This is...palkhi

This is palkhi. 

If you say that like "This is Spinal Tap" it sounds a lot more interesting.

My understanding of this event is severely lacking, because even the English-language news articles have words I don't understand literally every other word. So really their just like the Marathi reports except using roman characters and putting the non-English words in quotations. Helpful.

From what I can glean from the haphazard way my father-in-law explains things, palkhi is this:  members of lower castes who are devotees of some god (sorry, missed that part) make an annual pilgrimage from some rural area in Maharashtra, through Pune (and lots of other places), to a temple of this particular god. On foot. It takes about 15 days. Of walking. All day. And then they have to walk back. Yeah. I'm not that devoted to anything. 

So yesterday, the palkhi arrived in Pune. There were estimated to be 250,000 people. Which is apparently fewer than last year. Wowza. (Btw, 250,000 is also called 2.5 lakhs. Takes just as much effort to say, and then you have to figure out how much that actually is. I just don't get it. Anyway, that's your Indianism for the day.)

We attempted to go see the procession, as I hear that they sing and play drums and cymbals the whole way. But after sitting in traffic for over an hour and moving maybe a quarter of a mile in that time, we turned around and came home. The pilgrims spent last night in Pune and took today as a day of rest before setting back out tomorrow morning. So while I didn't get to see them en masse, I saw plenty of them sleeping by the side of the road and in trucks and in shop stalls and anywhere else they could find a patch of ground.

Anyone who knows me even a little bit (or even has just seen me in a public place) knows I don't do crowds. I do not enjoy having no control over where I am going because it's impossible to move independently of those around you. I don't enjoy not being able to look around because I must keep my eyes at all times on the person I am trying to follow (usually my husband who always seems to forget I'm trying to follow him...today I learned he comes by that honestly but moving on...). I just don't like crowds.

I knew I had to sort of check that at the door when coming to India. India is a crowded country. There's no such thing as personal space because it's just not even possible. So you have to be prepared to battle the crowds to some degree no matter where you are. But even then, when I'm prepared for the situation, I usually spend the entire time hyperventilating and looking for the nearest way out. 

But today that did not happen. Maybe it was the vibe of all those religious pilgrims gathered together ("where two or more are gathered in my name..."). Maybe it was the fact that it had been my idea to check it out in the first place, so I better not back out. Who knows? All I know is, I was calm, I was focused, I maneuvered my way through that crowd like a pro never once losing either one of my in-laws, and I still managed to take in what was going on around me. 

There was a massive line winding through the streets of people waiting to see whatever it was the pilgrims had carried with them...had something to do with two saints...I saw the things and I still don't know. Anyway, it was the first time I've seen a line of Indians all waiting patiently with no pushing and even standing with adequate space between each other. We, however, did what I so often reprimand both my husband and my in-laws for doing...we skipped to the front of the line. We walked right past everyone else and right up to the police officers guarding an entrance. They were letting in the seriously elderly or crippled who couldn't spend hours standing in line. They also let in the white girl. 

This being India (and more importantly, a religious site, temporary though it may be) we had to shed our shoes before going in. Once inside, you hardly had to walk for yourself as the row of police physically propelled you along. As soon as you touched the holy item, which in this case was a cast of someone's footprints, an officer thumbed something black onto your forehead and you were ripped away and pushed deeper into the room. 

We made our way through the room in I'd say less than one minute. There were a few other temples that people would stop at before being shoved along by the police, but I left that to those who actually knew who they were worshiping. 

When it was all done, we were dumped out the far side of the room. On the opposite side of the building from our shoes. Into the makeshift bathrooms that had been set up for the pilgrims. I told myself the ground was wet from the showers, not from the toilet areas, as we padded barefoot down the alley. Then it was back out into the crowd to work our way through the streets, barefoot, back around to where we'd left our shoes. Wouldn't it make more sense to just have people carry them in their hand? I definitely would have preferred that. The other thing about being in a crowd is you can't see the ground to look where you're stepping. And I'll just leave that one at that.

When we finally made it back home, after spending another hour hanging out roadside while Mama did her business with the fruitwalla, we discovered there was no water. It would be another 30 minutes for the water tank to fill and give us water. My in-laws sat down and tucked into lunch. I looked at the blackness of my feet and the dirt caked onto my hands, and silently bemoaned the fact that I am not in the U.S. where eating like that is only done by the homeless.

The evening was going to be spent at the house of a family friend who was letting a few of the pilgrims stay with her and is going to give a lecture on the palkhi. In Marathi. I was so looking forward to this, as you can imagine. But my mother-in-law (whose idea it was to go) decided she did not want to go, and so told me that if I am too tired it's ok, I don't have to go. I wonder what she would have done if I'd responded that I really wanted to attend the lecture? 

At any rate, I'm off the hook for the evening, so I am heading over to B's house to hang out. I could really use a nap, but I will happily forego that in favor of some time spent with people my own age!