Further Cow Chronicles (email #6)

The good news: I just finished Shantaram. All nine hundred and thirty-two pages of it.

The bad news: I think that the pigeons in our toilet are breeding.

Hello dedicated email readers! (Un?)fortunately for both of us, I have ticked off all other possible procrastination options over writing this email. Some of the more interesting chores included perfecting my very very poor paper airplane making skills, and washing for the first time this week. (No really! They've cut the water back again…)

And now that Shantaram is lamentfully concluded, a novel that is more whale than book, I can recall for you the events of the past fortnight.

You may recall that my last email both started and ended on a sour note – the bombings. I want to clear up that I was wrong about my assumptions of the Kashmiri rebels (turned out to be some fundamentalist faction in Bengal), but the implications have remained the same regardless. Everything has calmed down heaps, but now a new enemy has reared its head in the dying wake of the terrorist attacks… The caste system!!

In the past week, there have been riots all over the state of Rajasthan concerning the treatment of the lower castes. Now, one would assume that the lower castes would want to be seen on the same bar as the higher castes, and would be fighting for their right to equality. Right? Wrong!

In a nutshell (skip this O-non-politically-interested-ones), the lowest caste receives a set amount of reservations for jobs in the public service. This means that if the lower caste only gets a 60% score, but you get 90%, they will be considered for the jobs before you are. At the last elections 3 years ago, the leading party appealed to the second lowest caste, the Gujars, and said that they would also give them these concessions. But it's nearing the next elections, and they still haven't done anything about it! So a bunch of villagers north of here got a little angry last Friday and ended up killing a bunch of policemen… And it's escalated from there.

You would surely think it would be an innate tendency to resist being discriminated against on terms of economical living standards; but this caste actually WANTS to be denominated against… Odd huh?

So what does it mean for us? It keeps us on our toes, that's for sure! Not scary per se, more so just restricting our freedom a bit. There's been buses burnt in town, and they're pulled up train tracks leading to the major cities, so it makes travel hard! Thus, weekend travel has been delayed until DFAT gives us the all clear again. Nice to know that the Australian government IS looking out for us though…

So in the meantime, I can tell you about what may have potentially been my last trip for awhile! And holy cow! (geddit???) It. Was. Amazing. Now I know I say that about just about every place we go to (bar Chittorgarh. don't worry: my mood around sexually-harassing men has turned from rage to sweet sweet sarcasm… it bites and it's satisfying!), but I retract the use of it previously so that it actually hits home hard now.

Pushkar. Pushkar Puskar Pushkar.The start and the end were a little rough around the proverbial edges, but the middle was my idea of perfect. However, as literary devices always have it, it's always the slightly less perfect parts that make the best stories! So I'll start from the bus trip.

Despite having several hundreds of kilometers to travel, not once did I dare to close my eyes to sleep. This was mainly due to the fact that I was terrified that the roof above me would collapse. Minute shards of metal would periodically drift into my lap with the elegance of a rampaging elephant. They emitted from a slit that combined 2 slabs of metal above me, effectively forming the floor to the sleeper carriage above me. I couldn't help but think that that man would soon be painfully awake in my painful lap. I could see the place where the screws once may have been, long forgotten by some nomad architect. I felt tempted to take one of the many adjacent screws that jutted out of the window sill at asymmetrical angles and wind them back in. Good Morning Tetanus. I watched the slit get larger and larger over the course of the trip, likewise drooping closer and closer towards my head. By the end, it was nearly touching the top of the bald man in front of me.

Speaking of this man, I can tell you that he has recently adopted a stray dog; that or one of the feral kids from the surrounding slums. This I can tell from the abundant scratches that covered his land-leathered fingers as they dangled so precariously close to my face. I can also tell you that he had turmeric split pea dahl for lunch that day. Why? Because I could see the dried mustard yellow fragments that fragrantly remained incases beneath his thumb nail. It wasn't ear wax, because I could tell that his ears were immaculate. Tufty, but immaculate.

That and my water bottle choosing poignant moments to relieve itself down my leg, taunting me of the bathroom that I would not see for another 6 and a half hours.

Combined, I was more than happy to get out in the fading sun in a little Muslim town called Ajmer. We intended to come back to Ajmer to have a peek-a-boo at the mosques on our way back, but I'll talk about this later.

A short bus ride through the mountains, and one very long, very dark, very lost walk later, we arrived at what is potentially the cutest little hotel I have ever seen. It was called Seventh Heaven (all hotels are named like that here. We almost chose Pink Floyd's at one stage too). It resembled what would happen if the Maharaja had plonked a Melbourne boutique hotel in the middle of an oasis, and had added hammocks and hanging chairs adorned with tasseled, multicoloured cushions. All for about 4 bucks a night!

This is where the story gets a little boring because for the next 48 hours, nothing horrid enough to incite any cynical or sarcastic commentary happened. Just hour after hour of aimless wandering through dusty antique bazaars, pilfering through colonial watercolour tins, century old watch parts and tribal Ganesh statues from Utter Pradesh. Or taste testing my way down tiny alleyways swarming with both sweet stalls and consequential flies. But perhaps the best was simply sitting in the ghats where Gandhi's ashes were scattered, and just watching. Watching the old men and women bathing, watching the new parents giving their children a Hindu-baptism, watching the slithering fish snap at the hooves of the passing cows, and watching all of the above watching me!

So back to the not-so-nice arse end of the trip! We planned to go back to Ajmer on the Sunday, but due to the riots that I spoke about at the start of the email, all the buses were cancelled. Our initial reaction was "Damn, I wanted to see those mosques!". Then "Wait, don't we need to catch the last train from Ajmer in a few hours?". To "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!! WE'RE GONNA BE STUCK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE RIOT!!!"

And then at this point, we realised that we had a grand total of 257 rupees between the 5 of us. 51 rupees left for 24 hours. That's a little over a dollar. And the ATM in Pushkar was closed due to the riots.

Perfect.

Can you imagine the afternoon that ensued??

I could talk about the 4 hours that followed for yonks, but I'll summarise it instead. We had taken some slum kids out to dinner the night before, and so suddenly their ever-dwelling presence became useful when they found us an off duty taxi guy that would illegally take us inside the city borders. We rationed lunch, and saved a chapatti each, knowing that we wouldn't be eating or drinking any more than what we had on us for at least 14 hours. We rode in silence through the main streets of Ajmer, and it was one of the eeriest experiences I have ever had. Imagine walking down Bourke Street at 3o'clock in the afternoon, and everything being boarded up and completely deserted. Not even pigeons dared to coo.

We made it on the bus and back home, where Meenaji, preempting our chaotic day, had prepared us a late dinner to feast upon. My love for that woman grows and grows with the ebb and flow of this other world.

And that shall be enough for now! I'll leave the more mundane daily activities like school, town and people to the next email; because I may not be doing anything too ground breaking between now and then!

1 month left in Udaipur from today… 2 months I've lived with a community below the poverty line! And I can't imagine any better way to have spent it.

Much love from all of the beauties in Bedla

Xx George