Rajastan is the part of India that you see in coloring books.  It’s bright and broadly drawn, immediate and jubilant.  It’s where florid jungle forests cradle castles built above baby blue lakes and men who are mostly mustached dance on endless, fluffy blankets of crème colored desert.  It’s the India with helpful elephants and lonely tiger cubs and monkeys that try to wear your hat.  It is the India you want to curl up and snuggle with.

Before I came here I talked about Rajastan with a friend who grew up there.

“Where are you planning to go?” she asked.

“I’m not planning to go anywhere,” I said. “I’m not going to spend my time being herded through tourist sites, stuck in a Jello mold of mid-western retirees and filthy backpack-”

“That’s not what I meant.  I meant do you have a general idea of what you want to do there?”

“Explore, head out on my own.  Meet people, try new things.  You can’t plan an adventure.”  It occurred to me that I needed to schedule a time to buy an appropriately cavalier-looking hat for my impromptu adventuring. “And the whole place is incredible. The cities are fascinating. The people are wonderful.  It’s this lucid dream world where mystical, magnificent things happen all around you.”

There was a significant delay to my friend’s response, as if my words had to travel a great distance to reach her.  “Yes, we are a magical people.  How exactly did you form this opinion?”

“The Eyewitness guide on India.  It has really pretty pictures.”

“Okay, but its not all like that.  People there are like people anywhere else.  You can’t just barge in there and expect people to be nice to you.”

“You have a shiny white pimple under your nose,” I retorted.

“Have a nice trip.”

And I have had a nice trip.  But like my friend’s face, it’s hard to look at Rajastan and not notice the erupting cluster of white heads scarring its surface.

Pushkar was the worst.  It used to be beautiful.  The city is built over a lake that’s adrift in an ocean of brown mountains somewhere in central Rajastan.  It probably looks like the letter “e” from an airplane. Most of the buildings line the edge of the lake like a fat crescent moon and a large white bridge connects a tip of the city across the lake back to its center.

The buildings look like siblings to each other.  They are all different, but the differences make you notice their similarities more than anything else.  Some are taller or wider than others, but they are all made from the same chubby white stone, have the same soft, flat features (arched empty windows and big square doors) and are all huddled against each other over thin little streets.

Families would come here.  For centuries it has been a quiet Mecca for traveling Hindus. They go here for the Brahma temple.  It’s an especially rare, especially sacred type of temple enshrined somewhere in the glistening city.

To get to the temple a family would start by crossing the lake; the men and boys in suits, the women and girls in saris, walking along the white arches of the bridge with their reflection drizzled up and down the shiny, sugary blue water.  Then they would walk within some shimmering street, watched by its family of buildings as they glided up into the temple.

But this secret paradise did not stay undiscovered for long.  Like the jewels of a hidden treasure, Pushkar’s beauty became a beacon for the world’s backpacking pirates.  And they have done terrible things to that place.

There are two ways to get to it.  You could drive, or there’s a train station at a neighboring city, which is burnt on the jagged crust of a desert adjacent to Pushkar.

Most people take a bus to Pushkar from the train station.  But the station is viciously crowded.  Like most things in India it’s not nearly big enough for the amount of people that pour through it.  It only consists of a long rectangular concrete platform and a ticket booth the size and density of a Port-o-Potty.  The ticket booth is stuck to a corner of the platform opposite the train tracks.  Attached to the booth is a line of stubby metal posts that extend down the back of the platform like vertebrae.  They sift passengers between the train and the street outside.

The street outside of the train station is a street because that’s what it is used for, not because it has any physical characteristics of a street.  It’s not paved. The street, the sidewalk, the storefronts, the alleys, and the flat plains that stretch to the horizon are all part of the same endless slab of scalding red clay. It has no edges or demarcations.  You know you are standing in it when an ox or a car or a camel is yelling at you to get out of the way.  There are no street signs.  Its occupants discuss when to turn, yield or stop through a dialogue of expressive grunts, honks and hisses. You know the bus stop for Pushkar is across from the train station because that’s where the bus is stopped.

When the station is empty, which is most of the time, it bares the details of corrosive neglect. Red silt covers the floor of the platform.  Paint peels from the walls of the sun burnt ticket booth. Scabs of rust calmly consume the thumb shaped metal posts.  The whole station is motionless, pinned in place by a thick breathless heat.

But everything changes when the trains come.

They drown the station.  An incoming train unleashes a deluge of people.  Each lumbers toward the station like swollen balloons.  They sway from their sloshing mass of humanity then burst open the moment they hit the station.  People rush out of the their doors, flood the platform and slam into the gasping metal posts.  The posts part the torrent into boiling, abrasive streams; each one drenches the adjacent road and crashes into the buses bound for Pushkar.

The rush snaps the desert apart.  The street gets clearly stamped out.  The trampling opens its cracked red clay and leaves a sticky brown mud, raised and wet like a sore. It’s also silent.  Any noise is deafened.  The ox and camels and cars know this.  They patently hold their breath while the flood of people pass over them.

The buses gulp up far more people than they can stand.  Each one swells until its windows are thick with limbs and its ceiling is bowed down under a smear of passengers on the roof.  Then they lunge into the brown mountains, desperate to relieve themselves the second they get to Pushkar.

Or at least I assume it’s like that.  I’ve never been there.  I didn’t want to bump into any other white people so I got to Pushkar by hiring a driver instead of taking the train.

I was there last week.  One day I wanted to go see its Brahma temple.  There are a few others in isolated locations in India, but it’s easier to go see the one in Pushkar, so I went there.  I didn’t know its specific location within the city, and after my second cross over the town’s bridge I asked someone how to get to the temple.

“Its right there,” the man motioned.  He was old, but his face seemed older than his body, it looked as overexposed as the city.

“Where?” I shrugged back.

“Right.  There.” He exclaimed with two jabs of his finger.  He was pointing behind him, at the roads leading out from the bridge we were on.  It was where I had just emerged from.

“No it isn’t,” I shook my head at him.

“Yes it is,” his finger insisted.

I did not know how to express that I had already been down those streets and had not seen the temple, so I shrugged again.

He took my hand and began to lead me back to the other side of the bridge.  I was wrong about his body.  It was as dry and brittle as his face.  He walked with the march of a rusted toy soldier.  There were three motions to his steps, each defined by the rigid movement of a single joint.  He ratcheted up his hip, straightened out his knee then fell on his extended foot.  The weight of his steps rang across the tin gears of his body.  I could feel them through his hand.

There were two writhing brown mounds blocking the end of the bridge.  As we approached them the mounds became giant, bristly haired leaches.  When we got closer it turned out they were people.  The hippie couple looked up at me from under their hemp blanket.  They both had the same hair, a globular mess that had assumed the pliability of playdough, and enough of it to make the blanket functionally redundant.  They both had the same clothes, that ill fitting, unwashed poverty camouflage that’s standard issue for hippie entrenchment, (one multicolored striped shirt with neck hole large enough to expose one shoulder, one extra large brown pant extending to the calf and curled on itself at the waist, three bead necklaces of unidentifiable ethnic significance).  One of them had facial hair, so I suppose that was the man.

They frowned at me the way I frown at a fingerprint on my camera lens.  When they saw me holding hands with the old man their faces constricted; their eyes, noses and frowns converged from annoyance to pointed hostility.  The man thrust his open palm at me.  I said “Oh sorry I don’t have any cash on me,” smiling, knowing that he really wanted me to say “Oh sorry I didn’t realize this was yours” while apologetically handing him the old man.

The hand retreated into the blanket.  When the old man walked in front of them they averted their sneers at me long enough to elaborately bow to him. He smiled politely and waited for them to get out of his way.  Neither did. After a moment we walked around the leaches and off the bridge.

Three roads intersected at the end of the bridge.  The old man pulled me towards the one to our left and used my own hand to point at its end.  I looked down the road I was involuntarily gesturing towards.  It softly ascended as it progressed, so that my view of its end was impeded by the advertisements that shackled together the second floors of the cafés and souvenir stores that stretched down either side of the street. There was a slick white banner between every building, pulling them together like wet tendons between hallow bones.

The stores were not well fitted to their buildings, each one expanded malignantly out of every door and window, clogging them with enormous menus and grotesque merchandise.  The juice bar on my right had two pineapples hanging like teardrops beneath its second story window.  The words “LASI” and “INTERNET” were smeared in lipstick hued paint over its doorway.  The banner pulling at the buildings face and lassoing it to the t-shirt shop across the street yelled “Mind Spirit Café! Juice Bar! Continental Food! Internet! Lonely Planet Recommended!”  The man at its counter gave me a professional, eyeless smile and beaconed for me to come inside.

No. No I will not come inside.

I wanted to yell that at him, to scream so loud that every native person in every one of their native countries could hear that I don’t like continental food or Lonely Planet or the Internet and that no part of this cafe appeals to any part of me whatsoever, and that this proud old building, a building that had undoubtedly nurtured generations of families, is not now painted like a trollop, hogtied and weeping, because of me.

I looked toward the old man.  At least he had to know that I thought this was disgusting, that I am nothing like those cowardly hippies and was on his side and that most importantly, none of this was my fault.  But he wasn’t looking at me or the juice bar.  He was squatting, peering down the street, squinting under the advertising banners that blocked my view.  I hunched down next to him and followed his eyes up the street.

And there the temple was, the last in a procession of marrowless buildings, mummified, wrapped under layers of advertising.

“That’s it?” I winced at the old man.

“What are you gonna do?” he shrugged back at me, then rose to his feet and slowly marched into the juice bar.