Get to know your camel; Naomi rode Bapu, a beige 9 yr old with a propensity for walking through bushes to brush off the maelstrom of flies that lived in his fur. I rode Simon, a grey 10 yr old who liked to get down in the dunes and kick sand all over his sun-baked body. Both camels were owned by Raju, a peripatetic Rajput, whose weather-beaten face and grey hairs made him look much older than his 26 years. Raju was scouted by an enterprising brahman at the age of ten to become a camel driver. At the the time he was working as a dishwasher for 300 rupees a month. The brahman offered him 500. Since then he learned idiomatic english from thousands of tourists from over 40 countries around the world in what he calls 'camel college'. He even knows the 'Barbie Song'. Still he can't read or write.
Our first stop, providing much needed relief to our burning thighs, was a tiny desert village, home to 40 or 50 Rajputs who make a living from farming. We were greeted by a languorous vision, a woman in a saffire-red sari carrying a brass pot of water on her head on her way back from a nearby well. She offered her image for 'one rupee', lasciviously covered her face with her sari and posed. I gave her a five rupee coin, I didn't have anything smaller. She wanted five more. This seemingly evanescent woman disappeared into the dust and we were soon surrounded by obstreperous children who wanted pens, money, chocolate and curiously to show us their school. We acquiesced to their last request and walked through the adobe-lined streets until we came upon a new sandstone building that seemed to have grown out of the desert like the rest of the town. Cartoonish paintings on the wall depicting school life indicated that this was indeed the school, just as earlier we had seen fading images of various maladies on the wall of the village clinic. The pride that these children had in their new school was immense and hopefully in the future the villagers won't need to rely pictures to distinguish the various buildings in town.
Shortly afterwards we arrived in a much smaller village of harijans (untouchables) who subsisted on sheering sheep and tanning leather. The differences between these two penury villages was remarkable. In this village the children were mostly naked and seemed to be afflicted with red-eye. The saris were faded and frayed, the faces of the women weren't covered in purda and strife was visible everywhere. Nobody asked for money and one child proudly showed us a well-loved plastic Beckham idol that some itinerant traveller had given her. Amongst the very poor, for whom every day is struggle for existence, there seems to be no room for greed. Their humanity was so intense that I felt as if I flew in from another perfidious planet.
After a three hour siesta and a camel-back pilgrimage across barren scrub and heat like something from Cormac McCarthy we arrived in the dunes. Golden sand filled all our senses and orifices for the next 12 hours. After we made camp, drank chai and ate biscuits the sun set in a resplendent slow-motion explosion of heliotropic hues. The spell that the sunset put us under was only broken when the vitreous star-bangled sky unveiled itself over the recumbent dunes. We sat around our campfire listening to the camel drivers sing Bob Marley and Bollywood songs, and tell stories about month-long safaris with a 78 yr old lecher and his 30 yr old wife (nicknamed Vulture by Raju), dipsomaniac Australians and nymphomaniac Italians. Sleep set in and we wrapped ourselves in sand and drifted while an enormous mottled moon asserted dominion over the night.
Our bow-leggedness brought on intense riding pains the next day and I began to understand the difficulties involved in being a cowboy. We were left alone with Raju, Bapu and Simon when the other camel driver took the two food-poisoned french travellers who were with us back early. The day passed by in a myriad of impressions and sights. Wild peacocks, feral dogs and timorous antelope darted behind bushes as our camel bells approached. Curried lunch with a sheep herder under gigantic wind-driven power generators. The last hour of riding was leg and crotch pain mixed with sadness. Fortunately our jeep was late and we spent time recovering in a field with Raju, a young brahman boy on his way home from school and two harijan children who were tending sheep and goats.
Brandon
