Camel Ride There were many reasons why camels had caught my fancy when I was quite young. I had seen pictures of them in my alphabet and rhyme books (“c for camel” often came to mind). I had seen a couple of them at the Byculla zoo, tossing their big untidy heads impatiently while chewing what seemed to be a perpetual cud. And my paternal grandparents had told me about them. They said that they would see camel-drawn carts in Delhi during their decades-long sojourn there. And, then, they had gone into camel country itself, so to speak, when following his retirement after spending almost four decades of his life in government service, my grandfather took up a two-year appointment as chief financial advisor to the Maharaja of Bikaner in Rajasthan around 1940. My grandparents described what they had seen and heard about an old tradition and celebration, the camel festival, where at the beginning of each year, in mid-winter, camel owners came from all over the Thar desert, bri