Pushkar, Rajastan...dust, desert, camels, saris, and M-80's.

As we walk though the dusty streets, kicking up the dirt beneath our feet, we enter Pushkar, the city of Brahma. A city built around a holy lake, where many Hindus come to bathe and place flowers on the water for Puja, offerings to Brahma for good luck. We aren’t the only ones arriving in Pushkar today. Along with us there are many travelers, Indians, gypsies, beggars, street musicians, vendors and numerous others coming to this holy city for the Dewali celebration. What Dewali is the celebration of, we still don’t really know. What we gleaned after asking several people was the vague understanding that it’s a day when all of Indian people are happy, beyond that no one seemed to really know, but we absolutely found out HOW they celebrated Dewali - with explosives! In the days leading up to Dewali we noticed that there were progressively more and more M-80’s, bottle rockets, thunder bombs and other insanely loud firecrackers going off. We, at first, just figured that these Indian kids just loved to have a good time by blowing things up. Wearing earplugs when walking down the streets was mandatory for preventing the unfortunate misstep of walking passed an M-80 just after it had been lit by a little boy. If you closed your eyes it wouldn’t seem to be a stretch of the imagination to be in a war erupting around you, with machine guns, pistols and hand grenades exploding in every direction. The video might give you a slice of what it was like. But not all the excitement was celebrated with explosives. Sweet shops kept their fires and vats stoked late into the morning hours boiling up small mountains of sugary treats for all to consume during the festivities. Small clay dishes with lit oil wicks sat burning, around every corner, stoop and step. Incense wafted from every miniature shrine, while there were gatherings for prayer in every shop keeper’s store. The whole town took part in the celebrations and I even saw a cow festively stomping on a pile of bang snaps. Dewali, after all was said and done, or rather, all had been lit and exploded, turned out to be a what we were told it would be…a time when all Indian people were happy. I’m still curious to know how many little fingers were lost from that evening's display of haphazard fireworks.
Though there was a constant but erratic rhythm of explosions throughout the days we still managed to find some places away from the noise and chaos. One of those places for me was when I hiked up the small mountain just outside of town to where a temple was built at its peak. I sat on the stone-walled roof of the temple, with the distant sounds of the town below me to the East and the orange and amber glow of the setting sun to the West. I took in the peaceful stillness while I sat,inhaling the soft scent of burning incense from the temple, caught in the arid desert breeze. I used that time to reflect on where we had been for the past 3 months and why we had chosen to set out on this journey. We were on a mission to seek out and collect instruments from these various countries as well as immerse ourselves in the experience of being…being in worlds that were completely foreign to anywhere we had ever been, experiencing new things, and opening our minds to new thoughts. All of these were the pearls of life, which often times were hidden within the hard and unyielding shell of traveling. It was the steep and arduous hikes up mountains which offered us the beauty of an evening sunset, or the long and grueling bus rides which brought us to a desert oasis. The hard work and determination of opening that shell was worth every ounce of energy once our eyes reflected on the shimmer of the pearl inside. In a short while we’ll be returning to the States to pour our experiences into new instruments, new songs and a new album. So in those moments of reflection on the top of the mountain, I was able to lift my head, take another breath before immersing myself once again for the last month of our travels through India and Nepal.