Rath YatraPuri's major festival

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

My first impressions of Puri are favourable but deceptive. My cycle-rickshaw man takes the long, scenic route to the beach area where the cheap rest houses are clustered, showing me planted fields, quiet lanes, a flat expanse of land rolling away to the sea. The air is clean and lightly fragranced. The fishing village we pass through is quaint.

Puri proper is a little less congenial although far from unattractive. One of the four cardinal dhams, shrines which define the borders of Hinduism, it is a site of great pilgrimage, attracting over 5,000 visitors daily. During its principal festival, the annual Rath Yatra, its population swells from 200,000 to well over a million, with the consequent result that, outside of the weeks of the Rath Yatra, the town has a certain sleepiness. Its main roads are all exaggeratedly large, like the loose-fitting garments of a twenty-something stone man who has slimmed down to ten, and who hasn't changed his clothes because he knows he will put the weight back on again. Its buildings too are outsized, its population a little larger than can be sustained without the influx of pilgrims during the festival, and although its narrow back lanes are suitably hectic, a constriction of people and cattle and traffic, the prevailing mood remains a calm and somnolent one. I enjoy it greatly.