The Fabric and Her Offerings
[McLeod Ganj, HP, India - 21 Days, May, 2015]
I have felt the chase: the chase that keeps
burping at your ears the anxieties of future, unwanted encores of every fear
that you feel like burying alive, and then choosing to step out of that mental
cemetery, for a second, to touch the untouched, try the untried, gifts one those precious chapters
bound tight into a single rosary that one clings to and counts on till the
curtains come down. And then the bow is prouder. Richer.
To start speaking about Mcleod Ganj, this is exactly how
you’d expect a traveller’s darling town to look and be like. I have experienced
every attire of her but her “pretty snowy”. Besides, one would bluntly and
bleakly say “commercial” and keep it loud unless he breaks stony and steep
passages to reach the town everyday and witness what goes on, listen to a
silent scream called “Free Tibet”: a nation, a culture clutching to a hope,
grovelling to the calmest god and promising the snow lion that one day shall it
roar.
And in the midst of that frustration and
insularity, you find many smiling, bowing to a subtle ‘thanks’ and giving a ‘thanks’
back. Of course, I had never thought something like this could happen when I’m
hailing from a grand city where the only factor that is taken care of is liability. This was my attempt to tear away. Here you find no comments or frowns to an
undeserving success of a fellow roadside businessman and might find all the
keepers sharing their daily tales over glasses of tea or old card games unless
you arrive at a stall and invite a kind “Yes, sir?”
The roads divide into
two ways, each way helped by two passages, thus making life easier for
vehicles. There is a strange show stopper who roams around in restaurants every
Saturday promoting a live show in some school downtown, which they organise to
raise some money. In fact, the terrible tragedy in Nepal had triggered every
small organisation in this town to raise money to help our nearest friends. Well,
everyone in the town knows him: brings titters on faces of stall-keepers as
they claim he’s crazy or some say, a wannabe, but for a traveller who had known
just some words about this distant town and had pulled and pushed himself
through the Indian scorch and deserted railway stations, a picture with a funny
pose and a couple of handshakes and good wishes are enough, aren’t they? But
the best thing about a traveller who stays in this town is that after three days
you know so many faces because there are not too many people around.
This way I get to know
Simon Davis at the library cafe: a lonesome traveller from Birmingham and about
him, it is pretty hard to describe how a person he is because I never got to
know him very deeply because you see, some people are so cool with answers, so
saturated with subtlety and readiness that they hardly understand or even
pretend to understand intentions or hopes behind questions and every time they
feel there is being an attempt to know them beyond their ‘shallow bay’, there
they are, ready with the marker to draw the line.
And he is one among
them. Apart from that, this person has a strange affair with India and her
charm. He has not been employed for quite a while and most of his stories
revolve around Northern India: her mountains, plains, valleys, lakes, and
beyond that, a love unspoken of. This was the fourth time in his life that he
was visiting the same Indian places he had every other time and I recently
received his mail where he says he would head to Reckong Peo, Kinnaur and Spiti
Valley. He is one of those who prefer staying at a place for a while and
getting to know it better, than just stepping on and flying away.
Triund is a hill, a
small piece of art that the town offers you at the cost of quite a tiring yet
thrilling journey. It is a one day trek, basically, sometimes urging you to
take a tent up there and stay the night, but also pushing you to use the last
bit of your tank to walk for an hour-and-a-half more, another five kilometres
uphill to reach the snowline. The day had an exceptionally strict sun, clear
and not windy. I still cannot believe to have selected such a horrible day to
trek on, but perhaps that is how you make a horrible day memorable, and both being
driven by passion: one who had never seen the natural snow and another who’d be
going there after eight long years and in Simon’s words, “a painful wait”. An
oath was taken to go pro, taking no vehicle and using the uptown hill road till
Dharamkot and heading to Triund thereafter. The road is normal, not many steep
breaks, but just stony, with a lot of rickety and curvy trees, some small, some
large, blanketing the skin of the hill and sometimes large old logs, ancestors,
lying defeated and dissected from the wild neighbourhood, wise and resolute,
whispering their fables yet living the eternal sermon.
The woods are
suspenseful, sometimes giving away a wild noise making you all the more careful
about what is at your side too. Then we stopped at a cafe which is called
‘Magic View’ and the name sufficiently fits the scene as from up there, we
could see the town’s horizon and how it lazily sits on its butt on the hill
with some of its houses askew and roads forcing themselves out from among knots
of foundations. I hardly remember to have stopped after that and there could
not be much of observing the atmosphere because at the same time, I had to be
very careful walking the complex path and making sure that I don’t twist any of
my ankles.
While we were a minute
away from Triund, a traveller on his way back said “You’re here, finally...it’s
verrry beautiful” Well, this is a courtesy, perhaps, for everyone who is on their
way downhill to tell the ones heading the opposite way, the amount of time till
the destination. Even we did that on our way back and I realised that it is
quite funny as you see a lot of happy and bright faces with a “Really?” and
some frustrated “Holy shit!” and altogether a feeling of pride and confidence
that you already had been there, felt it and done with it. But honestly, you
can never get done with that scenic beauty. The impact lasts forever.
Triund is a pretty plain
at the top of a hill, scenery of greenery, cattle, shepherds, fresh air and
cleanliness and the mighty Dhauladhar Ranges drawing its boundary. We found a
place under a huge rock to take a break and lunch, but the place was rather, a
strange one: a gentle, wet land, kind of a slope with a small stone, manually
fixed in the ground, dressed up and painted red to give it a godly rank and
just ahead was the release, the nothingness, the negligence of nature. There
were oaks and pine groups scattered around, looking fresh and fit, proudly
owning their turfs and clung to the body of the hill, a huge rock rebelling against
gravity, to hold itself on the cliff, capped with dried mud and grass passing
an impression of a drunken Mother Nature to have had thrown up on it, while on
her way to painting this casual landscape on an unending crazy canvas.
With such funny
impressions playing their own ways in my mind, we reached the snowline. The
place has no name: just “snowline”. The snowline marks the beginning of the
Dhauladhar, greeting a trekker with a frozen brook and mixtures of mud and snow
and a significantly wet land, boasting of a single cafe in the wilderness, with
simple food, tea and water bottles. This cafe is a camp-cum-cafe. In other
words, it provides accommodation to the ones who want to stay there for the
night. Unfortunately, our day had no campfire scheduled for the night and
threats of an incoming thunderstorm which did descend upon the town as the
night befell. The beauty spot of the frozen brook was mesmerizing: a team of
rocks gathered at the area where the sun rays strongly hit and thenceforth the
ice melting to water and rushing down. There was a rocky plain which, once,
seemingly, happened to be a venue for two livelihoods, but now, there just
remain the ends of them.
We meet a funny team of
two Italians – Andrei from Rome and Ricardo from Tuscany. Andrei was mostly
busy all throughout with his mistakenly rolled joint which had probably hurt
his trip, and also because he had burnt a part of his moustache while lighting
it up. Moreover, he sounded like a crazy fan of Roma and my intention became
just to have a little fun with his temper. That’s how I reacted – “Oh yeah? I
think Di Canio could have done the same job in Lazio as Totti did throughout
his career had he stayed there and not moved to Premier League.” That pissed
him off, really. He wasn’t ready for such an instant and abrupt criticism of
their “Last Roman Gladiator”. But no, I was messing around, I confessed, and it
did take a short term yet respectful appraisals of Roma’s history to bring him
back to comfort.
Ricardo had been off, roaming around the place. So he came back while we were still talking and Simon
asks him, “Hey, so you fixed your Italian flag at the top of the cliff or
what?” Ricardo’s reply was the most amusing of all – “Ah, no...no...we are
Italians...we don’t fix flags. We like a place, we build restaurants.” That definitely makes sense, I agree. Besides them discussing food, it was fun to listen to his travel
stories – all the way from Cambodia to India through Thailand, their funny
questions to shepherds in search of “Cheese” which the shepherd, seemingly,
could not understand and thus, reacted with a question along with an expression
of utter befuddlement, “Kaun sa cheese?” (“What thing?”).
This guy, Ricardo, had
left his family to open a restaurant at a Cambodian beach. While on our way
back, had a sudden urge to brush his teeth, I had no idea why unless I found out that it was his intention to explain to us the pros
of a supposedly magical ayurvedic “Dant Manjan” (Tooth-paste) which he had found at Varanasi. He was busy talking about his inherent talent of being able to
bargain anywhere on Indian streets. This guy was crazy: an untamed mystic
seeking awe and trying new jumps and moves although tittering before every, but
never thinking twice: much like Sal Paradise’s beloved Dean Moriarty. For me, having
been wonderstruck by the puzzling beauty of the place, I couldn’t talk much but
just listen and keep their actions and words registered in my mind and hence,
I could tell you.
The dusk was just
orange, pure and clear. Talking to my own self just about having made it, tired and wasted, faced the thunderstorm that the evening had to offer.
