And then, after the hydel project, the road disappeared. It was now merely a churned brown mess, upon which our vehicle slid desperately close to a suddenly charmless edge. The gents on their two-wheelers went skidding past, of course, as the mountains pressed in forbiddingly over us. At this height, this isn’t a valley any more. It is a gorge, and an appropriately angry river, tired of being compressed, hammers through it. Then we were at Gobind Ghat itself, engaging a porter, having some lassi, paying our tickets, parking our car. This is where we crossed the Alaknanda on a pedestrian bridge. This is where the walking began.
Gobind Ghat is not an old town. It has no value aside from the fact that it caters to Sikh pilgrims en route to Hemkunt. It is distinguished chiefly by being ugly. In fact, it is fascinatingly ugly, since it is perched on a beautiful spot, hard by the foaming river. Think of the effort required to rob a place such as this of its charm. But I digress.
There is a gurdwara here where pilgrims can stay for free, hotels where the paying public dosses and myriad shops selling religious trinketry. There are Nepali and Bhotia porters waiting to carry your bags up and plainsmen from UP running mules. There are sedan chairs for the infirm. There is noise and bustle and the eager shining faces of the devotees are everywhere.
One hears the pipes and squeaks of Birmingham and Toronto and the bass drones—and occasional tenor chortles and imprecations—of the Punjab plains. I think I see rural types conditioned to a received piety and homesick expats and their progeny driven to devotion and thoughts of pilgrimage by being far away, and I think, yes, this is exactly as I imagined it. But as I am hunkering down behind my cynicism, the complex reality of things as they actually are intrudes. There are sardars from everywhere, city slickers and villagers. There are old open-bearded men with the loose-limbed gait of farmers who have worked their own fields all their lives alongside their own clipped-bearded and sometimes clean-shaven sons, whose farming has been conducted from the tops of tractors and combines. There are women in jeans and shalwars and men in pyjamas and pants. There are nihangs in their blue and saffron uniforms, their archaic weapons clutched in their hands. There are organized jathas, groups of pilgrims coming from a village or gurdwara or social group, both from India and abroad. There are singles and family groups and newly married couples. The occasional tourist, like myself, is wearing shorts and hiking boots. Many of the others are merely in sports shoes, the older element in their juttis and chappals.
At 1,800 metres, in blazing sunshine, we cross the river and start walking to Gobind Dham, twelve kilometres away and 1,200 metres higher. Gobind Dham is also known as Ghangharia. It is only open from around the beginning of June to the end of September. Hemkunt is snowbound outside of these months, and the other big attraction here, the Valley of Flowers National Park, is also closed at the same time. The entire area is part of the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, and even in the lower reaches of the trek, there are incredible vistas to be had. The trail follows the path of a stream I hear referred to as the Lakshman Ganga: this stream too is in spate. The narrowness of the rocky path and the fact that you are sharing it with mules and parties of pilgrims headed back down means that in places, you have to step with care. At this time of year, if you fall into the river, you will find yourself in Hardwar before you know where you are. But the views are beautiful. Sheer rock faces tower above you, the vegetation changing as you climb. Sometimes the sun is blotted out by a cliff, and then you turn a corner and you see a line of mountains in the distance and birds on the wing and a union of green and blue that you thought existed only in bad postcards. Old yogis take it easy in little caves off the track, smoking what is freely available on the sides of the trail. The well-being extends to everything I see as I trudge happily on.
It is exhilarating to be on this trail with the sun on my back. There are teashops at regular intervals and the path is pretty even, at least to begin with, and the going not too hard. There are even Cokes and chocolates in the teashops and we see little plastic rainslickers for sale—slickers we don’t buy because, of course, the sun is shining, right, and what kind of idiot buys an umbrella in anticipation of rain? Returning parties of pilgrims hail us with the familiar cries of Waheguruji ka Khalsa, Waheguruji ki fateh. Every so often I hear a Boley so nihal. Sat Sri Akaal, I answer. Pretty soon, I have got my travelling companions doing it too. We exchange nods and small talk with other walkers, snigger quietly at the ones going up on their mules. And then the wheels begin to come off.
It begins to rain.
And it rains. And it rains. My shoes come apart, and I am reduced to chappals. The stones that we are walking on are rough-hewn and hard to deal with in boots when the stones are dry; wet, and with me in chappals, they are a real handful. The water sluices down the track. The packs we are carrying become heavier, our breathing shallower. We finally buy the slickers and think we will be dry, but discover that plastic always brings sweat in its wake. As we ascend, the rain gets colder and colder and the sweat against your skin is hard to tell from the water pooling at your neck and wrists and sliding everywhere. The mules continue to go up and down and do their business right in the road and the mixture, at times, seems just a tad too rich and it dawns on us that twelve kilometres in these mountains is not a walk in a city park.
But the inspiration of the people around us is strong. I see an old couple, easily in their seventies, trudging up slowly. They must have started well before us. They know that they will still be walking in the dark, on the hardest section of the trek. They are carrying sacks of produce from their own fields as a gift to the gurdwara, a gift that will find its way to the langar that feeds the travellers. I offer my hand to the man as he sits and catches his breath; his hardy old wife is still walking slowly ahead, her body bent against the angle of the climb and the weight of her cargo. The old man laughs and thanks me, says that he doesn’t need my help. He has God, and that is support enough. You can’t argue with that. There are other old people on the trail and others who have made the long journey from their homes in the villages of Punjab and further afield, people visiting from Goa and Bihar, people who have come here from England and Canada and the US. All trudging their way up to keep an appointment they have made.
With what? With whom? With a yogi? With a Guru? With God?
With themselves, you might say. But that is a trite, easy answer.
The rain slopes off the leaves of the trees and catches in my beard and the rock faces disappear in the mist and the sheets of moisture. I am aware of my own body complaining, an old injury in a knee being awakened, my lungs starting to labour. I know I am concentrating on putting one foot in front of another, I am watching the path carefully so that I don’t miss my footing and slip on my worn rubber chappals, I am focusing on my breathing without even being aware of it. My head is beginning to ache insistently and I am teetering on the edge of nausea.
I know there are people on the trail in greater discomfort than me. I know that the Bhotia porters, if they weren’t carrying their loads, could probably run up this trail in a couple of hours. I know faith isn’t supposed to be easy, that physical discomfort is merely the entry-level hardship that you examine your own faith by. The problems of the intellect and the spirit are harder to deal with and anyway, I am not that invested in being here. I am a tourist who happens to be a Sikh, en route to a place I consider to be of marginal spiritual and historical value. And I am in pretty good shape, compared to some of the people on this trail.
But it is hard to walk up there. It is very hard indeed. And I am not even halfway there.
I read the hand-painted exhortations on the stones. Religious injunctions, the greetings I am used to, even an occasional suggestion that you take it easy every now and then and enjoy the view. I see one sign in particular. ‘Charan chalo marg Gobind.’ It is from a hymn in the Guru Granth Sahib. Walk in the path of Gobind, it says. Gobind is one of God’s names, and the shabad tells you to walk in God’s footsteps, to bend your own feet in that
direction.
A work of disputed authenticity states that a man named Gobind walked here in a previous life, before he came back and created the Khalsa. I see his descendants around me, the rain slipping off their tired determined faces as they slog their way upwards to where they will spend the night. The next morning, bright and early, they will set off to walk the final six kilometres, rising a further 1,300 metres till they finally see what they have come here for—a gurdwara by a freezing cold lake. Having bowed their heads before the living Guru, the Guru Granth Sahib, and having taken a dip in the lake, they will turn around and come right back down again and resume their lives. They will have walked, at least for a short while, in the footsteps of Gobind.
Am I the only idiot here who thinks he is missing the point, when the point of the pilgrimage is self-evident all around me?
But my questions persist. If the tenets that make us who we are are set aside, even for a moment, then what good does it do us to climb these mountains? It doesn’t help me to think that it is okay, these are only simple peasants, their faith is different from mine; that their faith is unexamined and they can’t be expected to ask themselves these questions.
My faith is a peasant’s faith, a faith meant to be shared between peasants and princes alike. I know from the people I speak with on the path and in the teashops that theirs is not an unexamined faith either. They know the problems with the pilgrimage and they have still come.
But what if they didn’t know about the problems? Of what value is my educated ambivalence when we are all meant to walk the same path anyway? So what if they were to see it as a literal injunction to walk in a man’s footsteps when the hymn means God’s footsteps. Gobind the man founded the Khalsa. The Khalsa believe that by doing so, he brought us closer to God. Is there such a difference?
When I think that my body is in the zone and my mind is ready to shut down, it merely slips another gear and whirrs harder. I can only wait and pray for the rain to stop.
It doesn’t, of course.
We reach Gobind Dham as the sun is setting, our rooms in the GMVN rest house waiting, a restaurant with a Bengali cook conveniently opposite the gate. I get a cobbler to stitch up my soles, and as I am eating and have to take time off between mouthfuls to catch my breath, I realize that I am already in the grip of altitude sickness. We are going up bright and early to Hemkunt Sahib the following morning. I have no time to acclimatize. We go across to a shop that rents jackets by the day, buy extra socks and T-shirts to wear as liners, and fall exhaustedly asleep.
The next day we realize just what a gorgeous setting we are in. Gobind Dham itself is a seasonal village that supports the traffic to Hemkunt Sahib and the Valley of Flowers. When that traffic dries up, Gobind Dham packs up and goes home. There is a gurdwara here, of course, and hotels now, where previously there was nothing. The village itself is nondescript but the surroundings are spectacular. There are meadows with wildflowers around us as we walk out of town and old coniferous groves on either side. There is a moment when we leave Gobind Dham when we can see the trail up over us, stark against the face of the mountain we have to climb; when we look down, into a gap in the mist, we can see the bowl of Gobind Dham and the river snaking its way down to Gobind Ghat. The world we can see looks like an old Japanese print, in perspective but a hostage to mist, the whole an image of cascading beauty caught in time. Other pilgrims have stopped as well, looking down into the suddenly brilliant bowl and valley, thinking of the distance they have already covered. Then the mist closes in again and we turn around and start afresh to where we have to go. And the rain begins again.
This part of the climb is murderously hard for me. My head is ringing by now with the sickness, and all I am trying to think about is putting one foot in front of another. Altitude sickness, like its cousin seasickness, is another variable ailment. I see other pilgrims just floating along the path, singing their hymns, telling jokes, eating crackers, the rain sliding off their slickers unnoticed. I see others throwing up by the side of the path too. I don’t throw up, but I am thinking about it. This part of the path is steep and rocky and there are switchbacks with deceptively simple shortcuts. You think you can shorten your agony by going straight up the hill but that isn’t ever the case, is it? Every turn has people sitting and catching their breath. The rain now is icy cold, and your fingers, where they grip your walking stick, feel frozen. Everything is either covered in sweat or cold and mostly you can’t tell them apart.
There is a village jatha walking alongside us. A middle-aged gent in the group runs ahead with a laugh to where one of his younger companions is struggling. He takes him by the hand and literally pulls him up the trail. To the side, I hear the whispered conversations that greet the sight of my American friend. Though overseas visitors do visit Hemkunt Sahib, they usually tend to be American sardars. The women wear turbans as well and dress a certain way. The people walking up beside us don’t know what to make of my friend. A few of them ask me about her. I tell them the truth. She likes hiking. Ah, they nod. I wonder if they snigger when I am not looking.
We finally cross the treeline on the way up. Now there are only wild flowers off to the sides, and even these are only intermittently visible, the mist and the rain are so intense. We cross a finger of snow and ice closer to Hemkunt. Dirty now, at this time of year, but still unquestionably frozen. We pick our way over a freezing stream, and that is when I decide, enough is enough. I am jumping on the back of a mule.
I am too tired even to be humiliated. All I am is happy. Happy, and wet.
And still my head pounds.
Finally, we reach. You come up a final flight of stairs and there is the gurdwara. The nishan sahib—a saffron flagpole topped by a double-edged sword, the khanda, the marker of gurdwaras everywhere in the world—stands by it. The lake sits behind the gurdwara, the langar before it. We make our way to the langar where huge vats of dal and tea are being boiled over wood and kerosene that is brought up, laboriously, by mule, every single day. The tea is delicious and hot and I savour cup after cup of it. Leveraging the fact that my travelling companion is a foreigner and a woman, I get to sit right next to a huge cauldron, my feet cooking by the flame. But even now, after the tea and the rest, every step I take makes my head spin.
My Bombay buddy, friends now with the other tough guys he has hiked up with, elects to jump into the icy lake. Even in my condition, I can see how beautiful this place must be when the sun is up. Now, with the mist and the rain, it is ethereal. Only the sound of the kirtan from inside the gurdwara on the badly distorted sound system breaks the silence. That, and the shrieks of the infants and children pulled into the lake by their pious parents. My American friend disappears into the ladies’ enclosure, there to take her dip in seclusion. Past the enclosure is a small, old Hindu temple. The gurdwara authorities maintain it. Sikh pilgrims, curious and respectful, go there too. I come back to see the Bombay boy gleefully clutching a Polaroid in his hand. Apparently there are photographers for hire at this height as well. It is a lovely photo, and we laugh immoderately at it.
Then, it is time to go inside the gurdwara for the ardas. Pretty soon, the last ardas, the prayer of supplication, will be over, and all these pilgrims will be on their way down the mountainside. There are no overnight halts allowed here. Inside the gurdwara, surrounded by sweating, shivering pilgrims, we file in to bow our heads before the last and living Guru, the Guru Granth Sahib itself. Gobind the man decreed that no man would lead the Khalsa after him; henceforth, the Khalsa would follow the Guru Granth Sahib, a book that contains none of his own writings. At every step Gobind the man said that he was only a man; that the Guru resides in the Khalsa; that after he was gone, there would be only the book—a book full of the simple wisdom of clerks and farmers and weavers and mendicants, Sikh and Hindu and Muslim—and God. Yet people come here at the behest of a story that states that an ascetic sat on a rock in this place many aeons and lives ago and out of that came a conversation with God that led to
all this.
Now I am before the Guru Granth Sahib. This is what I have come to do. To touch my aching head to the ground here as I have done in other places such as this, all over the world. The company changes, true. But the prayers remain the same, the book remains and so do I. I stand with the rest of the congregation as the ardas begins. A shivering girl beside me keeps time with her chattering teeth, but makes no attempt to dry herself off. Her eyes are tightly shut, her hands clasped together, her lips moving in time to the ardas that we all know. I feel my own eyes starting to water. I don’t know if it is the altitude or the words that I know so well, the words that I am mouthing too. I don’t know if it is the fact that all these people standing here, wet and shivering, are doing the same as I.
I feel as if it is tangible, the thread that binds me to the men and women around me, men and women raised to acknowledge no other authority but God and taught to bow their heads to nothing but the Guru. I feel what makes us different from the rest and I know that what makes us different connects us to each other. I have nodded to passing sardars in every part of the world I have ever been in, heard Sat Sri Akaals in places I never dreamt I would see a Sikh. I kneel and touch my head to the floor at the conclusion of the ardas like everyone else and then, when we stand up, I follow the shivering girl as she shouts out Boley so nihal. Sat Sri Akaal resounds around the hall, again and again and again.
We are separate from each other and when we go down to where we came from we will resume our lives. We are different and we will remain so in Punjab and Delhi, in Goa and Bihar, in England and Canada and the US. But in the presence of the Guru, surrounded by the words we know, we too are one.
Gobind the man made us so.
If it pleases a good Khalsa to make his or her plodding way up here, again and again, to reaffirm a commitment to that extraordinary man and his creation: if that good Khalsa follows a myth rather than fact; do the feet of that Khalsa wander off the path of God?
Pilgrim's India Page 12