arcche

2012-01-25T05:12:00.002+05:30

I have been thinking about you. I know

that you are not. But, you see, if he has

gone anywhere, I must think it is you

he has gone to.

I ask, therefore, that you meet him, give him

a cup of tea, and take him for a walk

through your best sunshine and high lands. Let him

tell you, for he loves to make friends and talk

to them, let him tell you, as you walk,

about the time he heard my mother shout

from outside their tent and jumped out

into the cold grass and colder wind and

stood there freezing, seeing Pahelgaon breaking

into gold, but shivering

for quite another reason.

Or he may tell you of the time we went

for a stroll that morning in Puri by

the silver coast of the silver sea in

the silver light of the young sun.

I took my camera, which was really

his camera, and he took

his younger daughter’s seashore-warm hand. I watched

as the two set out hand in hand and matched

the rhythm of the sea wave for footstep

to footstep for wave and edged closer

and closer to the water until the

sea felt that enough

was enough

and came up in one delicious surge and

licked them wet and salt and

as the water ran from them they glittered

as silver as the morning

they stood in.

Or he may tell you of things I cannot

imagine and only he and you know

of. He would tell you them as he would wend

time telling old tales to an old friend.

Walk with him. There is rhythm and spring and

stories in his step. You will see. Only

walk with him.

Dying was new to him, and he was not at

all sure how and not at all sure when and how

to go about it.

Not sure, even at the last, that he even

wanted to go about it.

You will tell me (will you tell me? are you

listening?) that such a thing cannot be,

and I am wrong, because it cannot be.

But I always think of him as a young

father. Like I grew up, and he did not.

Like he is always the man who swung

me on his shoulders or hung

me off his arms or walked with me

and walked with me

as one day when I was eight I stubbornly

tried to follow one of the oldest rivers

of the land to its youngest moment

as it fell away from a glacier

and became water.

But back in the day, when he really

was a young father, and I really

thought you were, he used to sing a

song all the time.

There is joy going through the world.

It overflows the earth all

day and all

night and passes into the sky. The sun and

the moon drink of it.

Why do you sit, then, lost in yourself?

Open your eyes and your heart and

look around you to see

how small our griefs can be.

Only fill up your life with love.

There is joy going through the world.

Only fill up your life with love.

A writer of great loneliness but greater

love and music wrote this song many years

ago. It was good poetry, but that

poet, and he was of the best,

had done better. I did not see

why this should be

the song my father should keep singing

again and again, as if the words had

magic for him—or did he make magic

of the words? My mother explained, suddenly

setting aside her long work day

and falling into the woman who had

fallen in love with him

and married him

against all advice and interdiction

from family and friends, that he loved

this song best. Then, as if to explain,

she simply said again,

he loved this song best. There is joy rushing

through the world, he went, and I went along

with him, for how could I doubt the sense when

he picked up the words and the tune and the

joy in his voice and just as if to make

his point at the end of the refrain,

picked up me and whirled me round and flew me

down and pecked me on the cheek, bristly moustache

and all. I tried to wipe the itch from the

bristle off. At which he went for a peck at

my other cheek. I gathered my crayons

together and got up and fled. There were

other songs too, many others, but this

one very often. I heard it when he

was in the same room as I was, when he

was in the next room,

and soon,

when he was nowhere close by at all.

His mother visited him the day after

we came home and the day before he died.

Back in the day, when he had no children

and his parents had four, and all of them

growing up in one small room stuck suddenly

in the middle of a crumbling building

in Calcutta stuck in the middle of

the century and they, his parents, did

not know how they would feed four mouths, he used

to sit, I am told, on a swinging door

and while his day away watching the big

world going about its work and his known,

smaller world coming in and going out

through his perch of doorway. Until

the boys from across

the street called, and he gathered

up his shirt and was gone. The

game lasted hours and hours and

he came home with the evening and with a

hunger that would not keep in his little frame.

His mother visited him the day after

we came home and the day before he died,

and the two were the same day.

Stairs are difficult for her now, and anyway

I had thought that this, of all things, she did

not have to see. She had the stories, and

I thought they were enough, the stories, and

we would live with them. Stories of nineteen

forty-seven and three years after and

the forty days and forty nights before

they came to the city in their old land

but new country. Of him at her

breast through days of homelessness but also

discovery in the unfamiliar,

familiar

city they would make their own.

His mother visited him the day after

we came home and the day before he died.

She climbed the stairs, slowly, the stairs that he

had built and up which we had last night

carried him up, because he could not walk

anymore, she climbed the stairs, and came to

sit by him on the bed.

She stroked his head

and stroked his head

and prayed.

She hadn’t anything to say that I

heard. Just the name she has for you, over

and over

and over.

I looked

at her as she looked

at him for a long time. He used to call

me mother, do you know? Is that not a

strange thing for fathers

to do—call their daughters

mothers?

I am no mother yet, though I had wanted

badly to give him what life I could, and

have him live, I am no mother yet.

On this day, I was looking at one. She,

my father’s mother,

the mother to his infancy and boyhood

and youth and fatherhood,

my father’s mother

found somewhere in the vast oblivion

that pressed upon the world and nearly stopped

my breath right there, something to say blessings

with. Called you by the name she has for you,

and gave back her son. I looked at her, not

believing a word of it, and all the

words she said was your name, and I did not

believe a word of it. But if you had

heard her (did you? for she was speaking to

you, you know?) you would have known what she was

giving, giving

up, giving

back.

I know you think you know,

and that you know

there is little to our poor round world anyway.

But she made him just as you did, and she

called your name and blessed him and gave him back

to you. So, you see,

I have been thinking about you. I know

that you are not. But if he has gone

anywhere, I must think it is you

he has gone to.

Listen to him. He is always making

plans. And he speaks with love and yearning

even when you think he must be past

it all. Listen to him.

When they still thought they could do something

about it, and we still thought I could do

something about it, and I still thought I

could go back to thinking you were, they

gave him medicines

and advice and more medicines

and he still raved far into the night, and

would not sleep. I tried to tell you how he

could not sleep. Until one day they said they

had no more help for him. They kept the straps

and the medicines but took away the hope

and left him to go ungently into

the good night, for what else could they do,

with his raving.

But come the night, when the doctors

were gone and the nurses were gone

and the medicines were gone

and only the restraints

remained,

and I did,

we talked

and he told me of all the travels he

had planned and would surely go. Not long, now.

I listened. Sometimes, when I wept, and he

knew I was there, he reached for my hands and

took them in his

and said that all would be well,

and I must not cry

and he would tell me why

for did I not want to listen about

this place he had heard of (from a friend, he

said), and where we would surely go. Not long,

now. I listened, my head in my hands

in his hands.

Surely, I thought, in a journey that would

never happen, anything was allowed?

And I said yes to everything. Green fields

in a huge bowl between white mountains

against blue skies. Deep light. A river. Not

yet seen, but heard. A river. A long walk

broken by a sleep on a rock

warmed with the sun’s day. Endless day. Wheeling

stars. More day. My mother feeling

his hand. Grassflowers. The scent of pine.

A flatbread just removed from the iron

grill and so hot

that the butter does not

stay on it but runs and soils our clothes so

that we must eat it quickly. Woodsmoke. Sun

light on red rhododendrons. Hot, sweet milk

tea. My mother, in a blue dress, ahead.

At the end of a long walk’s day, a bed.

He was caught between the above and the

below, he said, and felt terribly

responsible for it all. If he took

his mind away from it, even for an

instant, the sky would part from the earth and

did I really wish for such a thing to

happen, and would I please therefore not

disturb?

I said yes to everything. Soft sunlight

on his bare arm. Sunlight on his closed eyes.

Waking up. Leaving. Leaving again.

My sister and I setting out. She in

red, in blue, I. Setting out so he could

follow and know the trail from our footsteps.

Fireside. A dark gray (or was it green?)

jacket. Cold water, as much water as

he wanted to drink. A terrible thirst

made sweet by the sweetness of the water

that quenched it. The silence of grass growing.

Night. A moon and a wait. The rest of lying

down encircled in a pair of arms. I

said yes to everything. although he

was desperately listening,

and no longer listening,

for an answer.

He asked for water. I gave it to him.

He emptied the glass and looked into it,

turned it around and turned

it upside down. Looked

deep into it. He could not make it

out, he said. They had told him that it he

drank it all, it would fill up again. He

could not make it out, he said, that

the glass was empty. Only one way to

fill the glass up, he said. To drink it all.

Did I know why the glass was empty?

I said yes to everything.

He talked about the sound of the sea.

Back in the day, when he really was a

young father, and I really thought you were,

his work took him to a young town

where the land cliffed over the

green waters. He had a house, and around

the house a garden and in the garden

a neem tree. We climbed it, we

swung off it, we slept on its branches, and

we ate, with absurd delight, its

bitter leaves. He cooked for us, and kept home

for the months we would spend with him. In

the months we did not, he wrote us letters

of the sea,

and of the neem tree,

and of the shadow it cast dappling the

sunshine in his room. He would lie in bed,

he said, and the tree would make dreams for him,

because it made play of the light, and broke

it into green and dark and the sea made

the sea-sound at his window. What was a

sea-sound, I asked, in the painful slowness

of my young writing, and the terrible

stretch of the time it took for my letter

to reach him. I started to check for his

letter the day after I posted mine.

And many years later, as it seemed to

me, there was an envelope, and I knew

just from looking at it that it had the

sea-sound in it. It was, he said, the sound

of someone calling that you wanted to

meet, and were dreaming about,

and in the dream, too,

they were calling you.

That was the sea-sound. And it only worked

when the sun and the tree played in the wind

rising from the sea.

I said yes to everything.

Listen to him. There is always yearning

in what he says. Listen to him.

Who knows but you may discover some

magic in the world you made, after all.

His mother visited him the day after

we came home and the day before he died,

and the two were the same day.

The day ended. As one day it had as we drove

beside the river and over the bridge

across the river that had flowed thousands

of miles over the land and was now near

the sea. Back in the day, when he really

was a young father, and I really thought

you were, we made a young pilgrimage, the

four of us, to the huge snowbound mouth of

this river. My sister barely three. And

I young enough that I thought I should walk

forever as long as the river

grew younger

beside me and at night dissolved into

a thousand thousand stars supporting the

mountains around. At night, when the walk

caught up with us, and the cold of the high

places, he sat us down and to make sure

we ate well before the next day’s walk, broke

into stories. Did I think it was a

river and mountains I was among, then?

How if he told me it was a great god

with great unkempt hair with the crescent of

the moon stuck in it, and the river a

flow of mazy wandering from out his

locks into the great land the great god stood

upon? How if he said the river

was a mother who looked after a

thousand thousand lives every day on that

great land? How if he told me that at this

moment, there was the river almost a

mile wide where it was getting ready to

meet the sea, and along the banks, all the

way of her journey, there were those who drank

of her, prayed to her, grew their grain with her,

and at the last, brought to her their dearly

beloveds so she would take them with her

to the sea? I didn’t hear any more, for

the smoke of the campfire grew curling to

touch the stars that held the mountains and I

remember only that he held me warm

(though did he really, do you know? for I

think I saw him then holding my bundle

of sister. And I think I remember

both him and my mother walking out to

the river’s dark noisome shore and entering

my eyes as they came silhouetted by

its dark light silken glow), that he held me

until the last light left the sky and the

day ended entirely on stars. And the

day ended many years later as we

drove beside the river and over the

bridge across the river that had flowed

thousands of miles over the land and was

now near the sea, and we talked in the car

about the other day that had ended

under the stars. The day ended now as

one day it had as we drove beside the

river talking about the day we had

ended on the stars.

Hold him as his dearest friend did, at the

last. We kissed him goodnight, this time the

bristle of his cheek on my lips. I kissed

him goodnight, knowing that I kissed him towards

quite another night than opened for us

under the dark green warm summer sky in

the land where our river met the sea, we

kissed him goodnight. But she went to sleep

beside him on his bed, which was also

her bed. Held his hand, held him, although he

may already have been past all holding.

Then, as she slept,

he went to sleep at last. Which woke

her up. Even you can guess the rest. But,

as I was saying, hold him. Hold him and

tell him how all our anger, anxiety,

urgency, and to everyone their own

anger, anxiety, urgency, became

an absurd love that we could finally

do nothing about. That we can do

nothing about. Tell him something that you

don’t really need to tell him, because he

knows and is very smug about already,

but tell him anyway because it will

make him smile.

Tell him he is all ours.

Take me, for instance. One half his, and since

my mother had a friend she loved that she gave

everything to, another half also

his. His to make, love, let go, and love still.

When he slept at last, he was full of

farawayness and a terrible

repose. He slept like a man who falls

asleep after making love and knows

that when he wakes up he will see his

lovemade beside him. And he did, for she

was holding him when he woke up for you.

Hold him like his friend did. When he could still

ask for things, like that glass of water,

he had asked to be held.

Hold him. And he may hold you too. And you

will see what warmth he brings to it. Who knows

but you will find out

what warmth is about

a pair of arms.

Sit down and talk to him. Perhaps over

a sunset, with the clouds beneath you in

the day’s last gold. He never tired, you see,

of the beauty of your world. And almost

against my better judgment, because he

gave me no choice when he gave me his eyes,

I too am still taken in.

Sit down and talk to him. He will have such

things to tell you. Sit down and talk to him.

2011-12-31T09:49:00.009+05:30

the simple matter of living and dying in love.

2011-12-05T02:26:00.000+05:30

Mountaineering Culture Studies at Michigan.

2011-10-30T04:13:00.001+05:30

dave holland.

2011-10-25T03:43:00.001+05:30

the shark's fin in 2008.

2011-09-22T22:37:00.002+05:30

Prayer for travelling people

If it is evening when they set out,

collect them into the last light

and make it dawn for them.

If someone kissed them

goodbye, let them both remember.

Give them fewer waits at airports

or train stations or bus stops

or rickshaw-stands. Mostly,

give them breath to walk

far and wide and with

clouds catching their eyes.

Keep them warm.

Give them silence if they

are happy. Give them

conversation if they are

in themselves alone

and thinking not just of

passing from place to

place but of passing the

very world by.

Bring to them the

kindness of strangers.

Fill their eyes.

Let there be someone,

when they arrive, to

bring them home.

2011-07-03T06:57:00.015+05:30

(click to enlarge)

The Sari Pass

5 May 2011

Billing, 9,512 ft

It has been a long and beautiful day. Another return, another almost-year of wishing upon the enveloping magic of high forests and clear air, and when I am back in it, it is again more overwhelming and wonderful than in my anticipation. But always intimately familiar and warmly generous – a sort of homecoming.

That word comes to me carrying its association of ideas and language, but also makes me stop. When I say homecoming, I wonder what home I have left, and may, when I cannot get out of it, talk about it. But not now. In the flickering light emanating from a stout little candle placed above a rudimentary fireplace built into this outhouse of the Billing Forest Rest House – the whole is but an empty room, with a stray old newspaper in one corner mightily rustled when the door is open and the wind finds a way in – I should tell instead of how I find myself where I do, of the day’s journey and dreamy beauty, and what I am walking into.

I could start with the last. I am walking into the Sari Pass of the lower Pir Panjal in Himachal. Sari Galu in the Chhota Banghal region, as they call it here. Thus far, it has been a series of bus rides from McLeodganj to Bir (through Dharamsala and Palampur and Paprola and Baijnath), and a trek up the nine kilometres between sleepy little Bir (5,000 ft) to high grassy Billing (9,512 ft).

But what a host of escorts all day. This trek is going to be weird to write about. Many in the high mountains have imagined companions for themselves in their moments of greatest need and loneliest travail. Smythe’s friend on Kamet, and Messner’s old man on Everest, if you want examples. But I am in a beautiful, lush world, and already very pleasantly companied. Last year’s Gulab’s brother-in-law, Ashok Kumar (also from Kareri, and possessing the same kind of manic energy), and my guide Swaroop Dogra (from a family of immigrés into Dharamsala from Kuarsi-lands, and as alert a looker-out for you as you could want). What need have I, then, of invisible companions? But I seem unable to keep out of my head the three men I thought I would have with me in the mountains this summer. And I have been holding all sorts of conversations with them. Beq saw me off to the Delhi-McLeodganj bus yesterday, and I spent the night in the same seat as I had last year, today stopped at Manu’s in the same way we had last year, and picked up provisions in the same shops we had visited in Bhagsu last year. Do you wonder then that I have been consulting him at every step, all day long? With KP, I shared several chuckles when a convoy of pups welcomed us as we got off the bus at Bir. And to George I have explained absolute volumes about the Gaddis, watersheds, high forests, and my theories about a very particular kind of blue sky that is a privilege of this part of the world. The lack of geographical specificity I have about home is what is responsible for my not having these three with me now, and I miss them all. But that I am here has to do with the special kindness of Beq and the untold resourcefulness of Manu. How else does one ‘plan’ to go on a trek in these parts just days ago and still get to do it?

***

I must be very tired. I fell asleep between paragraphs. And was woken up to be fed. Swaroopji, Ashokji and I have just finished a dinner of soup, lentils and rice, and I am writing in the candlelight that Ashokji is using to wrap carefully in a worn little plastic bag his obnoxiously loud media phone (a near clone of the one Gulab carries), and which Swaroopji is using to quizzically watch Ashokji under. It has been a long day. And I should tell you about it before I fall asleep again with the notebook in my hand.

I should start at the brief stop at Dharamsala, then, on the up from Delhi to McLeodganj. In the first light of morning, as we wound up Kangra, I opened my eyes and saw the Dhauladhar. More ribbed with snow than I could have thought possible, for last year’s rain-torn range had been sombre with naked shale and granite. And this morning, even with the sun rising behind it, I could see what a generous dusting of white was still on the range, and that it was only just breaking out of the hold of winter. The bus moved on from Dharamsala after ejecting half its passengers, and I looked out the window with a silly smile on my face as we neared McLeodganj after clearing the cantonment area and the John-in-the-Wilderness church and cemetery. It was just past seven in the morning when the bus tumbled us finally forth into McLeodganj, and in fifteen minutes thence, I was at Manu’s old office in Bhagsu. Half awake with the wonder of being again in wonderland, and half asleep from the last several days’ travel.

The only soul around was Manu’s younger brother, a kind and shy little gentleman, who pulled up a chair for me. Nothing shy about Manu himself, of course, though he is even littler than his little brother. Manu came in as the sunshine did with the sun curving the sky just enough to send a few shafts into the office room. And that put paid to any dozing I may have indulged in. How had the bus journey been? Did I feel rested? Did I have a sleeping bag with me? I would, of course, require a stove for the trek? Should we wait here until Ashokji came in with the kerosene? I would gasp at the magnificent tent he had ready for me – see if I didn’t! Did I feel up to going provision shopping in half an hour? But of course I must be dying for some tea. Would I like to freshen up in the room upstairs? Would someone please find out if there was water in the toilet upstairs? Did I know how to fix the printer? Would I, please, once we were back from the trek? Oh, there was no telling if I would be back here? Why on earth would I want to go to Delhi or Chennai after the trek? But I would try to come back to McLeod, wouldn’t I? And where was Bibek, after all that talk and planning of the big trek? What a wonderful set of routes he had planned! We would do such things next year, right? That Bibek has some good ideas. Would I like a bag to carry the shopping back in? The toilet upstairs does have water. Would I like to head up?

I would like to head up. And take a quick shower. Who wouldn’t, after carrying the dust of Haryana on their person?

A bit later, I joined Manu in his office again, and just as he was waxing eloquent about the encyclopaedic regional knowledge of my proposed guide on this trek, a certain Swaroop Dogra, a slightly stocky and pot-bellied man walked into the office. Swaroop, Manu introduced him. Knows all the damn routes in the area, he said. Though – and he looked at him sideways in a glance of both censure and admiration – he was changing professions even this minute. Had a restaurant just opened in Bhagsu, Swaroopji had. Though a better guide for the area we were going to would be difficult to find.

Ashokji had by now come in with the kerosene, and was busy packing an array of kitchen stuff as he threw a few words into the discussion here and there. In his wiry frame, I saw the same grace and relentless energy that Gulab and so many others of these parts pack. But Swaroopji was curious – with the enviably rosy look of the proverbial Himachali, yet a very un-Himachali short stature; with powerfully built arms and legs, yet that slight pot-belly. Well, I would learn more as I walked with him, I guessed. And as he left to finish his own packing, Ashokji and I went shopping for stuff I hadn’t already brought from Delhi.

By ten, we were everyone ready to set off on the first leg of the journey, and I was loudly proclaiming that I was going nowhere without some breakfast in me first. The four of us therefore went into a nearby parantha place, one Manu picked, and we had wonderful, rich, buttery aloo-parantha. I could have eaten till I had burst. Fresh coriander and ginger in the potato filling, the slight tawa-touch burn on the parantha, the run of melting butter. And good lime pickle. Until I am back in such things, I don’t often realise how much I miss this food.

And Manu told stories about their last trek in the area I was going to. Very interesting villagers in those parts, he said. Manu and co. had once been travelling with laden ponies, and they had been stopped with warnings of a huge tree that had fallen and was blocking the trail utterly. There was no way pack ponies could get around the fallen tree, they were told. Having therefore diverted the ponies and their drivers to another – longer and slower – route, Manu and his pedestrian companions had approached the area in question, hoping against hope that they could clamber over the tricky bit and thus make the appointment they were travelling to keep. They had, in the expected place, found a tree-trunk of a perfectly un-unusual diameter. Having cleared the trail of this very average-sized tree-trunk, and now feeling perfectly foolish that they would keep their appointment minus the ponies and goods that had been the point of said appointment/meeting in the first place, they had continued on, freely cursing the villagers. On another occasion, while passing through a village, they had somehow triggered the ire of an old man. And had been asked to keep off his part of the village, for he would not have strangers polluting his doorfront. What right had they to pass through his fields and village, anyway? And Swaroopji had, with a straight face, asked Manu to present the All-State-Absolute-Permit-For-Travel. Manu had been taken aback and on the verge of asking Swaroopji if he too had lost his rocker, when he had caught on and passed on an indeterminate and grubby little piece of paper, and in the mere gesture, saved their little group from further questioning by an unusually irate group of villagers.

***

Our bus left McLeodganj at 11, and Dharamsala at 11.45. I called Beq to tell him I was on my way, then fell asleep in near-absolute contentment. A stop in Palampur, and an amused Swaroopji shaking me awake before treating me as the last piece of luggage to be taken off the bus and loaded aboard the one going to Bir. More sleep, and the last I see on this trip is the road winding past the Beas. A stop again, this time in Baijnath. No need to change buses, but half an hour of waiting in the bus as cucumber-sellers ply their wares to hot and thirsty travellers. I can hardly keep my eyes open, and it isn’t just the heat.

Shortly before three in the afternoon, the bus tops a bend, and suddenly there is no further to go, for here is an end to the metalled road. We are the last three passengers still on the bus. As we are let off and the bus disappears in its own smoke, the little shop we are standing in front of emits a little shopkeeper who looks as if he cannot figure out why at this still hour these three people should not be at a peaceful nap or at least a peaceful sit somewhere out of the sun. Leaving our rucksacks in his care, we set off to see if there is anywhere that will still serve lunch. Fortunately for us, a Nepalese family – quite likely the only one in the area – still has their little dining room open, and we get some vegetable noodles and momos. Then, a final bit of shopping for greens and vegetables. And then, we are off.

***

The jeep track from Bir to Billing is gradual enough, but what we wanted was the foot track. We were starting on a steep-ish route today fairly well into the afternoon, and would have to make good time to reach Billing before we lost light completely. Fortunately, days are now long. And setting out in the falling afternoon sun saved us a world of sweat. Even so, it was exceedingly hot the first hour or so of walking. But if that retarded swift movement, I had an accelerator in the thought that surely it would be cooler the higher we went!

As we left Bir behind, we saw returning to their homes the last of its wood-gatherers. The wind picked up pleasantly as we entered the forests of oak and rhododendron that populate so many valleys of Himachal at these heights. Imagine, then, a forest green with slanting light, and under your feet a carpet of yielding earth and fallen leaves. The only sound is what I make when I move. The heady smell of the forest. And if I look up through the interleaved trees, a luminous afternoon sky.

Swaroopji and Ashokji have a pace I cannot match, possibly ever, but certainly not now after spending the last few days trying to write a semester to an end. But it is a relaxed enough walk, and as break-ins go, I could not have asked for a pleasanter.

***

I called George from a breather in the oak forest, out of sheer surprise that I still had any reception on my phone, and because, as chance would have it, we were the three of us at this time sucking on the last of the boiled sweets the Easter Bunny had brought me. I wished again that those three were here. Not high, I wasn’t yet. But what a pretty altitude to be in, now that the red of the rhododendrons was taking over from the sombre green of the oak. As the sun drew down, the forest turned dense, and the light was both green and gold. Lingeringly, it stayed with us awhile, but when we had about a kilometre left yet to go on our route, the sun set, and we walked on in the remnant light of the sky. As on the trail to Triund, so here: the track to Billing does not cross any streams, and we were running low on water. But the air was cool, and even smelled of distant rain. Not surprising; just before leaving McLeodganj, we had asked Manu to check on the weather forecast, and he had alerted us about possible rain over the next couple of days.

***

We reached Billing under the great peace of a single silver sliver of moon, and in even that soft light, I could see why the place was a haven for paragliders. Slightly higher than Triund but with the same soft rolling greens at one end falling into the void, it must provide a wonderful take-off point for gliders. To the south-west, the lights of Baijnath shone through the evening. And we fetched up, in almost exact re-enactment of last year’s arrival in Triund, in front of a little outhouse. The same wooden structure, the same cows, and even – as we now scurried to get indoors and set up camp – the same rain. Ashokji went out right away to get some water from a stream some way down, but was unable to find it the first time in the dark, and came back with empty bottles and the thirst still in his voice. But he was lucky the second time. And even as he stepped into the outhouse with his happy load of full bottles – Swaroopji and I had meanwhile cleaned the outhouse room and set up the stove and candles – the sky exploded in thunder, lightning and rain.

You know what happened next. I started out well-intentioned indeed to write the day out, but fell asleep with the pen in my hand. Now, having dined and warmed my tired feet, I feel more awake, though I have no doubt that I shall be asleep the moment I get horizontal again. But this really is the lap of luxury: a good walk, a full meal, and being able to write at the end of the day. My companions are happy to let me be, and though I have all these conversations in my head with people I wish were here, it is curiously liberating to have fewer people to look after. Indeed, to be the person that is looked after. Very pleasant. I have the feeling I could get very used to this.

I seem so far removed from the world I come from and worry in. I worry about home and the people who made it home for me. But where the source of my worries lies, lies also the source of this gift of the mountains. My parents brought me to Kedar, and I remember with nervous clarity that first encounter with that which was utterly demanding and utterly giving at the same time. I still wonder about it. Why I was brought there. What my parents sought to accomplish with that ‘pilgrimage’. What they saw. And what they expected to see in and through my eyes. Could they have known how the heights would ever after fill and shelter my eyes?

***

Ashokji and Swaroopji are cosy, immobile, fat, round, sleeping-bag worms, and the candle is burning low. I shall fall asleep to the sound of thunder and rain, the occasional flash of lightning through the windows, the smell of wet mountains and the most pleasant aching tiredness I know.

***

6 May 2011

Khalhail, approximately 7,000 ft

It was the wind woke me up. Rattling the doors of the hut, and smelling for all the world like a rain-filled, busy night, and a restless, sunny morning. In between pottering about for toilet and using the toothbrush, I now saw how magnificent the Billing alps were, how rounded, generous, and perilously alone at one end of a strand connecting to the main ranges.

I was soon called in to get my breakfast and tea. And for the first time, realised what a terrific blunder it had been to forget my tea in Delhi. Ashokji had spotted this gap in my provisions yesterday, and gone and got a packet in Bhagsu. I tell you, I have been resigning myself all day to swilling some absolute muck over the next few days!

But otherwise, a lot of today has been like turning the clock back. I have told about how similar Billing is to Triund. And like the Triund-Laka-Lahesh day last July, today started with waking up in an outhouse and ending the day’s work by being washed into our destination. Rain in the mountains, as Ruskin Bond calls it. In gentle places like these, the after-rain makes layers and layers for the air as far as vision will stretch, tendrils of remnant fog or flying cloud, and a quiet of infinite repose. I am writing from such a quiet. And the vista I have open to my north and east any monarch could envy. It is the kind of earthscape Beq goes dreamy over, for he loves these colours of green, travelling mists, flowers that use even the smallest cracks of earth to grow in, and mountains held together by winding rivers. And for such a hedonistic little fusspot, I must say, he puts up rather well with the whimsical asks of the trail.

It all started with a demanding enough warm-up, I thought, as we climbed the ridge flanking the east of Billing. But merely half an hour into this uphill we gained the wide track that would wind us first into the border of the district of Mandi, then back into Kangra. We would follow this track quite evenly for the next couple of hours, breaking a couple of times only where the prospect so pleased as to want us to pause and go into inner gloats, or where I found curious things like marvellously textured mushrooms growing on mammoth trees.

The morning mists slowly dissipated around us, and the sun shone out on bunchy rhododendrons and baby spring leaves of pine. Tiny, tender, infinitely bendy little pine needles coloured in golden young green. Once, finding a branch hanging beguilingly close to the trail on which I walked, I brought my face close to it, and was at once taken into an entire pine forest held within a single cluster of young leaves.

***

The light turned. Some two hours into the trail, as Billing fell away in the west distance and the Dhauladhar gleamed in the further, higher west, deep thunder overtook us, and in a manner reminiscent of last year’s monsoon-trekking days, enfolded us in clouds that burst with us still held within them. Ashokji and Swaroopji shook their heads and assembled under the un-shelter of an uneven rock. And I, oh so blasé from almost never having been dry on the previous trek, stood by to listen.

‘The teashop!’ said Ashokji.

Meaningful nod from Swaroopji.

‘We can shelter there! It cannot be more than half an hour away, now.’

No reaction from Swaroopji. Until he lifts his eyes and meets Ashok’s, again meaningfully.

Ashok begins to catch on. It is still early in the year. ‘You think it might not be open!’ And a bit louder, this time more indignantly: ‘You think it might not open?’ He clearly thinks it terribly unsportmanlike of the teashop if it isn’t open. And terribly unsportmanlike of Swaroopji for discussing such a possibility.

‘It might not be,’ says Swaroop. He points at an unlikely and momentary gap in the clouds to point in the general direction of the higher ranges. ‘It is cold, this rain. It must have snowed higher up.’

It must indeed have. We were going to have a drippy and cold walk ahead, and it was while I was trying to fiddle out a bit of improvised raincoat for Camera that Swaroopji gave me his raincape to wear. Would keep the camera properly dry, he said. And he stalked off. There are moments, you see, in which one does not argue with Swaroopji. But I was very grateful. I know this saved the camera a fair bit of wet, for the rain was now coming down quite hard, and I have a suspicion that the protective overall may even have saved me a fair bit of cold. It was certainly more efficient than my own little rain jacket – which, in this instance, I had not the opportunity of using.

***

The teashop was open, and we trooped gratefully in out of the shower and billowing mists. We had given ourselves a fairly early start – it was only a bit past ten now. But the world was already dissolving in an ocean of sound.

Inside the teashop – the only one on this trail and on the border between the districts of Kangra and Mandi – an old Gaddi gentleman sat stoking a fire and smiling a bemused welcome to the wetraggled three of us. There was nothing to do anymore but try to wait the rain out, so we fell to yarning, tea, and Maggi. Might as well have a spot of lunch, said Swaroopji, while we were holed up here. And use the fire for the cooking to dry the wettest bits of ourselves. Ashokji, after he had dried his socks, expressed to the old man his sincere thanks by whipping out his media phone and with an earth-rending sound, clicking his photograph. The poor man looked a bit startled, but to his credit, kept hold of his stoker. When Ashokji, now inspired, pointed the phone at Swaroopji, the latter raised his arm in protest and defence. I couldn’t entirely blame him.

About 11.30, the rain showed slight signs of abating, and we peered out through the teashop door after once again emptying out and adjusting the little pots and pans on the floor in which the rainwater leaking in through the ‘ceiling’ tarp was collecting. It was time we got a move on. We were getting cold after all the walking and not taking the wet off, and I was even getting sleepy. But just as Ashokji stretched one last time and rose to collect his sack, the rain picked up with renewed energy, and it was another hour still before we could again think of setting out.

At 12.30, the fiercest of the rain was over, but it was still putting up a good show. But such things were not important anymore; we were entering the Barot valley, the Uhl river valley, which leads right on up in the north to the Thamsar Pass. And I wonder what that must be like, for it was a valley of dreams that we now walked into. Curvy, tree-bedecked, reaching high and low in the contours of trail, both generous in space and warmly intimate, and this rainy afternoon, green enough to shelter your eyes for eternity. Above us, the clouds joined and parted in almost gratuitous disregard of the rain still coming down on us, and the closer and higher Pir Panjal wove in and out of view. So too, we only caught glimpses of the Barot river far below. But mingled in gentlest measure with the sound of rain came even now the subdued roar of that green water.

In time, the rain became a drizzle, and the trails to Baragram and Kothi Kohr peeled off across the valley and to our north. And we started to descend sharply onto cultivated terrain surrounding the villages below: Mayot (or Mehot, as some spell it), Khalhail, and the like. I could not have enough of the green and changing mists. When we came into Mayot washed down along with other hillside debris, it was close on two in the afternoon, and the rain was finally letting up. We came to a halt at a high carpenter’s shop in the village to wait it out until three, when, we were told, school would be over. For it was the school building in Mayot we wanted to stop at.

We waited, our rucksacks on the floor of the open workshop, while the afternoon air rang with the sound of lessons repeated with a note almost of desperation – suggesting that we were not the only people waiting for school to be over. Meanwhile, there was only one thing to do. It had been a day’s trek reminding me very much of him, so I switched on my phone to see if Beq could be reached. And it felt good to tell him of the rain, the valley, and the winding trail. Had he been here today, he would have been slower even than usual, for he would have wanted to stop everywhere to drink everything in and take no end of photographs.

***

Our unmistakable indication that school was over came when the school building ejected a band of maroon-clad children, all of whom seemed to head straight at us. What they wanted, really, the carpenter’s shop. And precious on a cold rainy afternoon like this, the sawdust shavings that they could use to make a fire. The carpenter gave the children a gruff enough acquiescence, but they seemed none too daunted, and proceeded to fill up buckets and whatever else they could lay their hands on with as much shaving as they could. They carried away their haul to the school playground, where, surely, tonight there would be a campfire.

Swaroopji came back after a quick peek into the schoolhouse. The thing had no ceiling, he reported; might we care to walk on to the next village and next schoolhouse, perhaps? The next village, Khalhail, wasn’t far off. Although we would now certainly find the schoolhouse itself locked up, he thought he remembered from a previous visit that the place had a charming little balcony on the first floor that would suit us admirably. I didn’t in the least mind walking on, Ashokji neither; we thanked the carpenter who had allowed us to leave our sacks in his shop so long, and took to the trail again.

***

Khalhail, on the way to tomorrow’s Barot, is at about the same elevation as Mayot, and with almost an even prettier setting. A tiny village, with one ‘general purpose’ shop and a tiny school, it directly overlooks the winding river and looks up in teaseful proximity to a craggy shoulder of the Pir Panjal.

And this time, we knew we would have the school to ourselves; the last of the students were leaving as we walked into the village. It was now almost half past three. Half as a visual reward and half perhaps to laugh at us, the sky finally started to clear. Swaroopji could not resist the sunshine but had to climb to the roof of the schoolhouse to lay out our wet things in an attempt to dry them in the final hours of the day’s sun.

I am writing, in fact, in that golden light. The balcony we are on faces east, and behind me, a sickled moon is already beginning to climb the sky. The balcony is open on three sides, and to my left, I can see that rugged shoulder of the Pir Panjal which stands guard over this cluster of villages, and which has this morning received a fresh dusting of snow. Ahead, the trail to Barot winds down, even as the river does, and near Barot, I understand, the two will meet. Swaroopji and Ashokji have gone for their own bit of exploring in the village, and come back with pakoras and thadda (a local wheat-based clear alcoholic drink). Having completely forgotten how foul the tea we brought is, I asked for tea first, and though the hot liquid did me good, I was not unhappy to soon switch to the delicately flavoured local.

But I am also hungry, and look forward to whatever it is that Ashokji has going in the pressure cooker. It has just gone. What talkers my men are. But how nice it is to hear conversing voices and yet be left companionably alone to do my own thing. I have even been reading, today. The Mallory story. Stuff indeed of wonder.

***

We have done dinner. A very good dinner, too – though why am I surprised at that? The sky has opened at last, and from the last lingering sunsetting lights on the dusted snow in the distance, we are now under a burst of stars. In the balcony, we shall be at the mercy of the wind tonight, but I don’t think any of us mind, for it is warm enough, and we should be cosy in our sleeping bags. We could have erected the tent, but could I then have gone to sleep with the opening of my sleeping bag framing a bit of Saptarshi?

***

7 May 2011

Andarli Malhan, approximately 6,900 ft

I am writing from deep within the Lohardi valley, and with a looming sense from behind me that it gets deeper still to the east. Where we go tomorrow. The village we are in is named with possibly a consciousness of being thus well within the valley we are walking into – Andarli Malhan, it calls itself. It is the last village in this direction from Kangra, and enjoys a ravishingly beautiful setting. From its highest slopes, the Pir Panjal whites are clearly visible, and from its lowest, the winding Barot-Uhl. The valley is tightening a little bit even here, and as I sit at the school yard facing west, I can see in awe-inspiring proximity another shoulder of the mountain this village clings to. The green is again gold at this time of setting sun. School is over, and in what playground there can be in a village so precipitously situated on slopes, the children are engaged in all descriptions of games and tumbles. From my seat in the tiny yard, I overlook that playground. The cries rising from that fray of play mingle with the calls of home-returning birds. And the whole world smells of departing sun on rained-on mountain earth.

***

I got into trouble this morning with the breakfast, and had to ask again that Ashokji go easy on the chilli powder. A couple of years of mashed potatoes may well have reduced my tolerance for the hot and spicy, but I do believe that my compatriots here like their food hotter than would be easy for most people. But it was a good breakfast nonetheless, when Ashokji fried up the eggs Swaroopji had mysteriously sourced yesterday. What else had they brought, I wonder? There seems no end to the stuff they can out-of-the-hat at me.

But the balcony and the rising sun – I must tell you of that. The pleasure of being summoned to wakefulness by a young sun! And to open your eyes and look at the white-topped mountains framed against a lightening sky! I brushed my teeth, filled my waterbottle, and packed for the day, all in a sort of trance, and couldn’t help smiling the whole time, for look at how lyrically lovely it all was. I checked with the phone, and it seemed in the mood to co-operate. I called Baba to describe to him where I found myself. He is very ill, and we know how difficult he can be, and that the difficulty owes in no small measure to the strange mental weirdness of the illness – a slowness of grasp, imperfect decision-making, a propensity to lose a long chain of thought. But if there is one thing I can expect him always to get, it is this kind of loveliness. And sure enough, it was good this morning to tell him about it all. I don’t know how much of it he will remember, and anyway, we finished on other and considerably more depressing things – like their decision to stay with the god-and-medicine-forsaken government hospital in Chennai, and neither Kutty nor I know how to convince them to leave – but for the moment, we spoke of good things, and he never needed explaining, because he always gets this enchantment of the open road. Always. It is magic with the man – that he is so close, all the time, to so much longing. Tell him of a splashy bath in a cold running mountain stream, and he will want to be there. Tell him of rising a crest to look on a vista of mountains on the other side, and he will want to be there. And tell him of balconies flooded with morning sun while the Pir Panjal wakes up around you, and he will want to be here. It is perhaps a longing that even I carry always, because, like I was saying, it is probably not only my love that keeps bringing me back to these parts. It is, in a real way, an inherited love. Therefore, a deeper and older thing than I am. Today, I told him in great detail about the trail yesterday, and about the loveliness of where I was. It must pain him to not be here. It must give him that longing again, more intense still. I wish it does. Such things keep people alive. If such things don’t, what can? I want him to want to be back here. We are always talking about treks we can do together. There are so many of them.

***

The road from Khalhail to Barot is all a pleasant gradual downhill, for we were walking to meet the river at Barot (5,904 ft). Today was, really, a rest day through which we walked. A merry sun-and-shade stroll down to Barot, with a little stop on the way where a water mill cheerfully ground wheat grains into powder, and another where the river bed nearly met the trail, and I could take photographs of the many-coloured stones lining the river bed.

***

At Barot, it was a wedding day. A threesome of kids was at a game of cricket before school started, and more children in twos and threes were walking to school, but most of all, the town was taken up with three weddings. In each case, there were sizeable tarps stretched over rows of chairs in anticipation of the feast in the evening, and for two of them, the processions of the groom were already under way. The rhythm of life, and all that. And rather a beautiful world to be thus rhythmed in.

We stopped for a brief tea at Barot where the Uhl formed with an unceremonious meeting of the rivers from Mayot and Lohardi. Further south, where it is properly the Beas, the river is regulated by the dam in Jogindernagar. But here, the water is frothy green and wonderful.

The road from Barot to Lohardi (6 kilometres) is motorable, but it was a fine morning, and Swaroopji and I agreed that on a day of weddings, finding a jeep would probably be more trouble than it was worth. Also, today we only had to get a little way beyond Lohardi, so there was all the time in the world, and no reason not to walk. And walk we did. Even the singing, drinking wedding procession from Barot to Lohardi did not slow us down, for following Swaroopji’s lead, we danced through it and left it behind us. That is, Swaroopji danced through it. And Ashokji made his way with smiles. I performed something of an awkward jig. Whatever it was, it made the people in the little procession smile (and offer me a swig of thadda), and we were through. And upwinding our way by the green woods and young river.

***

Swaroopji finds me very quiet. And unlike Ashokji, who is always discreetly looking out for me, he is very cheeky and keeps slowing his own step to fall back and walk with me. He fears I might be getting terribly bored walking by myself. He may well feel that way, for he loves conversation himself. He and Ashokji find so much to talk about. But he is also very kind, and I think understands when I say I am more than happy by myself and – as just now – chasing lazily with my camera the butterflies trying to decide which flower they will visit next. And without a doubt, the man has a gifted eye, for by now I know that whenever he picks a spot for a breather, it is a turn of river, or a crest of mountain, or such a wind in the trail that there is a stunning prospect ahead and behind. And the thing is, I really have nothing I could say to add to the song of a full-throated river, the murmurs of leaves on high trees, and spring conversations between birds I cannot even name. I am, I think, made entirely sufficient and accommodated by the world around me. And the slight preoccupation, as always, is about wanting to hold on to this clarity of vision and taste of air on my tongue. These things don’t last in the world I live and work in, though they always remain mine to remember and layer my next hopes with.

***

At Lohardi (6,710 ft), the road ends again, and a narrow trail winds up into the further reaches of the valley. We stopped at this break where the river was very close to the trail. As we needed to again restock a bit, we decided to halt for lunch and another spot of provision-shopping. We ate at a little shop that served rice, two kinds of dal, and a magnificent yogurt-based kari. It had been playing with clouds all morning, but turned very fine for a bit now, and the perfect lazybody that I have become, I happily trusted all shopping to my two men, and took a chair out to the shop courtyard for a nap. A slight breeze, a warm sun, and the sunhat pulled down over my eyes. When they got back with vegetables and some rice and dal, Swaroopji greeted me awake with a cheeky ‘Good morning!’ He must think I have an infinite capacity for sleep, and perhaps I do. I sleep every night without a blink between night and day, and even so am tempted at every possibility of a nap. While I shifted awake on my chair, I could feel not only his eyes on me, but also the bemused glances of the sunburnt old lady who ran the shop, her daughter, and even the two dogs that were monarchs of the courtyard they surveyed.

Swaroopji and Ashokji were taking their time packing the new acquisitions up. Very well, we would have tea. I ordered three glasses. I drank mine still sitting out in the sun. And was joined by a soft-spoken little man with a forehead lightly smeared with sandalwood paste. He too had clearly just walked from Barot.

A hot day, he said.

But pleasant, just now, wasn’t it?

Yes, he said. But he was getting on in years. How long could he go around tramping the countryside? But people will be people, and hold marriages at all sorts of places. The bride’s family had insisted they could not come down to Barot, but that the ceremony must be held at Lohardi.

Well, he had made good time, I told him. From what pace we had seen the procession to be in, they must be a long way away yet, and he should get himself a nice lunch here, and some rest, before things got busy again for the evening.

Oh yes, he intended to do just that, he smiled. Where was I from?

Kolkata.

What was I doing here?

Trekking into the Lohardi valley. Towards Sari.

With whom?

There, the gentlemen chatting over their tea.

Did I know it would be very cold further up?

We were carrying warm clothes and bedding.

Good, good. We must take care. It would be very cold. And had anyone even been up pass-ways this year? It had snowed so much over the winter. Had the pass even opened yet?

We shall find out, I expect.

So we shall. Well, we must take care.

So must he. And I was sure the evening would prove enjoyable for everyone.

A warm smile, and he went in for his lunch.

In a few minutes, we had paid for our own lunch and tea, shouldered our packs and were off. A far off rumble of thunder sounded just as we stepped out, and the lady of the shop shelved her tray and came out calling after us. We must make good time now, she said. The afternoon rain was not far off, and we didn’t want to get wet, did we?

***

Now just you try making good time with a full lunch inside you. It is a short way from Lohardi to Andarli Malhan, but all uphill, and we walked with our waist straps undone. Even me, who only had an improvised little strap, because my original strap and buckle had been sawed off by some idiot at some airport on the way here (my rucksack had been complete when I had flown from Detroit, but in Delhi, I found it minus one half of the waist-strap and without the sack-cover). But it was a beautiful trail – green, close, and clearly coming together to squeeze through into the higher reaches of both the valley and the river. The rumbles of thunder came closer and closer as we walked, and it wasn’t a moment too soon when we walked into yet another little carpenter’s shed and sheltered, for the world burst again into rain. This time too, the school was visible just below us, and we would have to wait out a couple of hours before lessons formally closed at four. With the rain and the increase in altitude from Barot, it was suddenly colder, and to sit cosy and jacketed watching the rain take over the valley was hardly something I could complain about. Swaroopji and Ashokji waited in, too, but it wasn’t long before they made a dash out. I had my suspicions then, and they have since been confirmed. Swaroopji brought back with him a surpassingly clear thadda – and a big smile on his face.

***

Once the rain stopped, the world was light and green and very warm, and I continued sitting there watching the folds of mountain as the last clouds boiled away. Meanwhile, in a break between classes, the school building exploded with wee kids, and they then continued to have a game all their own to peep put, take one look at me in my strange t-shirt and high socks, flash a smile half shy and half daring, and with a cry retreat behind a door where I could no longer see them. I had to smile, though I did nothing else. For fully ten minutes they kept at it, never tiring of their own discovery and daring and wonder. When Swaroopji and Ashokji came back, we shifted our sacks to one of the half-built little rooms adjoining the school – and a very cosy little room it looks like it’s going to be for tonight, too.

It is a golden afternoon, and Swaroopji and Ashokji spoil me. I have taken off shoes and socks for a good wash at the school tap, and am sitting with a steaming mug of fresh mint tea beside me.

***

A few candlelight paragraphs before bed. Ashokji has been happily lured away – forgetting even his dinner – by the group of young village girls who came down to keep us company through the evening after dusk. There is a dance – to music – happening somewhere close by, they said, and we would be very welcome if we came. I should have gone, but hardly trust myself to keep my eyes open anymore, and if this dance is anything like what I have seen in other places in the hills, it could stretch well into the night, and I am not rested enough to go for such an evening and then tackle the few thousand feet we have on our plate tomorrow before Sari Base. I have a feeling Swaroopji would have liked to go for the dance, but even after his thadda, he is too alert and responsible to go off thus leaving our provisions un-looked after.

After tea, Swaroopji and I took a short walk up to the higher village, whence the whites of the Pir Panjal were clearly visible. It was a good walk to take, for we could discuss the route of the morrow, and how to tackle what we may find. Winter has indeed been severe in these parts, and even in Andarli, we have heard concern over our heading for Sari now. The place is completely snowbound, we are told, and as far as they know, not a single shepherd has thus far crossed in from the Kullu side. And certainly no one has crossed from Kangra into Kullu that they know of. I asked Swaroopji what his own assessment of the situation was, and – exasperatingly, if you ask me! – he said that it was a good thing I was wearing snow boots. And that was all I could get out of him! But we hadn’t any snow equipment, I pointed out. No ice-axe, no rope. Yes, he said, he wished we were carrying ice-axes. But we would have to do it the Gaddi way, therefore. With staffs made out of stout young saplings of a certain local wood, with one end pointed to simulate the spike of the axe. The staffs took a bit of getting used to, but we should be able to make them work. In fact, the staffs might just have a bit of edge over the axes in the terrain we are going to, for if the place is as heavily snowbound as we are told, the extra-long shafts of the staffs should be a big help. As for driving them into the snow to arrest quickly and efficiently, well, that I would have to learn. And, he added somewhat portentously, I should find plenty of practice soon enough!

I wonder, therefore, what conditions we shall find on pass day. Manu had told us that the Bara Banghal passes were not yet open, but it looked now as though no one had made a crossing even on the Chhota Banghal this year. My own experience on snow is fairly limited, and though I know from my maps that the terrain itself is not difficult, I have no doubt that there will be challenges, for a lot will depend on the sun and consolidation of the snow we find, and whether or not it will be of a bind and consistency to allow reasonable progress. As with Indrahar, so here: camping grounds are well below the pass on both sides. The pass will therefore take a while to reach, and a while to get off. I think we are looking at a long pass day no matter what – but I do wish, if possible, to avoid such a long day as we had had with Indrahar last year, for with the kind of terrain Sari seems set to give us, that long a day could be risky.

But I had another little agenda, germinated by Beq’s mention of a glacial lake called Dainasar a bit north of Sari Pass. Could we veer by the lake on the way down from the pass, I asked Swaroopji. Possibly, he said, just possibly. If we made good time. It would be a long day’s work, and to go a bit out of the way on such a day might cost us a bit. But we could certainly try. We would see how we did in the final stretch of the ascent, and take a call.

I couldn’t agree more.

***

Andarli is a typical inner Himachali village. That is to say, it has the same meticulous woodwork and architecture, the same captivating turns of road, the same smiles, the same irresistible brilliance of setting. From the highest point in the village, we saw the full curve of the green cirque of mountains which enclosed the village and its adjoining fields and terraces. And we saw the greater, higher, whiter cirque beyond, in that curved shoulder of the Pir Panjal which holds this more immediate green within its concentric bosom. To lead one’s eyes along the bigger cirque is to finally register the scale of the landscape beyond the shelter of the green mountains we are within. And to me, that awareness comes with an old, familiar invigoration. When Swaroopji and I got back to the school room our wander of the village, Ashokji was brewing yet more mugs of tea. And he had proudly collected several sheaves of aind, and washed and ranged them by the window. I recognised the spiky, leafy saag from last year. And I have just minutes ago polished off a brilliant plate of saag and dal and rice. All this wonderful valley-lushness and indolent dependence on the kindness of the villages ends tomorrow. We shall then be on our own. I am smiling as I write.

***

8 May 2011

Sari Base, approximately 10,000 ft

You will laugh when you hear what is going on. The same leisure that allows me to retire on a comfy little rock with notebook and pen is driving poor Ashokji and Swaroopji crazy, and I keep having to try and keep a straight face, for they are so evidently trying to fill the hours, and so constantly being thwarted by their own manic efficiency. But I shan’t talk about that just yet – there is time at hand, as you can see, and there will be leisure enough to laugh at my men. I should tell first of the long, lovely day, and the gorgeous walk that brought us here.

***

The long, lovely day started with, um, the trousers. Nothing figurative there. I really do mean trousers. Whose, you ask. Ashokji’s. What about them? They are missing.

Apparently, Ashokji came back late last night from the dance, and completely forgot to take his washing in. This morning, he is minus exactly one pair of trousers. For a wardrobe of which that pair forms fully a third of the total number of pairs of trousers, this is unfortunate. And Ashokji is stirring the morning tea with unnecessary vigour, while muttering in his breath that Swaroopji should, without delay, ‘initiate enquiries’. Why doesn’t he go out and ask around, he says. Why won’t he make enquiries? Why won’t he send out emissaries? To this, not without reason, Swaroopji replies that he does not fancy the task of knocking, at 6.30 in the morning, on village doors to ask if anyone recalls pinching a pair of trousers. This, he points out, is simply not done. You don’t go around asking people if they have lifted trousers off bushes. Such questions go against village-visiting decorum, he says. Simply insupportable behaviour. To which Ashokji, also not without reason, points out that Swaroopji would be a lot more convincing in his blasted reasoning if he could keep his silly grin off his face.

I really am trying to keep a straight face through all this, but as I obediently take my mug of tea, I share with Ashokji my story of a friend who also thus went out merrymaking one night, and came back later minus the trousers he had been wearing when he had set out, though even upon return, he had had on him meticulously notched and tied the belt that had been looped through that very pair of trousers. Ashokji grows very contemplative. With a deep philosophical nod of his head, he finally says that he counts himself better than my friend, for his missing pair of trousers had only been set out to dry on the rhododendron bushes outside, and he had come home, hadn’t he, with – and in – the pair he had been wearing when he had left? Swaroopji and I nod gravely at this clear sign of Ashokji’s superiority over my friend, and peace reigns. We proceed to breakfast.

***

Andarli Malhan faces west, and does so from the shadow of that cirque of mountains. It was, therefore, a very late sunrise this morning, and we were ready to go before the first sun touched the fringes of trees in the spur of mountain immediately facing the village. We packed up, cleaned the little room that had accommodated us for the night, handed in the toilet keys to one of the young gents answering to the young schoolmaster, and just as we were setting off, Ashokji slapped his forehead, and said, ‘Atta!’ True enough, we needed some chapatti flour. This had not been available in Lohardi yesterday, and we had been told that we could pick up a kilo or so at Andarli. Ashokji had even asked one of the villagers about where some ground atta could be found, and the latter had pointed to his own house, a little way below where the school stood. Swaroopji said we would wait even as we were, sacked and ready to go, if Ashokji would quickly run down and get the stuff. And Ashokji set off, as the sun slowly climbed down the trees to touch the highest houses. But, it seemed to us from where we stood, he never quite got to the house he had set out for. But turned around, and with increased speed even on the uphill back, started to climb up to us. When he came a bit closer, we could see why, for in his arms was something that looked suspiciously like a folded pair of trousers. When he reached us, he was all smiles, and without waiting for questions, offered, ‘Mera hai, mera hai! Para tha, maine utha laya!’’ (‘Mine, mine! Was lying there, I picked it up!’) More smiles. I nodded my congratulations, for what else could I do, but Swaroopji was smiling broadly, and only opened his mouth to say, ‘Atte ko bheja, pant le aya.’ (‘Went for atta, came back with pants.’) At this, Ashokji’s face underwent another transformation, but before he set off again for the atta, he carefully packed his trousers inside his rucksack.

***

It was a dream of a walk. Imagine following a young river into the deeper, higher, mazy reaches of the valley, on a day of deep blue skies, fair breeze, and golden sunshine. There were a few wood gatherers and fieldworkers around Andarli as we left the village behind after a turn of mountain, but an hour or so onwards and inwards, not a soul anywhere. We saw for ourselves that people weren’t going to Sari just yet. Indeed, few Gaddis were even going to the higher pastures now. The trail was overgrown with tired grass after the months of winter, and where there had been little bridges across the river, were now only such remnants of wood logs that had not yet been carried away by the flow. Ashokji found us the staffs we needed, and after rubbing their top ends into bluntness so we wouldn’t accidentally slice our hands open where we held them, we started carrying them even now – they weren’t necessary yet, but they would be tomorrow, and we had best learn to use them efficiently.

As we went higher, though, it became necessary to move from shoulder to shoulder of mountain so we could keep due east in the direction of Sari. And with that, it became necessary to cross the river – or the younger flows that entered it – at several points. The first time, things went well enough, for the river was, though somewhat wide, fairly calm. Although it was a very precarious bridge we walked over, it was early enough in the day that we didn’t have to worry about new melting waters washing it from beneath us as we walked. Also, at the other bank were little grassflowers that I couldn’t wait to get within lens distance of.

The second time, however, it cost us a whole hour to first find a place where we could conceivably cross and to then make the crossing. One instance when we thought we were following the trail, the mountain gradually peeled away underfoot, and we had to doubl back on our own steps before we could again scout up to reach a likely looking bank of river from which to attempt a crossing. Swaroopji did at one point look like he might attempt a jump somewhere – and urge us to likewise exercise the chhalang – but to my relief, he thought better of such a plan, and with a gesture of resignation, sat down on a rock to take off sack, socks and shoes. He tried the crossing first without any load, which was wise, because in high streams like these, the currents can sit very unpredictably, and it is often all one can do the first time to learn the patterns of the current. When satisfied – and Swaroopji had to be fairly quickly satisfied, for the water was pretty cold – he came back, and Ashokji and I similarly de-sacked, and started to take off footwear. I was still bent over untying my second shoe when I happened to look up, and could barely restrain a cry when I saw my undone shoe making a graceful arc over the furious river. It made a crash landing on the far bank, and Swaroopji turned back to me with a expression suggesting he wished I would hurry up, please, for he had to wing another shoe across the river, hadn’t he? I considered telling him about the more conventional manner of doing things – simply tying the laces and carrying one’s pair around one’s neck – but he was clearly having none of it. Why carry shoes when you could throw them? Even as I watched, my second shoe rose into the air and fetched up at the other bank. And it was time to shoulder my sack, try and find anchors among the riverbed rocks for my staff, and make the crossing myself.

For the third crossing, we were mercifully spared getting wet to our waists again. We found a dramatic alignment of fallen trees that we could use to get across, though the bank at the other end was none too stable. There were a few delicately balanced steps to take before we could be certain that we wouldn’t after all land up in the river. The crossing itself wasn’t tricky, though it was certainly a spectacular when you looked down at your own feet on that trunk and saw the gushing river underneath.

By the time we had to make the fourth crossing, the sun was riding the sky and the water fairly swollen. And we were beginning to touch the remains of last year’s snows, so the water was also proportionately colder. We tried for a good while, therefore, to spot a likely place to cross without having to get into the water, but many turns and doublings back later, we were still left with only one relatively calm spot. On the opposite bank, we would land on a thick patch of snow. This time, the river took our toes almost off where the current was swiftest, and we sat in the sun at the far bank for a good while just trying to rub some feeling back into our feet.

Ashokji warmed up in typical fashion. No sooner than he was able to stand again than he had scooted off. And returned with his hands full of wild walnuts. We set to cracking them open with stones, and although the net yield was meagre indeed, we were happily warmed up at the end of this unusual exercise.

At the fifth and final crossing before the day’s camp, there was no way out but to step on the receding glacier itself. I would have thought that it being already into May, the snow would be very treacherous, and I am sure that in places it was. But Swaroopji took his time selecting a patch we could cross without trouble, and we reached camp without incident. And I began to get a sense of exactly how heavy the winter had been, and how much snow, therefore, we may begin to expect down the waterways and glacierways on the Kullu side. Later, over the Maggi that Ashokji gave us for lunch, Swaroopji voiced the same thought. If in Kangra the glaciers still stretched so far down, what must we find in Kullu, where the snows recede slower still? It would be a long way downhill tomorrow, he said, and even now I have a foreboding that post-pass, it may turn out to be something like the descent after Indrahar. Such a thing will not be wise with me, though I have no doubt that Swaroopji and Ashokji could well push themselves to descend many hours after the pass, notwithstanding how challenging the ascent, nor how long it takes. But they are right – that will be tomorrow’s to worry about, and the thing to do now is to get as much acclimatisation and rest as possible. Tomorrow we go deeper east, and deeper into the quite intricate valley network that Sari is at the head of.

***

I made, I think, a good start on the rest and acclimatisation. Shortly after lunch, and with the empty Maggi bowl still held in my hands, I leaned back to recline on the massive tree-trunk I had used as my seat. And cradled within an indent of its generous bark, I tucked in for a most marvellous nap.

It has been a clear day throughout, and I woke up to the rays of the sun slanting ever so gently into the west. And with the roar of the river in my ears. This is a haunting sound, and will take me a while again to unremember. The water has been with us since Khalhail, but never this white and young and urgent, and never this close to our campsite. In the moment before waking fully up, it is as if the whole world is composed of nothing but that tremendous roar. And it brings with it a sense of deepest motion and deepest calm – the calm of relentless power and energy. Like I say, it will be difficult to un-hear this sound again.

And how far it takes me from Ann Arbor, which, my calendar tells me, I have now left for exactly a week. What a world and age away it is. Seems hardly conceivable that I was there. Except that I was, and that on that last walk, there were all those phenomenally gnarled tree trunks and young spring buds to photograph. I found such things here, today, when I went out walking with the camera. And I had to marvel again at the forms and bends and textures of the world. I wonder what the Gaddis and people who wander these lands most intimately make of them. Last year, on the way down from Minkiani, we had seen the preservation against the elements of the stone-paved road that they had laid down. What a knowledge of wind and water and contour of land it takes to make such architecture! What did these people make of the architecture of these ancient trees and gnarled forms? Their fall, their bend, their soar, their decaying splendour? But the trunks weren’t the only things I found. This is a wild and wonderful place, and I found caterpillars, bones of cows and big sheep that had breathed their last here, wild walnuts, tiny grassflowers, many butterflies, little plants growing within the soil blown into a fallen tree-trunk, and the curve of melting glacier along the outlines of stones on the river-bank. In brief, a big world. And deeper time than humanly knowable, though how reassuring it is to me just now that I am for a moment caught somewhere within that interpenetrated embrace of time.

***

Very beautiful sky. And a heartbreakingly lovely coming on of evening. The trees catching the last light, so that there is a distillation of greens. A very soft breeze. Fantastic forms of rock growing fantastic shades of darkness and shadow. White clouds making silhouettes of the highest trees. I cannot put a finger to my sadness, save to say that it is a very lonely job loving someone against all odds. When everyone wants, however gently, to have to stop loving, to draw a breath of release and relief. Beliefs and loves used to be clearer, once. Now I don’t know. I can muster prayer these days only to such loveliness as belongs to this evening. Out of an unreasoning claim that what is so entirely beautiful has no scope to be anything else, and therefore must in turn also engender beauty, however far away, and however indirectly.

But even that is not all. It goes further. Loveliness itself asks for witnesses, asks to be shared, for that is its way of fulfilling its own infinite potential for growth. Tonight, this world needed more witnesses. I miss very intensely those who should have been here to share this with me.

***

But I promised, didn’t I, to tell of the drama – a comedy, to boot – unfolding even now in front of me? You see, we finished lunch by three in the afternoon. And Swaroopji and Ashokji were left with the daunting prospect of several hours of potential rest and relaxation. After lunch, by way of gainfully spending time, they expeditiously napped. But it was only about four of the afternoon when they both woke up and regarded the world for something else to do. So they made popcorn and tea and we sat and watched a Gaddi come by with his big flock of sheep. But it was only half four when even the tea utensils had been washed and put away. So they quickly erected my tent. Before my very eyes there came into being a crazy little affair, and all my protests about the more desirable placement of pegs and groundsheets came to nought, as they smiled in appreciation of their own job well done and I was left to look at a curiously rippled sort of tent. 4.40. So they decided that tonight we absolutely must have lungdu, the stalky little green plant of these parts that can be steamed to cook and mixed in with stir-fries and curries with other vegetables. And they ranged far and wide in search of the green lungdu, and came back with enough to feed (I provide a conservative estimate) about ten people. By now, I was breathless. As the men sat down with their pile of lungdu to peel and chop away at, I thought we should finally have some rest. And I left for another little walk with the camera.

I got back around half past five, and behold, the lungdu is done and ready to cook, but the good men have clearly had time hanging heavy again on their hands again, for now – in broad daylight! – they have a raging fire going. Even as I came within earshot, Swaroopji shouted, in a manner suggesting that he was only courteously letting me know what should be obvious to the meanest intelligence, ‘Abhi tandoori roti banayenge!’ (‘Now we shall make tandoori rotis!’) I had been about to ask if a fire was really necessary at this time of day, but promptly swallowed my question. Doubtless, I should have seen – from afar, of course – this profound design behind the fire. And it would be blasphemous to now question the reason behind its existence. In any event, no one was listening to me. Swaroopji was feeding the already mammoth blaze, and Ashokji had jumped off his ledge to go look for suitable round stones to make a tandoor with. Despite both an impulse to laugh out loud and my initial scepticism, I watched impressed as they fashioned their little stone tandoor, inserted it within the heart of the fire, made a little air channel through which to air it. Then they made a second little channel through which to insert the flatbreads to bake. How could I have harboured any scepticism? Inabout half an hour, the rotis were done, and came out smelling very good indeed! I was on the verge of congratulating them on this unusual yet highly successful effort, when Swroopji glanced at his watch again, and said, ‘Abhi 6-hi baja hai!’ (It’s only 6!) And proceeded to decide that we now needed to make jacket potatoes. So in they went, all our potatoes, into the tandoor. And some thirty minutes later, we were eating them done sweet and succulent, split down the middle and salted. No luxury like my luxury, I couldn’t help thinking, as I burnt my tongue on the just-out-of-oven potatoes, under a sky slowly admitting stars.

It came as rather a shock when Ashokji got up, dusted his hands, and declared that he would now make dinner. Really? – I wanted to ask. No more dreaming up crazy things to do? Was the evening really over? It was, and dinner it was going to be. But the lovely men have filled up my evening with wonderful tandoori roti, crazy company, and, much laughter. I am writing under a sky coming alive with stars even as the last light of day lingers in the air. Finally, the fire makes sense. It is keeping me warm as the world goes into night. And Ashokji is serving dal, rice, and lungdu in our bowls. Tomorrow, we Pass.

***

15 May 2011

Dharamkot

I went to Triund today. Under an emphatic sun and in the company of scores of the obnoxious populace in the Dharamsala area today because of the Indian Premier League twenty-over cricket match. But all the silly people could not take away from the marvellous ringed-around view I had of the Dhauladhar from the grassy greens of Triund. Much, much whiter than I remembered from last year, and a fuller view than we had had all through the monsoon days in July and August. And I was on a mission, too – to take to Sunil of the teashop a bit of screw-bolt for his newly acquired telescope. Somehow, this little piece had stayed with KP and Seena, and Seena gave it me to carry up when I told her I was going to walk to Triund. As for her and KP at the newly opened Om Cafe, let me not go into that, but suffice to say that you couldn’t ask for better cooks or finer hosts. Everyone, please go eat at Om Cafe of Dharamkot.

I shall leave tomorrow for Delhi and Chennai (to God knows what things) but what a wonderful few days I have had after Sari here. Yes, we crossed Sari – and a brilliant crossing it was, too, and I shall turn to that in a minute – and reached Kullu on 11 May. At Kullu, I bought a few Gaddi caps, and Swaroopji, Ashokj and I walked the streets, visited the playground and ferris-wheel setup, stood at the vegetable and fruit markets, and made our way through the knitwear shops. A very charming afternoon before we had to get on the hurtle-bus back to Dharamsala. (No disrespect intended, but I call it the hurtle bus for a reason. That bit of tin can was supposed to get us to Dharamsala at five in the morning after an 8 p.m. start at Kullu. It got us there at 3.15 a.m. Now imagine for yourself how it must have taken all those hillside hairpin bends.)

But colourful Kullu and hurtle-buses to Dharamsala are things of the plains, and I should turn back to the high morning whose day brought us to beautiful Sari.

***

We rose early. I knew I would. I had gone to sleep almost reluctantly drawing my tent flap on a star-fired sky, and I think even my sleep had had something of the suppressed excitement of that dark pulsating light. Besides, didn’t we have a pass to cross today? But Swaroopji and Ashokji were up, too, and by the looks of it, had been up for a while. In the pre-sunlight chill, Swaroopji was his red-shawled wrapped-up self, but he waved me a good-morning and come-hither as I got out of my tent, and I obeyed to leave my packing for the nonce and just sit in the waking stillness over mugs of hot, sweet tea. For such a very talktative man, Swaroopji can be very quiet in his moments of quiet. Like he is – all over again – drinking in the loveliness around him. And wants to focus all his energies to just that end.

Thanks to all that manic activity of the previous evening, there really wasn’t much that needed doing today. Breakfast was ready, and the famous tandoori roti would serve for lunch with jam and cheese. We got to picking up camp – laying out the tent outer and inner to dry, rolling up mattresses, washing and stowing the utensils – as the light grew around us. But even so, the first light we really met was after we had started. And it came home to me anew that we were really walking east. Yes, we got on the glacier soon after leaving camp. But there were a few mini valleys to negotiate yet before we could get on the snow-tongue leading into Sari. But glacier or no glacier, what I mean when I say we were walking east is that the sun was in our eyes no matter how we rounded the bends of mountain – and I had the eerie sense that we were walking straight into the light.

The river climbed beside us for a while before disappearing under the snow for good. It caught the light, too. Young glints as the water made its way through rock and glacial ice. At one point, where the water jumped a few feet down, the trail narrowed precipitously beside it, and the three of us stopped to make sure we were on the right track and in the right direction. Because as far as we could see, here we would have to proceed by actually stepping on some of the smooth polished rocks over which the swift water flowed. And this could be tricky, for on the left was a sheer wall of rock, and on the right a steep fall into the current. Again, Swaroopji went first to investigate, leaving his sack and staff with us. He stepped his line with infinite care, and a few minutes after he had started, disappeared behind the sheer rock face on the left. I tell you, both Ashokji and I looked involuntarily at the stream to see if he should happen to be floating by after having fallen in somewhere up ahead! We stood there for a while, with both the glare of the water and the sun on our faces, and in the fine spray sent up by the torrent. Until there appeared, where we had seen the last of Swaroopji, a pullovered arm waving a come-on. And come on we did, though we again took care to pass on the sacks one at a time first, and only then attempted the rock-hugging rock-stepping exercise over the furious water. It wasn’t that bad, really. But if I had to cross there a second time, I wouldn’t dally overmuch, for there are at least three steps where an inch or two out of place can mean an unstoppable tumble backwards into white water and jutted rocks.

***

I would divide the track between Sari Base and the Pass into three phases. First, an uphill before walking beyond the river, second, a beautiful stretch of meadowy high grounds to seek out the right glacier to follow up and third, the final relentless ascent. After we lost the river, we gained a network of glaciers, and followed one of them up to high fields before taking a turn decisively to the left at one point. The ground remained fairly level, and it was easy to see why this place was such a favourite with the pastoral people of these parts. Once the snows receded, the land would be green, and sheltered against all manner of rockfall or – should snows persist – avalanche. In fact, just as we made the left (we would veer back right not long after and thus continue east), we encountered a Gaddi shepherd with his flock in a remote little tent perched some way above the glacier. Among the Gaddis, Swatroopji said, most people in these parts were of the Sevak tribe. A ridiculously hardy people with wondrous knowledge of the snows and waters and greens of these lands. Coming from someone as resourceful and hardy as Swaroopji, this was a high certificate indeed, and if it were possible for me to go into greater awe of the Gaddis, I think I did, here.

The gentleman we met was the only soul we would see all day, and he confirmed for us that the bits of bramble they place near the final ascent to the Pass had not yet been removed. The Pass had not yet been ‘opened’ this year. Too much snow, he said. Certainly not passable yet with cattle. And hardly passable anyway, though it seemed to him like we had picked a good day and a good route. If we took the ascent not using the snow-tongue but the earthy ridgeline on its right, we should be able to make good time. And the rains of the last few days had cleared the skies up, so the weather should be our friend today. Good thing too that we were travelling light. Good luck on our way. But had we some medicine, perhaps, for a head cold?

I did, and offered the gentleman what I had. He smiled his thanks and waved us on in a sort of bon courage. I turned around to look at his receding frame as he walked back to his flock, and suddenly took in the phenomenal sweep of the landscape this man now called home. His was a tiny blue tent in a huge waste of brown rock and dirty yesteryear glacial ice. But how that glacier turned and swept up to the meadowy stretch in front of him. And how the mountains on all sides ringed the glaciers and pastures round under the folded deep blue sky.

***

20 May 2011

Chennai

I am taking up my story on a hospital chair. My father was dying – surely, ravingly, and longingly of travelling landscapes – day before yesterday when Kutty and I fought to get him to this hospital. He may still be dying – who knows? Day before yesterday, I was told they couldn’t be sure what would happen in the next few hours. Yesterday they didn’t say much. Today neither. I only take silly hope from the fact that as he loses hold on his present terrible reality, he is talking increasingly of a walk that we need to take in some place where the land curves and the sun shines on sweet smelling earth until the vista opens up to a magnificent high view. A landscape richly drawn for not having to bear the weight of any corporeal presence. The ravings of a madman. I can even give you the medical term for his condition: hepatic encephalopathy. As he imagines this landscape somewhere in his shadow of a mind, what bewilderment there is in him when he realises he is unable to get out of bed, that he is too weak to even sit up. But he keeps asking me to start out on the walk. There is no point in us both getting delayed, he says. I should go while the day is fine, and he will follow soon. I should go. After reassuring him that I shall of course set off soon, and that the day will surely continue fine, I do leave. They do not allow people to stay long in the Critical Care Units, anyway.

I am back on the chair outside, and because of what he has said, really out on a walk in my head. The searingly light-bound ascent to my recent Pass, and the tremendous vista into Kullu from atop the range. It is an intensely beautiful visual legacy to carry, and I am thankful I have it now. Makes me think, perhaps far too beguilingly, that a world that has such loveliness cannot possibly have my sick father, and that he must therefore be well soon. I know that that is no logical way to think. But that huge generous view fills my eyes as I sit looking at the whitewashed walls of the hospital, and it is so compelling in its beauty that I want to believe in it and in wholeness and love and longing and the fulfilment of longing. I shall, like yesterday, be on this chair all day and night. And I shall take up the story. Oh yes, it will be a good thing for the hours I shall have to spend here. But now that Baba cannot hear people around him in actual speech, will he listen as I tell my story here?

***

The wide tongue of glacier – this one probably never melts even in high summer or rains – turning left and soon coming back right was the one we needed: it lead right to the ridge that in turn connected to the Pir Panjal spine. And to that indent on the spine which is Sari Pass. We stepped on the glacier from the meadowlands, and for a while, did not notice the upward bend of our feet as we stepped. But soon, the world took off on a fairly sheer angle, and we were hugging the ridge whose open-book to our left held the massive snow-tongue. On a ridge, there is little scope to criss and cross and zig and zag, so the going was very direct. And before long, we had climbed into the next thousand or so feet, and the air was clearer and the world whiter on all sides. To our left was the snow-tongue we were following up. And to our right, a fall into a few hundred feet sheltering another tongue of glacier. The thick lushness of the valley was suddenly way behind us, and all we had left were the stunted rhododendrons and blasted pines clinging on in desperate angles to the mountainside. This upward snow tongue had started melting at its edges, but we could see it getting thicker as we went higher. It was whiter, too, because when it rained down in the valley, these heights still received fresh snow.

And this is where I must confess to a mistake that might have cost me dearly on this trip. I had not double-checked, and could not for the world of me say where I had left my prescription sunglasses. I was, therefore, minus the tinted glasses that you really, really should have in such conditions if you wish to avoid snow-blindness. I had discovered this lapse last night while doing my final bit of packing before the Pass, and there was nothing I could do it about it anymore. Except take care to consistently slit my eyes whenever I looked on the glare of relatively fresh snow, and remember to close my eyes for about ten seconds for every fifteen or so minutes of looking on sunny white. I can now report that against all my fears that day, I escaped any unpleasant consequences of my lapse. But I know also that I got off so lightly because we did assiduously keep to the ridge (and not on the snow-tongue) for as long as possible on the final ascent, and because, most importantly, the snow itself was mostly old. Had this been fresh snow, all the slitting of my eyes and resting them at intervals on the six or so hours we were obliged to spend on the snow this day would not have saved me.

Climbing the ridge was hard work, but precisely because of its steepness, it was quick to offer rewards. Every few minutes, I would grant myself the luxury of looking back at the country we were leaving behind and below, and every single time, the view had changed. A bit more of the glacier below had become visible. Or we had come level with a few more high points and could see the higher humps and runnels of snow and the hitherto concealed crevasses on them. Kangra itself seemed laid out in layers and layers of rising earth and a brilliant exchange of blue, green, rusted earth, and deep white. And clouds flew over us in wisps, broad shades, banners, cauliflowers and many other kinds you could name. Whenever I could look up from where I was placing my feet and take in the spread around me, somewhere there would be in progress a play of sun and shade, and the world therefore changing colours.

Though it wasn’t a windy day at all. And I was thankful it wasn’t. It saved us, without doubt, a world of cold. But more importantly, it made for a certain indrawn and surreal quiet. I had encountered such quiet once before. In the stretch of glacial moraine as we left Vasuki Tal near the Chaturangi Glacier in Garhwal and headed in the direction of the Chandrabhaga peak. We came up at a bend of glacier near the massive monolithic rise of Satopanth, and the whole time we rounded that broad bend of glacial moraine, the huge snow dome of the mountain loomed behind our shoulders on our right. The wind had suddenly died, and under the fierce sun, the white of the sky-touching dome beat down on us with terrifying intensity. Like a kind of dare, though knowing fully well that we were simply going to round the bend of glacier, and move away over the Chaturangi again. None of us – we were a group of nine – volunteered a word the entire time we made our way through the fantastic formations of rock and ice on the glacier. And when we had rounded the bend and Satopanth had again acquired the normal dimensions of a big mountain regarded from a distance, we put down our sacks for a breather. I remember wondering what it had meant, that extreme silence under a sky ribbonless of cloud. Mountains can cast spells and perform fears on little humans. They can twist your neck up in a command that you look at them entire, and the very soar of the glance you attempt can make you lose your feet. Satopanth had been to us, in that hour or so of the bend, close, detailed, and quite frightening in sheer mass and rockbound upsurge. And it had been unthinkable to challenge that monolithic quiet with even our breaths. Forget speech.

On the rise of earth to Sari, with all motion in the world held at the level of high clouds and deep shadows, there was the same heart-stopping stillness of sound. And once we lost the woods and started to touch the snow, something of the same white intensity. But it was, without a doubt, an illimitably kinder and more tolerant intensity. After all, in this white bequest of winter were caught little rhododendron shrubs, clumps of battered yellow grass, and many-coloured rocks. Perhaps there were, somewhere under the snow, even runners of grassflowers – who knew? The air grew thinner with every step we took, and we approached the same crystalline clarity of vision and depth of silence that I associate with the Satopanth bend. But today’s stillness was, if you like, an inhabitable one. A light-held, brilliant stillness. You didn’t say anything in it because it was all said for you.

***

All said for me, maybe. But for Swaroopji? After a spell of very steep negotiation of mixed rock and snow and earth, we gained a little table-top-sized patch of level ground, and Swaroopji, leading, stopped and turned around and said, ‘Kisiko bhoog nahin laga?’’ (‘Is no one hungry?’) You couldn’t mistake the sense by its interrogative phrasing. It was a flat call for lunch. So we sat us down on the little level patch and ate the roti and jam and cheese. The man was right, of course. It was about eleven now, and we had done a fair morning’s work. I was hungry enough to eat a full couple of those business-sized rotis, and I polished them off in such speed that in the thirty minutes we gave ourselves for lunch I even managed a little wee pleasureful shuteye. While the men had their smoke.

Soon after we started walking again, the ridge sharpened, and the world fell away steeply on both sides. To our left many snow tongues ascended to the range ahead, and to our right stood a deep void. And in our way stood several rhododendron shrubs. You see, they needn’t have stood ‘in our way’ our way at all. We could just have gone around them, couldn’t we have? But here’s where I shall perform a formal naming of this trek. If last year in our gallivanting over the passes and valleys the trek had been all about the chhalang (leap), this year, I offer, the trek was all about the jhari (bush).

Let me explain. Here is a perfectly nice wide patch of snow. Broken where little rhododendron shrubs stand, though they stand at quite an angle to the horizontal, for they are rooted perpendicularly to the considerably sloped ground. And I would think that on my way up, I should be allowed to skirt the bush, and head up on steps cut into the snow. But we have been following the basic discipline of a trek, and trying to follow in each other’s tracks. So, after I watch in some astonishment as Ashokji climbs straight up the slope and through the bush – with, I might add, considerable struggle – I ask if I may just go, um, around the bush. And Swaroopji says, ‘Dekho, yahan se ao. Jhari ke beech se aa jao.’ (Look – here, come this way. Come through the bush.’) By now, I think of Swaroopji and Ashokji as rather competent people who know their stuff. And, like a good person, I want to obey instructions. So I swing my staff up, anchor myself, and plunge into the shrubbery. And emerge from it a few minutes later, quite breathless, only barely clinging to the hillside, and minus the tip of one painful fingernail. Swaroopji looks at me with approval, and Ashokji nods and proceeds to plunge into his next bush. And I stand there not understanding why we must thus travel through instead of around jharis. I tell you now that owing to Ashok’s predilection for The Direct Route we got ourselves into bushes a fair few other times on the trek. But on this day, I decided I had had quite my fill of jharis, and I proceeded here onwards to pick my own way around rather than take the track beaten – yes, beaten – ahead of me by Swaroop or Ashok through the bushes.

***

About an hour after lunch, we touched snow for good. There was no ridge to follow anymore, for in folds of vanilla ice-cream white, it welded perpendicularly into the main range. Swaroopji muttered something about ice-axes one last time, and got up from his brief smoke. Ashokji followed suit and strapped on his sack. Though not before asking if we would absolutely have to get on the damn snow. ‘Abhi yahan aake tu aur kya karega?’’, said Swaroopji. (‘Now that you are here what else do you think you will do?’) And I peered up to the deceptively gentle looking folds of mountain immediately ahead, wondering how many humps lay concealed from my present view and what it would be like to step those final steps up as Kullu finally rose into view.

The snow was sunned on and therefore somewhat tiring – we went in up to our waists a fair few times – but it was consolidated enough by night that we had purchase to keep steadily going. Most importantly, it lay on such a spread of mountain that it was safe to cut it up into zigzags as we gradually gained in height. In such snow, which can break quite easily into slabs and follow gravity happily down, the lay is important indeed. Had the ridge not met the range and made a kind of bowl down there leaving the snow with nowhere to go, we would have feared avalanche conditions and had to go straight on up instead of doing the far less tiring zigzag we now were. We were gaining in altitude and doing what gasping for breath it required -- buta straight step-cutting up would have given us quite a bit more gasping.

I thought we were doing sort of all right in our rhythm – though, assuredly, I did wish I were faster and better acclimatised. Swaroopji led, I followed, and Ashokji brought up the rear. All of us probed ahead with the staffs and held them to arrest on the slope side whenever necessary, and each person spaced themselves from the next person by a few steps. But before long, Ashokji hailed Swaroopji and asked him to stop and explain what he thought he was doing. For a while, it wasn’t clear to me what the matter was. Ahead of me, Swaroopji looked a question, too. Thinking that whatever we wanted to discuss we could discuss once Ashokji and I caught up with Swaroopji, I moved on. But disregarding my come-on, Ashokji stopped where he was. And when I turned around to see if he was following me, I found him pointing me out to Swaroopji with a clear quod-erat-demonstrandum. This put me in even more in a puzzle, and I had to stop to try and find an explanation. Meanwhile, Swaroopji had caught on, and both men were nodding their heads gravely when we got together. And I was being spoken about in the third person. ‘Hyan, yaar, iska to taang chhote hain. Chhote chhote steps banane parenge.’ (‘Yes, my friend, this one has small legs. We shall have to make smaller steps.’) And littler steps there were here onwards, in consideration of the littleness of my person – and, well, I did speed up.

***

Up we went, into the world of flying clouds and passing shadows. The rhythm of breathe, plant the staff in, kick one foot in, breathe, kick the other foot in, so settled in that the minutes fell away until the sun tilted over from east to west. And still we walked, crossing hump after hump of white. In patches of shade, the kicking was easier. In patches of sun, exhausting in the horribly yielding snow. I took care to rest my eyes with every breather we took, but that apart, it felt good in that rhythm of movement while I neared the crest of my visible world. So that it was almost with shock that I had my first view of Kullu. The hump ahead looked like all the humps thus far had looked, and I had no way of telling that this was the last one until the world fell away suddenly to the right, and a range of mountains whiter and more jagged than any in Kangra started to come into layered view. I stopped here to get out my camera, and Ashokji went past me on to the top. And I soon heard many sounds of clicking from the media phone camera. We were, then, at the Pass.

Once I had climbed the last few yards, I emerged on a little level high from which on one side Kangra lay at our feet and on the other, Kullu. To the latter, the ground now descended with startling sharpness. But rose in the far distance into a magnificent array of high, white-topped peaks. To the west, in Kangra, the Dhauladhar stood in layers upon layers threaded with white. To the east stood the distant peaks of the Kullu and Parvati Valleys – here, it was the white that was was threaded with brown. Ahead, to the north, the range went further into the higher Pir Panjal – in the direction, as Beq points out, of the Kaliheni Pass on the Bara Banghal that we had planned for the original trek route this summer. No, Bara Banghal had not yet ‘opened’. Far from it. We were only even ‘opening’ Chhota Banghal. And suddenly, caught between the splendour of these two magnificent spreads of earth, I found this an extra reason to be pleased. Here you go, dear world – the Pass is now yours for the rest of the year. Look, and be charmed. To the Pass, I want to say that I can think of several pairs of eyes that should have seen this with me. Consider me eyes for them all. And now, while I sit on my hospital chair, fill my father’s eyes as you have filled mine.

***

There are many uses to George, and he must know several of them. But this one he would never have guessed. He packed lunch for me for the airport as I left. And a bit of Fruit and Nut chocolate came with the lunch pack that I put by in the top pocket of my rucksack for later. As things turned out, that ‘later’ did not happen until now when, standing on Sari, I dug around for something to make the first little offering to the Pass with. Having ‘opened’ the Pass, we left on it a little square of Fruit and Nut Dairy Milk chocolate. And the three of us nibbled the rest.

We would later have reason to be very glad of this. When we reached the first villages in Kullu a couple of days later, one of the first questions from the shepherds was whether we had made an offering while at the Pass. The first crossers every year customarily offer a sheep. What had we offered? Well, we had had no sheep. But we had made our own offering, we told them. An unusual one – the gods resident on Sari might not be in the habit of receiving squares of Fruit and Nut chocolate – but an offering in thanks and pleasure and prayer nevertheless.

***

As passes go, Sari is extremely modest. Even Sari Top is at only 12,500 feet – quite a bit lower even than Indrahar, which is itself a mini sort of pass. But what a view this little pass commands – particularly on the Kullu side – and what a sense of connection of the visible and invisible world is yours on top of it. In Kangra, we had left behind the flows of Lohardi and Barot that ultimately form the Uhl. As I stood looking at the reach of the Kullu and Parvati valleys to the east now, I could see in my mind’s eye both Uhl and Sarbari turning round on my south to become the Beas that would ultimately also take in the Parvati. And the low spine of the Pir Panjal that held my feet I could see extending jaggedly north into the higher Bara Banghal region – until it was threaded in by the Manimahesh range in the high west. A big world for little people to be standing on. But the little people make the world big by standing on it.

Swaroopji came up and waved his hand in front of my eyes to break my regard on the many-miled air into Kullu. I had been looking in particular at a beautiful slightly lonely bit of mountain a bit to the south in the Kullu valley. I could see it wasn’t very high, and I have since looked in the maps to see if it has a name or elevation marked anywhere, even as a point. But I don’t know yet just what I was looking at. But it was a lovely bit of mountain – a near-perfect pyramidal geometry, a patch of white near the top, two ramparts on its two sides, and a majestic rise from wherever in the valley floor it stood. I wanted to be there. Well, I wanted to be everywhere, climb everything. I turned away and asked Swaroopji if he knew what that mountain was. No. And would I please stop looking at irrelevant mountains and look instead at relevant lakes? What had I been going on about Dainasar for if I couldn’t even spare it a glance, pray?

Indeed, I had all this while been so busy looking level and up from our high vantage point that I had not noticed the slight bend of snow on the Kangra side to our north, and nestled within it, a mesmerizingly blue-green tear-shaped glacial lake. It was iced over in the middle, betraying that it was shallowest there. Its sides had crusted in symmetrical patterns of snow. And where there was water – even if it was below a layer of ice – it caught the changing light of the sky in its blue-green-ness.

I realised then that Sari Pass must be a bit south of us yet, and we had come not so much to the Pass as to Sari Top. That’s where you see Dainasar from. I was confirmed in this when Swaroopji said that instead of going to the Pass and descending in the direction of the village of Tyun, we would attempt a descent from a bit further north in the range. The idea – his idea, and I was happy to endorse it – was to continue north some more along the ridge between Kangra and Kullu, until we reached a point whence we could gain one of the big glacial descents down. I didn’t, when he said this, realise just how big the glacial descent would be. But perhaps I should have had an inkling when he said that he wasn’t sure just where we would surface. Somewhere quite a bit north of Tyun village, certainly, but he didn’t know the names of the villages we would come to. Finally, he expected, we would touch Kalang. For a moment, I couldn’t figure out just where that was. But Beq and his map-addiction must have rubbed off on me somewhat, for in a while I figured he was talking about a little town way down (about 6,000 ft) on the banks of the Sarbari. And when did we expect to get there, I asked, in some wonder. Tomorrow, said Swaroopji. Or if we wanted to take it easy, which we may well choose to do, the day after. We were looking at a long descent, then, and a fair bit of ground to cover.

***

It was now two in the afternoon, and the weather had held out magnificently. But there were more clouds flying the skies than we had seen all morning, and though that in itself could be reason any given day to sit down and watch the play of on the two valleys on two sides, we knew we had to start down without much delay. It came back to me that Swaroopji had said it would be a long way down after the Pass, and I was willing to give it as good a go as I could for a fair few hours yet. But I also knew I would be on the lookout for possible campsites.

The route Swaroopji proposed followed the spine between Kullu and Kangra on for a bit. And it was interesting going over mixed rock and snow with one foot in Kangra and one in Kullu for about half an hour, until we toppled right and into Kullu, and started the long and arduous descent. The ground fell sharply enough – relentlessly at 45 degrees most of the time, and touching 60 not infrequently – but it wasn’t just that. It was that we had to go mostly over land that glaciers and snow-tongues had recently receded from. Leaving them terribly unpacked, slushy, and on the angle we were negotiating, treacherously slippery. Once on the decent, there was often no stopping for up to an hour. For to stop meant having to check your momentum and find a rest for your feet, and most of the time this was simply not possible. But this also meant that when you did stop and reacquaint yourself with your knees, they had plenty to say about such goings on. The first level-ish patch we saw, we knew we would rest at. And sliding and checking, we hurtled towards it. I was nearly there when I slipped with both feet taken off the ground, and came to rest some ten feet below after grasping for dear life on to an unlikely and solitary little jhari. It took me a few minutes to get right way up again, and make sure that bruises would be all I would have. And when I joined Swaroopji and Ashokji – who had reached this point not untouched but certainly less scathed than I – Swaroopji looked at my mudslided bottom and shin and ever so generously offered, ‘Aap ne to nishaan laga hi liya, utrai ka.’ (‘So you have finally taken on the markings of a descent.’)

So I had, so I had. I sat down to swallow my pride, but Swaroopji offered me some biscuits instead, and in that high overlook into Kullu, just before touching the glacier we would follow way, way down, the three of us sat silently watching again the play of clouds and sun and shadow. Until Ashokji said that he had seldom seen so much snow. And Swaroopji looked at him sideways, assured him that he ’adn’t seen noth’n’ yet, and got up to shoulder his sack.

***

The glacier, which I later saw fed directly into one of the Sarbari flows, wound long and deep and in places, even steep. At this time of day, it was an unenviable job to keep my legs from buckling, to prevent potential slips and slides by arresting with the staff, and to keep walking though there was never an end in sight to the massive white fall. About three hours into this knee-crunching and shoulder-shattering exercise, I was well and truly ready for camp, and looked around me in something akin to stoic scientific curiosity, for the wildness and desolation of the landscape showed no signs of relenting. We must have come down almost a couple of thousand feet from Sari Top, but we were still quite high up. More importantly, the snows had nowhere relented to the extent of freeing up grassy patches. Cliffs of rock and ribbons of ice were all we saw around us. And under our feet, the unremitting rippled white. Nowhere a place to stop. There was nothing for it but to go on, as a heavy seven-hour day became a heavy eight-hour day, and extended still. The heavens finally closed too, and to look back at the way we had come was now to see the white cascade we had descended disappearing seamlessly into a greater and more diffuse white. There would be rain soon.

It was about half past five when we came to a big turn of the glacier, and I saw Ashokji, who was now leading, go out to the middle of the huge snowy waste and come to a complete stop. It took me a few minutes to get where I could see what he had seen, for the glacier had broken into a flow at a sharp downward tumble, and we had to use the cliffy muddy mountainside to gain the glacier back under our feet after the sharp downward. This is what Ashokji had stopped at the sight of: many, many miles of the glacier still to go, its wild white ripples disappearing folded into the distance as far as the eye could see from that high prospect. And something clicked in me, probably at the sight of both the miles of glacier and the sudden broken flow of water. I turned my eyes up to the last earth patch we had cleared a few dozen feet up and saw that it could be done. Not the best place to do it, but a legitimate one nevertheless. We would stop here.

Swaroopji was in turn getting ready to step back on the glacier, when I stopped him, and said that we would camp on that little shelf of earth a little way above. No, we would not attempt to reach the villages tonight. I had had my reason for having asked of Manu a 2+ tent, and we would all three of us use it tonight. Yes, I knew that the shelf sloped, but we could use what remaining daylight we had to level it out for our little tent. And we had kerosene and we had water, and I would be happy to pitch camp.

Swaroopji did not take me seriously the first time I said we were stopping here. Such a thing had never been done, and had I seen the spread of the land and the state of the sky and would I please stop joking. No, I wasn’t joking. And I did have answers to all his objections. And so it was that we retraced in a slow uphill a fraction of our steps, gained back the shelf, and on that tiny, sloped, shrub-riddled patch of wet earth, started to ready camp.

***

Readying camp here was, um, an experience. The inclined little shelf did have room for our tiny tent, but in order to pitch it, we had to spend a solid hour uprooting thorn bushes and cutting down jutting branches and roots of rhododendron shrubs, and then using big flat stones to cut out blocks of earth to lay out in a platform for the tent. The ground sloped considerably, and the skies portended rain. We simply had to make certain that the platform for the tent was high and secure and solid enough that we wouldn’t be washed off on to the glacier from the already wet and slippery earth, tent and all. Backbreaking work for tired people, but I know now that it was the correct decision to have made. We found out next day that the glacier would have continued for some eight kilometres yet. There is no doubt that it was better to have camped than to have walked onto it under gathering skies in our already considerably depleted state.

We had our little tent pitched in the nick of time. The skies burst as we hurried to pack our sacks and stove and kitchen stuff under the tent outer, and dove inside our tiny shelter. With the rain and wind the temperature had dropped sharply. And I was tired indeed from the day. Inside the tent, as I got out my sleeping bag to try and warm up in it, I was shivering with cold and exhaustion. I don’t know whether Ashokji and Swaroopji got out their sleeping bags owing to their own cold and exhaustion, or from their instinctive kindness and companionableness, but I was grateful for their company and consideration. And while I closed my eyes to look again at the wonderful view from the Pass, it was strangely soothing to hear the two men at their conversations again – planning dinner, joking about the slips and falls of the day, wondering about the many feet of snow still on the Pass, and discussing the photographs taken on the obnoxious little media phone.

***

Somehow, in that perch of a campsite, Ashokji managed to whip up a rather lovely khichdi. And serve it over steaming mugs of tea. I ate gratefully. But Swaroopji had a thing or two to say about Ashokji’s understanding of spice and salt. The guy runs a restaurant, after all. Ashokji finally puts down his own bowl and asks if Swaroopji wants him to pass the salt. Yes, please, says Swaroopji. ‘Rook, rook, namak bhi mai doonga’ (‘Ok, ok, I can pass the salt’) – and Ashokji turns precariously from his already precarious little seat, and starts rifling through the kitchen stuff for the salt. Swaroopji, alarmed at the vigour with which the tent outer shakes as a result of Ashokji’s search, sighs and stops him: ‘Tu theher, tera pangewala namak mujhe nahin chahiye!’ (Wait, I don’t need such fractious salt!’) The search stops for the while Ashokji takes to glare at Swaroopji. Who breaks into a smile. ‘Aise-hi kha loonga, aise-hi kha loonga.’ (‘I shall do without, I shall do without.’) Peace, and the sound of three hungry mouths.

***

This was the wildest campsite I had ever been on. Not high, not very. Only about 10,000 ft, I should think. But a seriously tiny step of earth caught between a rising cliff and a tumbling glacier. Above, the stretch of the glacier to the high spine of the range. Below, the massive bend of it before it takes off at a run again for many miles of white. And all of it under a throbbing sky every so often sounding with distant thunder.

Night fell as the wind rose. And in preparation for squishing ourselves into the tent, we took off finally our wet footwear and ranged them under the tent outer. The snow had got in everywhere, and there wasn’t a chance of anything drying over the night. But we would be happy enough if we managed to stack and anchor things such that nothing got swept away by the rain as we slept.

***

4 June 2011

Hyderabad

The good and the bad. The wonderful and the terrible. Against everyone’s fears, he cleared himself of the infection in Chennai. And we were able to travel back to Hyderabad. My hopes soared. And today, he will not eat as he needs to eat. A stubborn refusal. He is back in his mind and no longer wandering imagined landscapes. Perhaps that is why he does not want to co-operate. But what if he doesn’t? He doesn’t have long to make up his mind, now that he is back in it. I wish he would see how much all of us want to keep him here. It is difficult for him to eat and walk and everything. Immensely difficult. How can any of us even know how difficult, for it is now a very solitary and lonely suffering that he is in. But there isn’t another way. He simply must eat and gain his strength back and take control of his functions and get around again on his feet. I wish his life had taught him discipline and drive as parts of his very instinct. He needed them at this difficult time. How long can he do without them? And how long can we try to manufacture them for him?

I am tired of being in hospitals. And generally tired. A lack of sleep, much running around, being hammered for answers and decisions and energy at all hours of the day. I am also probably beginning to catch the mandatory dust cold of the city. But that is not why I snapped today. It is that I don’t understand his stubbornness, for I can see that he will not live long to be stubborn. There was much to be afraid of some ten days ago. And beating all odds, he got better in Chennai. Why, in the slow but definite upwards trajectory, must he now stop? Things are very close to the edge, and no longer in anyone else’s hands. Ours to support, and the doctors’ to say how. But his own to live.

I am trying to see if I can get back to work. And in or out of the hospital, it does me good to take up the story. I have been typing it up everywhere – hospital lounges, Baba’s hospital room, airport lounges, the High Dependence Unit, guest houses. And I was showing him the photographs the other day. He cannot see very well. But he hears the intoxication in my voice. In Hyderabad, in February, when he had trouble sleeping one night, he insisted I stay awake too, so he could tell me about the last trek he had been on, several years ago. The sweetness of sunshine, he had kept saying, the sweetness of sunshine. ‘Ki mishti roddur, ki mishti roddur.’ Sunshine in a soft breeze. I had not seen the point in being kept awake to repeatedly listen to those two details. But when I showed him my photographs yesterday, I wanted to tell him about just such things – all the while hoping that he would have the ability to register what I was saying, and see what I was showing him.

***

It rained in the night and I woke up at some wee hour of the morning with what felt like the drumming of water in my ears. I came immediately alert at the thought of our tiny tent on this little shelf between worlds of the sheer vertical and horizontal. We must have done things right, however, for our little shelter seemed to be holding fine. I closed my eyes again and in the dark thought on the various kinds of rain around me – rain on glacier, rain on the broken water a few dozen feet below us, rain on rock, rain on wintered-over grass, rain on the muddy earth. And my reward was to dissolve in sound myself, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up with my left hand very cold where it had lain much of the night in contact with the tent inner. It was a cold morning. In a cold place. The wind had not died after the night’s rain, and combined with the wet in the air, it gave us a fair chill until the first rays of the sun touched down on us, and gradually dispersed the clouds.

But what a world was there when the mists dissolved. To the east and south, that wild tumble of glacier beneath high white-ribbed mountains. To the west, a white descending from the sky and reminding us of the way we had come yesterday. Ashokji made tea and breakfast, and Swaroopji and I picked up camp. Swaroopji took another look at what had been camp for us, and shook his head. ‘Yahan camp kiya, abhi to kahin bhi camp laga doonga.’ (‘Now that I have camped here, I shall be able to pitch camp anywhere.’) And he set about collecting bits of branches to make a fire with so some of the wet clothes could be dried.

It was an early start, for we remembered well from yesterday the slush of glacier that happens when bits of it gets sunned. And before long we had made our way to the point where we had turned back the previous evening. I looked at it again – the relentless plummet of winding white into the far distance – and had new respect for Ashokji and Swaroopji that they had thought to tackle this yesterday. My knees were rested from the night’s rest and yet wobbly. How would they have behaved yesterday if we had attempted this descent last evening?

Also, from constantly arresting with the tall staff yesterday, my right shoulder was absolutely livid. Part of the reason why I had for a good part of the night been obliged to contemplate different kinds of rain. Today, standing in front of the winding glacier, I thought to take a photograph, and found the camera heavy!

***

We had gone on the glacier – with the same heel-pointing and near-skiing that had occupied us much of yesterday – about thirty minutes when Ashokji stopped in the lead, looked back, smiled, and sat down. I didn’t have to be told what was going to happen, but that didn’t stop me from flinching as Ashokji slid himself off a step of snow into a long, steep, curved stretch of glacier, breaking at the stop of the curve, and – it seemed to me – only just preventing himself from being launched straight into air and bottomless white. Swaroopji behaved in a similar fashion upon reaching the step, and surfaced with a wide grin on his face. When it was my turn at the step, I both admired and cursed the two men. The stretch of snow after the step was indeed steep and mushy enough to warrant a glissade. But it was a fair drop into the depth of glacier, and after I sat down, I had to will myself to keep my eyes open as I pushed off. And for about thirty feet, the world slid by with frightening speed. I arrested at the stop of the curve, successfully, and immediately felt the jolt running up my arm all the way to the shoulder and settling there with another bang. I looked up at my men with what I hoped was an expression of righteous ire. It cannot have come out very well, for they smiled warmly at me before hoisting their staffs again and stalking off.

***

The glacier took the way of water – least resistance, any old tumbles, and no regard for the whimsical unevenness of rocks. And we descended with it, every once in a while taking care to pull over to the side from such breaks where the water flowed through. Momentum belonged to the snow, and breaks were few and far between. The angle eased only after a solid couple of hours, and I thought back to yesterday, when I had been trying to convince Swaroopji that we needed to break for camp. No way, he had first said. Campsite was only half an hour away. At least, he could make it in half an hour. And would I not give it a try – even if it took me an hour? Would I not make that teeny tiny effort? I had not tried, of course – my dear hillpeople pack prodigious power and are well renowned for their notorious understanding of mortal time and effort. But I wondered if it had been a sheer and complete lie when Swaroopji had said what he had, or whether he had been on an honest conjecture and tried to pass it off as fact. For there was absolutely no way we could have gotten off the glacier in less than two hours – even with the speediest walking – from where we had been yesterday. Unless, that is, we decided to bumslide the entire way and were willing in the process to lose a few limbs.

***

I should tell of the green world that started to come into being as we tumbled down with the glacier. But pause a moment to hear of the glacier itself. It comes down as a river does. But forgetting entirely that it isn’t water that constitutes it, but ice and snow. So that, when it gets ambitious and descends near vertically a few dozen feet at once, the break shows, and gets built into its very form and texture. In high and late winter, the falling snow covers such a break and evens the world out under white. But come the beginnings of spring and summer, as the snow on top melts and the water underneath flows swifter and higher, the snow cover disappears, and we come along and see that huge evidence – built into the thing itself – of the exchange of mass and gravity. The sheer mammoth cross-section becomes a place for a glissade for little creatures like us – if, that is, after the cross-section, there isn’t a gape into the water flowing underneath. Or, if we sit across from such a cross-section of break, we get to grow respect at the sheer volume of ice and snow that we are commercing on.

So, some two hours into today, the never-ending glacier showed signs of ending and the severe world we were in suddenly chuckled and poured forth in many shades of green. I asked Swaroopji – as we had seemed to have no way but the glacier to get back down – what sort of route people took in the later summer or the monsoons. Did the glacier persist so low down even then? No, there is then a way through the valley. ‘Kaisi rasta?’’, I ask. (‘What sort of way?’) A big, manic smile: ‘Wohi, chhalanag-wali rasta!’ (The same, the jump-some way!’) And as if to ratify Swaroopji’s words, we came within minutes to where the glacier broke in a big chunk, and all that lay ahead was rock-bedded river flanked by grassy fields.

I stepped off the snow with strangely mixed feelings. Here I had been wishing the silly glacier to be over and done with, but I realised suddenly what a privileged vantage it had given us. The vantage of a river – its wind, sit and tenacity. And how much, despite the protests in my shoulder, I had enjoyed my time on it.

I wasn’t supposed to, not yet, for there would be time enough when we pitched camp. But I could not resist a long look back at the winding white way we had come down, and the surge of white in the far distance which was the place we had come from. From here, you half knew its existence, half didn’t. The range was several turns of glacier away, and already seemed to me a secret and coveted place. Swaroopji sighed, and said we would pitch camp soon, and I could make as many wanders as I liked. At this, I shut my mouth, turned round, and took off walking again, but I wasn’t going to say no to his excellent suggestion of stopping where the snow still shed its light and the river flowed full and young and loud.

***

We pitched camp, in the manner befitting travellers of this wonderful land, where the fancy took us. Several winds of green took over from the glacier for our route. About an hour into this brave new world, we came upon a large meadow with the river on our right and the far distance at back framed by the white land we had come from. All under a deep blue sky. A languorously lovely day – lunch before we bothered to set up camp. And even when we did bother, there seemed not much to do. The sun had warmed the world up, and although I could not match the men in stripping down and taking a dip in the cold water of the river, I managed a good cold wash and some deliciously burnt sleep.

Afternoon came slow into the valley, the light refusing to die long after the sun had set. Two Gaddis that had a little wood store nearby came and went on their errands and sat with us an hour or so to ask questions about where we were from, and what the Pass had been like. Swaroopji and Ashokji satisfied them as best they could – Ashokji all the while chopping up some more lungdu that he had collected this afternoon – and I listened to an old-as-time conversation of travellers exchanging notes on the travel-land. The stars came out in their hundreds, and with outrageous swiftness. Under their terrible freedom, we dined on hot rice and greens. And went to bed with the river running through us.

***

The day after brought the end of the road. The end of waiting. The end of a certain kind of praying. A cold morning and a late sunrise, all the while to the west the white pastlands caught the sun and seeped it slowly down on us. No one spoke today as we picked up camp. Under the clear morning sky, we were perhaps all aware of the rich benediction of having at the turn of the opening year ascended to a high pass smoothed by winter and come off it with eyes and lungs drunk with magic.

It was all downhill, now, into further greens and villages of colours and woodwork. Ashokji’s phone shuttered away now fearless of any failing of the battery-life, and I do believe I would have been much slower than the two men today had they not paused at every bridge and crest to pose and click. But such as it was, in a world of blinding green under a full sun, I would often catch up to sacks lowered to the ground as the media phone clicked away, and little barrels of smoke rose from the endless bidis Swaroopji smoked. But for all the instinctive slowness to the descent, we left the last whites behind about a couple of hours into the day, and Swaroopji collected our three staffs to smartly add them to a trailside fence to some farmer’s field. ‘Abhi inko thora retire kar dete hain, kya?’ (‘Now we can retire these, can’t we?) Someone would be very glad on the morrow.

***

The end of the road came no less unexpectedly for being expected. The high ridge of Tyun was now behind us, and the roar of the Sarbari close. But even so, Kalang happened to us in some suddenness, and it took a while to sink in that this was where we undid our sacks and sat down to wait for the bus that would take us to Kullu.

Famed old colourful Kullu (3,991 ft), of many stories and travels to and from the fair heights. I had never visited before, and coming down from the upper reaches, my first thought was that the town was terribly warm and terribly peopled. But a good walk put things in perspective, as did the long wait we had for the evening bus. It was at the old bus stop that the rains caught up with us again, and darkened the world with grey and wind and cold. My sadness was in the very skies, and the whole world was pouring forth. I sat there until our bus rolled to a stop at the stand. It pulled away with us in the direction of Dharamsala – and you know the rest.

***

6 June 2011

Hyderabad

I cannot remember the city from when I had visited it as a child, many years ago now. We had come as part of visits down south. A young family visiting a young father in the young port town called Vizag, and taking a bit of time out to see the capital city of the state of Andhra Pradesh. All I remember from those days is sun and sea wind, a sturdy young neem tree in our backyard in Vizag, and every once in a while, packing off as a family to all sorts of places come weekends. I need only close my eyes to see us windblown on a golden beach, sometimes Kutty in a red swimming suit, Mum on a slow stroll, Baba parking the scooter. Or a train journey chugged through lush forests and umpteen rock tunnels. Huge-ceilinged natural caves – with an unusual name, Borra – where I am afraid to whisper for fear of what the rocks will tell me back. Fireflies in their hundreds lighting up a stuffy evening. Or an endless game of table-tennis. There are bits of time that my mind will not allow me to recall just because I want to recall. But it has a way of throwing things back at me unbidden at strange moments. So you see, when I try to remember Hyderabad, I can say little. A little breakfast of buttered toast in a guest house, a whirlwind visit to some sort of museum, and a beautiful fort in which, if you stood at strategic places and clapped, you would be heard pretty much all over the fort.

The pity is that I remember everything about the last time I was here. In February. We reached Hyderabad one beautiful morning of high spring/early summer. I was coming from under feet and feet of snow in Michigan, but the year was already turning in India. In Kolkata, the doctors could do no more. It was a problem on a different scale – not unforeseen, but certainly precipitated so suddenly as to be frightening. Kutty and I came home to Kolkata, and there was one less person at home than we wanted to see. So, when the doctors told us that Hyderabad was where we wanted to be to ready up for a liver transplant, Mum, Kutty and I made arrangements to check out of the hospital early one morning as soon as Baba was declared able to travel. And all of us headed to Andhra Pradesh. It was a beautiful morning in Kolkata too. Dawn broke as the ambulance drew out of Saltlake. None of us had had very much sleep the night before, and I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, I was looking through the ambulance window at a lightening sky and the peculiarly bedraggled and achesome skyline of Kolkata. Then the airport swallowed us up, and another let us out in Hyderabad.

A month later, I thought we knew what we were doing, though none of it could have been expected to be easy. Indeed, I was sure none of it would be. Certainly not for me. But what life I had I wanted to share back. And all plans were made towards making such a thing possible.

I shall probably never entirely know why they departed from what we decided. But here we are, and I am tired enough that I am past anger. Baba is soft with the ravages of the illness and with a stubborn departed longing to live. Take him home, the doctors tell us. But what home has a dying man? And what home will he leave us with when he is gone, as he surely will be, very soon?

***

12 June 2011

Kolkata

When I called him from Khalhail of that beautiful morning upon waking up under the golden light and the white peaks, we talked about the country I was in, ways of approaching it, and the route that lay ahead of me. But in a bit he cut me off, all but telling me that he didn’t want to hear about it – he wanted me to write it up. And he would read. Sure, I would write it up. Don’t I, always? And we had talked about other things.

He died early morning day before at home. I don’t even know where his last trek was. He went sometime in 2002, I think, though I don’t know where. But they keep coming back to me, his insistent words about the sweetness of sunshine there had been, the sweetness of sunshine. And a fair breeze.

Every sunshine remain with him.

2011-06-28T15:59:00.000+05:30

yosemite.

2011-04-12T09:26:00.002+05:30

s is making all sorts of magic :).

2011-04-05T03:21:00.000+05:30

win.

2011-03-26T04:49:00.001+05:30

claim.

2011-03-14T03:49:00.001+05:30

fly a photo by olidhar on Flickr.

hyderabad.

2011-02-09T10:05:00.002+05:30

i read this in the norton rendition today. kempe is marvellous. laughter builds and builds alongside wonder and admiration and intrigue and much else. but you read, really, for these moments, when it is simply impossible to not fold the book in your hands and give over -- several times -- to laughing out loud :).

2011-02-02T06:25:00.004+05:30

winter. storm. winter storm.

2011-01-26T08:54:00.006+05:30

sunday. the second movement of mahler's second symphony. imagine a dead man. and then -- for what could be more retentive than a dead man's memory? -- him imagining his life in music. what a world of thinking back and longing. you remember it well into the sublime last movement and even after.

monday i came and went back and around and around and back all day listening to a man who had just died.

one reason for a very quiet birthday. but five voices to break my silence all day, and i am glad of them all.

go watch how the camera has to work to keep up with the man.

(detail from Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, Saint Rémy, June 1889 [photographed at MOMA])

2010-12-26T02:01:00.003+05:30

month of white and red.

and sometimes i think all i did this year was leave.

merry christmas, all.

2010-11-01T09:19:00.001+05:30

rest less ness.