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published on :
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Once, a lotus petal fell here
MITA KAPUR
It’s time again for
everyone’s favourite sensory overload in Rajasthan
In the mela grounds, I asked a foreigner if I
could sneak a peek at the day’s programme she was reading. She looked me
straight in the eye and said, “Rs5 please.”
A long serpentine
channel teeming with people of all colours, cows, camels, dogs, and
jeeps blaring their horns to be heard over the loudspeaker chants of
“Shri Ram, jai Ram, jai jai Ram”, the main street of Pushkar
seemed to cram in the entire prism of earthly existence. A whole
bazaar, which never seemed to end but kept turning around the corner
into narrower lanes, exuded a sense of eternity. Fitting, because it
was to celebrate Brahma-the God of creation in the Hindu
pantheon-that we had all congregated there. One of the several
legends concerned has it that Brahma’s children were killed by the
demon Vajra Nabha. To exact revenge, Brahma struck him with his
weapon, a lotus flower. The demon died with the impact and the
petals of the lotus drifted down to earth in three places. One of
them was Pushkar (literally, born of a flower), where a lake sprang
into being. Brahma is supposed to have performed a grand yagna
(religious ritual) there on Kartik Purnima
(the full moon day in the Hindu month of Kartik);
till today, thousands flock there to commemorate the event.
Also See Trip Planner (PDF)
Amid this flowing stream
of humanity, the incidence of saffron robes increased as we neared the
Brahma temple. Lost as they were in their frenzied worship, it was
evident that the flies, rotting flowers and fruits, muddy puddles and,
always, the pressing, jostling throb of people didn’t really matter. A
curious crowd had collected around a skeletal sleeping sadhu, half of
whose body dangled over a swing. The local word was that the sadhu had
sworn to keep standing for a year and the support of the swing ensured
he did not collapse even while asleep. Run-ins with other
similarly incomprehensible vows-all manifestations of a feverish will to
submit to a power greater than oneself, even at the cost of ignoring the
basic demands of existence-shook me up. One encounters all kinds of
rites, rituals, belief systems in our country, and Pushkar is so real it
frequently slips into the surreal.
Yet it is not bhakti, that near-untranslatable sense
of spiritual devotion, that we experienced there, but politicking priests.
Religion is a business and worship is categorized. Our pandit took us to the
ghats and told us, “You can choose to do puja worth Rs501, Rs1,001, Rs2,100, and
above, there’s no limit.”
The waters of the Pushkar lake, spread over about 5
sq. km, were green and murky but people plunged into them with a fervour that
surely had its own cleansing properties. As the chanting of pandits and
devotees rose and fell like a symphony, our man dipped a saucer into the lake
and made us sip the water. For that moment, gazing upon 52 ghats-the grateful
gift of wealthy merchants-and the combined devotion of thousands, our concerns
about water quality simply fell away and we sipped and prayed. |
