Himalaya Bound Read online

  I can’t say exactly how far Hamju hauled the saddlebags, but he carried them for at least a half-hour or forty-five minutes, up the very steepest part of the very sloppy trail. Watching him, I was doubly amazed—in part at the fact that he was, at this point, literally stronger than our horses, but also at the fact that, even after weeks of living with them, my friends still had the ability to amaze me.

  Our campsite at Manji was in a flat clearing nestled between a grassy hill dotted with boulders and a dense forest of tall pines. A creek flowed nearby, and we were just far enough off the trail that we were invisible to hikers heading to Dodi Tal. It was obvious that we weren’t going to reach the little lake ourselves in the two days’ time that Dhumman had predicted three days earlier.

  Namith was growing impatient with the rate of our progress, or lack thereof. He was tired, and he’d already been on this journey longer than he’d originally signed up for, since when he agreed to translate for me, we both thought that we’d be making the substantially shorter migration to Gangar. Now, he was seriously considering bailing out and heading home to Dehradun. He asked Dhumman how many days it would take to reach Dodi Tal from where we were currently camped. Dhumman, once again, said, “Two.” Namith digested this new information in silence, and with more than a little bit of scepticism.

  Had we wanted to, we could have made it to Dodi Tal in just a few hours, but there was no incentive to do so. If it had snowed where we were, it had surely snowed at Kanasar, further setting back the clock for our ascent to the high meadow. Dhumman thought it made sense to take advantage of this new delay by re-stocking our supplies from the shops at Sangam Chatti, the village at the trailhead—which we had passed about a week earlier—before moving forward. From Manji, it would be possible to make the round-trip to Sangam Chatti in a single day, whereas if we waited until we reached Dodi Tal or Kanasar to resupply, the journey down and back would surely be too long to cover during daylight. Since we were in no rush to move forward, we would lay over at Manji the following day while a supply run was made—and Dhumman asked me to go with the team that would make it.

  In normal circumstances, when Van Gujjars need to restock their foodstuffs during summer, a couple of people descend with the horses and bulls, and the animals haul everything back up to the bugyals. Our horses and bulls, however, were much too weak to make the trip, so Gamee, Hamju, Sharafat, Chamar, Mariam, Goku, and I descended without them, leaving at dawn and hoofing it ten miles down to Sangam Chatti, along the main Dodi Tal trail. Compared to the way we had come, this well-maintained route was like a superhighway; it was steep but it was direct, with no obstacles and firm footing.

  From one of the dry goods shops, we purchased what we needed: atta, rice, tea, sugar, potatoes, and spices. While waiting for the clerk to bring everything to the counter, I phoned home on the shop’s land line. There had been no mobile connectivity since we’d passed through Uttarkashi ten or twelve days earlier, making this by far the longest I’d gone without speaking to my girlfriend and our son since the start of the migration. She answered, surprised to hear from me out of the blue, glad to hear I was safe after my extended silence. I tried to explain where I was and what I was doing, but I only managed to talk in scrambled circles about the weather and how beautiful the landscape was and how it was taking longer than I anticipated to reach Kanasar. When it came to telling her about our life on the trail, there was simply too much to say in a short phone call about a scenario that was so completely foreign to her that I hardly knew where to begin, and ended up feeling like I was trying to describe life on an alien planet for which words hadn’t yet been invented. But it didn’t really matter. I just wanted to hear her voice and listen to my son and let him know that, yes, I still existed and would see him again before too long. When I hung up, I forked over the 150 rupees that I owed, which seemed to my friends like a stunning amount of money to pay for a phone call, but to me seemed like a bargain.

  When it came time to divide up the supplies, Goku and I split a sack of atta between us. It weighed 100 pounds. I put my half in my empty pack, while she carried hers wrapped in a shawl that rested on her back but was supported by her head. Once everyone was ready, we set off. The haul back to Manji was a beast. The trail gained about 6500 feet in elevation, and I felt like I might as well have been carrying a giant rock in my bag. Somewhere around the eighth mile of our ascent (which was the seventeenth mile of the day), Goku and I found ourselves trailing far behind everyone else. Sometimes I mustered my willpower and surged ahead of her, other times she passed me. (By this time, at least, the painful abscess on her foot had healed.) We struggled onward together with a sense of camaraderie, and I was glad to see that after weeks of intense physical activity, I was now about as strong as a fourteen-year-old Van Gujjar girl. We loped into camp side-by-side, like fellow warriors emerging from battle, battered but victorious.

  With every muscle in my body exhausted, I slept well that night. When I woke in the morning, I was surprised to find that no one was packing up. “We’re staying here another day,” Jamila said. “The horses and bulls need more rest.” Though it was clearly a sensible decision, I couldn’t help being disappointed. I was eager to move forward and was beginning to feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football—only the football was Kanasar, and Dhumman was Lucy Van Pelt, always pulling it away after holding it in front of me. Namith, who had doubted Dhumman’s most recent predictions about our progress from the instant he uttered them, gave me a look that said, “I told you so.”

  Gamee came over to us and said he was going to go all the way up to Kanasar that very day, in just a few minutes, to scout out the situation at the meadow. He wanted to see if there was any grass growing yet, and what kind of condition the huts were in. He invited me go with him, and I instantly said “Sure!” It sounded better than hanging around camp when I was in the mood to move—and I could bring back pictures, so the rest of the family could see for themselves how things looked at Kanasar.

  We travelled light and fast. I carried my camera, some water, my rain gear, my polypro shirt, and the few chapatis that Jamila had given us for lunch. Gamee carried his lathi.

  An hour-and-a-half later, we were walking alongside the waters of Dodi Tal. A round pool the color of smoky topaz, it was more a pond than a lake. Trout darted through the translucent shallows, disappearing as they flitted into the opaque depths toward the center. A small white temple sat on one shore, and a few shack-like shops offered hot chai, Maggi noodles, and a limited selection of candy to hungry trekkers. Positioned where it was, tucked into the forest with no scenic vistas, the lake itself failed to impress me. I could understand why some people might want to hike all the way up to Dodi Tal to visit Ganesha’s birthplace, but the aesthetic rewards alone didn’t seem worth the effort of a purely recreational trip unless one is continuing past it, to Kanasar.

  Beyond Dodi Tal, a trail wends its way through a tight, rocky canyon, criss-crossing a stream numerous times. It then switchbacks up the walls of a steep, treeless bowl, climbing nearly 3,000 feet over a pass on a high, exposed ridge. From there, it’s an easy mile-long jaunt to Kanasar over open meadows, with staggering views of the snow-covered, 20,722' summit of Bandarpunch towering above the scenic canyon carved by the waters of the Hanuman Ganga.

  The weather was perfect, and we kept a quick and steady pace even as we ascended the imposing face of the open bowl, our bodies moving as if on auto-pilot all the way up to the pass and onward across the bugyals.

  When we reached the camp at Kanasar, we found two huts—one large and one small. Gamee inspected them, inside and out. The smaller one had obviously been used to house buffaloes. It needed a good cleaning and a little bit of roof work, but it wasn’t in bad shape. The big chhappar, however, wouldn’t be habitable without major renovations. The walls, made of sticks and long strips of pine bark, needed to be rebuilt in numerous places. The kitchen hearth would have to be entirely reconstructed. The roof was just a bare skeleton
of tree limbs, with nothing covering the rafters that could actually shield the inside from rain and snow. It was a real fixer-upper.

  I took pictures of the dwellings, to give my friends an idea of the extent of the renovations that would be required, and of the surrounding area, so Dhumman, Yusuf, and Alfa could gauge when the meadows would be robust enough to support their herds.

  Gamee and I sat outside the big chhappar and ate our chappatis in silence, basking in the warmth of the sun, soaking in the Himalayan views—the soaring ridgeline of Bandarpunch rising in a stark white silhouette against the sapphire sky; a majestic topography of corrugated, crumpled rock unrolling beneath the snowy peak; and far below that, the river curving in a sensual arc from its glacial headwaters, through a gentle grassy basin, then vanishing into a rugged chasm framed by sheer cliffs. Though I knew we needed to turn around soon to reach our camp before dark, the view was so sweet my eyes didn’t want me to leave. It was hard to imagine a more beautiful place to spend the summer.

  Back down at the camp, I found Appa at work in a haze of acrid smoke. After so many miles of walking, everyone’s shoes were riddled with holes and cracks and other symptoms of wear. Appa took the worst-damaged, cut them into pieces and then, with the glowing metal of a patal blade that was heated in a fire, she melted them onto the shoes that were worth fixing, patching holes and reinforcing worn-out spots. We greeted each other familiarly and were beginning to make small talk when Dhumman came over and asked to see the photos from Kanasar.

  I pulled out my camera and turned it on. The family clamored for a glimpse of the LCD screen. They wanted to look at the images over and over, asking me to zoom in on the landscape shots so they could assess the state of the grass. The meadows, all agreed, were not quite ready for the buffaloes. The grass needed a little more time to grow.

  That conclusion, I think, sealed Namith’s decision to depart, though perhaps he had already made up his mind. As it turned out, Mustooq had decided the time had come for him to return to the Shivaliks, feeling that his wife and two young sons had been stuck there without him, tending to his sick father, long enough. Namith and Mustooq would leave together, the next morning, accompanying each other as far as Uttarkashi. Namith asked if I was ready to go, too.

  I didn’t even consider it.

  Though my ability to communicate would obviously suffer without Namith in the picture, by this time I knew everyone in the family so well that basic interactions had become second nature and didn’t require any interpretation in either direction. My Hindi vocabulary had grown a little, too, and my friends were always patient when I paused to flip through a phrasebook. While I did spend many hours with Namith on most days, I also spent many hours without him, doing things like shuttling the family’s belongings up to Manji, or going on the supply run to Sangam Chatti, or hiking up to Kanasar. Recalling the days I’d spent without a translator along the Asan River, and how worthwhile they had been, only reinforced my conviction that there was no reason to leave now. Of course I would have preferred for Namith to stay, but I didn’t try to talk him out of going. I knew the trip had been a strain on him, that he had physically pushed himself beyond anything that he’d expected, and that, with the glacial pace of our progress, he was losing interest in the endeavor. Everyone understood his reasons for leaving, and we all knew that if he didn’t really want to be there, it would be best if he wasn’t.

  Shortly after sunrise the next morning, while the air was still cold enough to condense into plumes of steam every time we exhaled, we loaded up the horses and bulls. We climbed out of our secluded nook in the forest and up onto the main trail to Dodi Tal. There, we all paused, bidding farewell to Mustooq and Namith with heartfelt handshakes, wishing one another safe journeys. I promised to call Namith when I got back to Dehradun, to fill him in on whatever happened next, and to pay him what I still owed him. In that case, he said with a smile, he’d look forward to meeting again soon. We laughed, then we went our separate ways. I felt like I was saying goodbye to a friend, but I wasn’t sad to see him leave.

  The walking was easy and the weather was good, so I was surprised when, once again, we stopped short of Dodi Tal, trying to squeeze an extra day out of the route. There was little flat ground to be found, so Alfa and his family pitched their tents about a mile away from the small spot where Dhumman and Yusuf set up. Both camps were tucked just off the trail, lightly camouflaged behind stands of leafy trees.

  From this day on, food was strictly rationed. Though we had just stocked up a few days earlier, Jamila and Roshni became hyper-conscious about our level of consumption, hoping to stretch their supplies as long as possible before having to head back down the mountain for more. We were allowed two chapatis for breakfast, two for lunch, and two for dinner—smeared with either butter and ground chili or butter and sugar. A small bowl of buffalo milk could help take the edge off our hunger pangs, but as the days passed, we became accustomed to living with a growl in our bellies most of the time. At their traditional pastures at Gangar, Appa told me wistfully, they’d never had to ration like this, since those meadows were only a few quick miles from a village where they could buy flour, rice, and other essentials.

  After helping Goku and Mariam haul water from a creek that was large enough to be spanned by a cement footbridge, I hiked back down the trail to Alfa’s camp. Word had come through another group of Van Gujjars travelling along the same route that one of Alfa’s close relatives, who now lived at the settlement in Gandikhatta, had passed away. The family would be gathering in Gandikhatta for mourning, and Alfa needed to be there, despite the massive inconvenience of leaving the mountains. He was going to start off on his days-long journey that afternoon, so I wanted to say goodbye, thinking I would be gone by the time he returned.

  When I reached their tents, Alfa’s wife Sakina welcomed me warmly, and their teenage daughter Khatoon immediately stoked the fire and put on a pot of tea. Niko, the eldest son, came over from under his tent to join us, leaving his wife, who wasn’t feeling well, to rest quietly alone. Their three small children, wearing balaclavas and layers of dirty sweaters, toddled and crawled around us beneath the plastic sheet, ultimately settling down in someone’s lap or clinging to someone’s neck or arm. I’d spent plenty of time around Alfa’s family, since they often camped right alongside Dhumman and Yusuf, and we usually travelled together; now that they were further away than shouting distance, it felt like I’d gone to pay a visit to long-time neighbors who had just moved across town.

  Sitting there with the steamy sweetness of chai wafting over my face every time I raised the ceramic bowl to drink, I suddenly noticed how normal all this seemed to me—and how crazy it was that it all seemed normal. After all, I was travelling with nomadic water buffalo herders in the Himalayas and could walk between their camps, sit down under their tents, and be greeted not as a stranger, but as a friend. Once, this scenario would have been a dream that I could only hope would come true. But now this absurdly extraordinary experience had come to feel about as special as going to the post office. Realizing this, I almost started laughing out loud. How quickly the fantastic becomes mundane!

  Alfa arrived just after we’d finished our chai. I shook hands with him and looked one last time into his piercing, crystal-blue eyes. Our goodbyes were quick—partly because of the language barrier, partly because he was eager to start his descent—but conveyed a mutual sense of gratitude for having had the unlikely opportunity to know one another.

  Clouds had swept in, obscuring the sky, casting a drab pallor over the forest. Walking back along the trail, a light drizzle bounced off my umbrella. I picked up my pace, hoping to get to shelter before the storm turned mean. When I got there, I found a few of my friends waiting for me, so I could break out my first-aid kit. At this point, nearly everyone had small wounds and minor injuries. Goku and Hamju each had cuts on their hands, which I cleaned and bandaged, though I was sure the bandages wouldn’t last long, since my patients weren’t going to stop doing t
heir chores. Mariam had stepped on a sharp pine needle that had broken off under the skin on the ball of her foot. Squeeze around it as she might, it wouldn’t pop up to the surface. With a safety pin and tweezers, I was eventually able to dig it out, which gave her great relief. I was surprised that the pine needle had managed to pierce her foot; her soles were so rough, they looked like they were covered in tortoise skin.

  When we reached Dodi Tal the next day, our caravan marched past the little row of shops and around the water’s edge to the far side of the lake—which took perhaps two minutes. Hiking on for another few hundred yards, we followed the shallow creek that fed into the lake, crossing it a couple of times, until we reached a grassy clearing surrounded by forest on three sides, with the creek and a fractured cliff face on the fourth. At ten thousand feet above sea level, we camped just below the tree line, and just below the start of a tight box canyon from which the creek emerged. There was enough room for Dhumman’s and Yusuf’s families, plus their animals. Now, instead of two tents, three had been pitched; Gamee and Akloo had set one up for their little family after tensions had flared between Akloo and Roshni. Alfa’s family, now led by Sakina and Niko, had stopped along the trail about a quarter-mile before Dodi Tal. They’d decided to aim for a meadow slightly south of Kanasar, so as not to overgraze the area, and it was here that our routes would diverge.

  This was our last stop before Kanasar, which was only six miles away. Despite everyone’s desire to get there and start settling in for the summer, the weather was too fickle for us to move forward. Intermittent bursts of sunshine were quickly obscured by clouds, which, depending on their mood, might shower us with rain or pelt us with hail. Camped where we were, the weather was merely an inconvenience—but it would have made the fully-exposed climb up and over the pass to Kanasar extremely dangerous, perhaps deadly. We had no choice but to wait for it to clear.