At 100km per hour the senses begin to slow down. The concrete houses, camel-drawn carts, and the rocky ranges of the Aravallis that line the stretch of NH8 from Delhi to Jaipur begin to blur at the edges, jostled by every minute bump and curve on the road. At 110km per hour the landscape around, which was once three-dimensional, starts flattening itself against the windscreen. In a curious inversion of speed, images begin to slow down. Shades of brown, green and orange erupt and die in little bursts on the screen. Till a dust devil dances across the road, bringing my Ford Ikon to a screeching halt. 120km is no speed to be at. Paranthas and dahi at Fauji Dhaba are in order.
On first appearances Sambhar is not so much a town as a dust bowl. And a salt-processing factory. Every camel, and every tempo carts raw salt. Sand-smothered lanes lead past the sprawling areas of the Sambhar Salts Limited — complete with British bungalows, reddish-pink office buildings, a salt laboratory and even an abandoned salt museum. After an eight-hour drive from Delhi, the town comes as a bit of a disappointment. No turn here leads to the vast saline seas that you’ve heard about. You can see stray ranges of the Aravallis skirting the western borders of the lake, but the land here is unremarkable and flat. “Jheel kidhar padega?” I ask a yellow-turbaned passerby. “Thoda aage, railway station ke pichhe,” he says. “Rasta dikha doon?” he asks helpfully. Where he’s going to sit in the mountain of luggage is anyone’s guess. I’m too tired to protest.
Five minutes out of town the scene changes dramatically. The dry bed of the Sambhar Lake spreads endlessly out from the town. Plains of brown merge with the distant hills. Occasional pockets of weather-beaten babul trees emerge where compacted mud gives way to loose sand. Mounds of salt on the far banks of the lake shimmer in the crimson twilight. It’s eerily silent. Salt, you’d assume, never created a revolution. But if salt can bring down an Empire, it can also dictate the life of a region. And this famous salt lake in Rajputana, on the border of the erstwhile kingdoms of Jodhpur and Jaipur, 90km northwest of Jaipur, has been the mainstay of the region—economically and geographically, for the last 400 years.
It also happens to be India’s largest salt water lake. A vast body of sand and glacial saline that spreads over an area of 190 sq km after a good monsoon. In the best years the depth of water averages 0.6cm, with the maximum depth going up to 3m. A 5km-long stone dam bisects the elliptical lake. The western half is a reservoir that supplies water to the salt pans on the eastern side through a primitive system of sluice gates. By January the western reservoir dries up, leaving a few isolated pockets of water. The latter half of October brings thousands of migratory birds to the lake. For three months the stillness of the salt pans is disturbed by many varieties of squawking and honking. When the birds leave the winds take over, howling over the sandy expanse, leaving layer upon patient layer of salt crystals in the pans.
The road to the right of the Sambhar Lake railway station skirts around the town and arrives at a railway crossing. We parked, and decided to walk along a bund that veered off from the tracks. The slanting rays of the sun glanced off a small body of water beyond the bund. A raucous group of children played cricket in the sand, and a few groups of men stood gossiping in small-town intimacy. And then I noticed them — shimmering in the haze of hot earth and wind-blown dust — a flock of at least 400 lesser flamingos, barely two hundred feet from us.
A shock of white and pink, poised on tall dainty legs, wandering cautiously, and very elegantly through the waters in their ballerina tutus. Some preened themselves, others balanced nonchalantly on a single leg, while most stood still in the saline waters, long necks curved back towards the feet so that their broad black and pink bills disappeared under the water. They would stand in a spot for a while, moving their bills from side to side, sifting the waters for the spirulina algae that flourishes in the saline conditions. Then they would take a few steps. A slight wiggle, followed by a little self-satisfied preening, and then a disdainful glance would be thrown at us, down upturned beaks. The same gestures were repeated, and reflected in the waters — where the pink merged with the pale twilight. “The avian cousin of the camel,” I thought to myself, having got over my initial speechless awe. Possibly a little more comely, but every bit my crotchety old aunt Emma, a duchess in the dirt, muttering “must we, must we” to herself.
The bright sunlight of the next morning sprawled lavishly over the small town of Kuchaman and the vast empty spaces surrounding it. Pockets of smoke and mist evaporated slowly, revealing jigsaw pieces of the nascent day. We’d decided to start early in the day, but at four (after a morning spent wandering through the Kuchaman fort) we were still pottering around the marble mines of Makrana, watching ant-sized human figures rappel hundreds of feet into the open mines.
Somewhere beyond Roopangarh, the road disappeared into a maze of tracks in the sand which veered off from each other at bewilderingly contrary angles. The sun was setting by the time we reached the Shakhambari Mata temple. The temple nestles in a small rocky outcrop on the southern bank of the Sambhar Lake. A few stray flags fluttered in the strong breeze. From the temple, we could see the lights of Sambhar town twinkling ten kilometres away. Darkness settled like a blanket over the lake. There was no way we were going to be able to make it back on our own. Luckily for us the pujari was headed to Sambhar town. We decided to follow him. He hopped nimbly on to a tractor. “Hamari gaadi jaa payegi?” I inquired apprehensively. “Shakhambari Mata ke darshan ho gayein hai,” came the reassuring reply, “Sab unki dein hai.” With that we rolled off at twenty kilometres per hour, into the pitch-black night.
Next day we finally got around to exploring the lake. Many small towns lie scattered around it. Roads and dirt tracks connect these towns, but for most of the year the usual (and more comfortable) route for traffic runs over the semi-dry lake bed. “Even we sometimes get lost on the lake,” said Sher Mohammed, self-appointed guide and driver of our hired jeep, as we streaked over the lake, leaving billowing clouds of dust behind us. “And then you can spend the whole night going round in circles,” he added, vindicating my decision to leave our car behind. Driving over the lake feels surreal — mirages of cloud-flecked sky reflect onto the miles of sand. A shimmering heat haze dances on the surface as the jeep squirms from side to side, tyres sinking into loose earth. There’s a small flock of flamingos near the Jhapog bund, but they’re too far for our binoculars, so we settle down near the Ratan Talao to observe a group of pintails and pied avocets. On the way back I notice that the bed of the lake is littered with flamingo feathers — for miles. Sher Mohammed looks on amused, as I wander off, collecting pink mud-crusted feathers from this lonely sea of sand.
The circuit house in the Sambhar Salts Limited area has everything nostalgia would require. A hand-cranked elevator for food (not operational anymore), separate staircases for the cleaning staff (not used anymore) and Daulat Ram Ji to wait on you (very much in use). The wooden balcony on the first floor looks out on 180 degrees of the lake. And it is two minutes away from the tracks of the Raj-era trolley train for which we were waiting at nine in the morning, on our last day in Sambhar.
A sharp toot broke the silence of the morning. A blue mother hen engine came trundling towards us from the salt pans. Next the engine was hoisted on a hand-cranked jack and turned around! We hopped on and tooted off. The salt pans (kyars) are vast 100m x 60m basins of still water. Salt was being extracted in kyar 8 and 9. A group of men and women stood barefoot in the salt pans, scraping the eight-inch-thick layer of salt off the ground. After extraction the salt is loaded onto rickety wooden wagons, which transport it across a complicated mesh of tracks to the salt factory, where it is not so much offloaded as toppled from tracks that run over a series of beautiful stone arches. The water in kyar 6 is an alarming purple. “That’s the colour it turns just before the salt starts crystallising,” explained Meenaji, our train driver. “Salt extraction here goes on through the year,” he continued. “We only produce the best variety of salt.”
As we head back to Delhi, through the painted towns of Shekhawati, my mind begins to wander. The road between Udaipurwati and Neem ka Thana runs through the Aravallis. It’s much prettier than NH8. But I’m oblivious to it. I’m still dreaming — of pink flamingos that we’d seen shimmering in the heat haze at the Jhapog bund on our second day, of gentle honking and gangly birds flying above, of trails of swirling dust, of the white of salt all around, underfoot, and in my hair… Memories, it seems, can also slow the senses down.
The Information
Getting there
Sambhar town lies 90km northwest of Jaipur. There are several flights to Jaipur (from Rs 2,500 from Delhi). By road from Delhi, drive down NH-8, take the Jaipur bypass, a little before the city, and continue on the same highway towards Ajmer. The total driving time is about eight hours.
Where to stay
If you want to get to the lake early in the morning (which is when you’ll spot most birds), you should definitely stay in the small town of Sambhar. The comfortable Circuit House (Rs 400–800; 01425-224208) run by the Sambhar Salts Limited is utterly old-worldly.