Briefly in Bhuj

BRIEFLY IN BHUJ.

Bhuj was probably doomed from the outset. Out in the Gujarati desert,
just south of the Tropic of Cancer, it had promised less of the cliche
of Rajasthan's Jaisalmer and more of the time when to travel in hope
was not necessarily better than to arrive. It might even have
accommodated that common naivety had not the mere fact of its mention
in the guide book tainted our expectations.

Either way, we blew it. Arriving late one night and at the fourth or
fifth attempt at finding a room, we stumbled finally and resignedly yet
again into the travellers' rest, the westerners' hang-out, the
guesthouse in the bazaar where the only Indians were the ones running
the place. In the courtyard, where travellers would pass hours talking
and reading on scattered wooden chairs, a dreadlocked white Londoner
practised juggling on his way to Japan where, he said, he would juggle
to a fortune for himself and his girlfriend. Waif-like, she looked
lovingly on, but as the clubs bounced around the floor, we feared for
her welfare.

For two days, we tried to walk the streets, fatigued through our own
bad time and energy management, increasingly numbed to townscapes which
should have been an end in themselves. Instead, our minds became set on
the street dogs which, no more common than elsewhere, had finally
broken through our defence of cautious indifference. Fighting noisily
by night and torpid and wounded in the daytime heat, they sought third
party targets in the morning and evening coolness. As their yellowed
eyes picked us increasingly for special menace on sucessive mornings,
we retreated, ill-tempered, to the courtyard even before the regulars'
quorum was complete.

But then came what should have been the breakthrough. Having our
second crack at the brightly painted Swaminarayan Temple, that one
guide book reference which had dented the town's cred as an authentic
backwater, we met a lady from Bombay. With voluble good humour, she
told us all about herself and then, as she, improbably, offered us
Bombay mix, said

"Are you going to the camel racing tomorrow?"

Camel racing, eh?

A Hindustan Ambassador took us north-east through rolling scrub, past
the airbase confronting Pakistan, past bare earth villages with cows
and curling smoke and more dogs, and out towards the Rann of Kachchh
whose salt flats gleamed white in the dry season sun. Here was the
village of Dhrang.

There isn't normally much at Dhrang. Set beside low rocky hills where
the ground levels out towards the salt, its concrete block and mud
brick houses lie off a single track of broken bitumen. It does have a
shrine to a man named Kabir who was buried alive in 1720, voluntarily
it seems, along with ten other men, a woman, an ass and, thoughtfully,
at least one dog. Kabir achieved saintdom for his effort though it
still seemed a lousy deal.

But there we should have scored heavily. For there, apparently
untouched by western travellers, was our own local event to satisfy our
conceit.

Arriving amid a sudden density of trucks and tractors carrying more
people than such terrain had seemed likely to yield, we dismounted
collectively and walked a mile through thinning scrub towards the salt
to join a larger crowd of men clad dhotis and western garb and women in
braided dress of black and green and maroon.

And yet, with the luxury of people apparently glad to see us, we
somehow contrived to miss the point again.

Perhaps it was a mistake of taking things at face value, for as camel
racing, it was brief. After much preamble, half a dozen brightly
decorated beasts walked away to the start to be ridden back at a
swaying, lurching, slow motion gallop, frothing and roaring at the
indignity of it all. And that was it. We waited for more, as if at
Windsor or Kempton. But a single race was it.

Back in the village, stalls sold water melon, balloons, cane sugar
drink, Thumbs Up cola and food from low clay ovens. There was music
from turbanned drummers and pipers and squeeze box players. There was
wrestling where, propelled to the front by people determined to give us
a good view, we saw a bout with the duration of sumo and adjudication
by a chain-smoking committee whose decision signal, like many things
that day, was seen by all except us.

For our timetabled and increasingly wooden mindset had merely switched
from dogs to camels and, the racing over, we were soon back in town,
little the wiser. Our trip was a month rather than the six months or
more of those in the courtyard. They were taking the time which the
subcontinent demanded for its proper absorption; we could only gobble
up and fail to digest. And there, the denial had to end. We weren't
travellers, we were tourists and we might as well have taken a
tour.