Sunday in Jaisalmer

Speeding from desert to church!

After watching the sunrise and still sleepy desert, we waited for a moment, until our snoring companions wake up. It turned out, that it was late, and we wanted to be in church at 9:00 in Jaisalmer (80 km away). Soda after he just woke up, quickly took off, he called on us, and with a great speed we drove in the jeep. We were on time, obviously, we were even ahead of time.

The church in Jaisalmer is located outside the fort, and there is also a school. Before entering you must take off your shoes, women sit on the left and men on the right side. Of course, the whole church was full and everybody sang out loud led by a lady who sang in a traditional Indian voice. The women were dressed in beautiful saris, elegant with subtle gold designs and occasionally glittering colorful stones.

Mass was of course in Hindi, and strangely enough, as I followed the text of the songs in the book, I could even follow the words and I tried to join singing. Father probably noticed that there are tourists in the crowd, one man and us, so he tried from time to time to say something in English. He chided strongly his young parishioners that they do not know the name of the bishop and the pope, and that probably they'll forget also the name of their parish priest soon. Indians did not even laugh, probably
they took these words deeply into their hearts and now they learn the names of all the ecclesiastical dignitaries by heart ...

After the mass, coffee was distributed (coffee was made Indian style: with milk, spices and sugar). Then it turned out that the other tourist was a Pole, hi hi! A geologist who came to do some measurements in the desert, as if the natives could not do it. After all, they know their own land better. He was greatly amazed when we prized the hospitality, cleanliness and kindness of Indians. He saw only the begging children. Then the priest approached us and told us a bit about the situation of the Catholic Church in this region. He is not allowed to baptize or teach about Christ outside the church and there are plenty of restrictions imposed on Christians. He told us also that he comes from south of India, from the Christians converted by St. Thomas the Apostle. This left our geologist a bit speechless, because it seemed to him, that the priest is a recent convert or something. I think so, because he posed such a strange question: are you from the recently converted Christians? ...

In any event, after a pleasant conversation and coffee, we ran to our jeep. Soda has already waited there. He was not bored waiting for us. We found him chatting with a policeman. Then we returned to the hotel where we could eventually wash up and dump the clothes stinking with camels.

In the afternoon we wanted to find famous Rajasthani jumkas, a kind of earrings. The boss of our hotel sent us to a dealer of the old, traditional rajasthani jewelry. This trader invited us to his, from the outside richly decorated house. In the room upstairs he started to present to us fine Indian jewels telling their story. However, this wonderful jewelry was too expensive for us and he had to show us cheaper and cheaper stuff, and when he came to the cheapest (in his opinion, because I thought it was definitely still too expensive) , I did not liked those “cheap” jumkas. We excused us and quickly escaped from there.

In the evening we were talking with Soda on the terrace in front of our room. He told us then about the history of this village Kuldara which we visited a few days earlier.

In this village, very rich Brahmin merchants lived once, they were from higher castes. During this time Salam Singh was an adviser of Jaisalmer’s maharwala. He was once passing through the village and then he saw beautiful girls and obviously fell in love with one of them, and demanded that she was given to him as his wife. However, neither she wanted him, nor the people in the village would agree to the marriage, because the minister was from the wrong caste. The elders from the village had gathered and decided that it would be best to move away from there, because the fiery minister would not let go and was already preparing to invade the village and take the girl by force. This is how the residents of this and other related 25 villages have fled one night. It is said that they moved to some place in the north.

Soda showed us also how to bind a turban, and demonstrated it on my head. After that, however, we were so tired that we went to sleep.

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