Those Little White Pills

 February 15th 2021

Yesterday, five of us took a walk to the top of a hill in the memory of a fellow-walker.  Doc was a thinker, part-philosopher part-iconoclast, consummate team mate. 

Above all, we walked together.  
Over the last twenty years, when we walked the hills – the ancient rock formations around Bangalore, above the stratus clouds in Coorg and across the narrow Pass of the Gaddis at Hampta in Himachal - he was a quiet, reflective, inspiring companion, his lithe frame skipping over the rocks, his breathing even, the eyes curious to explore.  When we shivered and cursed the biting, unrelenting freeze, he would swap short notes with our trek guide on local medicines – the cold was in the mind and if you convinced yourself that it wasn’t there, well, it wasn’t.
 
Every plant had a story to tell him, for wasn’t his homeopathy based on the science of the botanical? His was a life inspired by these plants, a life that was happy to seek answers to quotidian questions of pagan mystique, an uncomplicated, disciplined life of meditation, with gentle humour and an inner smile.  If he felt unwell, we would never know of it, for much of that conversation was with himself.  If he felt angry, he too would never know of it, for it was an alien emotion.  When the walk was done and we were back in our homes, he’d disappear till the next walk happened.  Attachment was like anger, an alien emotion.
He was built to be a walker.
 
On one walk, he reflected that he was becoming aware of his own mortality, which despite having had the occasional deeper conversation surprised me.  That is what walking does to you sometimes, and that reflection – when you see a giant of a hill by your side, the result of four billion years of utterly miraculous evolution – is evocative, humbling, meditative.  
Doc was a meditative walker.  The journey mattered.  Time did not.

We laboured up the beautiful Kaiwara Hill last morning – a
drying forest of waiting tinder - and exchanged our Doc stories and the odd one he had left behind in that noiseless, unassuming way of his.  We laughed about his little white pills, thinking of the times when he had defended his science with a knowing smile and allowed us our earthly mirth.  Had he been on the walk, that smile would have been teased us back in turn.  

We trundled our way up, with even DV – whose legs had last been pushed to perform three years ago – making the grunt to the top, and laughed and joked for much of the time, for Doc would have wanted it that way. 
 
“Don’t pay attention to me,” he would have said, in that dismissive way of his, “just move on.”
Doc was a walker, you see.
 

And as we dropped our bags at the top of the hill, and took the odd photo – sunlight reflecting off grey hair, stomachs in, shoulders up – he must have been smiling down on us behind that neatly trimmed beard in that bright way of his.  For nothing better could be expected from this motley bunch of stragglers, all of whom would remember him as The One Who Walked Alongside In Meditation.

The panorama from Kaiwara betta
Circa: February 14^th, 2021