by Ruskin Bond
*4 This essay is part of a report read to the Royal Geographic Society, London, on March 23, 1868, by Captain T. E. Montgomerie, in-charge of the Trans-Himalayan Survey Parties. Pundit Nain Singh and his brother were employed by the British to conduct a secret survey of Tibet, a mission of great secrecy and high risk. At the time of the writing of this report they were still employed on explorations and could not be named in it.
*5 The Tibetans stew their tea with water, meal, and butter; the tea leaves are always eaten.
*6 A Tibetan always carries meal with him, and makes suttoo whenever he feels hungry.
*7 The starlight in Tibet, as in all very elevated regions, is particularly bright.
*8 With a very high peak at its western extremity, called Harkiang. A very high peak was also noticed to the south between the Raka and Brahmaputra valleys.
*9 There are no lakes known in the Himalayas higher than 16,000 feet, but possibly one of those heard of by the Pundit may turn out to be a little higher.
*10 Between the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth, the explorer Sven Hedin mounted four expeditions to Central Asia, particularly the Trans-Himalayan region, and was instrumental in making it known to the Western world.
*11 Mark Twain traveled to India, and Darjeeling, as part of his circumnavigation of the globe, which he recorded in Following the Equator: A Journey Round the World (1897).
*12 Frank Smythe is credited with having popularized the Valley of Flowers, now part of the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve in the western Himalaya, after he spent a few weeks in the valley in 1937, where he trekked and climbed—and nearly met the Yeti. He wrote about his time there in The Valley of Flowers (1949).
*13 The British occultist Aleister Crowley was, among many other things, a mountaineer who headed the first-ever attempt to climb Kanchenjunga. The mission, which ended in disaster, is chronicled in his “autohagiography,” The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929).
*14 Excerpted from High Adventure: The True Story of the First Ascent of Everest (1955).
*15 A journey in the Eastern Himalaya, part of a larger account of travels in northeast India, excerpted and translated from Woh Bhi Koi Des Hai Maharaj! (2012).
MEDITATIONS
When the sight-obscuring veil
Thinned
All at once the wordless nothingness
Turned loquacious.
The soughing pines sent heady scented wind-messages—though unseen.
Birds huddled in the shrubbery
Called out to me in God’s own tongue.
In the distance, a Pahadi song.
—DHARAMVIR BHARATI
* * *
FRAGMENT FROM THE ADI PURANA
Jinasena
The Himvaan range stands tall indeed and radiantly united. It is king among mountains, as if it has modeled itself upon you (you who are a king among kings).
Its peaks are golden, jewel-studded, and extend upward to a height of one hundred yojanas. It is as if a (skilled sculptor) has chiseled it into being.
Standing with its eastern and western extremities bathed in the water of briny seas, so magnificent is the range, it is as if it was created to measure the span of earth itself.
Siddhas, scholars, and naag live upon it forever; such are the jewels which adorn the forests upon its slopes.
Precious stones glow upon its slopes in magnificence, as if they have been crafted from the reflections of the very damsels of heaven.
The forests spread around it smile among the blooms and, with their radiance, seem to mock Nandan Van itself, the Forest of Immortals.
At its brow is the Padmasarovar, a lake of many excellent qualities and bearing the purest of waters upon which float radiant golden lotuses.
This mountain bears upon itself the Great River Ganga, which flows from the eastern end of the Padmasarovar, and the Great River Sindhu, which flows from the western end of the Padmasarovar.
The river Rohitasya, which emanates from the northern end of the Padma Lake, is also borne by this mountain.
By adorning itself with these three insurmountable Great Rivers, it is as if this mountain wishes to demonstrate (through mantra, vitality, and sheer dominance) its ability to bear the weight of the earth upon itself.
* * *
JUST A STRAND IN SHIVA’S HAIR
FACE-TO-FACE WITH THE AXIS OF THE WORLD
Arundhathi Subramaniam
AUGUST 18, 2011
A mountain is a mountain. Or so I’ve always believed. Despite all that Sadhguru says about scaffolds and knowledge repositories, a mountain is still a mountain, as far as I can see.
It is true, some are endowed with more height, more girth, more grandeur. But in this pageant spread out before us, Kailash isn’t short on competition.
But there is the obvious difference. Even with the sinister blanket of cloud that hangs heavily across our landscape this morning, it is evident that this mountain allows itself some distinction. Amid these mountains of snow-lathered green and garnet, this is the only granite mountain we can see. Dark, crenellated, forbidding, cloud-smothered, it stands implacably, a postcard pinned to our grimy window, a reminder of why we are here.
Meru, Shambhala, sky pillar, Shiva linga—I don’t know about any of that, but the view at my window is proof that Kailash exists. Or perhaps it is just that we have entered the postcard ourselves. That seems equally possible. Breathing this rarefied air, it is possible we have stumbled into a subtler dimension and are now postcard pilgrims about to participate in a collective optical illusion, about to discover that the divide between fact and fiction has always been obscure, cloudy, snow-congealed.
The Tibetans believe, in fact, that this still point in a turning world is actually a visitor, an alien—a flying mountain that had to be tethered to the earth by the gods and finally secured by the Buddha’s four decisive footprints. It is a reluctant visitor, too. In Kaliyuga, the age of degeneration, it yearns to be elsewhere and is likely to take wing at any time. For all its solidity, that is also easy to believe. One day, the denizens of this hotel could well wake up to find their windows have turned into empty slates, wiped clean of eons of visual habit.
And it is for this that we made this trip, I reflect as I stand at our first-floor landing before breakfast. It is for this black convulsion of earth with its endless train of legend, its reputation stretching across millennia, way back into ancestral memory.
Is it worth the journey?
I decide to suspend judgment. I might not be able to take the burden of anticlimax right now. I don’t have the breath for it. All I know over breakfast is this: I am colder than I have ever been. Manasarovar is a tropical paradise in comparison. I yearn nostalgically for my tent and its sleeping blanket. I cannot eat a bite. I am down to tea and periodic infusions of hot water and honey. The slightest exertion makes me aware of my lungs like never before. The bathrooms are unspeakable. The yard in front of the hotel is a picturesque riot of human and yak shit. The rain is incessant. Everyone around me looks the way I feel—bewildered, battered, in varying states of medical disrepair. Two of our group have been on oxygen all night. Conversation is sporadic. The Sound of Isha music team is rehearsing, trying feebly, if valiantly, to infuse some nirguna bhakti into the dining room (the one which doubles up as a dormitory and pantry and smells like it, I think uncharitably). It’s difficult to ignore the wheezing breaths and occasional nosebleeds amid the strains of Kumar Gandharva’s bhajans.
And yet, oddly enough, we are whole. Smiles are wan but they haven’t disappeared yet. If I could sit motionless through the day, nursing a mug of tea, I tell myself, it’s possible that I’ll survive. My breath is reasonably even when I sit still. The cold could be manageable if I don’t leave this space. (There are advantages of having a versatile single room; never unused, it carries the residual
warmth of continued human habitation.)
It is at 1:00 p.m. that we get the news. Sadhguru has announced that he is making a one-kilometer trek uphill toward Kailash. Those of us who are inclined can join him. The clouds have cleared. The sun—Aparna pops her head in to announce with admirable cheeriness—is out. Kailash is visible. Come on!
An uphill trek when climbing to my first-floor room feels like an expedition to the stars.
I remember Sadhguru’s words the evening before. “Don’t force yourself. I want to take everyone back alive. Right now we’re probably at 16,300 feet. When we climb to the highest point, we’re going to touch around 17,600 feet. After this point, every fifty feet will make a big difference in terms of how your body behaves with the change in oxygen levels. So those of you that have taken ponies or yaks to get here, don’t push yourselves any further.”
I stare at my shoelaces and slowly shake my head. Each time it feels like the demands can’t get more preposterous, they do.
And so, of course, I spend the next hour following Sadhguru up the mountain.
* * *
It is at this point that I probably should abandon understatement. It is time to let go of the last vestige of self-respect. To claim to be witness-archivist any more would be a sham.
I may have started out on this trip as a seeker-observer. A sympathetic one, it is true. Committed to my guru, it is true. But still, if I were honest, I have been oscillating for the large part of this week between respectful observer and cautious participant.
At some point yesterday, however, I realized the extent to which the journey had diminished me. I had been pared down to a pilgrim. Nothing more and nothing less. Footsore, travel-weary, breath-rationed, bewildered, like everyone else around me. Helpless, ineffectual, leaning on wooden staffs and sturdy Sherpas, the stoic strength of yaks, and the goodwill of fellow travelers for support.
But at this point, I have been whittled down even further. There isn’t much of a choice about it either. If I were to look at the path winding endlessly before me, it wouldn’t take much time before I sink down and accept defeat.
The only strategy, I discover, is one step at a time. And one breath—one shuddering breath—at a time.
But of course, the mind that is wily enough to think up strategies is also wily enough to see through them. And so it is a matter of minutes before I give in to the inevitability of failure and beat a retreat.
The fact is I don’t.
I admit that this has nothing to do with tenacity or courage. After the Manasarovar dip, I carried a soupçon of pride, perhaps not entirely unpardonable. Pride at my capacity for endurance, for being game enough to brave the elements, for midlife recklessness. But at this point, I know that not a single step I take has anything to do with me.
Which brings me to my confession: I am now, quite simply, whether I like it or not, a devotee. The only way I make this ascent—past a twisting, winding panorama of stream and crag, glade and rock—is by pinning my gaze on the guru. It is the sight of his form ahead of me, sure of foot, long of stride, nimbly negotiating the path ahead, that keeps me going. Each time it feels like agony to put the next foot forward, each time it feels like my lungs are going to burst, I focus on him. In savage terror, in desperate trust. If he is my guru, he has to ensure I make it. I don’t have much mind left now, or much body, or very much breath. If he is my guru, he has to carry me along.
And I find that although the prospect of a trek is still hair-raising, I am able somehow to take the next step. The next breath. And then the next.
Periodically, he turns. His gaze sweeps over us all, alert, calm, dispassionate. On a couple of occasions it rests on me. I realize then that he knows the truth as well as I do—the fact that I am, in fact, subsisting on his presence. Perhaps others are too.
It feels like an era before we halt. In actuality, it has taken us just a little over an hour. Sadhguru decides that we should stop by a waterfall. As I take my last few steps, faltering and stumbling, he looks down at me, his gaze not unkind.
“You’re doing well,” he says quietly.
It takes me time to reply. “Because of you,” I say inarticulately, short on breath.
His eyes glimmer with amusement. He is not unaccustomed to my longstanding distaste for overstatement. This clearly doesn’t sound like me. It is now, however, a fact, a bald statement of truth.
I manage to add, “And my back. The pain. It’s gone.”
“So miracles do happen,” he says lightly. He has turned away before I can respond.
I subside on a rock. We are now at the highest point of our journey—over 17,500 feet. When I look down, I marvel at how far we have climbed. The hotel now seems like a distant speck below us. Looking at the path we have taken uphill, it feels we have traveled more than a kilometer. But it is not the hotel or the path behind us that commands our attention after a moment. It is what lies before us: this towering presence, striated by snow, swathed in endless diaphanous tissues of mist. Black, enormous, emphatically present.
If the invariable human problem with the sacred is its intangibility, its elusiveness, here all complaints are surely laid to rest. For here is reality in capital letters. Here is mountain—solid, physical, eminently tactile. And here is metaphor—richly veined, textured, inflected by eons of spiritual folklore. The result of this conjunction between the physical and the metaphysical, between the literal and the emblematic, is Shiva frozen eternally in form. Or to put it another way, here is simply the staggering sight of centuries of abstraction—of incredible mythological and mystical sophistication—embodied in unequivocal stone. Here is idea made image. The conceptual made concrete. Thought turned thingy. Miracle as mountain.
No pilgrim, no aesthete—no one, I decide—could ask for more.
For the next hour, twenty of us sit meditating on the mountain. The chant of “Tryambakaya Mahadevaya” accompanies us.
Later, I ask others in the group what this experience meant to them. “Magic,” says S. “The deepest meditation I’ve ever had,” says A. “Time stood still,” says T. “It was my seventh time,” says M, “and it still took my breath away.” “Bliss,” says N. Swami. Nirvichara merely smiles. Our young “non-meditator” photographer from Delhi grins. “I was busy shooting Sadhguru and all of you in your meditative trances and explosive states,” he says mischievously. “But then I started shooting Kailash. And the closer I went to the mountain, something began to happen…” He pauses. “Man, that mountain’s alive.”
In my case, I’m not sure what exactly that hour meant. But with Sadhguru seated a few feet behind and the mountain in front, I do remember being aware that this was the defining moment of my journey, the point of my pilgrimage—a pilgrimage that began much earlier than ten days ago. This is the hour I will look back on, I told myself, the hour I will remember, the hour that I will wonder at for the rest of my life. This is the stuff of personal myth, the point at which a bunch of seemingly random human histories—mine and the rest of the group’s—intersects with the beyond without any of us ever being any wiser of what that intersection really means.
The mountain begins to pulsate. Perhaps it is the effect of moving cloud and shifting light. The effect of being in a place that swims between fact and symbol. Or perhaps it’s just the altitude and Diamox. Or perhaps it’s the two accomplices at work yet again: the master and his “50 percent partner,” Shiva. I wonder if they even know, as partners in crime, where one’s sphere of influence ends and the other’s begins.
Then the tears start. And great wracking sobs. And so prose ends and another language takes over.
* * *
HIMALAYA ON A PUSHCART*1
Dharamvir Bharati
“Himalaya on a Pushcart”—a most interesting title, isn’t it? And believe me, I did not have to seek it at all. It arrived fully formed.
It was only yesterday. I was standing
at a paan shop with a senior novelist—a friend too—when an ice seller came along, pushing a cart laden with blocks of ice—gleaming, freezing, billowing clouds of vapor. Almora being my friend’s birthplace, he gazed at the ice for a moment, lost among the vapors, and said absently, “It is ice that is the jewel of the Himalaya.” The title leapt up at me: “Himalaya on a Pushcart.” Why am I telling you all this? If you are an amateur poet, just starting out, bhai, take this title and pen down some lines—one hundred, two hundred even—lines unrefined, meaningless. This title is for you. And if a brand-new poem is an overly vexatious enterprise, there is an opportunity for competent songwriters, too. Let’s address these blocks of ice. Come down, come down here. Why are you perched up there like the monkeys which make the high peaks their home? O poets new, climb onto the pushcart, let your creations find buyers at paan shops.
All of this occurred to me, and I immediately told my senior friend everything. Outwardly he laughed, but I felt that the ice had scored his heart. In all honesty, anyone who has seen the cloud-wreathed peaks of the Himalaya conversing with the moon and the stars—even from fifty miles away—has witnessed pristine white snow shimmer and sparkle like an ocean of milk under the glow of a new moon; the snows of the Himalaya will score his heart, too, and at every remembrance of it, a sharp ache will rise. I know, for I too have witnessed those snows.
* * *
The truth is that we had traveled to Kausani only to gaze upon snow and ice from up close. From Nainital we went to Kosi village, having negotiated the terrifying twists and turns on the road from Nainital to Ranikhet and from Ranikhet to Majhkhali. The road forks at Kosi; one goes to Almora and the other to Kausani. A more back-breaking, ugly, and drought-stricken route would be difficult to imagine. Not a drop of water or a speck of greenery, and hemmed in all around by dust-brown mountains. The reckless novice bus driver from Almora hurtled us at such speed along the twisty road cut into the mountainside that all of us had a yellow tinge to our faces when we reached Kosi. We were the only two travelers for Kausani, so we disembarked. The bus sped along to Almora. We ducked under a tin-roofed shed and, parking ourselves on a wooden bench, whiled away our time. We were tired and the weather was humid. A lorry arrived after two hours and when we saw Shukla-ji climb down from it, we heaved sighs of relief. A traveling companion such as Shukla-ji is can only be found if good karma has accrued over many past lives. It was he who had enthused us to visit Kausani; tiredness never found expression on his face nor did laziness—one look at him would drive all our fatigue away.