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Journalism of Courage
By Soity Banerjee
We were somewhere along the sandy edge of the Indian border, at the bottom of a shifting dune. Unmoored, on a beach without a sea. Our eyes adjusted to the noonday sun and to a vast emptiness held together by a geometry of ripples — as if the wind had run its fingers through the sand. The patterns unbroken, except by the tracks of a beetle, a few thorny shrubs, and four wild Moringa trees. Not Khejri. Or Thor. Or Jaal. But Sehjan or moringa. Trees that had no business being there. Non-natives. Like us. Yet, there we were… Deserted in the middle of a nowhere that was somewhere, and it was beautiful.
Of all the blurred recollections I have of our trip to Barmer a few years ago, I wonder why the moringa trees stand out. Was it their leaves shadow dancing on the sand? The smell of the Thar buttered by a late winter sun? The thrill of being told off by a BSF officer, who said we had strayed too far from his comfort zone? Or, simply, the overwhelming sense that for the first time, in a long, long time, we were truly alone in a crowded world.
Two nights ago, I thought of the Thar again when I met a band of Manganiyar singers at a soiree in Delhi. They reminded me of the moringa trees in the desert. Ill at ease in the city, yet, their voices shadow-dancing over the din of clinking glasses and laughter rippling through the room. When they said they were from Barmer, I asked, “Where in Barmer?” “Near Jaisalmer,” they replied, falling back on an answer that satisfies most people in the city. A couple of beats later though, the penny dropped, and the khartal player piped up to say, “Sheo gaon se aaye hain, baisa” (We’re from the village of Sheo, big sister). Soon enough, we were discussing the merits of the laddoos of Gadra Road, the floating horizons of the redanas or salt pans of Barmer (though we only think of the Rann of Kutch, when we think of salt pans), the orans or sacred groves, and of course, the desert, wide and wild… Jaisalmer was not invoked again. Neither was Jodhpur. For, Barmer had settled into the conversation like warm sand between our toes.
It’s hard to believe that Barmer continues to live in the shadows of Jaisalmer, the golden city of Indian tourism. Even its brief brush with fame — thanks to the discovery of oil fields in the early aughts — hasn’t left a mark on the national imagination, primed as it is by the images of forts and palaces of Rajasthan. With no ‘incredible Indian’ monument to call its own — certainly none that could rival the sonar kella (golden fort) next door — Barmer’s best offering is the Munabao Railway Station on the India-Pakistan border. Or the wood fossil park at Akal with petrified trunks from the Jurassic age of Himalayan chir pine and deodar trees in the middle of the Thar desert!
But Barmer has never aspired to be Jaisalmer. Or to be a best-of-anything-anywhere. And it is in this ‘not-bestness’, really, that it thrives… Here, the roads lead nowhere, but always arrive somewhere. The sky seems larger and wider and bluer than imagination, bursting into a billion stars when the birds go home. And if you arrive, as we did when the cold is slowly leaching away from the bone-coloured dunes, the Roheda (Tecomella undulata) trees set themselves ablaze with yellow-orange blooms. Like fireworks in the sky.
One night as I looked up at the stars — the original fireworks of the firmament, I heard the distant strains of a song. One that began with an ode to the Roheda and its flowers. Turns out, it was a prelude to a prayer by the Bhopa minstrel-priests for Pabuji ki Phad, which is sung all night long. An oral epic tradition from the 14th century, in which a long narrative cloth-painting of medieval legends serves as a makeshift temple for communities like the Rabaris. The painting is brought to life by a retelling of the many adventures of Pabuji, the intrepid traveller-deity, who apparently brought the camels of Rajasthan all the way from Sri Lanka to the village of Kolu nearby, as a wedding gift for his niece!
In a place with no borders between art and life, music and memory, land and sky, you can hardly un-believe a legend about Sri Lankan camels (though there are none) being carted to Rajasthan. It may even put you in mind of Amir Khusrau’s Persian fairytale translated into English (after French and Italian) as The Three Princes of Serendip. A fairytale where the princes go looking for a lost camel in Serendip, the classical Persian name for Sri Lanka! A name that also gifted the English language a most precious word — ‘serendipity’.
When you’re this far west from all things familiar, serendipity seems even more serendipitous somehow. And in the desert, even in the deep winters, can anything be more serendipitous than finding a well? I can’t remember now if we were returning from the village of Chohtan, known for its kataab or appliques handmade by women, or from Girab, where we had the most outstanding haldi ki sabzi and ker-sangri-kumath (no dal, baati or choorma in sight!). But we were somewhere in the middle of nowhere — yet again — when we spotted a fossil water well. The kind that the locals call patali kuan or the well of the netherworld, dug by hand by semi-nomadic shepherds, sometimes seven or eight centuries old!
Assuming it was easy enough to haul water with the help of a wooden pulley, a rope and a skin-bag, we rolled up our sleeves. But it took our party of four several attempts to draw a single bag of water. When we did succeed, a small bell tied to the well tinkled sharply as a reward. But before we could say tintinnabulation, a flock of sheep appeared out of paper thin air to lap the water we had just poured into the vats. Was this serendipity? Or a way of life in the Thar, where sight, sound, smell, and everything else is distilled into the art of finding water? It’s a well of traditional wisdom that our climate-stressed world would do well to drink deeply from. The moringa trees know this. So do the minstrels, beetles, Rohedas, and perhaps, the camels of Serendip.
The writer is a travel and food writer from Delhi
