Flying through Rajasthan

You can get a handle on most countries after a few days but after six weeks in India I am still grabbing straws and left surprised. This is not to say that traveling here is difficult – quite the contrary since the mantra seems to be “anything is possible”. Perhaps you would like to look at several hotels at 2 am when you bus arrives or arrange a continuing bus at a moments notice – and of course, it is not a problem.

I left Gujarat, where I was the only foreigner and camel carts cruised the roads under tree canopies filled with flocks of parakeets, and moved north to Rajasthan, the land of kings. Udaipur was James Bond (Octopussy), Jaisalmer was Arabian Nights, and Pushkar is a dry hippie haven – no meat, no eggs, no alcohol allowed, though the holy men and hippie counterparts ply the streets in prayers and beards long past their chins.

Traveling at night in a sleeper bus allows you a bed perched above the rows of seats. It’s a glassed off capsule with the window open, you are only locked in by a thin black bar from the world below you. There is plenty of time to pass as the desert, and every smell from dead carcass to watering hole comes directly into your nose as you lie there. I find myself, in a land barren of trees, wondering if middle schools still have wood shop and find it easier to imagine then even Cambodia, so far away though much more recent. Highway turns to sand as the dunes progress. A lone shop is open for tea as the family sleeps out front on the benches and beds under the naked light bulb. Small towns and new people join our bus, others leave. An albino boy tries to sell bottled water, horns try to move cows. Through this, you drift in and out of sleep like it is all a dream world created in imagination, not reality, which seems to make it all make more sense. What is India and its billion people scattered through wild lands and baked summer soil? Who are the kings and where have they gone? Is this Arabia, or Asia or does the term Indian sub-continent really express what this is – its own creation that can never fit a tag, label or stereotype but only be named by the sari or smile?