We climbed on their backs and rocked far forward, then abruptly back (enough for whiplash), and suddenly we were up, up–way up! And we began to plod, on silly thrones and in single-camel file, into the Rajasthani desert. Each stride only confirmed my prejudice against these animals: the next thirty-six hours in our long anticipated “India camel safari” were sure to be hellish. I had never imagined the possibility of anything different.
Fraser settled into the rocking rhythm even before we were beyond earshot of the constant racket that makes modern urban India what it is. The outer environs of the city were sadly strewn with trash and garbage, dead carcasses of cows and other less-than-welcoming items. By now Fraser was riding sidesaddle, leaning back on that night’s quilted bedding and reading “Harry Potter” like the Little Rajah that the camel agent soon nicknamed him. I envied his ease. Charlie bobbed up and down with her newly hennaed hair flaming in the early morning sun. For a brief moment, Molly tolerated her turbaned old driver and her camel. Then, a few steps later, her mood changed. “I think I’ve ‘done’ the camel-safari thing,” she said. “Don’t you?”
Onward we rode under a pleasant winter sky, slowly heading forty kilometers westward toward Pakistan. We soon understood a truth about deserts that we should have already learned: the first kilometer is exactly the same as the fortieth or one hundredth, and nothing whatsoever snaps the monotony. There is not even real sand. Just dirt, and bushes that look like they want to die. This may have been desert, but it certainly wasn’t David Lean’s endless waving dunes of sand.
Our camel drivers clearly would have disagreed. Clothed in their dark green turbans, tattered English sports jackets, and those long diaper-like loincloths that Indians call dhotis, they looked picturesque without even trying. They sang lovingly to their camels in the cadence of a trot, and recited poetry extolling their virtues in Rajasthani as they led their animals from the ends of cords that they had threaded through their rubbery nostrils.
My camel habitually stopped at the sight of bright white objects lying in the dirt, hoping to find a bone–perhaps sheep or goat or dog or cow–to crunch on loudly. When he did this it sounded like someone chewing peanut brittle close to your ear with his mouth open. In masticating these remnants, my camel whipped up sheets of slavered foam that the breeze blew back from his smacking lips to the knees of my pants. This was not poetry. It was something that even now I cannot put a name to.
We broke for lunch in the shade of a thorny tree, one of the few in sight. Our lead driver, Irda, whose teeth were stained the color of mahogany, lit a fire of scrub wood in a pit of sand. Meanwhile, we MacPhersons lay on a quilt in the dirt reading “Siddhartha,” “Harry Potter,” “Lord of the Flies,” and “The Constant Gardner,” respectively by me, Fraser, Molly, and Charlie. At the crowning moment we were served a bowl of vegetables in a thick yellow broth, with pancake breads called chapati. My stomach churned almost loud enough to compete with the gurgling guts of the camels nearby.
Back on the trail, we came upon a starving desert village named Boo, where curious and bored youngsters swarmed around us. As the village girls touched and pinched Molly, she likened the experience to the life of movie actress Julia Roberts. “I’d rather be dead than be a celebrity,” she told me. I felt sorry for her. An eleven year old has a right to personal private space, and no obligation to satisfy the curiosity of strangers, no matter how curious they may be. But it seems another verity of India that no one can afford public privacy with so many millions around them competing for the space. She did her best to smile and agreeably answer their questions. We were all tired. Finally, she rose up from the edge of a water well and walked off alone across a bone yard of dead cattle and goats.
Fraser, on the other hand, had something to keep the villagers of Boo at bay–a slingshot he had bought in Zimbabwe. He had perfected his aim so that he could hit a Coke bottle nearly every time at twenty yards. In India he has taken potshots at sacred cows, Indian water buffaloes, and rapscallion monkeys in temples and on hotel grounds. One evening in Jodphur, while staying in a gorgeous maharajah’s summer palace, we went out looking for him in the gloaming; he was blasting fruit bats out of a banyan tree. Whenever he unleashes a stone, young and middle-aged and even some old men invariably get in line to take a shot themselves. They then follow up with earnest advice on how best to take aim and release.
Meanwhile, over by the water hole, Charlie played the technology card with the village women by wowing them with the digital camera. And how she made them laugh when she showed them images of themselves on the camera’s viewing screen. The sight of ten or fifteen women of various ages covering their mouths with their hands to hide their giggles was heartwarming. Charlie chose right.
Our camel agent found a place for the night on a nifty dune, one with eddies and ripples and not too many goat and cow prints or turds. There was a soft breeze blowing and a view of the setting sun, and while one driver set up our tents another started to cook dinner over a fire. The sun dropped as if exhausted into the haze.
Soon it was dark. The stars came out and we squatted cross-legged close to the fire for warmth. An old man appeared from the darkness with a drum that he played while the camel drivers sang and kept rhythm with bones. The drummer was just winding down his repertoire and we were thinking of bed when a group of nomads gathered, carrying a flute and another drum made out of a clay jug. As they started to play, we found the mood, and almost that quickly the safari, and even the camels, turned magical. And we danced to the exotic, beautiful whine of the flute in the fire light, with the cool sand under our naked feet and brilliant stars swarming around our heads like sparks from a fire.
