Kansas, Mumbai, Jaisalmer

The Mumbai team needs to send us a courier, but they don’t know where exactly to send it. “I know that,” Batman says into his phone. “I thought the idea was to do it in a place without a postal address!”

Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

The wind blows to a different tune in the desert. Life is gradual. These sands trickle through the hourglass at a much slower pace. The day begins at sunrise and ends, surprisingly, at sunset. As it well should. Not like in the metropolis.

This is proving to be a problem.

With a week to go and an almost empty plot to set up all the way into the dunes, construction needs to be on 24/7. And it needs to be done by people who live and die by deadlines. It needs to be done by people who feel every tick of the clock like a blade on their neck.

This festival now needs a Mumbai.

Everything is going according to plan. Except the plan itself.

Perhaps it’s for the best. The team has recently worked out that it is cheaper to get skilled labour from Mumbai than from Jaisalmer. It is cheaper to pay for their travel, food, stay and services for the entire duration than to pay the charges quoted by local professionals.

Grand Meister had warned us that skilled labour is in short supply in this little desert city. They are in even shorter supply a week before Diwali.

The same goes for materials. Now that the vendors for the festival setup have backed out, the team needs to source all the required materials themselves. And they need to do it right now.

Where in Jaisalmer would you find thirteen kilometres of cloth? Where would you find three thousand empty plastic bottles? How about ten thousand bamboos?

Nobody here can imagine orders of such quantities. And when you do find the materials, the cost of rental turns out to be astronomical.

So the team has decided to do something so daft that it just might be brilliant. If something costs too much to rent, they’re going to buy it. This puts a major dent in the budget. When you rent, you can pay part advance and the rest after the event. When you buy, you have to put all your money down at once. Cash-flow tightens like a noose.

The festival is already running into losses. But it will happen. They’ll take the hit. They’ll make the assets, if they must.

Fridges? Buy them. Metal trunks? Buy them. More bamboo than you’d find in a forest? Fuck it. Buy them.

“By the time this is over,” laughs Batman, “we’ll be the biggest decorators in Rajasthan.”