Himalaya Bound Read online

  There wasn’t much chit-chat.

  “Are you with the press?” Rasaily asked.

  I said, “No.”

  “Are you an Indian citizen?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you doing here?” he asked, rhetorically and angrily, raising his voice. “I can have you arrested for being a foreigner participating in a political rally!” He smacked his hand down on his desk.

  This was definitely not what I was expecting. I didn’t even know how to respond, and before I could come up with anything half-intelligent to say, Rasaily pressed on against me.

  “You are an outside political agitator, a foreigner making trouble in India, and there are serious consequences for that!” he said, seeming to have found a theme that he liked.

  “I’m not agitating anything or anyone,” I answered, finally finding my tongue. “Even if I wanted to agitate these people, how could I? I don’t speak Hindi! I can’t even talk to them.”

  My logic, which seemed self-evident, was lost on him. He continued to accuse me of meddling in local politics so, seeing no reason to endure his baseless tirade, I stood up to leave. I took a couple of steps towards the door, but three of the uniformed men leapt up, grabbed me, and physically held me back. With no choice, I sat down, furious and a bit frightened.

  I wanted to lash out at Rasaily, telling him he had no right or reason to keep me against my will. I wanted to dare him to arrest me, to make an international incident out of this and draw attention not only to how he dealt with me, but how he was shutting the Van Gujjars out of their meadows, destroying families and an age-old culture. But I didn’t say any of that. I opted, instead, for what I thought would be a smarter strategy—placating him and playing stupid, figuring he’d eventually see that I was no threat, get bored, and release me. I calmly tried to explain that Manto had invited me to join him at the park headquarters, and that I had no idea whatsoever that as a foreigner I shouldn’t have been there (if that was even true). I apologized for the mistake, and said that it was based in ignorance, not malice. I even tried telling him that I was an environmentalist who loved national parks and agreed that nature needed to be preserved. Rasaily, however, wasn’t swayed.

  He demanded to see my passport, but I lied and told him I didn’t have it with me; there was no way I was putting that kind of control into his hands. “How can you not have it with you?!” he shouted. “That is also a crime!” He picked up the phone, made a call, and said something in Hindi. My main worry, at this point, was that he was going to try to force me to give him the memory card from my camera or, worse, the camera itself.

  Instead, he pulled out a piece of paper and handed me a pen, commanding me to “write a statement explaining what you were doing at the rally.” So I wrote that I had come at Manto’s invitation, that I was not engaged in any political agitation or activity, and that the whole incident was based on a big misunderstanding.

  Rasaily insisted that I make a few changes to it, like specifically naming the office at which the rally had taken place as well as the NGO that Manto ran. Once I did that, he told me to add that I was participating in a political rally. I refused. He repeated his order, and I refused again.

  Just then a policeman who looked no older than twenty came through the door—responding to the phone call Rasaily had made. Once Rasaily explained his version of the situation to him, the policeman enthusiastically agreed that I had done something terribly illegal and that he was arresting me on charges of being a foreign political agitator. It seemed like I had entered a story Kafka might have written if he’d lived in South Asia—but as strange and scary as the prospect of going to jail was, at least, I thought, I’d be out of Rasaily’s office. By this time, I’d been in there for nearly thirty minutes.

  The door opened and I was escorted into the parking lot. Manto and Namith were gone. The young policeman opened the side door of a white SUV. I didn’t get in. His partner, who was standing beside the vehicle, unslung his rifle from his shoulder and trained it directly on me. It was hard to imagine that he would actually shoot me, but the way the morning had gone thus far, I decided I’d better not risk it. I got in the car.

  The driver sped through the streets of Dehradun, as quickly as traffic would allow. Various scenarios ran through my mind. On one hand, it was impossible to imagine that I could possibly spend any significant amount of time behind bars, because the charges against me were so ridiculous. Still, I was deeply rattled. My biggest fear was that I’d have to abandon the migration, that the project I’d already deeply invested myself in would turn to dust.

  My mouth was so dry I could hardly swallow. I’d finished all of the water I carried earlier in the morning, and the driver refused to stop for any.

  When we reached police headquarters, I was marched into a room whose light blue walls were scuffed and peeling. Only a few people occupied the rows of wooden benches that faced a table at which no one was sitting. After a couple of minutes, a police officer emerged from another room.

  He came over to greet me, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I could tell at once, just by his demeanor, that he was a reasonable man. He asked me my name and my nationality and requested to see my passport—which I immediately handed to him. He looked it over and gave it back, then wanted to know why I had been brought in. I told him my mouth was so parched it was hard to talk, so he brusquely ordered the young policeman who had arrested me to bring me some mineral water.

  Once I’d taken a few sips, I explained what had happened and what I’d been doing at the Rajaji Park headquarters in the first place. He listened, nodding, and when I said Rasaily had had me arrested as a foreign political agitator, he rolled his eyes. I phoned Manto—who had gone to the RLEK office once he realized he wasn’t going to be able to get into Rasaily’s office to help me—to verify my story, and put him on the phone with the officer. When they were finished, the officer handed the phone back to me, and Manto said he would come to the police station right away. The officer looked at me with a half-smile. “I’m sure you haven’t done anything wrong,” he said. “I’m going to let you go.”

  I shook his hand and thanked him profusely. He asked if I’d like some chai, but I politely declined, saying I was supposed to meet some friends and was already quite late.

  As I walked out of the building and towards the street to wait for Manto, a newspaper reporter fell in step beside me. He starting asking questions about my detention and the events leading up to it, but I didn’t want to talk. My goal was to continue migrating with Dhumman’s family and, after my encounter with Rasaily, it seemed wisest to keep a low profile.

  Manto picked me up in his Maruti minivan, and I told him the story from beginning to end. He was deeply apologetic for encouraging me to meet Rasaily. But, he said, “At least now you see the kind of man the Van Gujjars are dealing with.” He added that he had alerted one of the newspapers about my arrest after I had phoned him, thinking that if a story was published, it would be an embarrassment for Rasaily, who would be seen as having terrorized a tourist. I said I wished he hadn’t done that, thinking it’d be better if everyone forgot about the whole thing, but Manto assured me I had no reason to be concerned. Later, it turned out, sympathetic stories did run in several newspapers; one bore a headline in Hindi that read “We’re sorry Michael, we’re so ashamed!” and offered an apology for the way a government official had treated a foreign visitor to Dehradun.

  When I got out of the van at the RLEK office, Dhumman and Yusuf came over immediately to make sure I was all right. Their concern was genuine, and I was touched by it. Manto explained to them what had happened, and they listened, slowly shaking their heads. They then filled in the details for the other Van Gujjars who were lingering in the back yard, while I went inside to see if there was any food left in the kitchen.

  The cars that had picked us up in the morning were just about to make their return trip, so Dhumman, Yusuf, Alfa, Namith, and the others piled in and left for Kalsi. I was f
amished, so I stayed behind and ate, and talked with Manto and his father, Avdhash, for a while, then took a bus back to Kalsi later in the afternoon, reaching our camp after dark. Everyone, of course, had already heard about my run-in with Rasaily, and I was greeted with chai, and questions, and the kind of laughter that expresses relief when you find out for sure that someone you care about has come through a harrowing incident unscathed.

  Something subtle, but noticeable, had shifted in the way that they looked at me. Even though I certainly hadn’t planned it, my friends seemed to interpret the incident in Dehradun as meaning that I was willing to go to jail for them, and they appreciated it. As the story spread among the tribe, I earned something of a reputation; after that, whenever I was introduced to Van Gujjars for the first time, most already knew who I was, and knew that I could be trusted. It also made a difference to them that I now knew first-hand who they were up against, that I had gotten a small taste of Rasaily’s methods and could better understand their situation.

  It made a difference to me, too. My experiences that day gave me insights into the Van Gujjars’ struggles that I never would have otherwise acquired. Regardless of any legitimate arguments that might be made about the possible environmental impact of the tribe on the meadows of Govind National Park, or on the forests of Rajaji, it was crystal clear that Rasaily was not a reasonable and compassionate man who regrettably felt that he had no choice but to evict nomadic families from their traditional lands because it was the only way to save the ecosystems from certain destruction. Rather, he seemed to relish using what power he had to push around those who were weaker and more vulnerable than him. He was combative rather than conciliatory, and seemed perfectly at ease dispensing a twisted version of justice to which logic was superfluous.

  That night, I felt even more like a part of the family than before. We went to sleep early, and by 2:30 am we were awake and preparing to move.

  5

  THE FORK IN THE ROAD

  The road out of Kalsi climbed steeply as it curled around a ridge, following the Yamuna into the gorge it hews through the burly Himalayan foothills. In the darkness, I could feel the change in the terrain even more than I could see it. As the shadowy slopes rose around us, I sensed their looming presence engulfing us on both sides the way you might instinctively know that someone is standing beside you, even if your eyes are shut.

  A palpable energy coursed through the caravan. We were all a touch inebriated with the excitement of moving into the mountains, despite the uncertainties that lay ahead. Even the animals seemed in high spirits, walking with an extra bit of bounce, eager, it seemed, to leave the searing heat of the plains behind them.

  We marched along the road, a thin ribbon of pitted asphalt that contoured around the curves of the canyon. After a few hours, dawn filled the space between the rocky ramparts that framed the river. At first, it felt like there was little to see—the cliffs were nearly sheer and the corridor they created was relatively narrow. As a result, what captured my attention more than the landscape was the water, pumping through the gouge it had carved, and was still carving, through the earth, surging over and around boulders, the sound of its rushing froth amplified by the walls of rock that contained it.

  Had I been able to look down on where we were from above, perhaps from an airplane, I’d have seen that we had entered a zone of topographical transition between the plains to the south and the high, glaciated summits of the Garhwal Himalayas, to the north. But this transitional space didn’t feel like a gradual one; from the ground, it felt shockingly abrupt.

  As soon as you step foot into the hill country, you are dwarfed by terrain that is suddenly thrust skyward and hewn by the force of rivers and rain and wind into a muscular geologic labyrinth, a mess of towering ridges and deep waterways that instantly impress a sense of smallness and humility into anyone who isn’t cursed with a pathological amount of hubris. In most parts of the world, these hills would easily be considered proper mountains in their own right, and are here only called “hills” because the major peaks behind them are so massive.

  Sticking to the road, our caravan would follow the Yamuna upstream for at least a week, perhaps more—we weren’t quite sure, and our plans were subject to change at any time. Day by day, as we penetrated further into the hills, the canyon opened up and the landscape became increasingly dramatic. The slopes on either side of the river grew higher and higher, kissing the sky and plunging down to the water. As impressive as they were, what truly blew my mind were the hamlets that were perched upon them. Far above the river, accessible only by a network of zigzag footpaths etched into the rocky cliffs, terraced fields of millet, wheat, and vegetables clung to mountainsides so steep, they looked like they might slide right off. Beside them sat houses made of earth and stone. I wondered who lived there, who farmed there: it was hardly possible to contemplate climbing those trails in order to come and go from one’s home, let alone raising families and cultivating crops in apparent defiance of the laws of gravity.

  Swaths of the hills were covered in the dark greens of deciduous forests, while the cascading patchwork of fields seemed stitched from pale greens and golds. But my main impression of the canyon’s color scheme was a varied palette of browns, which changed in depth and richness over the course of a day, as the sunlight moved across bare earth and rock.

  Despite the Van Gujjars’ defeat at forest department headquarters in Dehradun, Dhumman still clung to a thread of hope that his family would ultimately be allowed into their meadows in Govind National Park. But he’d also come up with an alternative plan to avert disaster in case they weren’t.

  While camped at Kalsi, Dhumman had connected with a friend, named Kasim, who had come to visit from Gandikhatta. Though he had been forced to settle, Kasim never relinquished the papers to his summer pasture, at a place called Kanasar. Since he wasn’t going to go there, he invited Dhumman to use the meadow if he needed to, giving him a copy of his documents.

  Dhumman still wanted to go to his own place, above a village named Gangar, since Kanasar was much further, higher, more remote, and was totally unfamiliar to him (though Yusuf had been there once before). Besides, he wasn’t officially allowed to take his buffaloes there, either, which meant he’d have to risk going, then see if he could cut a deal with the local ranger to let his family stay for the season. But because Kanasar was not inside a national park, he was guardedly optimistic that they’d be able to work something out.

  For the first week of travel past Kalsi, the route to their ancestral meadow at Gangar overlapped with the route to Kanasar. But at the village of Naugaon, the ways would split: Dhumman’s usual route forked to the left, towards the Tons River, while the Kanasar route forked to the right, towards the mountains between the sacred Hindu pilgrimage sites of Yamunotri and Gangotri. The families needed to decide which way they were going to go by the time they reached Naugaon but they wanted to keep their options open until the last possible moment.

  Every morning, we were awake and moving long before daybreak. Dhumman, Mir Hamza, and Bashi—along with Yusuf and a couple of his sons—would start off in the darkness with the buffaloes, which walk more slowly than the pack animals. Meanwhile, Jamila, Roshni, and the rest of the family would load everything on the bulls and horses, then follow. Eventually, the cargo caravan would catch up with the buffalo herd and, often, everyone would arrive together at the next camp. I usually travelled with the pack animals, since Jamila had more use for me than did Dhumman. Our goal was to get off the road as early as possible, since automobile traffic became heavier as the morning progressed. With drivers whipping around blind curves and veering recklessly when passing us, it was frighteningly obvious that vehicles were the greatest physical danger on the migration.

  When we were lucky, we camped in small fields on the outskirts of the villages we travelled through. Other days, we parked ourselves on the highway’s narrow shoulder, with a cliff falling away behind us and the road directly in front of us. We c
ooked right there. We ate right there. We slept right there. We looked like homeless refugees, with all of our belongings piled up around us, cook fires smoldering, children napping, sprawled out in the dirt at the pavement’s edge. Cars and trucks sped by, unnervingly close, throwing up plumes of dust. I was sure someone was going to get killed, probably one of the little kids. But no one else seemed overly concerned. Of course, in India the margin between life and death is often measured in millimeters, so perhaps a hunk of metal and glass hurtling past with only six inches to spare is no cause for alarm, and I was just having a hard time adjusting my hyper-vigilant American sensibilities of spatiotemporal danger to local standards.

  After reaching our camping spot, the routine was more or less the same each day, a variation on a theme. One crew, led by Dhumman and Yusuf, would take the buffaloes down to the river, where they’d have access to water and, ideally, could find something on which to graze. Meanwhile, another crew stayed with Jamila and Roshni to set up camp, gather firewood, haul water, cook and watch the children. A couple of people would be sent into whichever village we were staying near to sell milk and buy supplies. No one had a permanent job, and each person played a number of different roles, including me. Some days I’d help Dhumman with the herd, other days I’d stay around camp with Jamila.

  When they weren’t busy with chores, the young women often socialized together under Jamila’s tent, since she was more easy-going than Yusuf’s wife Roshni—like the “cool mom” at whose house all the neighborhood kids like to hang out. Mariam, in particular, spent quite a lot of time at our tent, as she was especially close to Appa and Goku. Khatoon and Akloo often came over, too. During the days when I stayed at camp, it wasn’t unusual for me to spend a couple of hours with only women and children. Namith and I, I realized, were essentially like palace eunuchs: I was an Angrez with a family of my own back home, while Namith had remained single by choice and, though Indian, was a complete foreigner to the forest world. Neither of us was a threat—nor a remotely realistic romantic option. Any protocol that might have normally guided interactions between Van Gujjar women and men from outside the family didn’t apply to us. They felt perfectly at ease talking and joking around, and would sometimes get surprisingly bawdy. These hours spent with the women were some of the most relaxed and enjoyable of the entire migration, infused with an aura of pure friendship, as though we’d known each other for ages. They were happy to have us around, and shared their thoughts and feelings with surprising openness.