Visit to Ajmer

A magical two day trip to Ajmer, Pushkar and Jaipur. I say magical, because everything about it was. The way it came about, the trip itself, the place, the feel.

Ajmer, or Ajmer Sherif as it's more popularly known, is a Dargah, a sufi shrine. It is one of India's most important Muslim pilgrimage centers, with the shrine being the maqbara (grave) of the saint Moinuddin Chishti, also known as Khwaja Gharibnawaz, dating around 500 AD.

Ajmer itself is a small and beautiful city, geographically nestled in the rugged Aravalli Hills and developed around a pretty lake, Ana Sagar.

The lake, the city and the Aravalli Hills

The Dargah

Once you get to the place, it's a further two kilometer walk to the Dargah itself, and we took some by lanes which took us through some of the narrowest and most intriguing lanes I've seen, and bonus was seeing donkeys in there too. (I think they're really cute).

The real narrow bylanes we took to the Dargah

And donkeys in those bylanes, sadly as beasts of burden too

The main street leading into the Dargah

The shop where I bought a taveez, as memoir of the trip

I wanted to have the whole experience, so at the dargah we did the traditional 'chaadar chadana'. This is a ritual of dedicating a brightly coloured, and beautifully embroidered chaadar (a large bedsheet...ours was bright red with golden embroidery), along with a basket of roses and attar (a natural concentrated perfumed oil). And that whole sequence was a really interesting and intense experience; next to the maqbara, the priest puts the chaadar over our head like a tent, and he''s guiding our thoughts, and it feels almost like it enables a conversation with the spirit of the place. Like Sagari said, I wished he'd let us stay in there a while longer. 

The religious fervor of the place also get to you, as you see people in a trance, some singing, some crying and it's just very intense; an experience worth having if you're upto it. And considering women are not allowed in a masjid, this was the closest we could get to a muslim religious experience.

An added factor; Sagari had sufi music playing through the three hour journey from Jaipur to Ajmer, though she didn't know earlier that we were doing a Sufi Shrine, and it just added to the whole aura of the experience.

To me it was also this whole feeling of .....'it was meant to be', to add to the magical element of it.

Ajmer has been one place I’ve been wanting to visit for a few years now, one of those just pushed to the back of the mind kind of things. Towards the end of december, when I’d gotten down to my new year resolution list, one of them was ‘make a trip each quarter, and at least two new places to be seen in the year'. As I wrote this one, I just saw the thought of Ajmer flash through the mind, must have been the subconscious mind throwing it out there.

And then, a day later I’m doing this casual, what’s up kind of chat with a friend and it so turns out that this friend is going to Jaipur in two weeks and the friend who she was supposed to go with had backed out and stuff and somehow, within ten minutes of the conversation, I had my tickets booked. One of the more impulsive decisions of recent past. And if I think about it, over that two weeks there were a lot of other things that fell in place to enable the trip to happen.

What it told me is that wanting something and letting it marinate in the subconscious is one thing, but articulation and awareness can get things moving at an altogether different pace if you’re up for it. :)