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The Scarlet 'Shim' of Rajasthan |
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Written by John Borthwick
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Saturday, 05 March 2005 |
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For a week our camels had plodded across the Great Thar Desert in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Our group consisted of three women and five men plus our camel handlers. Each morning the camels digruntledly folded their legs, like double-jointed deck chairs, until we mounted, then arose awkwardly, to bounce and blister us another day across the burning desertscape. By night we clustered around blazing campfires, dancing to the tabla and
harmonium of the cameleers. One evening, outside the old fortress village of
Shri Mohangarh, the three women of our group wandered to the local shop for some
party supplies: a bottle Indian whisky and a pack of cigarettes. ("Anything but
Camels, please." they requested.)
Hours later we were dancing like
dervishes when I realised that there were four women now gyrating around
the fire. The newcomer was a bare-ankled Rajasthani, garbed in a red skirt and
full veil.
Before we could fathom her identity, a truck came bouncing
across the desert. The old Bedford lurched to a halt beside our tents and out
tumbled two local lads, somewhat farther down the whisky trail than we
were.
"Verry good-night to you." said the driver whose upper lip was
tusked with one of those wild boar moustaches so prized by Rajasthanis of the
testosterone caste. "You are having scarlet women here?"
"Scarlet
women?"
"Yes, in the shop I have seen them ..." he pointed at our female
trio. "These foreign fillum star-looking ladies."
A guffaw erupted from
the "fillum stars". The driver peered towards them.
"Yes, and cigarettes
and whisky too. We too would like to join you."
"We're not scarlet
women." bristled Anne, a solicitor from Perth. "We're tourists."
"No,"
insisted the man, pointing, "She is definitely scarlet."
All eyes
turned to the woman in red.
"Who, Florence of Arabia, here?" said Terry,
a knockabout bloke from Cairns. "That's no scarlet woman, my friend. That's a
'shim'."
"What?" answered the truck driver. "Please don't speak foreign
Englishes."
"A 'shim', a 'she-him'," explained Terry, with which he
strode to the veiled Rajasthani woman and, to our horror, gently tugged the
cloth from her face. There stood Raju, one of the camel men, grinning like a
demon, dressed in a skirt and twirling his own elaborate mustaches.
As
the disappointed party boys climbed back into their truck and clattered away,
Terry breathed a sigh of relief.
"I was gambling that those hairy ankles
were attached to you, Raju." he said.
Reproduced with kind permission of the author from his collections of travel
tales, The
Circumference of the Knowable World and Chasing Gauguin's Ghost.
Copies may also be obtained direct from the author. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 13 September 2006 )
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Friday, 16 May 2008
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