by Frank Kusy
I was glad to be back in Pushkar. It was a magical place, my second ‘home’ in the world, and I knew I would be returning time and again. I well remembered my first impressions of the place: a small jewel in the navel of India, ablaze with its colourful mix of pilgrims, hippies, merchants, and holy men, its outdoor menagerie of cows, pigs, dogs, and monkeys. The ancient buildings were all whitewashed and flaky, the lake full of leaping carp and small turtles (holy to Brahma), and the winding, sleepy marketplace dotted with browsing backpackers.
The first thing I did on arrival was to see whether Maria had checked in yet. ‘Yes, madam come today,’ said the receptionist at the Pushkar Palace hotel. ‘She is presently in garden.’
She was indeed in the garden, but she was not alone. An animated Rajasthani man on crutches was talking to her. ‘Who is that angry-looking guy?’ I wondered. ‘Hmm…this looks like a private conversation. I’ll leave them alone.’
Going up to my favourite room, no 111, I had a pleasant surprise. A huge heart-shaped ring of bright red rose petals adorned the bed, and a single bloom of fragrant frangipani sat on my pillow. ‘Aw,’ I thought. ‘She loves me.’
How much she loved me became apparent a few minutes later, when Maria appeared. ‘Don’t say a thing,’ she murmured huskily. ‘Just come here and open your present.’
Two hours later, having opened my present quite a few times, I lit a cigarette. ‘So you missed me, then?’ I said with a grin. ‘How was Khuri?’
‘You were right to leave when you did,’ she grinned back. ‘Bhagwan saw the funny side of us getting together, but when Mama found out about it, she threw a blue fit. I had to leave the day after you – she doesn’t approve of sex before marriage!’
As I gazed once more into those big, blue eyes of hers, wondering yet again where all this was going, I also found myself thinking – for some reason – of the strange Indian she had been chatting to in the garden.
‘He’s not your ordinary Indian,’ Maria said when I brought the subject up. ‘He’s different. You should go talk to him.’
So, an hour or so later, having showered and taken some food, I sought out this guy. His name was Ram Narayan, and he certainly was different. ‘I do not want money,’ he said proudly. ‘I just want chance.’
I regarded the hunched, fierce-looking figure before me. Maria had confided that he’d had a bad injection from a doctor when he was a child, and he had contracted polio which had withered both his legs. What chance could I give him?
‘Erm…well, what can you do?’ I cautiously enquired.
‘I can ride camel!’ said Ram, adjusting the bright turban on his head and twirling his long moustachios.
That gave me an idea. Khuri had been great for camel-trekking, but Pushkar – which was far nearer to Delhi and more accessible to foreign tourists – could be even better. The dunes started the minute one walked out of town, and the desert-scapes were more diverse and interesting.
And so ‘Ram’s Desert Experience’, Pushkar’s very first camel-trek company was born. The deal was simple. I bought Ram three camels (total cost $100). In return Ram agreed to take me and my friends for free treks into the desert whenever we hit town. It was the only way he would accept my ‘charity.’
‘You’ve done a good deed there,’ said Maria, giving me a big hug. But I was not so sure. By some karmic quirk, good deeds – like taking on Bernard as a partner, for example – had a habit of coming back and biting me in the bum.
I hoped this one would be different.
*
In between buying Ram his camels, I took Maria for a tour up the single long market street which tracked round the northern end of the holy lake.
‘What do you think of Pushkar, then?’ I asked her. ‘Is it as good as you expected?’
‘Well, it’s like a mini Jaiselmer with a holy lake, isn’t it?’ she smiled in reply. ‘All these mediaeval alleys, quaint old houses, sleepy backstreet temples and shady banyan trees parked with dozy dogs, camels and cows. But then you’ve got the backdrop of stark desert and two towering hilltop temples which make you feel you’re in a quasi-Mediterranean resort. I love it!’
At the bottom of the market, I bought five beautiful mirror embroidered jackets from a barrel-bellied old rogue called Narendas. I would have bought more, but a brief inspection of the rest of his stock revealed that none of the other jackets had pockets. They also appeared to have no collars and no sleeves. ‘Sewing machine not working...broken,’ was Narendas’s excuse, but then, just to tease us, he fished out one coat with sleeves, pockets and a collar. ‘This one has embroidery on backside’, he announced. ‘Backside is expensive!’ Narendas was pleased with his little joke and allowed himself a protracted cackling wheeze. A crimson cavern of teeth blossomed forth as he laughed and a red gob of paan juice was jettisoned into the street. He reminded Maria of a fat pirate, a very fat pirate. ‘How can Narendas be so big,’ she whispered, ‘when he doesn’t eat meat?’ The answer was simple. Narendas did eat meat. He also drank whisky, more than a quart a day. Which probably explained why his coats had no pockets.
Further up the narrow, cobbled market street, we came across a silver guy called Lalit Kumar. Lalit wore a practised look of mourning on his face, and Maria thought he must come from a long line of undertakers. Every time we asked Lalit a price on anything, he looked perplexed, then morose, then downright funereal. He shuffled to the back of his shop, meditated a bit, came back again and said ‘I geeeeve yoouu...’—followed by a price. If we questioned the price, his face screwed up like a prune and he whined ‘Why you make like theeese?’ And every time we tried to leave his shop, he gave us an injured look and produced something new to buy. I felt quite sorry for Lalit, until I realised this tragic act was all part of his sales ploy.
‘I think he’s a con artist,’ commented Maria as we came away from Lalit’s with three times more silver than I could actually afford. ‘No, he’s just an artist,’ I laughed. ‘I can learn a lot from him!’
After lunch, to my great surprise, I chanced across my old friend Dave from Thailand in a tailor’s shop.
‘What are you doing here?’ I said with a chuckle. ‘I thought you’d gone back to Vancouver!’
The ruddy-faced young Canadian grinned. ‘Yeah, well, I got on the plane and saw all the miserable faces staring back at me, and got off again. I rebooked to India and have been hanging out in Pushkar ever since!’
Maria stared at Dave in disbelief. He was wearing a pair of tie-dye underpants on his head.
‘Oh, don’t mind me,’ he said, catching her look. ‘Frank will tell you. I’m a crazy guy.’
‘So what are you doing here?’ I repeated the question.
Dave tipped me a wink. ‘I’m here buying clothing for a friend.’
‘Really?’ I exclaimed, my eyebrows going and staying on hoist. ‘I never had you down as a businessman!’
‘Man, oh man, it’s so easy. I just choose stuff and bundle it up and send it from the post office, and this dude I know back home with a market stall pays me a hundred bucks a week.’
‘Is it really that easy?’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Dave, casually removing his trademark flip flop and whapping a fly. ‘Though I have noticed one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Well, it’s kinda freaky, but as far as most Pushkar people are concerned, you are an alien. In fact, all of us Westerners are aliens. We come from a place that none of them have been to, or are ever likely to go to, and we wander round with an apparently endless supply of rupees to spend. Not only that, but we dress in weirdo hippy clothes, we eat (to them) tasteless crap like pancakes, chips and falafels, and we have completely different bodies, because we prefer to sit in chairs instead of on the ground. We also like to spend time with our own—we huddle together in crowded little cafes or restaurants, and rumour has it that we actually cohabit with each other outside the bounds of matrimony.’
Maria and I exc
hanged a secret smirk. We were remembering Khuri.
‘The most successful Indians,’ continued Dave, ‘are the ones who have learnt to communicate properly with aliens. They know a few words of our language, they have the ability to make strange-looking alien clothing, and they have worked out (even though they totally disagree with) what we like and what we don’t like. That’s why all the rooftop restaurants here with “western-style buffets” do so well, and why tailors travel halfway round India to get people like me Varanasi prayer-shawls which are normally worn by the relatives of dead Hindus. They know you come from a different planet, man, but they just don’t care as long as you give them lots of rupees.’
‘That’s a bit cynical, isn’t it?’ I queried.
‘Not really,’ countered Dave. ‘I mean, take a guy like my tailor here. He’s got his standard 20 words of English, ranging from ‘Yes, please,’ to ‘Order coming, baba,’ and that’s all he needs to make pots of money. Any other Indians who try to intervene while he’s doing a deal are shushed into silence because it is his job to deal with aliens. And he never says anything bad, because aliens are sensitive to being let down. Instead, he just acts out a part, in practised broken English, so that he makes more, not less, money. I mean, you go up to him and say “Why are these silk saree dresses 50 rupees when they were only 40 rupees last week?” and he’ll mumble apologetically “Dresses expensive, please. All other buyer pay, now you pay – okay, baba?” And you know you’ve got no choice because everybody else has made a mint out of his stuff and have come back, like you, to quadruple their order with him. He’s got you over a barrel, but he won’t actually say so, because if he makes you lose face you might fly back to your planet and never come back!’
‘Great theory, Dave,’ I said, scratching my head. ‘Though we aren’t the first Westerners to touch down on Planet India. The first batch of us aliens arrived during the Raj. That’s where standards of speech and dress were first set. Then, 30 years later, the second wave arrived but they were all hippies and freaks heading here for the weed and the beaches. And they spoke foul language and dressed down in saris and local dress, which really confused the Indians. So now they’re the ones dressed in suits and speaking the best Queen’s English, and they only tolerate us because they’re waiting for us to transmogrify back into the first batch of aliens!’
‘Fascinating, ain’t it?’ concluded Dave. ‘And nowhere more true than right here in Pushkar. Just have a look around, man. Aliens have carte blanche to break every commandment in the Pushkar guidebook. They can smoke ganga, they can drink alcohol (okay, only after dark or in their rooms), they can kiss and hold hands in public, and they can take photographs of the holy lake. All these things are forbidden by Hindu law, but aliens have lots of dollars so they can do what they like and all the locals turn a blind eye. That’s why Pushkar is so cool—it’s not like India at all!’
*
To celebrate our reunion, Dave took us for some food at what he called the ‘Techno Café’—the small cafe opposite the post office, where all the donkeys hung out and where bhang (marijuana) lassis went for ten rupees a throw. And hardly had we sat down, than a wedding procession came up the road. It was a typical Rajasthani wedding procession, with the groom up on a horse, lots of colourful ladies dancing around him with pots on their heads, and in the forefront was a band, which took up the whole square. And the band was heading towards the Techno Cafe, which happened to be on a hairpin bend. So we got up for a better look and what did we see? Another band coming the other way! I fished out my camera, thinking to myself ‘This is going to be good!’ And indeed it was, because as the two incredibly loud and incredibly discordant bands rounded the corner, there was a head-on collision, and the whole mass of people involved just ground to a halt for about 15 minutes. Then they kind of worked it out and merged and flowed through each other, with both these bands working overtime trying to be heard over the other one.
Maria liked Dave. He reminded her of her younger brother, who was a stand-up comedian in Sydney. She was particularly entertained when Dave and I began regaling each other with all the amusing hotel and traffic signs we’d seen around India:
Hotel Jai—Be our Cosy Guest tonight, wake up Gay in the morning (Kodaikanal)
International Frunk Phone Service—Dial and Talk Foreign at Once (Jaiselmer)
Hotel Traffic Jam—Veg and non-Veg (Delhi)
Keep a Strict Watch around Yourself! (Darjeeling)
Mocking of Ladies is Punishable (Pushkar)
Five minutes for Tea and Urine (unidentified bus stop)
Hop along in life, or cross the road carefully (Delhi)
Dear Mr Motorist, if you drive like Hell, you will see it soon (Jaipur)
Let Pa drive, Ma sit behind (Madras)
When you approach a corner, get Horny (Simla)
Don’t gossip—let Him drive (Mount Abu)
Darling, do not Nag while I am Driving (Manali)
The last few, I told Maria, were the creation of Public Works Department ‘poets’, who were notoriously sexist. They were also responsible for other warning signs like ‘Family Awaits—Please Oblige’ (a direct appeal to the paternal instinct in every Indian driver) and ‘Beware of Distracting View!’—which had nearly taken my bus off a cliff at Kodaikanal. My driver had been more distracted by the sign than the view.
The following day, leaving Dave to have his nipple pierced in the market, Maria and I prepared to leave Pushkar. As I packed away my stuff, I discovered a tribe of large cockroaches in my sink. They were feeding on – of all things – the residue of last night’s Oraldene mouthwash. I rang for room service and a bearded ruffian appeared with a large broom and battered them all to death on the bathroom floor. ‘That was a bit drastic,’ said Maria, rather horrified. ‘This is India,’ I told her. ‘India invented drastic.’
Both of us were quiet on the night bus to Delhi. Our whirlwind romance was coming to an end, and we knew it. From time to time, Maria looked at me sadly and I gave her a sad look back. We held hands, and imagined an alternate universe where we didn’t live thousands of miles apart, and where we could continue our India dream forever.
At the airport, having torn myself from Maria’s tearful embrace, I faced another difficult hurdle—how to smuggle 28 kilos of silver and handicrafts onto my plane as ‘hand luggage’. There was no way I was going to check it into the main hold. I had heard too many stories of dishonest baggage handlers to risk that. So I shoved it into the X-ray machine at security check and waited for it to come out the other end. But it didn’t. It had become stuck there. Two burly policemen turned up to yank it out, and when they did so, loose bags of silver jewellery flew all over the place. ‘You need all this silver for the plane?’ hissed one of the policemen and fixed me with a predatory grin. I nodded helplessly and waited—anticipating a huge fine or confiscation of our goods—while he went off to consult with his colleague. Finally, he returned and did something quite unexpected. Bending low, with a furtive look on his face, he whispered ‘Give me MONEE!’
Unable to believe my luck, I emptied out my pockets and came up with 47 rupees in small change. It was only £1.50 but he seemed quite happy with that. So happy indeed, that he shook my hand and waved me onto the plane.
Chapter 27
Birth of a Market Trader
The business had a rocky start. For one thing, Bernard had bought a lot of the wrong stuff – the marble chess sets from Agra which had chips in them and which nobody wanted, the silver-plated tea services which were already turning suspiciously rusty, and the so-called ‘gold’ jewellery which had gone a strange green.
I also had a few turkeys from my side. My valuable antique Victorian rupees had been rendered non-valuable by some Indian cowboy ‘cleaning’ them in silver dip, my precious Maria Theresa thaler coins had been declared ‘fake’ when I had them valued at Sotheby’s, and half the stones had fallen out of Lalit Kumar’s ‘first class’ jewellery. As for the he
ro who mucked up my 1000 banyan leaf Christmas cards by writing ‘Happy Critmas!’ inside them, well, he was definitely off my Critmas card list.
The day was saved by the high grade gemstones Fateh helped me choose in Jaipur’s seedy Johari Bazar. ‘Buy my packet! Buy my packet!’ the throng of grimy workers had cried as they clambered over each other to sell me stones they’d smuggled out – down their dhotis or under their armpits – during their lunch breaks. I had no idea what I was doing: all that I knew was that I was having the time of my life. ‘What a buzz!’ I’d shouted to the Colonel. ‘“Spiritual experience” or not, I was born to do this!” And although I hadn’t managed to sell the stones back home in Hatton Garden – they weren’t quite high grade enough – I did manage to move them up in the Jewish Quarter of Sheffield, and made a very handsome profit.
My other saviour was my mother. She totally disapproved of my new vocation – ‘Do you want to be a barrow boy all your life? – but she it was who helped set up my first stall in London’s Martin in the Fields market. She shoved the chess sets and tea services to one side – ‘What’s this tat? They won’t sell! – and promoted the silver jewellery and ‘one offs’ like the beautiful Moghul paintings I’d bought in Udaipur, the equally beautiful batik paintings I’d bought in Solo, and the fantastic picture of a roaring lion which had been painted by a blind artist in Chiang Mai. By the end of my first day, the stall was nearly empty and I returned home to Nicky in high spirits.