travelers" who believe that they and their kind alone are truly immersing themselves in India. I good-naturedly but dryly told a group of Israeli girls who looked like extras from a straight-to-DVD Jerry Garcia biopic that if they really wanted to be Indian they should either go all the way and buy saris or just score some sequined jeans and sew randomly-chosen numbers to fake Ed Hardy shirts. They were nonplussed and proceeded to talk amongst themselves in Hebrew for the remainder of dinner.

As they talked a pair of incredibly stoned men straight out of a Hell's Angels rally drove by on monstrous motorcycles with Vishnu tridents affixed to the rear, and for a moment - just for a moment - Pushkar had me impressed.

CORRECTION: The world was not created at Pushkar, it is merely a very sacred creation of Brahma, the Creator, who created the rest of the world elsewhere.

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.