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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| At Kuari, Day 1 and Night 1 |
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| 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.
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. |
