India day 15 – Pushkar, Rajasthan

The haveli may be in a small back street way from main part of town, but it is opposite a temple and we are beginning to realise that this has its drawbacks particularly at festival time.  Festivals in < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /?>
India seem to get into full swing at night and we are woken in the early hours by deafeningly loud music, a commotion in the street and engines revving.  We find out later that groups of revellers make a circuit of the temples with portable loudspeakers blaring out music with a total disregard for anyone trying to sleep. Apparently there is a  law that prohibits noise after 10 at night but it’s rarely enforced.  Fortunately, tonight the racket is short-lived.

We spend some time researching accommodation for our next stop, Jodhpur and settle on the Singhvi Haveli which is able to accommodate us in their best suite – the Maharani – for 1400 rupees.  So we decide to splash out as it sounds as though it could be something quite special.  We shall be sorry to leave Pushkar, though;  it has been a pleasant and relaxing place to get away from the madness that seems to be India and enjoy a more unhurried pace and relative peace and quiet. 

I’m still not feeling particularly well so we revisit the medical centre and I get a thorough grilling and a physical examination by the doctor who pronounces that I have gastritis and prescribes three lots of medication:  a probiotic, anti-acid and a moss green pill which might be an antibiotic or could be something else.  The consultation and medication costs about the same as a single prescription back in the UK.  I’m now taking five pills a day:  2 vitamin B1s (to deter mosquitos although I’m not sure how effective they are), doxyclyline anti-malaria, a probiotic and and unidentified green tab.   Hopefully I shall start to feel better soon.

We meet Mr Sharma again at 4pm, this time for a guided tour of the town and it’s temples.  Mr Shrama is a Brahmin and therefore knows a thing or two about the Hindu gods and spends a large part of the walk recounting Ganesh came by his elephant head and the story of Brahma and how there came to be 52 ghats in Pushkar.  We visit a number of temples, some of which are private and don’t permit non-Hindus to enter so we can only peer through the gateway, others are tiny hole-in-the wall shrines, some, like Brahma`s temple are more substantial, but all are dilapidated, mildewed and in need of some TLC.  There is a Jain and a Sikh temple in Pushkar but our tour doesn`t include these unfortunately, probably because Mr Sharma is mainly concerned with the Hindu side of things. 

Mr Sharma explains that the government provided 46m rupees to fund a project to dredge the lake but the money ran out before the project could be finished, which explains why the bottom of the lake is currently two distinct levels.  Mr Sharma is clearly irritated by this state of affairs which he puts down to government corruption and the siphoning off of funds into politician’s and contractor’s pockets.  Even more incomprehensible in his view is why the government should have provided money to start a bridge building project in Pushkar rather than provide funds to complete the work on the lake which in his view is far more pressing.  Mr Sharma doesn’t appear to be very enamoured of Indian politics.

At the end of the tour we are invited into his home for a cup of delicious marsala chai and to meet his wife and daughter.  This educated family live in three rundown rooms on the ground floor of their rather unprepossessing guest house and the only furniture in their main living space is a bed and two plastic chairs.  The family recently acquired an attractively patterned tortoise which one of their sons found in the woods and decided to bring home and we are invited to hold it, stroke is and generally admire it.  Their two sons and daughter have all been to college but his sons are experience difficulty finding good jobs and his daughter can`t get a place on a teacher training course because of a quota system that reserves places for low caste Hindus with lower academic achievements.  Mr Sharma is particularly put out by this because he has invested all his available income in educating his children and one of his son`s achieved the highest mark in his exams and still can`t get a government job.  Meanwhile Mr Sharma is so hard up that he had been unable to replace his worn out shoes until we paid him for yesterday`s tour.  What a crazy world we live in.

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