The Heat and Dust Project

by Saurav Jha

  I remember that I was at once afraid and free. I found myself stupidly crying on the road. It was a relief that nobody knew me in that neighbourhood. So I sat in the park and old men walked past. Leaves crushed under their feet and a smell of sap rose from the earth. I cried bitterly, in the grip of an exhaustion that was inexplicable.

  Later that night I sent an email to S from my friend Gee’s computer: ‘I am willing to consider the alternative.’

  Saurav

  We have been assigned seats to the right, second row from the front. D scribbles in her notebook. I buy moongphali. Outside, the bus station buzzes with activity. Already our ears seem attuned to the familiar mixed noises: travellers, conductors, salesmen, eccentrics. Among the smells that stream in, the most prominent is a stench of urine. Over the months we will recognize this as the unifying trait of bus stands across the country. There are a few squabbles over the allocation of seats. A balding man in his late forties comes and claims the seat next to me. He waves his ticket at the conductor. He distributes his luggage hurriedly, a canvas bag and a small sturdy suitcase, here and there, and continues to look about his person cagily. As though somebody else might edge him out of his seat. When the bus leaves the depot, he relaxes, wipes his brow with the white gamchha on his shoulder and starts to chat.

  A prosperous farmer, Kailash Chandra Jain grows moong when it rains, and jeera, bajra and makki round the year. On the side he runs a business. He is a supplier of white stone powder. There are many more marble centres in Rajasthan than before, now that groundwater is being exploited in many parts of the state. He has four children: three daughters followed by a son, a formula common enough across India. It is invariably accompanied by the joke that if the parents are fortunate, the son will bring back in dowry whatever was spent on the weddings of the (two, three, four or sometimes even five) daughters that came before. But his eldest daughter, Kailash Chandra adds, as though reading my thoughts, is extremely hoshiyaar. She has just finished school. As a matter of fact, he had come to Jaipur to admit her into a year-long coaching programme that would prepare her for engineering and medical entrances, the PMT. He emphasizes the PMT again and again, a mnemonic for his family’s future plans. This year-long specialized college is an expensive proposition. But things are changing, even in this conservative state. Wouldn’t it be better to spend this money now and let her stand on her own feet than spend it later on dowry, probably over a foolish boy who is not a professional but only depends on the lands of his forefathers and maybe a business or two? This was his wife’s argument. He agreed. How many times can you sell the same land? he asks. But a degree? That’s different.

  When he hears that we are travelling in Rajasthan with no particular map, Kailash Chandra urges us to visit the Nisya Temple at Chand Khedi, one of the oldest pilgrimage sites of Jains, located around 80 kilometres from Kota, where, he claims excitedly, we are sure to witness a real miracle: water trickling out of a magic tumbler round the year. The phenomenon, he says, has intrigued rationalists for many years. He now stands up, swaying as the bus turns sharply, and begins to gather his belongings.

  In a moment, the bus enters Kishangarh, his stop – the old town once famous for the painting style and now booming because of marble trade – and he repeats urgently, this time looking past me to D, who has copied down the words ‘Chand Khedi’ in her yellow notebook: ‘Do note down, madam, there are many miracles connected to this temple. You must tell the public these legends through your writings. Even Aurangzeb tried to destroy the temple in Chand Khedi but failed. It is said, when his troops attacked, an axe damaged the toe of Lord Rishabha’s statue. Immediately, a huge torrent of milk flowed out and the troops were washed away.’ Rishabha or Adinatha is the Godhead of the Jain cult Kailash Chandra belongs to.

  A large number of people disembark at Kishangarh. A bustling swirl of lights and sounds and corncob sellers, after the many miles of darkness. One of the hundreds of towns in India. Some other time this might be our destination. Today, though, Ajmer is 18 kilometres away.

  ‘We must go to Chand Khedi,’ D tells me seriously, stabbing the yellow notebook with her pen, her eyes shining behind the black spectacles. ‘There must be something to that water-dripping-out-of-a-tumbler story.’

  But we don’t; it gets added to the List of Regrets.

  8

  We disembark at the wrong stop near Pushkar and, in our hurry, step right into a muddy patch. It is dark and cold and after the bus leaves, we find ourselves wavering by the highway. The quiet is occasionally broken by the rumble of buses or trucks that go past. Over the weeks, the melancholy of arrivals will become a familiar sensation – the slight stumbling over unfamiliar terrain, eyes trying to adjust to strange faces, the overwhelming feeling of suspicion that will mostly dissipate in the next hour or so, the weight on our shoulders – but now, it’s still a reasonably new uneasiness. Like the melancholy of new love.

  S shines his mobile on the map, trying to make sense of the tiny print in the Lonely Planet guide. (We have exchanged our bags, so at least I am able to breathe.)

  But a few steps ahead there is a tea stall, and when we ask around, locals take us under their wing – the rucksacks, we understand later, are an important marker in hippie-friendly places – and a few men offer to lead the way. Through several dark galis and short cuts, during which I must confess I taste the acrid waves of doubt in my throat many many times though the men are unfailingly polite, we suddenly enter the main street of Pushkar, Sadar Bazaar Road. They are not touts and, in any case, we tell them our room has been booked already. Lights glimmer in houses and store-windows.

  As we inhale the air and look around, there is a sudden spring in our step and our bags have become light. We grin at each other happily, linking fingers. The charm of Pushkar is immediate and affective. The whitewashed latticed houses. Homey restaurants promising Continental and Jewish cuisine, and entertaining spelling. Quirky curio shops displaying wooden jewellery boxes, handmade paper notebooks and silk harem pants. Fat cows rambling past. We wander around in a sort of delirium, admiring everything. We even check out a few other hotels. Just like that.

  Then we find a rickshaw and it quickly takes us to Mayur Guest House where I’d called in the morning. A family-run establishment, it turns out to be a delightful old house, designed and limewashed in the traditional style, nestled in a decent neighbourhood. One part of the main house is sectioned off for guests.

  The considerable charms of Pushkar, however, will always be subservient in my mind to our room. For 250 rupees, we have been given a large clean room with skylights. Attached bath. The walls have a bluish tinge. There are clean white sheets on the bed and two clean white pillows smelling of starch. There is a Jaipuri rajai folded neatly and kept under the pillows. A slim mirror. Bare shelves on the wall. There is a large window with green fluted shutters. The room opens onto a tiny open courtyard with a few rattan chairs. While I knock off my shoes and socks and roll on the bed in hysterical happiness, S returns from signing the register and reports there is both hot water in our attached bath and a small collection of books to borrow.

  Later, however, a photograph will tell me that the memory of the green fluted shutters is a false one, for the room seems to have had, at one end, a regular frosted-glass window, large and curtained. But when I shut my eyes and am in Pushkar again, in the room that spells out the formula for joy (clean sheets, hot water, books to borrow and the promise of blue hills in the distance), I see the window with its green shutters, casting the room in that happy gloom that only shuttered windows can.

  I remember how the night in Pushkar gets cold. After the first flush of sleep, I lay awake, huddling for warmth next to S under that single quilt, imagining the darkness without. There is the occasional lowing of a cow; a random argument in French as footsteps pass by the window; and once, the escalated speeding of a scooter with a faulty silencer. It is like a noisy pebble in a lake, and
it takes several minutes for the effect to wear off, even after stillness has descended again.

  It is the middle of the night and I sit up and look critically at the soles of my feet. I can feel the roots sprouting.

  Saurav

  Pushkar. Afternoon. Brown hill against brilliant blue skies. (I do not know what this peculiar blue is called: renaissance blue is apparently the exact shade but it sounds idiotic in this context. In the course of our journey, I would find the same shade of blue in the underglaze of the few remaining tiles from Samarkand that are studded on the walls of the Jahangir Mahal in Orchha. So we shall settle for Samarkand blue.) The skies are a brilliant Samarkand blue. I cannot remember now if the spire of the temple is visible from below.

  We have a late lunch. Since we won’t have to pay for dinner tonight – we have an invitation to one at our homestay – D stretches the budget airily and eats ravioli swimming in cheese sauce, sitting cross-legged on a cushion. It is a sunny restaurant with blue walls, low tables, and flowers hanging from its windows. And it is full of excited French tourists who have been lured by the promise of blue cheese flown in from Provence. The manager, M, is originally from Tamil Nadu and subsequently from Calcutta. He wears an accent that is neither Tamil nor Calcuttan, and an eager overfamiliarity that a few Indians adopt, particularly in places where mainly foreign tourists come; it leaves a strange taste in the mouth.

  Then we set out. As we begin to leave the village behind, first, stretches of brown-gold sand. Under a banyan tree children play with bricks and a ghastly doll. A forlorn camel is tethered to a cart. A track runs in the middle. Small eddies of fine sand rise as we walk. Low blue hills on the horizon. Our shadows precede us, long blue blurs on the grey road. Finally, Ratnagiri hill – though that’s tautology, like saying Ratna-hill hill – with numbered steps leading up.

  In the beginning I am very enthusiastic. This is exactly the sort of exercise that will make me as fit as I was at eighteen. This is exactly the point of the project, of this new life. A trek a day. I hurry uphill, waving to D as she rambles with her camera. But by the time I am halfway up and the tall bare trees seem an arm’s length away, their pale chiselled trunks spectacular against the sky, I am already winded. The breath comes out ragged. My chest is burning.

  I am worried at who I have become.

  The endless blue surrounding the hill on all sides now plunges into me like ice. In the nature of fear, it pulls along the other components: the jobs that we have given up, the money in the accounts that will no longer be topped off at the beginning of the month. And now this – these ragged breaths. It is too late, the fear booms. I am too far from the natural state; every attempt to return to it is mere pretending, the sort of Pinko fad that we have assured ourselves this is not.

  I shrug off my jacket, I pause and look at the filigreed branches that stretch into the sky. Beyond the green fields punctuated by golden-brown plots of sandy earth, little white boxy houses merge into each other as though made of ticky-tacky.

  A descending tourist stops next to me to rest. He drinks water from his bottle.

  ‘Is better coming down.’ He smiles.

  ‘You bet,’ I reply, allowing myself to be quickly cheered. We fall into conversation. He’s Israeli. A thin young chap, twenty or so. He wears a sleeveless black t-shirt and khaki shorts. Just out of the army, I presume.

  We talk as strangers do. He has just finished his military training back home, he’d been in signals, he says vaguely. We arrived last evening, we are at Mayur Guest House. He’ll leave tomorrow. We’re not sure where we’ll go from here.

  ‘Have a good trip,’ I tell him.

  ‘Enjoy the view,’ he says.

  We shake hands. He leaves. D catches up, smiles at him as he passes her, and begins to lead the way.

  More and more people are climbing down now. Mostly lean foreigners who smile politely and hurry along, absorbed in themselves. For most of them, the landscapes are an interesting setting, remote and appropriate, for their obsessional inner dialogues. Henry David Thoreau had suggested that ‘to be truly free’ one must be surrounded by unfamiliar landscapes and strangers. Some take photographs. But without those cues – we will see later from friends we make along the way – the names and particulars of hills and forts and views, the details, are immaterial. They all merge into a blur. The opposite for me: everything I see is invested with meaning. Everything is a version or a shadow of something I know or have heard and want to interpret better. It is with these that I stage my obsessional dialogues. And then, inevitably, I carry the burden of their meanings and their failures.

  A few local youths with gangly limbs and bright clothes descend nimbly. It is plain they own these hills. The routes are remembered in their bodies. They clamber up and down along the slope. They stare at us freely, yet are surprised when I smile or look their way, and quickly avert their eyes. But the children who run down at great speed like mountain goats are enamoured only of the foreigners. They wave at us half-heartedly but their eyes are on their quarry, and they follow them, shouting out greetings and swear words alternately. After them, old men, in groups of three and four, descend. They are very chatty and tell me they make this trek to the temple every day. They don’t mean to be smug, I know. But they are proud of their lives, of their certainties. That, at their age – one is sixty-eight, one seventy-three – they can still climb up the hill and pay their regards to the goddess in person, every day. It means something to them; they like to talk about it.

  Savitri, whose hill this is, is a redoubtable mother goddess. Polly Parashar, the owner of Mayur Guest House, told us the local version of the legend this morning. The story of the epic estrangement between Brahma and Savitri, his first wife. Later, we acquire a small booklet, Pushkar Guide, authored by the Late Shri Tejulal Nagori, for ten rupees. This gives a colourful account.

  The asura Vajranabha was creating havoc on earth, killing people at will. At least so goes the story from the perspective of devas and men. To deal with him, Brahma threw his lotus in Vajranabha’s direction. In the Puranic version, however, Vajranabha was doing grave tapasya to bring about the destruction of the devas. The ability of the asuras to conduct arduous tapasya was well known and greatly feared. The lotus that Brahma threw (the Puranic version maintains the lotus was not thrown but fell of its own accord) not only destroyed Vajranabha through the sound waves it generated, but it fell at three places, and fresh water sprang from all three spots. The largest and first of these lakes is the Jyeshtha Pushkar, followed by the Madhya Pushkar and the Kanishtha Pushkar.

  Polly also informed us that the word ‘pushkar’ is a composite of pushpa (flower) and kar (hand). Brahma’s hand, that is. After that, naturally, Pushkar became Brahma’s spot.

  In the age of Chakshusha Manu, Brahma appeared on earth and decided to conduct a yajna at Pushkar. One yojana land was earmarked for the rites and rituals. Invitations were issued all round. Indra came with a large contingent of gods and goddesses. Shiva appeared with an entourage of disciples. Brahma requested Vishwakarma to make suitable arrangements for the gods to stay, and asked Kuber, the god of wealth, to provide money and clothes to whoever asked for these. Vishnu was urged to preach good things to all who would gather. Shiva would be required to protect the yajna along with his ganas. And Vayu, the deity of air, was asked to carry forth invitations for the yajna across all three lokas. Brahma himself created the low hills around the site of the yajna to keep the place secure from asuric attacks.

  But it is not the asuras who cause trouble.

  When the sage Pulastya indicates the time is propitious, Brahma sends his son Narada to summon Savitri. It is traditional for man and wife to participate in a yajna together. However, Narada, who is some kind of an Amar Singh character on the divine stage, instead of telling Savitri to come at once, asks her to wait for her friends – Lakshmi, Indrani, Bhavani, as well as a few celestial nymphs. Returning to the
site of the sacrifice, he informs Brahma and Pulastya that Savitri has decided to come later, accompanied by her friends.

  At the site of the yajna, Pulastya is worried that the auspicious moment will pass owing to Savitri’s delay. Finally, he advises Brahma to take another wife and perform the rituals with her. Indra is sent to look for a suitable girl and finds Gayatri, who is, according to some versions, a Gujjar milkmaid. However, when Savitri appears at the site of the yajna and sees Gayatri carrying out the oblations along with Brahma, she is justifiably furious. Shri Tejulal Nagori narrates: ‘Turning to Lord Brahma, she cursed him, you have become old and have lost the thinking faculty. Now I curse you, except at Pushkar, at no other place you will be worshipped … Mother Savitri was so furious that her face turned red black with anger and she appeared as Mother Kali of Kolkatta (West Bengal).’ Afterwards, Savitri left to come to Ratnagiri and meditate here.

  Meanwhile, Gayatri rose to the occasion and redressed the curses as best as she could. For example, Savitri had cursed the celestial nymphs with childlessness. Gayatri simply told them that they would never feel the desire to have children, and so, childlessness would cause no suffering to them at all. Gayatri’s abode on a nearby hill is thus called the Paap Mochani Temple. She told Brahma that though Savitri’s curse could not be revoked, and Brahma would never be widely worshipped, no devotee would get the benefits of the Char Dham pilgrimage unless they also come to Pushkar.

  The winter light is pale when it falls on fields in the distance. From high up, the views are spectacular. The hills again. Browns changing to blues that merge with the horizon. On the other side, though, the edges of the western sky are now curling into a crushed pink dusk. Engulfing the ticky-tacky houses. Unreasonably, I am filled with great hope – about the future, about the journey, about revolutions and transformations. About us. The Jyeshtha Pushkar is visible though it seems dry. Apparently, Tejulal Nagori notes, when Aurangzeb had come to wreak destruction in Pushkar, one of his grandfather Jahangir’s favourite places, he’d washed his face in the waters of one of the lakes. And his face had suddenly aged. Buddha Pushkar, it began to be called: old Pushkar. Aurangzeb with his prematurely aged face had moved on, the story goes, leaving the ghats untouched. It is said that afterwards, he made a land grant to the Parashar Brahmins of Pushkar.