by Ruskin Bond
But who was this with Shukla-ji? Tall, thin; a slim face adorned with an Emile Zolaesque beard; in loose trousers, a woolen jerkin flung over his shoulder; and slung by his side—was it a thermos, a camera, or binoculars? The gentleman had an insouciant air about him. The man, his slim-trim frame—much like mine—and his casual swagger! Gauging the ever-increasing curiosity on my face, Shukla-ji said, “Sen is one of the most famous painters of our city. He has been awarded by the Academy for his work. He is using that money to travel.” Sen quickly became one of us—what a clear-hearted man he was! And we were soon to witness his antics.
The view transformed as soon as we left Kosi—the river gurgling between rocks rounded smooth by friction, small villages flourishing on its banks, and fields like crumpled green muslin. What a beauty Someshwar Valley is! Green and lush. We passed one bus station after the next, small hill post offices, and tea shops, and occasionally drove over bridges spanning either the Kosi or one of its tributaries. The road sometimes pierced desolate pine forests. The bus groaned over the road that twisted and turned like it was traversing the pitted, scaly back of an ancient dragon. Yet it was pleasant and, after the fatigue of our earlier journey, the bus ride induced a stuporous lassitude. But at the same time an anxiety gripped our hearts. We were nearing Kausani, having left Kosi eighteen miles behind. Wasn’t Kausani only six miles away? The magical beauty of the place that we had heard so much about…where was it? Before we left, a colleague had told me that Kausani had entranced him more than Kashmir had; Gandhi-ji wrote his treatise on Anasakti Yoga here and declared that to live in Kausani was to feel like one was living in Switzerland. These rivers, valleys, fields and villages were beautiful but hardly deserving of such high praise. We expressed our anxiety to Shukla-ji off and on and, as Kausani approached ever nearer, our anxiety transformed into impatience, then dissatisfaction, and soon, our faces began to reflect distress. We couldn’t be certain of Shukla-ji’s reaction because he remained silent.
All at once the bus rounded a large bend and began climbing steadily.
Kausani is situated at the very top of the high mountain ranges to the north of the Someshwar Valley. Beyond Kausani, the terrain falls away steeply. The bus stopped at its station. It was a small, quite decrepit village and there was no sign of snow anywhere. We had been thoroughly cheated. How disappointed I was! I clambered down from the bus, fuming, and stood transfixed, a statue engraved in stone. The valley spread out before me was of incomparable splendor. This was the gloriously colorful Katyur valley which the Kausani range had shielded from our view; surely only demigods and the glorious Kinner people of legend made their home here. The valley was tens of kilometers wide and spread over with fields like green muslin carpets; it was crisscrossed with ocher pathways lined with white stones and by rivers which were like vines that grow and double back upon themselves until they are inextricably intertwined. A quick thought came to me: I should pick these vines up and wind them around my wrist, hold them to my eyes.
We had been transported to a new world altogether. So ethereal, so beautiful, so exquisitely adorned and blemishless…I felt I must take my shoes off and wipe my feet before even setting a single step upon that earth. My eyes scanned the valley inch by inch and crossed it; and where the verdant fields, the rivers, and the woods dissolved in the haze and the indigo mist of the horizon, I could make out the dim outlines of some small hills; beyond the hills were clouds and beyond the clouds, nothing. My eyes restlessly scanned the billows until, all at once, my heart felt a small jolt. What is it that stands firm and unmoving among the shifting clouds, itself a fragment of cloud? And what amazing color it has: neither white, nor silver, not even light blue, yet all three at once. What is it? Can’t be snow. Yes sir! What is it if not snow? A thought struck like a bolt of lightning: Beyond this valley stands the Himalaya—King, Emperor, among mountains. These clouds hide it but it is there, in front of us, and one of its smaller peaks peeks childlike from a cloud-window. I shouted in excitement, “Snow! Look!” Shukla-ji, Sen, and everyone else looked but by then the snow had been hidden from sight. Almost as if someone had pulled the small peak inside, thinking it to be a mere child which might tumble out the window in its excitement.
What roaring life that one audience with the Himalaya filled us with. The disappointment, the discouragement, fatigue—everything vanished in a flash, as if by magic. We were all eager and excited. Now the clouds would part and the Himalaya would stand before us, uncovered…a boundless beauty would unveil herself, inch by inch, and…then? And then? My heart galloped.
Shukla-ji was calm; he would only glance at me and smile, as if to say, “Such impatience, such restlessness…You hadn’t even reached Kausani that your face fell. Now do you understand? The magic of this place?” The khansama at the dak bungalow said to us, “You are fortunate indeed, sahib. Fourteen tourists arrived and stayed for weeks; not one glimpse of the snows. You’ve arrived only today and it looks like the weather will clear and the clouds part.”
We put away our luggage. But all of us sat in the verandah up front, without even a cup of tea at hand, and kept staring at the shrouded mountains. The clouds slid down and, one by one, one new peak after the other showed its outline. Then all stood revealed—a sensational, mysterious, jagged row which began on our left, sped to our right, and disappeared into the depthless nothingness. If I could express the emotions that were bubbling up within us at that time, I wouldn’t be feeling these scars on my heart, I wouldn’t be feeling this heartache. The only certain, though faint, realization was that just as standing before a block of ice bathes one’s face in cooling vapors, the breeze blowing in from the Himalaya was touching my forehead and evaporating all my struggles and my inner turmoil, all the “taap”—the restless heat within. I understood for the first time why seekers of yore thought of bodily, spiritual, and material turmoil as taap and why they found their way to the Himalaya to quench those restless fires. Yet another truth rose, a new sun on my mind-horizon. How ancient are these snow masses! Who can plumb the depths of that primeval time from which these ageless indestructible snows have gathered on these massifs? It is because of this that some foreigners have given the snows on the Himalaya a special name; they call it the Eternal Snows. The sun was on its way down and momentarily lighted up the crevasses, the glaciers, the sheer cliffs, and the gorges on the distant peaks. I thought with a slightly panicked heart: Has a human ever set foot upon these peaks or is it only snow which blizzards upon them, howling and moaning?
The sun set out on its downward path and, gradually, liquid saffron flowed in the glaciers. The snows turned red, the color of lotus blossoms, the valleys and gorges deep yellow. As night descended we rose, washed up, and took tea. But everyone was quiet, inward, as if each had lost something of his; or, rather, each had found something, such a thing that he was immersed in his soul, and was busy securing it within his heart.
The moon rose and we stepped out again…everything was peaceful now. It was as if the snows were asleep. I pulled an armchair a little to the side and sat upon it. Why has my mind become so bereft of imagination? It is in sight of these mountains that so many have written so much and here I am: a poem a far cry; not a verse, not even a word wells up within. But this is of no consequence—nothing is of consequence before the Emperor of Snows. The clouds shrouding my inner being are slowly parting. Something rises within, something akin to these peaks, and tries to soar ever upward so it can match their loftiness. I felt: Himalaya is an elder brother and has progressed upward, much above me, and seeing me—the younger brother—at a level lower than him, frustrated and abashed, is inspiring me and throwing me an affectionate challenge: “Do you want to soar? Do you have the courage for it?”
All at once Sen sang a few verses of Rabindrasangeet and a spell broke. We became charged with energy, all of us, and brimmed over with irrepressible power, euphoria, and joy. Sen was happiest—restless as a child, like a small bird. He chirp
ed: “Sirs, I am wonderstruck! What miracles of God in the Himalaya.” Our laughter hadn’t died down when he stood upon his head in the shirshasan pose. On being asked why, he replied, “I want to see the Himalaya in a new perspective.” We later came to know that he was vexed with the ultra-modernist style of painting in Bombay. “All them genius people view the world standing on their heads. So I also look at the Himalaya like that.”
The following day we climbed down the valley and walked twelve miles to Baijnath where the Gomti flows. The image of the Himalaya floated upon the sparkling waters of the river. There was no telling when—if—I would reach the white peaks and so I gazed upon the reflection of the mountains shimmering on the surface and remained immersed within it.
* * *
Even today I remember and an ache rises in my heart. My friend the novelist saw the ice on the pushcart the other day and slipped into a sea of memories. I understand his pain. When I speak of the Himalaya on a pushcart and laugh it is simply a ruse to forget my heartache. The snow peaks call out to me. And I? I stand at a crossroads, gaze upon a few blocks of ice on a pushcart, and tell my heart it must be content. It was at such a moment, surrounded by such Himalayas laden on pushcarts, that the saint Tulsi said: “Will I ever dwell thus? Upon the lofty heights of the snow peaks?” The thought steals into my heart that I should send the Himalaya a missive: “No, friend…I will return. I will return again…and again. Your heights are my home, where my heart finds peace…I am helpless in this, and there is nothing I can do.”
* * *
TRAVELS IN INDIA AS AN UNKNOWN SANNYASIN*2
Swami Vivekananda
I was once traveling in the Himalayas, and the long road stretched before us. We poor monks cannot get anyone to carry us, so we had to make all the way on foot. There was an old man with us. The way goes up and down for hundreds of miles, and when that old monk saw what was before him, he said, “Oh sir, how to cross it; I cannot walk any more; my chest will break.” I said to him, “Look down at your feet.” He did so, and I said, “The road that is under your feet is the same road that you have passed over and is the same road that you see before you; it will soon be under your feet. The highest things are under your feet, because you are Divine Stars; all these things are under your feet. You can swallow the stars by the handful if you want; such is your real nature. Be strong, get beyond all superstitions, and be free.”
Many times I have been in the jaws of death, starving, footsore, and weary; for days and days I had no food, and often could walk no further; I would sink down under a tree, and life would seem [to be] ebbing away. I could not speak, I could scarcely think, but at last the mind reverted to the idea: “I have no fear nor death; I never hunger nor thirst. I am It! I am It! The whole of nature cannot crush me; it is my servant. Assert thy strength, thou Lord of lords and God of gods! Regain thy lost empire! Arise and walk and stop not!” and I would rise up, reinvigorated, and here am I, living, today. Thus, whenever darkness comes, assert the reality, and everything adverse must vanish.
Once when I was in Varanasi, I was passing through a place where there was a large tank of water on one side and a high wall on the other. It was in the grounds where there were many monkeys. The monkeys of Varanasi are huge brutes and are sometimes surly. They now took it into their heads not to allow me to pass through their street, so they howled and shrieked and clutched at my feet as I passed. As they pressed closer, I began to run, but the faster I ran, the faster came the monkeys, and they began to bite at me. It seemed impossible to escape, but just then I met a stranger who called out to me, “Face the brutes!” I turned and faced the monkeys, and they fell back and finally fled. That is a lesson for all life—face the terrible, face it boldly. Like the monkeys, the hardships of life fall back when we cease to flee before them.
Once in western India I was traveling in the desert country on the coast of the Indian Ocean. For days and days I used to travel on foot through the desert, but it was to my surprise that I saw every day beautiful lakes, with trees all around them, and the shadows of the trees upside down and vibrating there. “How wonderful it looks and they call this a desert country!” I said to myself. Nearly a month I traveled, seeing these wonderful lakes and trees and plains. One day I was very thirsty and wanted to have a drink of water, so I started to go to one of these clear, beautiful lakes, and as I approached, it vanished. And with a flash it came to my brain, “This is the mirage about which I have read all my life,” and with that came also the idea that throughout the whole of this month, every day, I had been seeing the mirage and did not know it. The next morning I began my march. There was again the lake, but with it came also the idea that it was the mirage and not a true lake.
So it is with this universe. We are all traveling in this mirage of the world day after day, month after month, year after year, not knowing that it is a mirage. One day it will break up, but it will come back again; the body has to remain under the power of past karma, and so the mirage will come back. This world will come back upon us so long as we are bound by karma: men, women, animals, plants, our attachments and duties, all will come back to us, but not with the same power. Under the influence of the new knowledge the strength of karma will be broken, its poison will be lost. It becomes transformed, for along with it there comes the idea that we know it now, that the sharp distinction between the reality and the mirage has been known.
Real monasticism is not easy to attain. There is no order of life so rigorous as this. If you stumble ever so little, you are hurled down a precipice—and are smashed to pieces. One day I was traveling on foot from Agra to Vrindavan. There was not a farthing with me. I was about a couple of miles from Vrindavan when I found a man smoking on the roadside, and I was seized with a desire to smoke. I said to the man, “Hallo, will you let me have a puff at your chillum?” He seemed to be hesitating greatly and said, “Sire, I am a sweeper.” Well, there was the influence of old Samskaras, and I immediately stepped back and resumed my journey without smoking. I had gone a short distance when the thought occurred to me that I was a sannyasin who had renounced caste, family, prestige, and everything—and still I drew back as soon as the man gave himself out as a sweeper, and could not smoke at the chillum touched by him! The thought made me restless at heart; then I retraced my steps and came to the sweeper whom I found still sitting there. I hastened to tell him, “Do prepare a chillum of tobacco for me, my dear friend.” I paid no heed to his objections and insisted on having it. So the man was compelled to prepare a chillum for me. Then I gladly had a puff at it and proceeded to Vrindavan. When one has embraced the monastic life, one has to test whether one has gone beyond the prestige of caste and birth, etcetera. It is so difficult to observe the monastic vow in right earnest! There must not be the slightest divergence between one’s words and actions.
You find that in every religion mortifications and asceticisms have been practiced. In these religious conceptions the Hindus always go to the extremes. You will find men with their hands up all their lives, until their hands wither and die…I once saw a man who had kept his hands raised in this way, and I asked him how it felt when he did it first. He said it was awful torture. It was such torture that he had to go to a river and put himself in water, and that allayed the pain for a little while. After a month he did not suffer much. Through such practices powers can be attained…
Once when traveling in the Himalayas I had to take up my abode for a night in a village of the hill people. Hearing the beating of drums in the village some time after nightfall, I came to know upon inquiring of my host that one of the villagers had been possessed by a devata or god spirit. To meet his importunate wishes and to satisfy my own curiosity, I went out to see what the matter really was. Reaching the spot, I found a great concourse of people. A tall man with long, bushy hair was pointed out to me, and I was told that person had got the devata on him. I noticed an ax being heated in fire close by the man; and after a while, I found the red-hot
thing being seized and applied to parts of his body and also to his hair! But wonder of wonders, no part of his body or hair thus branded with the red-hot ax was found to be burnt, and there was no expression of any pain in his face. I stood mute with surprise. The headman of the village, meanwhile, came up to me and said, “Maharaj, please exorcise this man out of your mercy.” I felt myself in a nice fix; but moved to do something, I had to go near the possessed man. Once there, I felt a strong impulse to examine the ax rather closely, but the instant I touched it, I burnt my fingers, although the thing had been cooled down to blackness. The smarting made me restless and all my theories about the ax phenomenon were spirited away from my mind! However, smarting with the burn, I placed my hand on the head of the man and repeated [Japa] for a short while…It was a matter of surprise to find that the man came round in ten or twelve minutes. Then oh, the gushing reverence the villagers showed to me! I was taken to be some wonderful man! But, all the same, I couldn’t make any head or tail of the whole business. So without a word one way or the other, I returned with my host to his hut. It was about midnight, and I went to bed. But what with the smarting burn in the hand and the impenetrable puzzle of the whole affair, I couldn’t have any sleep that night. Thinking of the burning ax failing to harm living human flesh, it occurred again and again to my mind, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”