Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"Like human body, sar! You have feet and ankles and knees and elbows, all attached, but also all separate. Not true, sar?"

"True," I said.

"God made us this way," Kailash Sahib said, holding the painting in my face. "The painting is like body. It requires—what? Yes, operation! It is normal, sar. And it is rare image. Without crack it would be lakhs of rupees, but this is small money."

After some haggling I bought it, and Kailash Sahib said he would send it to me in a few months.

"You are lucky to find such beautiful painting piece. Please write in visitors' book."

I wrote my name and, We bargained. We both won.

"You are also lucky that today is the first day of Gangaur festival. As you leave here you can see the procession. Go to City Palace, it will be wonderful."

The Gangaur festival celebrates the union of Shiva and Parvati, whose marital bliss is an inspiration to Indian couples and who are also noted for "lovemaking so intense that it shakes the cosmos, and the gods become frightened." This celebration would unfold over eighteen days in this month of Chaitra (March-April). Most Indian festivals were no less noisy and disruptive than any other aspect of Indian life, so it was hard for an alien like me to tell when the pageant actually started or finished. The wonderful part of this one was that cars and trucks had been diverted from the route of the procession, so that the parade flowed uninterrupted past the Palace of the Winds, the ancient observatory, and the lanes and boulevards of the gated city.

Forty elephants, painted with flowers and Hindu symbols in colored chalk, were draped in red banners, silk scarves fluttering from their tusks. There were dancers whose sensual movements and hip thrusts could be seen even through their billowing skirts; a boy on stilts fifteen feet in the air; a band playing Indian oompah music in syncopation with blatting brass; yoked bullocks pulling gun carriages mounted with cannons; and four camels with large-bore guns mounted on their humps. And landaus and painted carriages with flute players inside, and prancing horses, and more elephants and dancers and bands, and at last a palanquin with an image of Parvati ("she who dwells in the mountains") on top.

Onlookers began tossing coins at the image and the bearers of the palanquin, which was a litter ten feet long, two men supporting each of its four enormous handles. The men tried to shield their heads from the shower of coins, and as soon as they moved on there was a scramble for the coins that had bounced off Parvati and the heads of the bearers—another mob scene, adults shoving children aside to snatch at the coins in the road.

That was when I slipped away and began walking with the rest of the dispersing crowd on streets that were free of traffic. It was a pleasant and productive walk. I stopped and drank a Kingfisher beer as the evening coolness descended. And down one wide street I saw a pharmacy and bought vitamins and a bottle of sleeping pills and some more capsules for the gout that occasionally plagued me—total cost, 170 rupees, $4.20. A prescription is seldom necessary in India, where drugs are cheaper than candy.

And after a mile or so a scooter rickshaw swept next to me and said, "Get on, sar. I will take you home."

***

"IT WAS DUSK, and the buildings crammed into the Galta Gorge were darkening. A monkey chattered and leaped to a branch in a banyan tree above Mr. Gopal's head, yanking the branch down and making a punkah's whoosh. We entered the gate and crossed the courtyard to some ruined buildings, with colored frescoes of trees and people on their façades. Some had been raked with indecipherable graffiti and painted over; whole panels had been chiseled away ... On the ornate temple walls, stuck with posters, defaced with chisels, pissed on and scrawled over with huge Devanagri script advertising Jaipur businesses, there was a blue enamel sign, warning visitors in Hindi and English that it was 'forbidden to desecrate, deface, mark or otherwise abuse the walls.' The sign itself had been defaced: the enamel was chipped—it looked partly eaten. Farther along, the cobblestone road became a narrow path and then a steep staircase cut into the rock walls of the gorge. At the top of this was a temple facing a still black pool..."

This paragraph, copied verbatim from The Great Railway Bazaar, doesn't need quotation marks around it because not much at the monkey temple in Galta Gorge had changed in the thirty-three years since I d last seen it. It was larger but just as ruinous, looking ancient: that was the Indian way. Instead of Mr. Gopal, I had Mohan with me. Mohan wanted to show me a miraculous image somehow imprinted in the rock face on a cliffside temple, high above.