FURTHER: A TRAVEL BLOG: PUSHKAR CAMEL MELA

Once a year the holy city of Pushkar is the site of a grand mela; the Pushkar Camel Fair. Thousands of people congregate for a combination county fair/animal market. This year the mela coincided with a massive religious convocation as well.

Tramping feet raise swirling clouds of choking dust. People, camels, cows and goats…everyone is going to the fair. Brown skinned women glow in immaculate bright red, orange and yellow saris. Men hawk, spit and smoke as they shuffle along in a loose flowing mass that stretches for miles. Ahead the organic torrent eddies and clusters. Elbowing and pushing the masses pass a narrow entry gate.

The crowd surges forward in anticipation of the excitement that lies within. I pause at the gate to gaze down the long midway lined with booths selling literally everything from soup to nuts. In the distance several spidery ferris wheels tower above the teeming horde below. A caucophony of sound assaults the ears. The concentrated murmur of the crowd becomes a roar. Loudspeakers blare music along with exhortations to buy this or try that. (At least that is what I surmise because not only do I not understand the language, I don’t even know what language(s) is/are being spoken).

Just inside the entrance, a large arena is surrounded by thousands of spectators stacked several deep craning to see exhibitions of horsemanship on the dirt floor below. Small boys climb above the fray, ascending high on the laddered steel support posts of the arena roof above.

Behind the arena are hundreds of tents housing horses and their attendants. There are horses of every size shape and color; some white with crazed blue eyes; others dappled and high strung.

Three men dwarfed by the size of the animal, attempt to lead a large stallion into the back of a small truck. The wild eyes of the horse hold promise that this will be a difficult task. Finally, the horse is coaxed into the truck, tied and driven off, stomping its hooves in fear and frustration on the steel truck bed.

Brightly decorated camels, some with saddles, others pulling carts, push through the throng offering rides to Indian and European tourists alike.

Swaying to and fro with vacant drooling faces the camels seem bored by the whole charade. Touts cry out, “ Camel taxi mister?” We ignore them dodging the plodding feet of the camels as they pass.

Beyond the animal tents the fun zone with dangerous looking carnival rides whip the ever growing crowd into whirls, dips and swirls all the while screaming with delight. The heat of the crowd and the intense mid-day sun begins to overwhelm us. The idea of an ice cold beer in a quiet restaurant becomes a compelling quest but first we must work our way through the throngs to find that cool oasis. We join the mob on the midway to head for the exit, now nearly a half mile away. Passing through the crowd proves an impossible task so we resign ourselves to pushing along in a mob of tens of thousands of people. Disheveled and overheated, we finally gain the exit. Quickly, we dive down a side street to escape the crush.

We wander backstreets navigating by a sense of dead reckoning only to be funneled back into the main market street, now a slow moving mass even denser than the one in the fair. The crowd starts to clump closer and closer as the already narrow road narrows further. Someone in the rear begins to push. I feel the masses around me start to squeeze tighter and tighter. Deb and I are separated by a small current. I yell at her to work to the side and duck into a shop. Unfortunately, she can not move through the crowd and is swept away... out of sight. I jump out of the river of humanity and step up on the raised floor of a shop but I have lost track of her. I plunge back into the river which thankfully opens out into a small square where I find Deborah. We flow along until we come to the entrance of a roof top café. We climb the four flights of stairs and flop down into chairs and have an ice cold beer far above the crowd below.