After a couple of nights in Pushkar it's possible to have a little understanding of how the place works - although probably 'a tiny understanding' would be a better description.
I know that I understand nearly nothing of how India works, but you still see a good deal by watching the world go by. Street life is a fascinating thing and I don't think it could be quite like this anywhere else in the world.
The streets of India remind me a little of Bangkok. You get the street food, the market stalls in every abailable place, the beggars, the dirt. But here (and particularly in Pushkar) there is animal life that is very integrated with the people and how they live.
Dogs roam and sleep in the streets. People finishing food will often put the leftovers down for animals. Funnily enough there is nothing threatening about the dogs (and this from someone who can be paralised with fear by strange mutts) and they seem very chilled out in general. I guess street dogs don't have any territory to defend.
As well as all the wandering sand-coloured dogs, there are wandering cows. Everyone talks about the cows when they come to India. Now it's my turn, but you can't help but notice them, especially. In a Hindu city like Pushkar. I feel particularly close to the cows now, since one nibbled by arm while we were waiting for the driver this morning. They are very docile beasts and even their sharp horns can't make me scared of them. They just cruise through the streets doing their own thing - they graze on rubbish and seem to ingest a good deal of paper, they walk, they dumbly gaze at people and every so often one pops into a temple to maybe performs a puja. No one serms to own them, but everyone has milk and curd and in the early morning people walk along the road with milk pails to collect the day's supply.
If you look up in Pushkar you may also see one of the town's many families of monkeys. Some like to grace the ornate tops of building with their presence while the ones that Darwinism shall not smile upon play on power lines.
Of course as well as dogs and cows and pigs and goats and monkeys and lizards etc, there are also people. And if you want to see heirarchy at work anywhere in the world, then watch an Indian street. At the very bottom of course, you have the beggars. Children, women, disabled men on wheeled wooden platforms. Some of the beggars are also religious men and in an ideal Hindu life you are supposed to eventually give up worldly goods to become poor and holy, although our Rough Guide says that not so many people do, which is understandable. I don't think I could be that good!
Definitely on a level above the beggars are the very small-scale businesspeople: a woman who tired to sell us one of a handful of anklets she had; a street shoe repairer who followed us down the road offering to fix L's boots; shoe polishers; men who seem to own nothing more than a set of scales and will weigh you for 10 rupee; that sort of thing.
If you have some sort of barrow or cart then you are a higher sort of businessman. Many fruit seller and Indian sweetmakers have their own portable stalls and these vary from wooden carts with produce laid out on them to commercial branded icecream carts.
To actually have a brick and mortar shop is something else entirely but of course there are shops and shops. Some, to our eyes, look like sheds and have a very limited range of merchandise. Others are very well laid out, like a jewellery store I went into, which had simply mesmerising displays.
Chain stores are rare where we've been so far. We've seen MacDonalds and KFC and an excrible-looking chain of coffee stores with the logo 'a lot can happen over coffee' (why not over any other beverage, please? Although I suppose this isn't as bad as the billboard we saw in Agra that recommended 'extreme machoism' as a desirable characteristic). Most places we've been in have been family run businesses and very small in terms of physical space, although the neat piles of textiles or drawers of silver-set jewellery in some make them rich in stock.
Of course amongst the small stores are banks and money changers and travel agencies - more than usual I'm sure course because we've been in many tourist places. Pharmacies are called medicine stores and are more dispensaries than pharmacies as we might know them; you order what you want from behind the counter and it is retrieved from the store's dingy recesses.
Amongst the people on the street vehicles will sometimes speed through. In Pushkar motorbikes (nearly always with men on them) growl through the narrow lanes and there are occasional cars. I imagine that the cars with their well-airconditioned looking passengers are from the top level of the social scale . . . But how do I know! Whatever I see is only as an outsider looking in and putting my own spin on things. That's the only way I can describe it.
Most fascinating to me were the processions that seemed to be happening in Pushkar. We followed a fantstic parade that might have been the female half of a wedding party; the brightly saried women carried silver jars of flowers on their heads and a brass band went in front. Later in the evening we saw another band leading a float filled with priests and the statue of some deity. It was quite a spectacle!
Near Pushkar is a Savitri temple on top of a rocky hill. It is an hour climb to the top but well worth it. The views are stunning. It seems an unhospitable landscape with the rocks and the desert-stunted shrubs, but when you climb above you see the patches of green as welland realise that people do coax a living out of the rocks here. We met many monkies on the way up
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