How do we capture a thought, a feeling? We word it and store it in our cupboards and mailboxes. We record it verbatim in videos. We even attach it through memory to snapshots of the past. But mostly, we don’t capture it; it embeds into our being on its own…
Not all thoughts and feelings get captured, nor they linger on forever. Only a few, limited number survive. Some of them we can recall while thinking back, some come alive from triggers attached to them. But the most interesting and perhaps the most important I feel are the ones that come up when we are neither recalling them nor can we locate the trigger.
A laughter would fall in the first, a smile in the second and a tear in the last…
How regularly have we have sat down with friends and family whiling away a good number of hours laughing about the ludicrous things we did (knowingly/unknowingly/drunk). How often we have had those smiles when some songs remind us of fabulous times spend a long time ago. And how rarely have we been glum of a sudden pang running through our bodies for reasons unknown.
Reasons unknown become reasons known and the pain dissipates. We look for the why, we get the reason and we reason the reason. Be it the obvious “Death is Inevitable” or the obscure “He is gone to a better place”, be it the factual “Nobody can see or experience everything” or the illusory “He is still with us right here inside our hearts”, they all serve the same purpose. They move the feeling from where it hurts the most to a more comfortable reasoned place where it stays till we forget and it resurfaces some other day.
My experience tells me the feeling is more potent that we give it credit to be but the reasoning serves its purpose too. Once bitten, twice shy might be overused but that is how our defenses function. The next time we aren’t taken in by surprise, the next time the walls are up. The next time death gives you lesser tears and more humility, for when you see another of the souls-you-know missing, you know it will all come to pass and so will you…
But that August night, that sinister smile, that insane advice, that useless fight… It remains etched in stone. A stone which never weathers, at least I think so... at the least I will know I thought so…
Monday, September 14, 2009
The Trek – Part 4: Money Best Spent
One hour to dusk and no clue as to where to head. I mean, we knew we had to go downhill. After all, we were almost atop a Himalayan mountain for crying out loud! But that was all we knew. We walked around trying to find a trail, not with the detective seriousness of course, with the laughing chatter of what a mess we are in, the kind of lunacy that takes you over when you are royally screwed with or without being responsible for it… though the lunacy is much stronger when you are not the reason for the mess!
Finally the dude remembered of a place where he thought was a trail and although we (including him) could only find one stone that looked like somewhat cut by humans of eons ago, it was a good enough for us and we headed, like I said before, downhill. I have never really climbed down or up any hill in a completely random manner (that is without a trail to guide) but considering moving down this newfound “trail” meant we had to sit down and push thorny bushes aside with sticks meant it was pretty much the similar to having no trail to begin with. Anyways, an hour and some scary wild sounds later (one of which we were pretty sure was a bear’s), we came down to the valley. And the relief was much increased when we saw a shepherd tending to his cattle. We were still not lost to the wilderness!
What the shepherd told us was the plain and simple – you city-dwellers cannot make it to Kareri. We have wondered and discussed quite a few times since then whether we would have been better off if we had just ignored his advice. Nobody has a clue. In fact, I have even wondered if it would have been even more adventurous…
So we took his advice that we should head to the village about a couple of miles south and started walking single file on the narrow comfortable path towards the village. By the time we got there, we were starving strangers coming in from the darkness with a single flashlight (yes, we still didn’t have the sanity to buy more at Mcleodganj) with huge bags on their backs and sun burnt faces that couldn’t be seen. In short, it was dark and we were hungry. The village was as primitive as I would ever see, that is, it had no electricity. Am not exaggerating and I can’t explain more, after all we didn’t really get a chance to explore it! The guy we stopped gave us even better news, namely – “This is harvest season and everybody is busy. We can get you a place to stay but apologies we wouldn’t be able to give you any food”. We had a tent for crying out loud! One we just hadn’t used all these days! But he didn’t budge and said maybe the next village a further down the path. And we didn’t really have a choice.
I was a strict vegetarian back then (now a vegetarian by choice) and the most difficult part for me on that entire trip was when we found a dead cow in the middle of the only trail we had. No, we did not try to cook it! The bad and stinking part was that she had been dead at least a fortnight and the pungent smell from her rotting body was filling up the nose a hundred yards away. And you really can’t hold your breath that long, especially when you have to run and jump over a dead cow with a rucksack on your back. It was indeed the worst experience of the trip for all others turned into good memories once we were past them, this one didn’t.
The conspiracy was widespread. Conspiracy because I still can’t understand why they couldn’t take pity on us and give us anything to eat. We were offering to sleep in the fields! Anyways, the next village had the same offer and we had no other choice than to keep walking south. Even our so-close-to-the-heart-by-now torch was taking her last breaths as we walked on hopelessly… and then we saw light!
It is difficult to understand the feeling of relief that a bunch of guys feel upon seeing a tube light after being in the darkness for a few hours. I am not exaggerating and I will not exaggerate when I say even the dismay was tremendous when we found out that the lights were of an inlet station of a dam. The dreams of shops and food disappeared as we sensed nobody might be there at all! But thank god for making burglars burglars because had they not wandered our society, nor would have the security guards!
The two guards at the station were good human beings. They didn’t have any food (it was still eluding us) but they made tea for us and gave us the good news that there might be a way out. All we had to do was to ask the driver of the vehicle which came in during shift change to double back and drop us to the town. That was our only hope for the night and when he came, we should have fallen to his feet if the need be and given him as much money as he asked for but what we did (and I will remove myself from we here) was to try and negotiate with him to come down from 300 bucks to 200 bucks. Imagine getting stuck, hungry and cold (and maybe even dead) for a mere 20 bucks per person! And that too, Indian currency!
Good sense prevailed amongst us and the driver didn’t get too pissed (although we thought he had when it took him more than an hour to come back) and we reached back to Mcleodganj an hour after we boarded the jeep. Nobody had imagined we had crossed so many mountains and covered so much road-miles that even I was filled with guilt about thinking of the driver as greedy when he had asked for those 300 bucks. Sixty bucks well spent indeed… best spent indeed…
Finally the dude remembered of a place where he thought was a trail and although we (including him) could only find one stone that looked like somewhat cut by humans of eons ago, it was a good enough for us and we headed, like I said before, downhill. I have never really climbed down or up any hill in a completely random manner (that is without a trail to guide) but considering moving down this newfound “trail” meant we had to sit down and push thorny bushes aside with sticks meant it was pretty much the similar to having no trail to begin with. Anyways, an hour and some scary wild sounds later (one of which we were pretty sure was a bear’s), we came down to the valley. And the relief was much increased when we saw a shepherd tending to his cattle. We were still not lost to the wilderness!
What the shepherd told us was the plain and simple – you city-dwellers cannot make it to Kareri. We have wondered and discussed quite a few times since then whether we would have been better off if we had just ignored his advice. Nobody has a clue. In fact, I have even wondered if it would have been even more adventurous…
So we took his advice that we should head to the village about a couple of miles south and started walking single file on the narrow comfortable path towards the village. By the time we got there, we were starving strangers coming in from the darkness with a single flashlight (yes, we still didn’t have the sanity to buy more at Mcleodganj) with huge bags on their backs and sun burnt faces that couldn’t be seen. In short, it was dark and we were hungry. The village was as primitive as I would ever see, that is, it had no electricity. Am not exaggerating and I can’t explain more, after all we didn’t really get a chance to explore it! The guy we stopped gave us even better news, namely – “This is harvest season and everybody is busy. We can get you a place to stay but apologies we wouldn’t be able to give you any food”. We had a tent for crying out loud! One we just hadn’t used all these days! But he didn’t budge and said maybe the next village a further down the path. And we didn’t really have a choice.
I was a strict vegetarian back then (now a vegetarian by choice) and the most difficult part for me on that entire trip was when we found a dead cow in the middle of the only trail we had. No, we did not try to cook it! The bad and stinking part was that she had been dead at least a fortnight and the pungent smell from her rotting body was filling up the nose a hundred yards away. And you really can’t hold your breath that long, especially when you have to run and jump over a dead cow with a rucksack on your back. It was indeed the worst experience of the trip for all others turned into good memories once we were past them, this one didn’t.
The conspiracy was widespread. Conspiracy because I still can’t understand why they couldn’t take pity on us and give us anything to eat. We were offering to sleep in the fields! Anyways, the next village had the same offer and we had no other choice than to keep walking south. Even our so-close-to-the-heart-by-now torch was taking her last breaths as we walked on hopelessly… and then we saw light!
It is difficult to understand the feeling of relief that a bunch of guys feel upon seeing a tube light after being in the darkness for a few hours. I am not exaggerating and I will not exaggerate when I say even the dismay was tremendous when we found out that the lights were of an inlet station of a dam. The dreams of shops and food disappeared as we sensed nobody might be there at all! But thank god for making burglars burglars because had they not wandered our society, nor would have the security guards!
The two guards at the station were good human beings. They didn’t have any food (it was still eluding us) but they made tea for us and gave us the good news that there might be a way out. All we had to do was to ask the driver of the vehicle which came in during shift change to double back and drop us to the town. That was our only hope for the night and when he came, we should have fallen to his feet if the need be and given him as much money as he asked for but what we did (and I will remove myself from we here) was to try and negotiate with him to come down from 300 bucks to 200 bucks. Imagine getting stuck, hungry and cold (and maybe even dead) for a mere 20 bucks per person! And that too, Indian currency!
Good sense prevailed amongst us and the driver didn’t get too pissed (although we thought he had when it took him more than an hour to come back) and we reached back to Mcleodganj an hour after we boarded the jeep. Nobody had imagined we had crossed so many mountains and covered so much road-miles that even I was filled with guilt about thinking of the driver as greedy when he had asked for those 300 bucks. Sixty bucks well spent indeed… best spent indeed…
The Trek – Part 3: It had just begun
Bullying mixed with reasoning creates a deadly inescapable cocktail that one has no option but to drink. Having woken up with aches in almost all moving parts of the body, I was in no mood to relent to the insane request of another day of trek and I stood (rather sat) my ground for a good half hour! After all, it’s difficult to argue with someone who had already been to the place when he was all of 11 or 12!
It’s not as bad a climb as the last one, we will stop whenever you would want us to, don’t chicken out now, this is a much better place, be a team player, don’t act like an ass… Imagine all that thrown to a guy with a broken body and spirit. All probability is that he would either run away and never see the buggers again or give up arguing and fall in line. Am glad I was not a quitter, for what lay ahead would be one of the best days in my life. Alas, no pictures because the bastards decided on a budget cut!
So the five of us took off for Kareri via a temple called Gauna Devi with nothing but two loafs of bread and a bottle of jam. Something we would soon regret. The trek was steep in the town but afterwards, it became an easy walk on the shady side of the mountain with a nice breeze and good views all around. We moved much faster than the previous two days, passing by villages spread across the terrain. Once warmed-up, even the body was not giving me any trouble. A new lesson about its function but one I haven’t really utilized it ever since haven’t really been able to even gym regularly in the past 8 years. We stopped in the shade of line of trees and had our brunch of bread-jam and that was the last of it. The two loafs were ravished with the calm certainty of at least finding a shack where we could have our regular maggi or at least a bread or at worse anything!
I wouldn’t call it a waterfall, it was more like a pond with running water and huge rocks to create barriers that made it a stepped pool. We plunged ourselves in, playing in the ultra-cold water coming straight from the glacier. Later on, lying on the rocks to dry ourselves and the clothes we began contemplating the next. The real fun was still a couple of hours away…
Our hearts sank, especially mine, when we learned that it was last of the nice walk in the park and the villager pointed us up! Yes, it cannot be defined as an incline. It was up, straight up! The kind better done for a very short duration; the kind just short of needing to drop the rucksacks and use ropes. It took us around an hour to crawl up but thereafter it was the usual arduous trek snaking around the mountain, the only difference between previous days – direct sun, no trees, and landslides. There were parts where the trail had been lost under the debris of broken stones and we risked moving ahead step by step because we had decently screwed-up egos, the risk appetite of lunatics and a hope of food at the temple of Goddess Gauna.
I usually keep my blogs nameless (maybe due to the ingrained belief of “What’s in the name”). It’s natural to me, I have to make an effort to write down or even use a name in the stories I keep retelling to whoever would listen but this time I want to make an exception and scream out the name of the bugger who had weaved tales of the beauty of the temple! But I will stick with calling him The Bastard!
One cannot imagine, or maybe can, the looks and curses we threw at him when we found that the temple was in ruins and abandoned maybe months or maybe years ago. An eerie absence of anyone else was ok, lack of food still fine and the fact that sunset was an hour away would have been fine if we had a way ahead. There was no trail! It ceased to exist… Simply put – We were screwed!
If you put this situation to a bunch of people doing a survivalist course (describing it much more vividly than I could manage), they would inevitably say that the best and the only sane thing to do is to turn around, retrace your steps and if you are lucky you would reach the town before midnight! But we of course did the opposite, the only saving grace being that we were lucky… extremely lucky…
It’s not as bad a climb as the last one, we will stop whenever you would want us to, don’t chicken out now, this is a much better place, be a team player, don’t act like an ass… Imagine all that thrown to a guy with a broken body and spirit. All probability is that he would either run away and never see the buggers again or give up arguing and fall in line. Am glad I was not a quitter, for what lay ahead would be one of the best days in my life. Alas, no pictures because the bastards decided on a budget cut!
So the five of us took off for Kareri via a temple called Gauna Devi with nothing but two loafs of bread and a bottle of jam. Something we would soon regret. The trek was steep in the town but afterwards, it became an easy walk on the shady side of the mountain with a nice breeze and good views all around. We moved much faster than the previous two days, passing by villages spread across the terrain. Once warmed-up, even the body was not giving me any trouble. A new lesson about its function but one I haven’t really utilized it ever since haven’t really been able to even gym regularly in the past 8 years. We stopped in the shade of line of trees and had our brunch of bread-jam and that was the last of it. The two loafs were ravished with the calm certainty of at least finding a shack where we could have our regular maggi or at least a bread or at worse anything!
I wouldn’t call it a waterfall, it was more like a pond with running water and huge rocks to create barriers that made it a stepped pool. We plunged ourselves in, playing in the ultra-cold water coming straight from the glacier. Later on, lying on the rocks to dry ourselves and the clothes we began contemplating the next. The real fun was still a couple of hours away…
Our hearts sank, especially mine, when we learned that it was last of the nice walk in the park and the villager pointed us up! Yes, it cannot be defined as an incline. It was up, straight up! The kind better done for a very short duration; the kind just short of needing to drop the rucksacks and use ropes. It took us around an hour to crawl up but thereafter it was the usual arduous trek snaking around the mountain, the only difference between previous days – direct sun, no trees, and landslides. There were parts where the trail had been lost under the debris of broken stones and we risked moving ahead step by step because we had decently screwed-up egos, the risk appetite of lunatics and a hope of food at the temple of Goddess Gauna.
I usually keep my blogs nameless (maybe due to the ingrained belief of “What’s in the name”). It’s natural to me, I have to make an effort to write down or even use a name in the stories I keep retelling to whoever would listen but this time I want to make an exception and scream out the name of the bugger who had weaved tales of the beauty of the temple! But I will stick with calling him The Bastard!
One cannot imagine, or maybe can, the looks and curses we threw at him when we found that the temple was in ruins and abandoned maybe months or maybe years ago. An eerie absence of anyone else was ok, lack of food still fine and the fact that sunset was an hour away would have been fine if we had a way ahead. There was no trail! It ceased to exist… Simply put – We were screwed!
If you put this situation to a bunch of people doing a survivalist course (describing it much more vividly than I could manage), they would inevitably say that the best and the only sane thing to do is to turn around, retrace your steps and if you are lucky you would reach the town before midnight! But we of course did the opposite, the only saving grace being that we were lucky… extremely lucky…
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