Standing on top of a little mountain overlooking Pushkar, I had an expansive view of the little Indian city. There was the holy lake, surrounded by frosty white temples and ghats sloping gently down to the water. There was the dense jumble of low buildings lining the long main street. And on the western edge of town that gives way to desert, there was what appeared to be a flea circus in full swing.
It was actually the world-famous Pushkar Fair: the reason I’d come, and the reason the population of this town of 15,000 in the western province of Rajasthan soars to about 200,000 for a week each fall, when Pushkar gets cooked up into a colorful masala of amusements, commerce, holy rituals, and cultural curiosities.
After a few days of observing the festivities close-up, I welcomed the change of perspective my high perch allowed. A low roar, distant and homogeneous, rose from the crowds below, pierced by occasional religious an-nouncements in garbled Hindi over the loudspeaker. A yellow ferris wheel dominated the fairground, and the brightly colored tops of tents could be seen, but everything was dwarfed by the surrounding hills. And I realized I couldn’t make out any camels.
But I knew from my walkabout the day before that they were down there, congregated in the vast sandy lot next to the fairground that serves as the camp for the itinerant camel traders. They were either standing, tripod-style with their hind legs tethered together, or sitting solidly on their haunches, looking as natural and permanent as a piece of furniture. Some of them were probably emitting borborygmic groans; others, with that indifferent, haughty gaze, quietly observing their human masters chat and boil tea on little gas stoves.
The Pushkar Fair is many things, but for much of the week, the dromedaries (camels of the one-hump variety) dominate. A week in advance, they are brought by the thousands to be traded, and then, when the human masses arrive, they are raced, painted and dressed up like young brides for the camel beauty contest, and made to do a very unnatural dance for the amusement of spectators.
The equine version of the same event, on the other hand, is positively thrilling. As the musicians muster a delirious crash of horns and cymbals, the horses squat on their hind legs, drawn down by the insistent tugs of the wrangler, lower and lower, limbo-style, while stamping their forelegs against the ground as if stepping on hot coals. The horses have a tense, wild look in their eyes—they seem both afraid and possessed, and as they shuffle forward on hind legs gleaming with sweat, the spectacle is seized by a taut suspense. The handlers try hard to coax their horses as far down as possible. One, a skinny old man in an orange turban, even started wriggling around on the ground himself. It worked: he came back out at the end to claim his prize.
The setting for these events, and many others, is the sandy flats of the main fairground, or mela. The street that runs alongside is a teeming bazaar of plastic toys, leather shoes, colorful fabrics, pots and pans, and all types of blades—from simple scythes to ceremonial swords in embellished scabbards. Improvised tea stalls offer milky chai and biscuits. Farther down, toward the camel traders’ camp, are camel accessories: decorative beads, neon plastic flowers, silver brooches. It’s best to take it all in on foot, although you will surely be offered rides on camel-drawn carts.
Milling about are the Western tourists, many of whom stay in the luxury tents of the tourist village. Their numbers are especially dense in the bleachers during the contests and along Pushkar’s main street. This lively artery, running along the north side of the lake, is lined with hotels, noodle stalls, Internet cafés, shops for cameras, leather goods, and CDs, travel agencies, handwritten signs pointing up stairs to rooftop restaurants, and clothing boutiques dealing in trendy items such as sandals, saris, and bejeweled, Indian-style shoulder bags. Entrances to many of the ghats are here, too, for devout Hindus (and even the odd foreigner) who want to descend the steps to the lake for a holy dip.
“Under the public exterior,” the travel writer Pico Iyer has written of India, “there [is] always an unvisited deep vault.” The most public of people in Pushkar is the perennial winner of the mustache competition, a showboating, twinkly-eyed fellow in a red toadstool turban who entertains spectators around town days before his event takes place. His mode of introduction is to remove his headdress (in which he keeps the coiled ends of his whiskers), and then proceed to unwind his mustache. He twirls it, folds it, and stretches it out as far as his arms will spread, sweetly smiling all the while. The tourist cameras flash, the film crews film. If the mustache man senses boredom, he begins to play his nose flutes.
Parts of the fair, though, almost seem to take place behind the scenes. One night, I wandered into a dark sandlot off the main road where a cow-milking competition was quietly proceeding; the squatting contestants methodically tugged on udders as a crescent of spectators looked on. It resembled some sort of solemn ritual more than a contest, until time ran out and the buckets were taken to the scale to be weighed as a murmur of anticipation swept through the crowd. A smattering of tourists were taking photographs in the dim lamplight of the alley, but most likely the winner wasn’t captured in a single frame.
Craig Whitaker recently lived and traveled in India for three months as a freelance writer.
