A Night at the Camel Fair: Fire-Dancing and Death-Defying Motorcycles

The Indian Camel Fair, called Mela here, was in town and a small carnival sat at the edge of the sprawling grounds. There were three Ferris wheels and several other spinning rides, but what caught my eye was a large circular construction that looked like a giant neon-lit salad spinner. It proved to be exactly what I’d hoped it would be: a daredevil ride where men on motorcycles ride in circles up the steep walls, defying gravity.

You’ll have to cut me some slack on the quality of these photos. Everything was shot hand-held in very low light and I’d guesstimate that the bikes were moving at 30 mph or more — I’m just happy they turned out at all.

I hung out by the ticket salesman for a few minutes to see what the cost was and figured out pretty quickly that people were paying twenty rupees each. When I got to the head of the line I was charged fifty. I made a half-hearted effort at protesting but he wasn’t budging on the price and I wasn’t going to miss something like this for a $.75 difference. Foreigners pay extra, as always…

One rider led off and was quickly riding the wall at the top edge on his beat-up bike (he had to hit the headlight five times to get it to work), a good twenty feet from the ground below. His buddy soon joined him and within minutes, they were both circling at high speed and performing tricks: riding side-saddle with their arms crossed, laying back on their seats and such.

This guy was just getting into his groove when his engine cut out with a loud, gurgling “blap blap blap…” He quickly coasted to the bottom in a neat spiral and leaped into one of the cars sitting at the bottom, where he’d spend the rest of the show hanging out the window and mugging for the crowd. After ten short minutes it was all over, but the crowd –myself included– all left with big grins.

By the time I got out it was 7:05 and the Mela program listed a Rajasthani ‘fire dance’ starting at 7:00. Unfortunately, it showed the dance happening at the ‘cattle grounds’, but there was no cattle grounds featured on the map. I popped into a convenient tourism booth and was told by a policeman who was tired of answering the same question to just follow three English tourists who had just left. This worked well for about one hundred feet but they then stopped to have chai with some friends.

I plunged onward into the unlit campgrounds, weaving through hundreds of grumbling camels in the dark, but eventually spotted a bonfire on a low hill and made my way there.

The fire was carefully tended and allowed to burn down to a large bed of coals while a live band played traditional music. There was a considerable amount of jockeying going on in the crowd as we all tried to find a good angle for photos.

Ten men in turbans and traditional dress slowly danced around the coals while one worked the fire, packing the coals into a flat platform. As the music built, men would step up into the middle of the coals with their arms raised, pause for a moment and then step off.

Others would take small coals from a small fire sitting to the side and place them carefully in their mouths as they danced and then blow sparks into the crowd.

The music continued to build and the dancers became bolder, running across the coals and then kicking a large spray of sparks in the air behind them. A few of these flew into the seated crowd — what I thought at first was applause turned out to be the sounds of people frantically beating tiny flames from their clothing. It was like a Gallagher show, but with no plastic tarp and the real possibility of permanent scarring.

Soon it was all over and we all headed home, carefully dodging hundreds of camels and trying not to think of what we were stepping in.

Tagged as: photos, India

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