On the Road to Pushkar In November 2012, Hukuma Ram made the trek to the Pushkar with a group from his village, their many camels in tow. It took them nine days of walking through countryside and roads to reach their destination. It was not an easy journey; they often struggled without enough water or food and there were days when they did not eat at all. But they could not miss the holy pilgrimage to Pushkar Mela, the great camel fair. Ram is Rabari, a nomadic people whose culture centers around their relationship to the camel. Each year, for five days around early November, camel traders bring some 20,000 camels from their villages to Puskar, a town in Rajasthan, India, for the Pushkar Mela where they buy and sell their camels, participate in religious ritual and celebration. This year's Pushkar Mela, which begins on Nov. 9 and lasts through Nov. 17, will see crowds of upwards of 200,000 people. Above, Ram stands beside his camel, Ropal. Ram first started working with camels when he was 15 years old, learning the trade from his father and grandfather. Ram has 15 camels of his own; he uses the females primarily for milk and the males for transport and plowing his patch of land where he grows vegetables. "It's a hard, tiring life caring for our camels," he said, "but I love them." Last fall was Ram's 20th consecutive year coming to Pushkar Mela. He went to both buy and sell. He remembered the first time he came to Pushkar when there were only as many as 12,000 camels and there was plenty of grass for camels to eat. In recent years, he's noticed that the grazing land is disappearing and traders now have to purchase food for their camels. Ram worried that Mela has become too commercial, that it has lost its sense of close-knit community. Still, he said, "If camels are happy, we are happy." Brent Lewin/Redux The Rabari story of creation goes something like this: One day, the goddess Parvati created an animal out of clay that looked something like a cow. She brought the clay figure to her husband, Shiva, the Hindu god, and asked him to give life to the animal. He looked over the clay cow-like creation; it's odd, he told her, that the animal should have five legs. So Shiva took the fifth leg and pushed it up through the body, creating a bump on the animal's back. And thus the camel came into being. But then Parvati worried: who would look after the newly animated creature? So Shiva rubbed his chest and shaped the dried skin into a small puppet. Then, by taking some milk from the banyan tree, he gave the puppet life. And so, the first Rabari was born, brought into being so he could be caretaker to the camel. Camels can live to be 50 years old. The Rabari give their camels names, like Vishnu, Ropal, and Haryan. It can take over a month of working with a young camel until it is fully trained -- learning commands like "sit down," "stand up," and "stay still" through positive reinforcement. As one camel trader said, "They're not an intelligent animal but they are good natured, calm, and very well disciplined." Above a camel walks on a road near Pushkar toward the Camel Mela. The camel traders come to Pushkar Mela to buy new stock and sell from their herds. Some traders will market their camels' milk to the local hotels where it's put in tea, coffee, and used for cooking. A trader can get up to 20 Indian rupees (about 32 cents) for a quart of milk. The dromedary, or Arabian, camel can produce up to five gallons of milk in a single day. Camel wool is also sold, yielding up to 2,500 rupees (or $40) per pound. Above, a Rabari camel trader from a town near Udaipur. A camel trader named Ramlal Marali holds the stick he uses to guide his camels. Marali came to the 2012 Pushkar Mela from a small village in the town of Shukwalla located 20 miles away from Udaipur. His group walked for 15 days on highways and through the countryside to reach Pushkar. Marali, 66, has been coming to the Pushkar Mela for 40 years. He owns seven camels but, he said, children will lead a city life and his family's camel heritage will die with him. Camel traders brand their camels with a mark that indicates the location of where they come from, as well as the caste they belong to within the Rabari. Camels stand in the desert in Pushkar. The Rabari used to serve royalty, India's great kings or maharajah. When kings would have to travel to a distant place or needed goods to be moved, they relied on the nomadic Rabari to arrange the transport. Although they have a reputation as being a closed group, with the help of a great translator, it was relatively easy to meet, interview, and photograph the Rabari camel traders at last year's Pushkar Mela. As the sun sets in Pushkar, a Rabari camel trader smokes marijuana from the chillum pipe in the desert. At the peak of the festival, the land is a sea of tents, camels, and people. A group of camel traders arrive in Pushkar at night. A Rabari camel trader poses for a photo, his camels behind him.