The Sounds of Pushkar

As we've heard before, and were reminded last night at dinner by a 40-year-old single Irish man hooked on monologues, "India is an assault on the senses." The cliche speaks of all five senses (or a sixth, if you have it), but it means different things for different senses.



In the case of sight, you witness the beauty of temples and the ugliness of poverty. Smell can be a friend or an enemy, depending on whether you're near an incense shop or a sewer, and touch is usually stimulated by crowds of people shoving through the door of a bus, or crawling into your de-upholstered seat via the windows. No point talking about taste: can food really be too delicious?



Unfortunately, as we've been reminded in the early hours of this morning in Pushkar, in the case of hearing, the "assault" is an all-out war on your ears.



We might as well have been under attack these past few days, with locals marking the holiday of Diwali with no less than a full arsenal of fireworks. In Jaipur, we experienced what must have been a hand grenade from a range of no more than 3 meters, giving us a warm blast of air on our cheeks and a musical ringing in the ears, and giving the local kids throwing the fireworks no end of amusement. Deafen the foreigners -- hah hah.



This morning, as their explosions on the ghats below our window bounced off the buildings and mountains across the holy lake, the fireworks sounded a bit more like the roar of jet fighters speeding momentarily over the city. Good thing I was already awake at ten 'till six.



And why was I awake so early? Turns out that bomb-wielding boys aren't the only ones who have something to say, and said loudly at that.



At sometime between being soundly asleep, dreaming of over-aggressive touts, and being awake at 3:30 AM, the dogs (those dogs being all the dogs in Pushkar, I'm pretty sure) started barking. Our room was particularly close to the yowl of a hound dog, or the Indian equivalent.



The dogs finished their conversation in about twenty minutes, giving me another hour of sleep until my visions of sugarplums danced in step to the drums and singing of a spirited reveille in Hindi, blasted over loudspeakers from across the lake.



Let me take step back and tell you a little about Pushkar. The desert town of 20,000 presumably sleepless inhabitants surrounds the holy lake of Pushkaraj Maharaj, the "Pushkar King of Kings," and one of the holiest sites in all of India. While pilgrims visit the lake throughout the year, the full moon of November endows the lake with soul-cleansing properties, drawing busloads of visitors to its banks. It's not a big lake, so at 400 meters in diameter, the town gets crowded quickly.



We're not even in town for the cleansing. The other big event in town, more important as an economic phenomenon than a spiritual one, is the largest camel market in the world, which converges on Pushkar at the same time as the pilgrims, increasing the population of the town to around 200,000 (or two lakh), not including livestock.



The town is built for 20,000, the place is now bursting at the seams, and our sound-insulation deficient room is simultaneously 10 meters from the water and 20 from the main market street.



Back to this morning. While we have previously experienced the pre-dawn calls of imams calling Muslims to prayer in a amplified drone or wavering song from across town, we had gotten used to shoving in our ear plugs and being done with the whole thing. Today, with nothing but loosely-spaced boards between the loudspeakers of the Hindi temple across the water and our heads, our feeble attempts at sleeping were time wasted. Half of the problem was the noise, and the other half was that I was worked up in frustration over the fact that people could crank up their music so early in the morning. What did these people do before amplification?



As if to answer my question, a small parade of cymbal-crashing, hand-clapping and drum-thumping crossed the marble tiles below the hotel's balcony. Worship, I suppose, takes priority over sleep when you're in one of Billboard's top-ten holy towns.



By the time we'd given up on sleep completely and started to enjoy the sounds of morning, our sense of ease vaporized along with the gunpowder in the fireworks. Two more temple loudspeakers began blasting their own discordant songs, and another speaker projected mumbled wisdom in Hindi. Nature joined in, with flocks of birds chattering overhead, and the crickets did what they could to out-chirp them. I'm sure that the fish in the lake, plentiful in an all-vegetarian town, were swimming as loudly as possible.



Perhaps it's most galling in the morning, but the blasts of noise continue all day long. On the roads, the horns seem to honk just to justify themselves. (Motorcycles usually honk in a polyphonic tone, playing what seems appropriate to their size, "It's a Small World After All.") Whenever the power dies, perhaps five to ten times a day, generators spurt to life on roofs and alleys around town. And whenever we step from our hotel onto the tourist-infested streets stretching both ways from our door, it's only moments before we're assaulted by the calls of shopkeepers, children, and pilgrims hungry for our attention.



It's no wonder that Indians tend to speak so loudly. After a few years of this, how could you not go deaf?