talking lentils

Picture: Sadhu says, these aren't even the fun kinds of drugs! Tourists never give good tips.
Song: things by Dizzie Gillespie
Drink: gin and Whispers of Summer juice

This past weekend I traveled to Pushkar, to the camel mela. Camel sadles, brightly coloured ropes, kitchen knives, these are all the things I remembered of the dusty aisles four years ago. Now the falafel and Israeli signs and oddly shaped pants are encroaching. I needed to buy some blankets for my bed, and they were very amused by the ones I picked; ‘no Ma’am, those are for camels, not for humans’. After being grabbed once too often by skinny Rajastani village boys, I was glad to hide away in a Tibetan restaurant, ordering tofu from a menu printed in Manali. It felt very far away from India, and yet very much the same as restaurants for foreigners from Kanyakumari to Kashmir.

At sunset, the tourists line up like game hunters. Their cameras reach absurd proportions, sprouting off chests and tripods, pointed at the people bathing at the ghats across the lake. Pushkar, at that full moon, is originally a place to pray. I had just finished a book called ‘The Battle For God’, about the origins of fundamentalism, and I wondered at this religious voyeurism. Why were we watching other people pray? Would we ever go somewhere because God said so, and if not, why was it quaint to see other people do so? I wanted to have ceremonies I didn’t have to decide, a time of the year in which to forgive and be forgiven, a time after which it was forbidden to expect fresh peppers.

I had all sorts of plans for what I would do tonight. I was going to change money, make dinner and snacks, translate some Hindi, read, write, etc. etc. Instead I ate my weight in fried potato flour, spilled juice on the floor, and spent an hour and a half looking for a lost document. I wanted to know why the lentils I cook here never taste quite right, and whether I should be worried about the noises coming from the butane cooker. Instead I’m on my second gin and juice, and despairing of my discipline.

Tofu notwithstanding in Pushkar, I was more delighted by the onion pakora I discovered in the lane outside my office, a place with remains a constant source of fried wonders. These days the rickshaw drivers wear their scarves all up around their ears, and the children in the lane have metallic sparkly orange sweaters to ward off the cold. In the Ajmer rail station, I was reminded that men holding their wives purses, anywhere in the world, look pretty much the same.