One Jain temple, forty thousand kilos of ghee. This is Bhandasar Temple in Bikaner, and I am in love.

In love with the idea that anything so wacky exists.

In love with the fact that when the foundation stones were laid here, they used forty thousand kilos of liquefied butter in the construction process rather than water.

In love with the sheer amazement of being able to look at the patches on the cool stone floor where the subterranean ghee still wells up. Five-hundred years of daily life and the floor still gets greasy from the age-old clarified fat. When summertime brings temperatures of 40 or 50 degrees celcius, the stonework will ooze even greater amounts of buttery sheen.

The 20 rupee rickshaw ride to the temple is pleasure enough. You dart through the old quarter of Bikaner; down higgedly-piggedly laneways barely big enough to swing a cat. It’s a riot, of course - of colour, of smell, of dirt and confusion. We get roadblocked at one stage, and it transpires that a camel drawing a heavy load in a wooden cart has got stuck mid-delivery.

But once you arrive, and you’re standing shoeless on the smoothly-worn stone floor, the amazement takes hold. The temple décor is insane:

Colour pumped to the max, and artistic sensibilities gone wild, every inch of space is covered in a swirling, fantastical vision of religious instruction. There are people eating ‘poison apples’ (a la the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden) and falling down dead in dramatic rigor mortis poses.

There’s a thief stealthily picking his way across building tops (a la Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves), before being pardoned by a gracious Maharaja.

Elephants march across the ceiling in cavalcade, next to pumpkin-coloured tigers and scores of waterfalls. Every doorway has wonderfully aged wooden shutters bearing life-size images of courtly musicians against a backdrop that’s the intense colour of unripe olives.

Bands of lapis-lazuli clouds sprawl across the ceiling like Japanese anime images brought to life. Nearby, angels that look pilfered from a mediaeval fresco are dancing in an expanse of aqua.

Flowers that wouldn’t be amiss in Mexican folk-art span pillars and walls like they’re going out of fashion - but everywhere, everywhere, are the inimitable reminders that this is India.

It’s insanity come to life, and it seems somehow perfectly fitting that this fistful of madness springs forth from a set of stones laid in forty thousand kilos of clarified butter.

Very much the stuff of religious wonders and everyday miracles.