I asked if there were still any orans left sacred to Pabu.
“Yes,” he said. “There is one close to our village. So far we’ve been able to guard the trees. People only pick the fallen wood for cremations. But who knows for how long it will be safe in times like these?”
Mohan went on to tell a story of how the Bishnoi caste, who believe in a very strict ethic of non-violence to all forms of nature, had managed to preserve their khejri trees from loggers sent by the Maharaja of Jodhpur. They had hugged the trees, he said, even as the maharaja’s axe men were felling them. Three hundred had died before the order was finally cancelled, and people still gathered every year to commemorate their sacrifice. I asked how long ago this had taken place.
“Oh, not so long ago,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “About 320 years back.”
I had known Mohan and Batasi for about five years when I set off with them that morning from Jaipur. We had just done an event about the Pabuji epic to a conference, and were now heading in the direction of their village of Pabusar, which lay deep in the desert towards Bikaner.
Soon after I had first met the couple, in 2004, I wrote a long New Yorker article on Mohan, and after the piece was published, Mohan and I performed together at various festivals; but in all the time I had known and worked with him, I had never yet visited his home. Pabusar, he told me, was a small oasis of green in the dry desert, and was named after the hero of his epic; indeed the village supply of sweet water was believed to have appeared thanks to Pabuji’s miraculous intervention. Now it was the tenth day of the full moon, the day of Pabu, when his power was at its height and he was unable to refuse any devotee. This time the epic was to be recited not in part but in full, at my request, and I was looking forward to seeing Mohan perform it.
On the lonely, potholed single-track road to Pabusar, the last leg of the journey, we began to meet other pilgrims who were coming to celebrate the modest village festivities which marked the day of Pabu. Some of the pilgrims were on foot: lonely figures trudging through the immensity of the desert in the white midnight. Other villagers rode together in tractors, pulling trailers full of women in deep-blue saris. Occasionally, we would pass through a village sheltering in the lee of a crumbling high-walled fortress, where we would see other pilgrims taking their rest in the shade of the wells that lay beside the temples. As we drove on, the settlements grew poorer and the road increasingly overrun with drifting sand. The fields of dew-watered millet grew rarer and more arid, and the camel thorn closed in. Dry weeds heeled and twisted in the desert wind.
In the end, although the drive from Jaipur was less than 120 miles, it took nearly the entire day. The roads grew almost impassable with sand, and without four-wheel drive we slipped and slalomed our way, two or three times having to push the car up modest hillocks, using sackcloth to give the wheels traction.
When we finally reached Pabusar, it was nearly sunset. The goats were being led home for the night, and the shadows of the milkweed bushes around the village were lengthening. It was the pruning season, and a few goatherds had climbed up the khejri trees to chop fodder for their goats, camels and cows. On the edge of the village I saw a lone woman in a yellow sari beating a kikkur tree with a long stick—not some Rajasthani folk ritual, as I had instantly assumed, but, Mohan assured me, merely an elderly goatherd trying to get the seed pods to drop for her hungry, bleating kids.
The village of Pabusar—Pabu’s Well—was, like the roads around it, half-buried by drifting sand, and fenced around on all sides by drythorn bushes. We abandoned the car in a final sand-drift only a few hundred yards from Mohan’s house, and walked the last stretch. Around the white shrine-temple to Pabu, beside a small water tank, a large crowd was already beginning to gather for Mohan’s night performance of the epic. A brightly coloured shamiana tent had been erected next to it, and to one side a generator was chugging away like an old tractor. The farmers were in a relaxed mood, squatting in turbaned groups, sipping chai and smoking beedis and playing cards. Their cows had been given their fodder, and, crucially for herders in a desert land, they had also been given water—the key episode and the climactic moment in the Pabuji epic:
O Pabuji, the cows’ little calves are weeping,
The cows’ little calves are calling out to Pabuji.
O Pabuji, may your name remain immortal in the land;
O Pabuji, may your brave warriors remain immortal!
Outside Mohanji’s small but newly built concrete house—a mark of some status in a poor village of conical thatched mud huts like Pabusar—Mahavir, his eldest son, was waiting for us impatiently. In his hands he held the furled phad. Another of Mohan’s sons, Shrawan, whom I had met several times before, was also standing by, holding his dholak drum.