Holy Towns, part 1 - Ajmer

Ironic that holy towns seem to contain the most unholiness. In India there is an obvious mechanism: they attract visitors (Indian and western), who in turn draw into the town charlatans, gigolos, sellers, scamsters, insistent beggars, and bad cooks. But I prefer to dream that the holiness of a town is the result of a striving, an almost evolutionary competition against the town's special wickedness. The holy exists side by side with the unholy, it even feeds the unholy like a favourite pet - it needs that element of something to castigate, or to do its dirty work. (Actually, this sounds a bit like the caste system of India, the need to have someone to trample on - is that where the verb 'castigate' comes from?). Anyway in Ajmer, having braved shawl and cap and flower sellers pressing around us, we were picked up at the entrance to the Muslim shrine Katya talks about below, and rushed through a series of courtyards by a tall young man with a skull cap, who seemed both helpful and imperious as he ushered us on. I felt it was because he didn't want us to get confused. But he brought us straight up to a man sitting cross-legged outside the main shrine, who opened a register, asked us to write our names, and immediately afterwards for a donation. This done, we were given a quick whisk with his flywhisk over our heads - literally brushed off without further interest.

Still, it was enjoyable hubbub outside the shrine, musicians, drums beating, people some clearly Hindu, pretty much everyone queuing up with offerings, plates of roses and sweets. We got some flowers, but it turned out that you weren't meant to smell them before you went in, because the smell was meant for God, or perhaps the saint? I'd always seen a more austere Islam before, so I wondered if the Hindu practices had bled into Islam here.

Into the dargah itself, this small shrine with doors of silver. A tremendous crush of people moving in all different directions, pushing and shoving. Two men stood behind a rail and took our flowers to pile with the rest on the tomb, other officials hitting people on the back to propel them through the crush if they didn't move on fast enough, a few men prostrating themselves to kiss the shrine, many of the women with frightened uncertain eyes as they were caught up in the melee, forty people milling in a space less than our front room - and then out again the other side, barely a minute for the whole experience.