Holy Towns part 2 - Pushkar

That sense of the most serene sacredness alongside chaotic irreverence was even more pronounced in Pushkar - a Hindu holy town this time. A thousand temples around a beautiful lake, with 52 ghats (bathing steps). The buildings white and the palest of blues. One of the most important Brahma temples in India - Brahma temples are very rare, by comparison with the popular cults of Shiva and Vishnu. The lake is said to have come into existence because Brahma dropped a lotus flower, and the impact created the lake. Brahma, waiting for his wife Saraswati for a ritual, got impatient and married Gayatri. Saraswati got her own back, decreeing that Brahma should only be worshipped in Pushkar. And there are two temples on high rocks on either side of the Brahma temple, one dedicated to Saraswati and one to Gayatri, that do indeed seem to glower at each other across the valley. Here's one, I forget which:

I got an immediate sense of going back in time as our car nosed into this place on the first evening, grizzly old men in turbans and flowing robes holding their sticks and standing outside dharamsalas (pilgrimage hostels) as they might have done 1,000 years ago. On the first morning, going in by myself whilst K wrestled with her stomach, I was hoping for that same feeling, but instead got a steady stream of 'sir what are your country? camel safari best in Pushkar' etc, followed by a boy who put a flower in my hand.

'No thanks,' I said.

'Here is for you, holy place Pushkar, you take plower, my blessing.'

'OK,' I said, taking it 'but no money'.

'No sir, take plower, is pree.' He closed my fingers over the orange flower. 'Is for pestival'.

I walked on another half a mile. Every hundred yards or so the same boy seemed to be hanging around. Bizarre considering he didn't have a motorbike, though he must have hopped on someone else's each time without my looking and sped past me. Then I took a turning down to the lake off the main road, and suddenly he was shouting at me, along with several others, 'No sir, this way, this way for pestival'. I declined, and they began to follow me, 'No sir, this way, back here, no lake that way.' I knew this was rubbish. They took their flower, miffed, and went back to the crossroads. Barely thirty seconds later down my road, another boy detached himself from a shop and pressed another 'pree plower for pestival' into my hand. He hassled me to such an extent that I got angry and he and his grubby 'priest' friend with anorak and scarf, standing by the lake, got worried. But after I had stood in the quiet I had asked for for about a minute, they started up at me again and again, until I consented to be led down to the lake, wash my hands in it, break and sprinkle my flower in it, then repeat after the 'priest' the names of forty or so Gods, finishing with 'my family, happy pestival, happy donation'. After which I gave him a piffling 10 rupees, resisted his demands for dollars, and retreated to a pleasant, relaxing cafe where I watched amused over a lassi as he and his friend shouted at each other in frustration.

There were wonderful glimpses of beauty, though, to offset this: watching women worshipping at a banyan tree, building piles of stones with holy red marks on them; being able to sit quietly at the main Brahma Ghat watching bathers; seeing an old sadhu (holy man) cross legged, trimming some coriander leaves in preparation for a meal; feeding a monkey some roses at the Brahma temple, which he took with alacrity, juggling flower from hand to hand to mouth as I gave him three then four roses; walking back through the town and out to our hotel among the bright hills, the warm sun on my back. And later, though sadly I didn't take the camera, I headed off with the driver down a very rocky track to a hidden temple five miles from Pushkar, where peacocks and monkeys walked in the temple grounds, a step-well lay nestled in the rocks, and a huge banyan trailed roots and extra trunks into the ground in fourteen different places. Admittedly, my sense of myself as an intrepid explorer, raised by the complete absence of tourists, and the charming quiet surroundings, dropped when I saw, in the tiny main shrine, behind the old Shiva linga and the majestic cobra placed on it, a plaque which I was surprised to see was in the Roman alphabet. Peering closer, I read that the entire Bhatti family and friends dedicated this plaque on behalf of their temple in Walsall, West Midlands, UK. They had helpfully included their telephone and mobile numbers on the plaque.