Who came first: the chicken or the egg? What happened first: Jodhpur’s Omelette Shop becoming famous or the coverage in Lonely Planet making it so?

The shop, opened in 1974 by Ram Kishen, is one busy shop. Selling a thousand eggs a day, half of them as omelletes and the rest boiled. Spiced to taste, with our without slices of bread, these cost as little as Rs. 10-15 (20-30 cents) a portion. It opens at 10 am, and closes just before midnight. Go at peak hours and Ram Kishen will have no time to talk to you. The clientele are mostly travellers in the day, and locals in the evening.

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There are signboards flaunting it being a place recommended not only by Lonely Planet, but by Rough Guides as well as some Korean and Thai guide book series. It gives its address in the Sardar Market as ‘just through the gate behind the clock tower on the northern side of the square by the inner arch.’ A warning is added: ‘Don’t be fooled by imitations.’

Ram Kishen admits business has never been as good as following an inclusion in Lonely Planet in 1999. He has even been able to save enough to buy his elder son a shop of his own. And extended his offering to include cigarettes, camera films, soft drinks and mineral water besides running a telephone booth. All is a space of a few square feet on a roadside where customers stand and eat.

The place, still marked so, was earlier called Garib Hotel (or poor man’s hotel) where bread, chicken, rice and vegetables were sold very cheap mostly for the labour class. But Ram Kishen, a Sindhi Khatri, says he became a changed man after a visit to the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1980. He was heavily into drinking and was a non-vegetarian before that; he gave it all up after the trip and is now a strict vegetarian.

He is not worried who came first, as long as his vendors send him a thousand fresh eggs daily.

This is one of the most bizarre stories of human migration one can hear.

Drive 18 km west of Jaisalmer and you will come upon the village of Kuldhara. Once a prosperous settlement of the Paliwal Brahmins, all the residents of Kuldhara and 83 nearby villages vanished suddenly one night in 1825, having lived there since 1291. In all likelihood they set up base somewhere beyond Jodhpur but no one has ever been sure.

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The Paliwals made their fortune by the sheer brilliance of their business and agricultural acumen. They knew the art of growing a water intensive crop like wheat in the Thar desert; they could identify areas with gypsum rock layers running under the ground surface to ensure water was retained for the crops. The rulers depended on the Paliwals for much of their tax revenues.

What made them want to abandon everything overnight? The Prime Minister, or the dewan, is believed to have developed a lecherous eye for the chief’s daughter; it is said the Paliwal women were in general stunningly beautiful. He may even have imposed unreasonable taxes on them. With pride and honour overruling all worldly interests, the chiefs of the 84 villages decided to go away in a single night with whatever they could carry with them.

Where are the Paliwals now? Scattered all over the world. And generally doing well going by their genetic lineage. It is said they even left a curse on the villages, bringing death and suffering to anyone who tried to live in these villages. For the Paliwals, this was not the first migration. Before Kuldhara, according to some accounts, they had left Pali near Jodhpur from where they originally came from; it was to escape additional war taxes being imposed by the king.

Looks like the royalty of Rajasthan had made an art of killing the geese that laid golden eggs for them.