We All Have A Story To Tell.....

Walking in the hills isn’t just about views and endurance and thrill.  It is about stories, ones that you hear, others that you imagine, a few – a precious few – that you see.

On the first day, Anand and I see a nervous barking deer shoot out of the undergrowth a few feet away and sprint across us.  This is rocky, uneven terrain at 7,000 feet, when we take every breathless step up that relentless hill with exaggerated care, but for the barking deer, it’s home and we are visitors unwelcome.  That sprint and leap is a story to see.  

Two barking deer

A couple of days later, on our return from the summit of Syari at around 11,500 feet, we see a Van Gujjar family - mother-and-child - grazing buffaloes in the valley below, beside their dilapidated hut.  They are an isolated family, these gentle nomads, there has been a storm this week, raining buckets and hail, and the night time cold is mind-numbing.  How, just how, do they live here? And that little boy calls up to us and asks, “Do you have biscuits?”.  We do have one pack, and we leave it for him and carry on, as he skips over the rocks and those crevices with alacrity to climb to our level.  Even in these remote parts, there is a deep conflict within the nomads of the mountains, for the Van Gujjars are seen as Them, not Us.  That is a story, but one for another day.   

 

If we remove the baggage these Van Gujjar little ones carry, they will fly.  Can we?

And down by our camp at 4,500 feet, along the spectacularly fetching svelte Assi Ganga river – called so because eighty streams flow into this river before it joins the Bagirathi – is an abandoned, skeletal two-storied structure, a building that had turbines and powerhouse equipment to generate power from the diverted flow of a rushing river.  The story?  In June 2013 –- exactly ten years ago – just a couple of days before it was to be inaugurated, a mid-day cloudburst caused devastating floods and landslides across the region, becoming the country's worst natural disaster since the 2004 tsunami. The Assi Ganga swelled as it had never done in living memory, a lifeline-turned-foe, a raging monster unleashed, and pulverized the building, sweeping away a score or more of human lives and submerging the turbines in silt.  The walls of that building and the metal beams that had once held the roof tell that story, one to which I can attribute – with dispassionate, though not indifferent, reflection – a salutary lesson. 

The view from our base camp.  ...and that's the powerhouse on the Assi Ganga

 

The man who runs this little shop, a hospitable, cheery soul who called us in for tea and biscuits, lost his all that day in June 2013. He is eager to talk, a garrulous narrator with a keen sense of detail and expressive articulation.  We listen.  

That is a story. 

 

I am an amateur bothersome trekker.  I huff my way up, am terrified of walking on ledges, imagining every possible worst-case scenario, will slip anywhere, given half an allocated chance, and sleep minimally in cold tents.  But I do it because I want to, which must surely rank as a form of masochism.  A vain hope that practice would make perfect.  The forests that we walk through, once we are done with the steep chir pine monoculture slopes above the camp, are gorgeous, filled with broad-leaved trees of oak, kharsu and maple, shrubs with edible fruits, rushes of cane and occasional deodhar and, at higher elevations, firs, with their tall uncompromising trunks and golden oak. 

These are forests with leopards and black bear and, as we walk, I imagine the first watching us with curious feline eyes and the second – the absent-minded hulk with poor eyesight – pottering around the forest in search of tubers and roots.  A Himalayan black bear is a large fellow with a half-moon on his chest and very little on his mind.  Almost always, the encounter with humans is an accidental one, when he will easily attack with ferocity, which is what terrifies otherwise brave Pahadis.  And he can mangle a human countenance.   Everyone – and I mean everyone – has an incident to relate of an unhappy encounter with black bears.

Each of that is a story too.  And, they play over and over in my mind when I walk those dark, nutrient-rich forests of humus and character, home to the belligerence of bears, the secrets of serow and the fantasy of fungi. 

Renu saw a leopard jump across the path on her way up to meet us and I would not mind seeing it return.  The two Bhutia dogs that met us somewhere on the way down will strongly disagree.  They stay close to us – in fact, they insist on getting in our way in the middle of our four-person convoy – when we go through this dense leopard country.  If they could speak, there would be a story or two there to tell as well.  

Yet, my closest – and nervous - encounter with wildlife on this walk isn’t any of these.  At Chai Thatthar, where we camp before the final day’s ascent, I go for a short walk down from my tent, stepping on a rich carpet of leaves and humus.  When I return, puffing up the hill, there is a rustle and movement in the leaves and I look down to see a Himalayan Pit Viper.  As I watch, it moves a foot away and stops, looking away from me, body coiled back in striking position.  I walk slowly away and breathe easy, but that was close.  Back in Bangalore, I identify the snake in Ashok Captain’s excellent book on snakes and read that it is ‘a quiet, timid snake, not likely to bite unless stepped upon.’ Snakes should advertise these qualities, me thinks. 

At Siladhuni, a pit stop on our way up, we chat with the cheery old fellow and his laughing wife who run a dhaba there, as he makes tea, that horrible, ghastly, syrupy stuff called Maggi and humungous, oily bread pakodas.  He smokes two packs of beedis every day and wears old decrepit shoes, but can walk up the path that we took three hours to do in half the time.  There is no lesson in this story, certainly none about the merits of beedis.  So forget that I mentioned this.

The shepherds come up to Kuari in the monsoon for weeks.  They pray at this little dolmen.  

At Kuari, where we spend the first night, we chat with two shepherds, an uncle-and-nephew pair, and I marvel at their inner resilience, physical agility and strength.  They have loyal Bhutia sheep dogs to protect the flock from leopards, but little protection from a changing weather pattern, for these hills of the Lower Himalayas are the frontier posts of climate change.  If we had time, this pair would have a hundred stories, real, imagined and predicted, to tell. 

 

At Kuari, Day 1 and Night 1

A hike makes us best friends

There are sweet stories to tell too: at the base camp by the river where I stay before and after the hike, I wake up each morning to the roar of the water rushing over rocks, and a faint mellifluous singing in the forest by our side.  The song wafts up to me over the river’s turbulent trundle and I open the door to listen.  It is four-thirty and the Himalayan Whistling Thrush is up early and has begun his recital, a delightful melodious incessant song of joie de vivre, of exuberant enjoyment, of attention to living in the moment.  Isn’t this a story with a lesson too? 

And, finally, there is the story of Bandarpoonch, the beautiful mountain that we see in front of us, when we rest on the summit of Syari at 11800 feet.  As the Pandavas ascended the path to Heaven, they came across an old monkey, it is said, lying in their path, his long tail a formidable obstacle.  Bhima asked the old simian, to get it out of the way; the tone was harsh, even arrogant, much as we demand today of the rivers that torrent down from these majestic heights of invincibility, rivers that we prayed to in earlier times because we believed in limits to our power.  The monkey, serenity personified, begged to be excused, for age was hardly on his side and asked if Bhima could move his tail for him?  Bhima, the Mighty One, took this lightly, but, well, to cut a long tale – or is it tail? – short, he could not move it an inch (or whatever nano measure was used in those halcyon days).  And then, when realization dawned, not a moment too soon, he begged forgiveness of Hanuman. 

That is the story of Bandarpoonch and I see every analogy of
human hubris I can in the re-telling.  Two days later, I see – with discomfort and awkward horror, for I am part of the problem – the gouging of hillsides for the Char Dham highway and, to my left, a hillside lost to a road that cuts through its mid-rib.   The landslips and boulder-falls that have resulted are Nature’s warning.  We need eyes – wide, open eyes – to listen to the stories that truly matter.    

Anand listens to Farida Khanum. 
Aaj jane ki zid na karo.