UNSHELTERING SKY

THE WEDDING PARTY of six arrived in the remote city of Jaisalmer, which rose like a crown out of the Thar Desert, each building a jewel, and all the jewels enclosed by an ancient stone wall, sinking under its ambition to contain the design frenzy of an almost imaginary city. When Nitin first saw it, he thought they would all be honeymooning in a fairy sandcastle. Their hotel had the feeling of a domed underground cavern, filled with treasures collected by Aladdin over several lifetimes: crossed spears, portraits of coy Rajasthani princesses wearing large nose rings, a wooden swing suspended from an intricately carved wooden stand. Dark red velvet curtains and illuminated sandstone corridors gave way to graceful pillared halls that looked like temples, each stage set giving way to another.

Neel was busy organising the final touches of his desert wedding trip. Having been given the options of ‘touristic route’ or ‘non-touristic route’ when booking the camel trek, he’d naturally chosen the latter, and he’d even organised for all the camels to be garlanded, with colourful cloth rags on the saddles and pompoms hanging from their halters. Next, he had to make arrangements for the pandit, who would ride with another cameleer and be taken back to Jaisalmer immediately after the wedding ceremony.

Everything was ready, but on the morning of the day prescribed for the wedding, Nitin lay in his bed, incredibly sick yet unable to vomit – absolutely unable to move. Savitri stayed with him in that palace underworld, sitting next to him on the four-poster bed, staring at the latticed alcoves that surrounded them. He could tell that she was willing him to get better and he couldn’t help but feel the pressure of her unspoken wishes.

‘Don’t worry, I’m coming with you,’ he assured her. ‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world.’

Yet he could see she was worried.

‘We can stay and you can get better. We can celebrate when they return. We don’t need to be there when they get married.’

‘No. I’ll be okay.’

But when they met the cameleers at the edge of the desert, the trip took a surreal turn. The others hopped happily onto their camels, but the man in charge of Nitin’s camel couldn’t get enough control over it to get it to sit down. Even the camel looked unwell. It made a loud, gurgling, belching sound until it vomited out its stomach and hung the putrid stinking thing out of the left side of its mouth, to air the red veins just beyond its rotting teeth. Nitin stared at the camel, and at the cameleer in a huge bright green turban, welcoming him with an echoing laugh. Then he vomited up the contents of his own stomach alongside the beast.

‘Okay, that’s it. We’re going back to the hotel,’ Savitri insisted.

‘No, no. I’m feeling better now. Better out than in.’

Nitin’s camel finally went down on arthritic bended knee for him to get on. It lurched forward and up with a fart, and then the cameleer hit the creature’s hump and it trotted after the others to form a single line that trailed out under the blue unsheltering sky. And he followed at the end of the line, looking back to see the Jeep driving away and endless dunes ahead of them, which they paced along aimlessly.

He managed to stay upright. He managed a smile. Good. The dunes kept their promise – there wasn’t a single tourist in sight, just wave after wave of curved, swaying sand. Nitin tried to distract himself from the hallucinations that appeared in the dunes, looking up instead at the impermanent blue, then at the toxic-green turban ahead of him. He vomited skilfully, this time a projectile that missed the side of his camel. He was at the end of the camel queue, so nobody would notice, except perhaps a camel trek later on that day along this same non-touristic trail.

When they stopped for lunch the others were so caught up recounting tales about camel behaviour he could only attempt to listen.

‘Feeling a little better?’ Neel asked.

‘Yeah, mate. Much better.’

‘We’ll stop before too long to prepare for the ceremony.’

When the time came to get back onto his farting, grunting, stinking ship, Nitin climbed aboard and followed the line once more, thankfully from the rear, leaning forward on a writhing hump, his sweat pouring into a red rug and joining the smell of camel sweat.

When they stopped at dusk, the cameleers constructed a simple tent for Mae to get changed in. Savitri tied on her mother’s wedding sari before showing Mae how to tie hers and helping tie a sari on Winsome. The magnificence of it all was wasted on Nitin.

‘Nitin, you’re next. You’ll need to wear a pagri.’

He went into the tent with Neel and Sage to get their Rajasthani wedding clothes on. They seemed to fit well, but the coils of fabric Neel twisted around Nitin’s head never seemed to stop. The pagri pressed his thoughts tighter into his painful cranium and the weight of the cloth trapped them there, crushing and sealing fears of death inside metres of pink cotton fabric.

‘You’re sweating lots. Did you get a bit hot up on that camel?’

‘Yeah. Not used to it, I guess.’

When they came out, the girls commented on how handsome the three boys looked, but once again Nitin couldn’t summon any enthusiasm to respond as a handsome man might.

‘What’s wrong?’ Sage asked.

Did it show? Nitin laughed. ‘Nothing wrong, mate. The moon’s coming up. I can’t believe Neel and Mae are actually getting married this time.’

The moon had risen a little higher than the sands by the time the pujari got to work organising the wedding party into two ritual circles around the havan fire. The inner circle looked like an upmarket version of the turbaned cameleers in the outer circle. The camels, thankfully, were left to smooch and burp at each other a suitable distance away from the nuptial ceremony.

Then the Vedic shlokas began, interrupted only by the sound of bells and bangles whenever one of the girls moved an inch. The hypnotic rhythm seemed to match the waves of the desert and Nitin tried not to sway. He wanted the whole affair to be over. He wanted to be able to press himself into the sand and imagine it was a bed.

But the wedding went on. And on. And on.

More prayers. Then the couple were tied to each other – his pagri to her palla. They walked seven times around the fire. The fire … the fire was burning hotter than his forehead. He felt himself sinking, knocked out by the prayers. The sand. Under him. His head was against it.

‘Quick, make him a bed.’

‘I should have stayed with him at the hotel.’

‘Just let him rest, yah. He’s not used to the food, that’s all.’

Nitin heard the voices. He heard the discussions about which dune would be best suited for the ‘honeymoon suite’.

‘The furthest from the camels!’

He heard the tinkling of bells as Mae walked with Neel over to their nuptial dune, and he heard the cry of an unnamed baby seeking milk and sleep, and he looked up at the moon as Savitri’s hand soothed his aching forehead.

‘Tomorrow we’ll leave the others on their honeymoon and see if some of these guys can take us home.’

‘No worries, sweetheart. I’m so sorry …’

Nitin sank into his dreams as his body sank into the sand, and he found himself converting the strange Vedic words and sounds from earlier into Christian epiphanies. He dreamed of Joseph in the desert, with angels going up and down the ladder to heaven. (Wasn’t Moses in the desert too, when he saw the burning bush?) Then he saw Indian gods and goddesses emerge from behind the dunes. Savitri appeared in her mother’s beautiful red and gold sari as a goddess holding a lotus flower, then Mae as Mary, but an Indian Mary, in a red sari. He was sweating. More epiphanies. There is no single religion. In this desert. No God to claim here, just souls … and bodies, ripe for harvesting under the full moon.