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The Children of Pushkar
text & photo by Ayelet Tsabari

Excerpts:

      I reached Pushkar one early morning after a long train ride through the desert. As the landscape became dryer, new passengers entered the train — men with bright turbans and long moustaches, women in red skirts embroidered with little mirrors or thin desert saris in bright orange, yellow or peach.
       A little holy town in Eastern Rajasthan, Pushkar clings to the shores of a lake. It is home to beautiful Hindu temples that attract pilgrims and backpackers from all over the world. Rajasthan is the India of postcards, full of romance and magic, palaces and forts, beautiful oases and mythic tales of Rajputi warriors.
       I’d visited Pushkar once before and found it wasn’t quite the remote, untouched oasis I expected. I thought it too touristy, too greedy, too commercialized. I came back because returning to a place can be like visiting it for the first time. Things had changed. I had changed.
       It was the beginning of a warm December day. The narrow alleys had been swept and the white houses blushed in the morning sun. The shopkeepers set their merchandise on tables, sipping chai from little cups. The surrounding desert is not visible from the village center, but the morning wind carried its soft, dry scent . . .

. . .

. . . Pushkar street kids walked between the tourists, trying to sell them flower garlands, paint their hands with henna, shine their shoes or simply get a few rupees. At first I ignored the children or smiled politely, like most of the other tourists. I had seen many street kids in India. But I soon realized that the Pushkar children were different. All the tourism had turned them into entrepreneurs. They never whined or tried to get sympathy with their poverty or disabilities. Instead, they competed for tourists’ hearts with their charm and sense of humor.
       Maybe that’s why I fell in love with so many of them. Or maybe I was just lonely. Maybe it was guilt or shame — growing up, I’d always thought I was poor, but to these kids, I was just another spoiled Westerner. Whatever it was, before I knew it I became an “older sister” to them . . .


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