jodhpur thrift tears: dust, denim, and dealers in the blue city
okay so i haven’t slept in 36 hours and my hands still smell like turmeric and mothballs. jodhpur. everyone talks about the blue houses like it’s some instagram filter come to life but let me tell you, the real color is the dust that gets in your teeth. it’s a dry, ancientsort of taste. i just checked and it's doing its thing-22.53 degrees, humidity sitting at a weirdly low 24% like the air just forgot to add water. feels like a perfectly crisped papadum.
the plan was 'vintage textiles,' which here means 'your grandmother's embroidered ghagra worn once to a wedding in 1978 and then stored in a chest with camphor.' i spent three hours today in a stall near the clock tower that was literally just a wall of saris, each one heavier than my laptop bag. the guy, ramu bhai, kept calling me 'madam inspector' and i'm pretty sure he thought i was from some textile museum. i wasn't. i was hunting for a dead-stock 70s band tee that definitely doesn't exist here. someone told me that the best stuff is hidden behind the Mehrangarh fort in the old city's belly, but a local warned me that some shopkeepers have a 'tourist tax' that doubles the price if you even think in english. i heard a rumor that the flea market at Sooraj Pole isn't just for goats.
by 2pm i was done. the sun wasn't even that strong but the dryness makes you feel like a raisin left out in the desert. i hid in this cafe near the stepwell that has wi-fi and the strongest chai i've ever had. if you get bored, pushkar is just a short, rattling bus ride away for a totally different kind of chaos. checked yelp for 'AC and decent snacks' and found this one place that felt like a mirage. the reviews were all 'overpriced but the mango lassi saved my life' so i went. they were right. the lassi was worth every rupee.
finding actual vintage clothes here isn't about salvation army bins. it's about knowing which haveli-turned-guesthouse has a 'storage room' and which uncle will sell you his own kurta from college. i met this other picker from berlin who's been coming for years. she said, 'the best haul is always in the last box you look at, and it's always slightly stained.' cheers to that. i also found a bottomless guide to jodhpur's hidden markets on tripadvisor that was surprisingly not full of crap. the author mentioned a guy in Sardarpura who deals in old military uniforms from the british raj era. i missed him by an hour. he'd apparently just sold a 1940s officer's jacket to a filmmaker. gutted.
the heat today was a dry sort of punch. no sweat, just instant parched throat. i basically lived off water with kokum juice. if you're coming, bring a scarf you don't love for the dust and a willingness to haggle like your rent depends on it. the pressure's sitting at 1011 hpa, which means nothing to me but my barista friend says it's 'stable.' cool. humidity's at 24% which explains why my lips are cracked and why my denim feels like cardboard.
i heard from a drunk australian in the hostel that there's a legendary stash of 80s Bollywood stage costumes in a temple basement, but the priest supposedly 'guards them with a stick.' i have no idea if that's true but man, i want to believe. my find for the day? one (1) slightly-too-small denim jacket with a faded 'rajasthan police' patch. cost me 300 rupees. it smells like history and damp walls. my bodymax temp for the day was 22.53c according to my app, which feels like a joke because i felt like i was melting. but the 'feels like' was 21.47, so technically the air was on my side.
the neighbors thing? yeah, if you get itchy for a bigger city, jaipur's a three-hour drive and it's a whole other animal. but jodhpur gets in your blood. it's all dust and deep colors and people who've seen every tourist season since 1962. i'll leave you with this: someone else's review on a local board said 'don't buy the 'antique' jewelry unless you want to pay for the story, not the metal.' that's jodhpur in a nutshell. it's all stories, and half of them are probably made up. perfect.
shoutout to the guy at the chai stall who gave me an extra ginger shot because he said i looked 'haunted.' he wasn't wrong.