Himalaya

by Ruskin Bond

  Sardar Sahib had studied Japanese art pottery in the 1920s, then had established a pottery outlet in Delhi, and soon his “Delhi Blue” pieces were sought after for upper-class Indian homes. In this village setting, we ate off plates with white and gray glazes, drank coffee or tea from distinctive mugs of different shapes, sizes, and colors, and were served water from a jug of the most vibrant deep blue. Our meals and tea breaks were invariably accompanied by Sardar Sahib’s vigorous laugh as he told stories. He told stories of the great Kangra earthquake of 1905 that he had felt tremors from as a child in Lahore; miracles of the Sikh Gurus; the adventures of his grandchildren in England. Soon after we arrived, my mother and I were folded into his stories: attending a local feast, we were ushered into an inner room where women were crowded on a charpoi. My mother sat down too, and the bed crashed to the floor, taking all the women down with it. Sardar Sahib collapsed with laughter whenever he told this tale, throwing back his turbaned head, his bristling long beard rising slightly off his chest. He regularly offered to bring my mother a sample of the milk-sweet purported to be so libidinally energizing it is called palang-tod, “bed-smasher.” Mummy Singh, who had perfect teeth and a naughty smile, giggled at his side.

  I unpacked my books over a makeshift desk raised off the floor upstairs, and began studying each day for the school-leaving exams I would take that December. As the summer progressed, white clouds steamed up above the melting snow on the mountains. Fleshy white gardenias bloomed in the garden. During the day, we spread out our clothes to dry on the gardenia bushes. At night, Sardar Sahib walked back and forth on the pale ribbon of cement path, chanting in the darkness from the Guru Granth Sahib. On a full-moon night, his beard caught the white of the glaciers and the flowers. When there was no moon, the Milky Way clotted the sky, outlined darkly at one side with mountains. Mummy sometimes walked in the night too, chanting under her breath. She wore tight white churidars around her sturdy calves, and white netted dupattas over her shoulders. The irises of her kohl-rimmed eyes shone when they caught the light.

  Sardar Sahib took us around to visit various friends, cautioning them all before they offered seats to my mother. Some were locals, like Masterji, a squat schoolteacher who worked long hours amid tin cans of rare flowers in his garden, and spoke English with a wheeze, or Shastriji, the lanky Sanskrit teacher who was renting rooms in Masterji’s huge family house, and whose bed my mother had broken. Also, we visited local residents who originally had come from elsewhere.

  Norah Richards, the key outsider in transforming the social life of this village, had died several years ago at a grand old age. Her house was still standing, though, a maze of adobe that echoed with stories of her giant hearing aid, her megaphone for summoning servants, her generosity, her politics, her dietary fads. Visiting the abandoned house, I felt a latecomer, shut out from a legendary era.

  One of Sardar Sahib’s good friends who often spoke of Norah was the painter from Punjab, Sardar Sobha Singh, who lived across the village by the main road. “GROW MORE GOOD,” exhorted raised cement lettering on the outer wall of his house. Sobha Singh had flowing white locks, which he wore without a turban. He only wore white kurta pajamas and white shoes, one of which was a platform shoe because of polio. All day he sat painting at an easel set beside his bed. The finished paintings were exhibited in the room beside him, and poster reproductions of a few favorites were sold to visitors or local people who aspired to middle-class sitting-room decor. The gallery included paintings of Sikh gurus, and scenes from Punjabi folklore, like Heer standing at the door before Ranjha, or Soni swooning beside Mehwal. A popular painting was of “Her Majesty the Gaddin,” a pretty pastoralist Gaddi woman wearing a headscarf with a lamb in her arms. There was also a painting of Norah Richards herself, looking out in a regal and mildly disapproving way at the bright acrylics featured on the walls around her. For me, her beaked nose and white ringlets conjured up Miss Havisham from the Dickens novel on my desk.

  While fuzzy birds in uncannily acrylic colors hopped and twittered in the aviary outside, Sobha Singh beamed, urging us to “take coffee” brought in on a tray with Milkmaid condensed milk. “For toffee,” he said, pulling out a five-rupee note occasionally from the pocket of his kurta and handing it to me. Though I did not consider myself a child anymore, it overwhelmed me to be noticed.

  Just down the road from Sobha Singh lived Mangat Ram. Mangat Ram also only wore white kurta pajamas. His white hair was cropped close to his head, and he wore thick black-rimmed glasses over a kind face bleached with white patches of leukoderma. In his small house, he had many musical instruments—sitar, tablas, harmonium, tanpura—and he played them all. I sensed that unlike Sobha Singh, who had his own ambassador car and was surrounded by soft luxury, Mangat Ram was struggling financially like my mother and me. He walked everywhere with a white jhola over his shoulder. He even walked to the shop one kilometer away to collect the daily paper. In his front room, Mangat Ram would chat with my mother and Sardar Sahib as I looked on restlessly, wishing there were more books on the shelf to eye. Starved for diversion, I was endlessly delighted when kind Mangat Ram once described a Quaker missionary my mother knew as a “Quacker.” I repeated this so often that now when I see images of Donald Duck, I think of Quakers.

  Everyone was waiting for the Sanyals to arrive from Delhi. They came later in the summer, and their house up the hill near Norah’s was opened and aired. B. C. Sanyal was well known for his sculpture, his paintings, his drawings, and his association with the Lalit Kala Akademi for artists. He had frizzy black eyes, curling black brows, a mischievous punning wit, and a gray beard that he parted in the middle with the minute precision of George Bernard Shaw. Mrs. Sanyal, who taught English at a prestigious Delhi school, chewed paan, exchanged Iris Murdoch novels with my mother, and made memorably exquisite dishes. Sanyal Sahib was usually upstairs, painting on an open-air porch that faced the mountains. It seemed a long time before we trooped up to see his oils, watercolors, and pastels of village women clustered together, ironic self-portraits, jeweled green rice fields, and, inevitably, mountains.

  For me, being fifteen amid so many old people was a challenge. They had all the dignity, gravity, and sure humor of seasoned lives, while I was a self-conscious adolescent without a stable home, whose thin skin was continually, painfully erupting. Each morning, I methodically reviewed every subject I would be examined on. In the hot, still afternoons, I walked to the main settlement of the village to Shastriji for help with my Hindi grammar, which had been hopelessly tainted by a Bombay upbringing. Shastriji’s daughter Vidhya, tall and lanky like him, with close-set dancing eyes, became my friend, the only friend my age. Some evenings we went to the stream to do laundry or sat at the deserted schoolhouse exchanging confidences. Otherwise, if I was bored with studying, I watched swallows swoop under the eaves. I read my way through all the novels on the shelves, including the Mills and Boons that were Mummy Singh’s favorites. The shelves also had art books. I feasted my eyes on the reproductions of Kangra miniature paintings from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with their romantic scenes of beautiful women waiting for their lovers or setting off on a tryst with Krishna. The flowering trees, bushes, open pastures, curving streams, carved doorways, arched windows were uncannily familiar, echoing our surroundings. I found it odd, though, that the paintings never seemed to feature the Dhauladhar mountains. Sardar Sahib laughed, saying that Krishna had lived in Brindavan, where there were just hills.

  “What is it like to live with such beautiful mountains?” I once asked Vidhya earnestly.

  She looked up, looked back at me and laughed. “They’re just there,” she said. “We go about all the work we have to do and we don’t even notice them.”

  I was startled by what Vidhya said, gathering up her family’s laundry by the stream. Was she joking or could she really mean it? Staring out of the window from my desk, I learned how each mountain in the Dhauladhar range had its own
character, its ridges and shades of white. I longed to know the stories of the mountains, to imagine happenings on those high peaks. If faraway Ba could tell stories of such mountains why couldn’t people up close do the same? Yet whenever I asked for stories or names, nobody could answer me. The only mountain that seemed to have its own distinctive personality to the people around me was Parvati’s peak. Parvati, from parvat, mountains: the daughter of the mountains, and Shiva’s wife. As the rains came and snow melted, making new patterns of glaciers and rock, it sometimes seemed to me, looking up from my desk, that Parvati’s mountain carried the features of a serene, smiling goddess.

  In 1976, we returned for another summer and in 1978 my mother arranged to rent a house up the hill from where Sardar Sahib lived. By 1980, when I had encountered anthropology in college, my curiosity about the lives of village people around us began to jostle against my shyness. Vidhya had married, but luckily only one village away, and she remained my emotional mainstay for daily visits and cups of tea. I began to drop in on other homes where my mother had ties, to sometimes write down the songs that women sang. Partly because of my Kangra experience, I became an anthropologist. A decade later as a young faculty member, I returned for a year to work on women’s songs and stories.

  The dialect spoken in Kangra is termed “Pahari” or “of the mountains” by local people, though linguists would call it Kangri. It is a sweet language full of “u” sounds: “here” is ithu, “there” is thithu, and “a little cup for a child” a kappu. In the songs that women sang, mountains very rarely appeared since the focus was on goings-on in the joint family, rather than on scenery.

  Yet wedding songs implored fathers not to give their daughters to the high and distant slopes, and ballads begged husbands not to leave wives alone in such desolate places. Here is one of the earliest songs I wrote down in a careful Devanagari script that could not quite capture the nuances of the dialect, from a young woman called Bubbly.

  The splashing rain scares me.

  On mountain slopes, pine trees reach out to scratch me.

  I don’t want to be alone, take me with you,

  The splashing rain scares me.

  How can I cut fodder when insects bite me?

  When I go to fetch water, thorns scratch my feet.

  Just look at the ravine where I draw water, look at the blisters on my feet.

  Take me along with you, my darling.

  I don’t want to be alone, take me with you.

  The splashing rain scares me.

  The lightning crackles, teasing me,

  The herdsmen on the mountains see me and laugh,

  Just look at the leaks in the roof, look at the dung I plaster with!

  Take me with you, my darling.

  I don’t want to be alone, take me with you.

  The splashing rain scares me.

  Back in the Madison library, reading about Gaddi shepherds who travel with their flocks across the northern wall of the Dhauladhar between Kangra and the next valley of Chamba, I once came across another memorable song about mountains. Like the songs I had heard from Kangra village women, this wedding song also described a bride’s longing for the home of her parents when she was married off to a man from a distant village.

  O mother Dhauladhar,

  Bend a little,

  O bend a little,

  On this side lies my mother-in-law’s place,

  On the other side lies my father’s home,

  Bend a little, O bend a little.

  On the marriage day in a palanquin

  My brother gave me a farewell

  “Bathe in milk. Blossom in sons.”

  My brother’s wife blessed me,

  My mother gave me tears,

  Bend a little,

  So that I may see My parents’ home.*3

  It was this song that vividly underlined to me that even as we looked north at the Dhauladhar from Kangra—mountains rising up as though at the edge of the world—surely there were also other valleys, like Chamba, where people looked south at the same range.

  In 1994, my mother could no longer stand living in her rented house with dank foundations, no running water, and a hillside’s icy shadow in the winter months. She moved to a sun-drenched space nearer the foot of the mountains, where her Austrian doctor friend runs a charitable clinic. In this village, we encountered new sorts of people: settlements of Nepalis who had settled there after the Gurkha invasion of 1805, and also Gaddis who no longer herded their huge flocks of sheep on annual migrations. One Gaddi Brahmin who had previously worked in the slate mine became my mother’s head workman in the building of her new adobe house. Pritam was a lanky, narrow-faced man in his early forties, with a gentle, courtly manner. He always wore a Kulu cap tight over his forehead, and he seemed to know everyone in the village.

  Coming to visit my mother in her new home, I missed the mountains as I had known them. Seen up close, from their base, they were no longer familiar. I missed my friends from the old village, missed the solitude of the open pasture behind my mother’s old house, where one looked out at a long flank of mountains across the horizon. At the same time, being realigned in relation to the mountains brought different angles of insight into people’s lives.

  From Pritam, I began to learn some of the lore of Gaddis, whose wanderings take them into steep pastures and over high passes. Of course, the hills and mountains had names, Pritam said, delighted by my question. We were driving in a van back from Chamba, and he began to point out peaks. In fact, didn’t I know that the hill on which my mother’s house was located was part of the domain of the serpent deity, Pakhalu Nag? Indru Nag, who controlled rain, was over on that other hill; Bhagsu Nag lived farther up beyond Dharamsala, and his maternal uncle protected Dal Lake.

  Pritam’s family had originally lived in Brahmaur, in Chamba district, which lies across the Dhauladhar range to the north of Kangra. Pritam’s forefathers were hereditary mediums for the serpent god, Pakhalu Nag. When Pritam’s great-grandfather migrated over the mountains from Chamba, he brought the deity’s sangal, or iron rods associated with possession, with him. En route, he threw the heavy rods into a river: “If you have energy (shakti), carry yourself!” he said. Later, when the family had arrived at their new home in Kangra, he shook his hand, and the iron chains came in.

  At first, the temple for Pakhalu Nag was built higher up on a different hill, called Kabrutu. The family lived there and would only come down to live nearer their fields at harvest. Later, they moved down near their fields, and Pritam’s father had a dream: “No one looks after me,” the serpent god said, “bring me down.” Following this dream, Pritam’s father took up a collection from the villagers, and a temple was built on the Toral hill. The stone image of the serpent god with the features of a human being was made in the nearby army cantonment town.

  Under Pritam’s guidance, I once went to worship this serpent god. We ordered new clothes—an orange shirt and a turban—to be stitched for him by the roadside tailor (who, Pritam assured us, knew the measurements of all the local gods). The silversmith down the road made a small silver snake that would be present at the puja and then go home with me. One monsoon morning as mists blew off the higher mountains, and the water in the ravine tumbled and foamed, I sat cross-legged in the company of a village Pandit and Pritam by a fire, making offerings to the snake god inside, as a huddle of local children and a few fidgety goats looked on.

  When Ma and I first visited Kangra, electricity was unreliable. In the monsoon, buses would pull up before fast-rushing streams, and one would have to wade across and walk the rest of the way to one’s destination. There was one phone in the village. At night, satellites blinked their way across the star-clotted sky. Visiting from graduate school in the 1980s, it was hard to imagine this quiet valley connecting to the rush of freeways and the barrage of communication that framed the rest of my
life.

  As I write in 2001, my mother, in her new village, has just been hooked up to e-mail, and messages fly in from her most mornings. She has reliable electricity now, which can be a nuisance when neighbors across the way crank up their television as they boil morning tea. Old adobe houses are being abandoned and new cement ones, with satellite dishes like reclining umbrellas, spring up where there were once open fields. Everywhere there are tall stacks of bricks or of split river rocks that people intend to use for their flat-roofed pukka homes. With tourism having declined in Kashmir, there are more ostentatious hotels built across the valley; planes fly in to an airstrip each week, and Maruti taxi vans go honking their way along the winding roads. One tourist place advertises an “Unavailable Bar,” which my curious mother could not resist investigating: it turns out that the bar carried rare imported liquor. Some of the local people I have known for all these years like all these changes, saying that now more things are available; others lament that the wisdom from the past is being forgotten.

  The old people have moved onward: Ba, Sardar Sahib, Mummy, Masterji, Sobha Singh, Mangat Ram, all gone as Norah had gone before them. I imagine them lifting up from the tops of their heads, leaving the pupa of old bodies behind to soar higher than the Dhauladhar and merge with the sky. Sanyal remains an embodied inspiration: he just turned a hundred years old in March 2001, and he is still drawing.

  On my wall in Madison, I have a precious watercolor of Sanyal’s in which monsoon clouds rise over fields, partially obscuring the Dhauladhar. Just as Vidhya once observed that mountains merged into the background, I too often do not see the picture in the rush and scramble of my own routines. When I do stop and really notice this painting, the Himalayas rise up momentarily in Midwestern America. Rugged snow peaks with idiosyncratic characters, grand white-bearing people looking out over shifting horizons—both stand tall inside me.

  * * *

  FRIENDS IN PRISON*4