Seventh Heaven in Pushkar

Our room at Seventh Heaven

Rose petals and fountain at Seventh Heaven

View of kites from rooftop 

Musicians at Ghats

Sunset at Ghats

I had heard that Pushkar was one of the holiest cities in India, and a destination point for “overlanders,”  a code word for hippies, in the late 1960s and 1970s, so I was looking forward to seeing what the place was all about. We got there in the middle of a warm, sunny afternoon and the place we were staying at, the Seventh Heaven, was awesome. It is a classic haveli, an Indian word for a residence that’s been converted into an inn. It’s hard to believe it was ever anything but a hotel. It has four floors, a 4-square, open air interior courtyard that reaches up to a rooftop restaurant with delicious food and views of the surrounding city. The view on this day was especially good, as kids were standing on the roofs of the buildings all over this small city flying little box kites in advance of a kite festival planned for the next day. There must have been 30 or more kites in the air, just in the vicinity of our hotel.

Pushkar is smaller than the other places we have visited. There are just a few streets in the village around the lake, all of them narrow and lined with one-room shops, along with restaurants and hotels. The narrowness of the streets keeps away most cars, but there’s plenty of beeping motorcycles bustling back and forth. Still, the village has a mystical feel to it. We decided to go for a walk around town. You can’t actually get to the water very easily. The only access is via more than 30 ghats, or holy bathing places, that line its entire shore. To get to the water, you have to make a donation,  enter the ghat gate and, after taking off your shoes,  walk through a temple. We made our way to what seemed like a public access area on the lake’s east side and I decided to walk down to the water while Lee took some photos of people playing some music by the Sunset Inn.

As I walked around an aluminum gate entrance apparatus, a man in white clothing stepped up to me and deposited two flowers in my hand. Moments later, I found myself being instructed by him to repeat a series of blessings he was reciting, for my children, my wife and various gods as I broke the flowers down to small bits of petals. It seemed as though he a Brahmin priest of some sort. Anyway, after converting the flowers into bunches of petals,  he told me to throw the petals into the lake for good luck. And then he asked me to provide him a hefty donation to insure long life and good health for myself and my family. I knew this was coming, but when you open the door just a little bit in such situations, it feels like you have committed yourself to this eventuality. I protested the amount he was asking: The opening bid was $50, but in the end I held firm and paid 300 rupees, the equivalent of $7 or so. I felt kind of sheepish about falling for this: Lonely Planet had precisely warned readers to be wary of people posing as priests and doing exactly what this guy had done. But then I looked over and saw that Lee had succumbed to the same scheme. She also paid $300 to another “priest” and as the two men argued for more, we moved on  Maybe they were holy men, but we didn’t think so.

 By then, though, we had shifted our attention to a beautiful sunset over Lake Pushkar, and all seemed well.  Sam