It’s early July, and it’s the off-season in Badrinath. It begins drizzling as we clear the plains and climb the hills, and by the time we reach Ranikhet, our first-day stopover of the journey, it is pouring. From the verandah of the hotel room, the valley is a crumbling sheet of blurry vegetation. Rain hammers down the windows, the electricity has tripped and the town has become pitch black; the lights of cars in the valley glimmer like fireflies.
The next morning, in the indigo predawn, we down hot cups of tea and continue the journey. The traffic is thin and emboldened, we speed, not honking or slowing down at hairpin bends. All that we gain on one leg of the journey, we lose on the other as we drive past a hydroelectric project commissioned on River Dauliganga. We are delayed by the earthmovers employed for the infamous road widening project to connect the four places of pilgrimage in Uttarakhand. Trees have been uprooted and large rocks are held back from the slopes by nets to prevent landslides. A cloud of dust from crushed gravel to pave the road hangs in the air, settling on our skin and choking our lungs.
As we drive on, we spot goats on rocks high up the mountain; in another location, a shepherd, with his flock, and an hour later a woman carrying dry wood up a path. We pass villages – self-sufficient communities of people who till land using family labour to terrace the mountain for rain-fed agriculture, growing rice, millets, and vegetables. They sustain themselves by rearing cows, buffaloes, and goats for milk, and sheep for wool.
Buses pass us occasionally, picking up people who trundle their way from the villages on some errand to the town nearby, or to disembark the men who work in towns and are now returning home. Those coming back after being away for work warm up to the familiar sights of older men crouching on low walls and smoking, children jumping across open gutters and canals of water flowing from the ice in the mountains, and women flattening dough for rotis.
Against all advice not to travel at night, we drive cautiously through the darkness and reach Badrinath at 10 p.m. The hotel manager reluctantly tears his eyes away from the TV screen mounted on the wall, checks our reservation, calls out to a boy, and slaps the room key on the counter. ‘Kake jao,’ he says, pointing to the glass-panelled dining room. The boy joins the manager to watch TV as we sit at the table and are served hot parathas with pickles and sliced onions.
In temple towns, the day begins early, and the clock is set to the rituals for the gods. Early in the morning, a young man is at the door with a pot of cardamom tea; he stands like a sentinel, waiting for us to finish our tea so that he can take the cups back. He doesn’t want to make another trip to our room on the second floor, and would rather snuggle under a quilt in a corner of the kitchen area. I ask him about his family and he responds with warmth; he smiles as he talks of his wife and children in the village, whom he visits once every two months, for a weekend. The young man looks at the clock on the wall and urges us to leave soon, to make it to the first aarti in the temple.
The temple of Badrinath has existed for centuries; before a path was laid, pilgrims walked for months to reach there. Prone to flash floods, avalanches, and earthquakes, the town is located in a fragile and highly disaster-prone zone. It appears like a miracle that the temple, with the congestion of stacks of shops and other buildings, still rests atop, commanding a majestic view.
At the feet of the temple, from the cracks and faults in the earth’s crust, plumes of vaporous cloud hover over a hot spring in an enclosed bathing tank. It is an open pool of microbial diversity formed in the process of mountain building. These mineral-rich pools foster a mass of algal and bacterial matter, which are the earliest life forms. This part of the Himalayas is seven million years old, while the age of the Earth is 4600 million years. The story of the Earth and the birth of the Himalayas is calculated in geological time whereas the story of humans is measured in palm-sized units like millennia, centuries, and generations.
Alongside the geological time of the earth, I am aware of the historical and mythical time as I head for Mana, the last village in India, 3 km from Badrinath. The drive to Mana opens the vista of the higher Himalayas – the subnival region where the grasslands and matting of lichens and mosses transition to the snow and glacier-covered peaks.
Time stands still in Mana, and the people make no claim to the history that lies scattered around. They lead a simple life in houses made of rock and slates, they tend gardens in their backyards, knit sweaters for travellers, and sell medicinal roots: they leave no footprints. We do not interest them; on the other hand, while walking through the narrow alleys, we fear that we are being intrusive, stepping into their privacy – the doors of their homes are open, and the smell of vegetables stewing on the stove reaches us.
We halt at India’s last chai shop for the soothing ginger tea before embarking on the trek to Vyasa cave where the scholar saint is believed to have compiled the four Vedas and narrated the epic ‘Mahabharata’ which existed as part of oral tradition long before it was committed to writing. Inside the cave, there is a small shrine that is believed to be 5,000 years old. The scribe of the epic is believed to be God Ganesha (there is also a cave dedicated to him in Mana). It is here that the historical blurs to a mythical time.
During a holiday in Binsar, we trekked through the forest of pine trees and rhododendrons to reach Zero Point, the highest region in the Kumaon range. It was a clear day and we got a breathtaking view of a 320 km stretch of the peaks of the Higher Himalayas – Kedarnath and Chaukhamba peaks in Grawal region, Paanch Chuli, Nanda Devi, Nanda Kot, and Trishul peaks in Kumaon Himalayas.
Paanch Chuli, a group of five peaks, was easy to locate, and I didn’t know then they had a connection to Mana. The five Pandava brothers, after renouncing their kingdom in Hastinapur, began their journey to heaven. It is believed that they cooked their last meal on Paanch Chuli: the five cooking hearths are the five peaks. The final journey in the Himalayas, the arduous trek of the five brothers with their wife Draupadi, is believed to have begun near Mana. A few miles from Mana, Draupadi collapsed and died. The brothers with heavy hearts left their beloved companion and continued their journey, halting at the five peaks to partake in their final meal.
According to Hindu cosmology, a cycle of evolution and devolution takes four yugas or stages, on the hypothesis that an original ‘order’ (dharma) established in the first stage, the Krita Yuga, gradually decays in the three others – the Treta, Dvapara, and Kali yugas – when the universe gets destroyed to commence a new cycle. The events mentioned in ‘Mahabharata’ are believed to have occurred at the beginning of Kali Yuga; we are now at the end of the era, heading for a devolution.
Based on external and internal evidence ‘Mahabharata’ is said to have been compiled before the 4th century Common Era. According to archaeological excavations in Hastinapur the date ascribed to events like the Kurukshetra war, described in ‘Mahabharata,’ is 950 BCE. This is to highlight that Mana, the small village and the portal to heaven is ensconced in such an ancient time warp – timeless and woven into one of the oldest stories of our culture.
***
For my grandmother and mother, not much changed during the sixty years of their lives. I don’t mean to say it was a life of monotony or unbroken serenity – there were moments of boredom, anxieties, losses, the daily drudgery of work to save for the future, frustration at the lack of resources; also instances of excitement, moments of romance and tenderness. They didn’t carry anxieties about the Earth’s future, nor did they suffer from the guilt of the depletion of the ozone layer. I remember my mother using a stone pestle for grinding; milk and vegetables were freshly procured as there were no refrigerators.
Throughout my high school years, I yearned to belong to a global village. Technology erased borders, shrunk space, and transformed the world into a village. It felt empowering – this somehow lifted me out of the dirt and noise of my immediate world, connecting me to people across the globe, and the distant cities and cultures appeared like a neighbourhood.
It carries an ominous tone now on entering the world of communication and transmission, an open world where diseases and germs travel freely, big capital flows, vested interests exploit labour, and development often views the environment as an antagonist. What is happening at the other end of the world knocks on our doors in no time, and our shores heap with rubbish from all over. Is it possible to measure space inwardly? “Walk gently,” my grandmother used to say; “talk softly,” she said, tuning her voice to a lower scale or pursing her lips in silence. It takes wisdom to perceive gentleness as care and silence as strength.
Gentleness and silence remain in my thoughts as I travel downstream River Alakananda. Once you have spent more than a few hours in the mountains, your ears get tuned to the roar of the river. We pull the car over and gaze at a temple perched on a ridge, with a flight of steps leading down to the spot where the rivers Alakananda and Dauliganga converge.
Dauliganga is a boisterous and turbulent river that originates in southwest Tibet, flows east into the Garwhal Himalayas, and merges with Alakananda at Vishnu Prayag. As the river is subsumed into the larger stream, she sheds her name, and her identity becomes fused with the large water body.
My great-grandaunt became restless after she crossed sixty. Her husband, my grandmother said, was wayward and disappeared for many months. The couple was childless. When her husband died, she was forty. After his death, she began living like driftwood moving among relatives; she made herself useful – stayed with my grandaunts during deliveries, babysat and sang lullabies, bathed the little children, cooked and managed the household until the young mothers felt strong enough to take charge. Then she moved on to older relatives to tend to them through illness. She travelled light, her two six-yard sarees folded into a cotton bag that also held her dogeared scripture book, a japa mala, and an old purse with currency notes folded and untouched. The family supported her and offered her the warmth of their hearts, but she never got carried away. She kept moving and left no trace, staying away from the mess that wants and expectations create.
At the age of sixty, she began making elaborate plans to leave Madras – she sold her small house, sent an amount by money order to an ashram in Kasi, and gave the rest to her sisters. She requested my grandfather to buy her a ticket to Kasi and then she departed. No one heard of her after that. Many of us in my generation never knew her by name; we called her Kasi paati and heard stories about her in the tales my aunts and grandmother shared, often in the context of a dish cooked in her signature style when they pointed to a utensil they inherited from her kitchen or the sarees they bought from the money she bequeathed. As Dauliganga surrenders to Alakananda, thoughts of this woman come to me – the ease of giving away, letting go.
At the confluence of the rivers lies a burial ghat. My great-grandaunt, when she passed away, must have been cremated at one such ghat in Kasi, on the banks of River Ganga. Arrival and departure co-exist. As I bend to run the water of the rivers through my fingers, I know that this water carries, along with my living cells, the ashes from the pyre at the ghat. I see a family that has come to send off a loved one. The sons, shivering in the ice-cold water, fold their hands in prayer after they dip the urn bearing ashes into the river.
In Rudra Prayag, we navigate the congested streets and stop for tea at a spot from where we can see the confluence of rivers Mandakini and Alakananda. Deep down, like the thrum of my heart, the two rivers flow, each with its distinct colour and character, and they become wider where they merge like a young woman gaining grace, the flow languorous because of the volume of the water.
We take a detour and drive to Chopta. The tantalizing path nudges us off the map and we leave the river behind. We stay in an old guest house, with no other buildings around, only the forest and the sound of the gurgling water of a stream deep in the gorge. The caretaker of the guest house tells us there are campers and hikers in their tents dispersed across the valley.
We walk to a dhaba across, a ramshackle structure of mud walls and an asbestos roof miraculously held together by the will of an old man who runs the joint. We place our order for dinner. The man kneads the dough and allows it to stand, then cuts potatoes and onions and tosses them in a pan spluttering with oil and masalas. A large dog under our table, a mountain breed stirs at the smell of food, wags his tail, and twitches his ears calling the master’s attention.
There is no heater in the guest house, and the food in our stomachs barely keeps us warm through the night when the temperature plunges to 2 degrees Celsius. In the morning, the guest house is suffused in a pearly glow, the heat from our bodies and moisture from our breath misting the glass panes of the windows. Swathed in layers of wool we step out to a view of the brightest blue sky, and the peaks washed golden by the morning sun.
We spend the day taking long walks, greeting hikers who emerge out of thickets in the forest from their camps set deep down near the stream. As the chill of the night thaws, we sit at a vantage point, watching the range of peaks changing colour; all around, the vegetation soaks in the light. The flowers pool warmth in their petals and set the bees in mad ecstasy. Lulled by the almost imperceptible pulse of life, we bask in the sun.
We are disinclined to leave and we know we are lingering longer than we should. I think of the pada yatra of Adi Shankara from the plains up to the Himalayas, along the rivers. As he walked towards Badrinath, did he tarry in a place like this, distracted from his mission, and using this time to write one of the many texts he composed in his short life? It is a marvel that in his short lifespan of 32 years he crammed teaching, writing, and travelling on foot the length and breadth of the country, mapping the spiritual geography of our subcontinent.
Early the next morning, we begin our descent down to accompany Alakananda on the final leg of her journey. At Deva Prayag, where the rivers Alakananda and Bhagirathi merge, Ganga is born. The voluminous water body flows from here to the plains, traversing thousands of miles before the river drains into the ocean. The valleys are broader, the pine trees falling behind, towns en route crowded, and the weather stuffy. The mountain air is gradually overtaken by the heat from the plains.
It is difficult not to give a persona to Ganga as she leaves the mountains behind, the place of her origin, her home. Her transformation is complete now. She is a woman heavy at her waist, her bosom swollen in bounty, her weight anchored to the earth like a mother who gathers her children into the deep fold of her existence. She is poised but forceful; one can sense a silent ferocity, the capacity to flood and destroy – a trait in a mother hard to fathom, even shocking. That is how the people respond when the river floods at any point along its course: that is the face of Ganga that perplexes them every time.
On arriving at Haridwar, I meander my way through the sadhus sitting on either side of the suspension bridge, Lakshman Jula, many of them vacantly staring, probably stoned by marijuana. From the bridge, I look through the slats and walk with quick steps, comforted by the companionable river below me.
I have travelled a long journey with her, not from Badrinath now, but from years ago when I undertook the first trek to the birthplace of the two rivers, Ganga and Yamuna. I was then half my present age, and it feels like someone else’s life. We move through stages of life, so disjointed, that we could, by all means, be five different people inhabiting the same body, running through stretches of races carrying the baton of desire. What I desired then is not very different from what I desire now: To be a pilgrim.
***
