Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  Port Blair itself is more a cluster of villages than a genuine city, a rambling assortment of low cinder-block buildings and tin-roofed bungalows strewn across a wooded peninsula between the open ocean and one of the largest natural harbors in Asia.

  The anchorage shelters a mixed bag of craft--banana boats, tramp steamers, and trawlers--and directly behind the docks is Aberdeen Bazaar, the marketplace and central business district. The narrow lanes are filled with odors--fruits and vegetables, incense and spices, diesel fumes from big belching buses. High-pitched Hindi music seemed to emanate from every crevice, competing with the shouts of merchants.

  One day on the outskirts of Port Blair, Neeraj and I came across a crowd of thousands gathered around a shrine to the Tamil fire god. We could hear noise in the distance, chanting drums, and a wave of excitement seemed to surge through the crowd.

  “The fire walkers are coming,” Neeraj shouted to me above the din. Soon a dozen devotees in a zombie-like trance, gesticulating and spinning, crashed into the crowd, their faces smeared with ash, their tongues and cheeks pierced with sharp metal rods as a sign of their faith.

  They danced across a fire pit that had been set up by the shrine, oblivious to white hot coals beneath their feet. Pandemonium broke out as bystanders were drawn into their fervor. I was caught up in a great surge toward the fire, and the worshipers in front of me began to stumble. They were almost trampled before the police intervened, beating back the throng with bamboo sticks.

  But then the fire walkers vanished, spirited into the temple, and the frenzied crowd was calm once again, content to collect the ashes over which the mystics had passed.

  In the last decade the island administration has established more than a hundred national parks, wildlife refugees, and nature reserves in the archipelago as an attraction for tourists with an ecological bent, and as a measure to save one of the last great wilderness areas of India. The parks are home to a vast array of weird and wonderful creatures, from the robber crab, which can rip open a coconut with its mighty claws, to the rare Nicobar monkey, which in proper top-of-the-food-chain fashion preys on the robber crab.

  Many of the parks are secluded and rarely visited, and myriad islands—some with strange names like Snob, Grub, Redskin, Jolly Buoy—float within the park boundaries.

  It was on Jolly Buoy that I lost my fear of the jungle. The person I have to thank for this is Neeraj. I can’t say he really tricked me into the forest, but he did lure me on a false pretense.

  We’d spent most of the day snorkeling and swimming off the north shore of Jolly Buoy, a tiny speck of land off the coast of South Andaman, when Neeraj suggested that we visit a secluded cove on the other side of the island. I asked if I should bring shoes, but he looked at me as if I were being silly.

  We walked along the beach at first, but then Neeraj veered into the trees. He gazed around, expecting me to follow. I looked down at my feet. They were bare, and I was thinking: aren’t there things in the jungle? Like snakes, spiders, and leeches that you can tread on. Neeraj could see the hesitation in my eyes.

  “Can’t we follow the beach?” I beseeched him.

  “The beach soon ends,” he responded. “This is the only way to reach the other side. If you don’t think you can make it…”

  So it came down to a matter of saving face. I grudgingly followed, stepping gingerly through the maze of giant roots and vines.

  Much to my surprise the forest floor was soft, almost springy. My pace quickened. I still couldn’t keep up with Neeraj, but by the time I reached the far shore I was no longer afraid of the jungle.

  One day near the end of my trip I went to Chiriya Tapu, a national park on the southern tip of South Andaman. I walked alone through the padauk trees, great white giants that seem to soar into the clouds, and then I trudged through the mangrove swamp, up to my ankles in mud--with a wary eye for the saltwater crocodiles that lurk in the murky tidelands.

  The name Chiriya Tapu means “Bird Island,” and thousands of avian creatures reside here, living amid the swamps and thick rain forests. There were times when the sky went pink with parrots, and other moments when all I saw was a quick flicker of neon blue--a kingfisher plunging through the trees.

  Parasites [worms] are most common in rural areas and a stool test when you return home is not a bad idea. They can be present on unwashed vegetables or in undercooked meat and you can pick them up through your skin by walking in bare feet. Infestations may not show up for some time, and although they are generally not serious, if left untreated they can cause severe health problems. A stool test is necessary to pinpoint the problem, and medication is often available over the counter.

  —Hugh Finlay, et al., India - a travel survival kit

  All around me was an unspoiled cosmos, hermetically sealed by isolation and now fundamentally preserved in its virgin state. I stood in silence, taking slow, deep breaths of the mulchy air, and remembered Tonga from The Sign of Four. More than a hundred years have passed since Conan Doyle conjured up pygmies and blowguns, and yet the Andaman Islands remain veiled in mystery.

  Somehow I take comfort in that notion.

  Joseph R. Yogerst is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London who has written or edited several travel books, including the award-winning Land of Nine Dragons:Viet Nam Today, and Long Road South: The Pan American Highway. His work has appeared in Islands, Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, and other publications.

  The bazaar in Sindnur was crowded, intense, kinetic beyond belief. Beggars with drums and whips established the tempo. I half ran through the market in response to the rhythm. I whirled past a sadhu with snakes around his neck standing on a bed of nails, Jain women with masks across their faces, a man lying prostrate on the road with a painted water pot balanced on his neck, parrot fortune tellers, cows, vendors. On and on.

  I was part of a great human spectacle, and I became almost dizzy, giddy, as I careened along absorbing images.

  When some children noticed me and began their game of Fox and Hounds, it was 4:45 p.m. and the sun slid behind a cloud. The vibrant afternoon mood paled, so I changed direction, out-distanced the kids back towards the rest house, and found a cup of tea and a delicious Indian sweet enroute.

  It had been a hectic, hyperstimulating hour. Its pace was in radical contrast to the countryside, where the impressions can build slowly. Away from the cities there is plenty of time to think, question, analyze. There is no urgency in the moment. Not so in the Sindnur bazaar. Just take a deep breath and do it. Experience it. Think about it later.

  —Jan Zabinski, “Walking the Length of India”

  PART THREE

  GOING YOUR OWN WAY

  The Valley of Refuge

  MARY ORR

  Even when cultures prohibit contact with outsiders, people still find ways to touch.

  IF YOU’RE GOING TO MALANA, YOU MIGHT WANT TO BRING A sheep. It could come in handy if you happen to touch a resident of this secretive, autonomous village high in the Himalayas near India’s border with Tibet. Most of Malana’s one thousand people, isolated here among the mountains and tumultuous rivers of Himachal Pradesh, are high-caste Thakurs. They practice Hinduism tinged with animism (nature worship); they fear the touch of strangers, whom they consider untouchables. They’re so caste-conscious they believe that if you touch them or their houses or their belongings, that touch will cause ritual pollution, and you’re expected to give a sheep to be used in purification ceremonies. Since few of the trekkers who find their way here carry sheep, however, enough cash to buy a sheep will do.

  The Malanis’ strict observance of their traditions has embarrassed the Himachal Pradesh state government. It spent a fortune stringing power lines over wild and snow-covered mountains to this fastness set behind a thirteen hundred-foot pass on one side and a precipice on the other. But the villagers refused the electricity because the lines went over low-caste houses.

  No one could tell my partner, Michael, and me how
long it would take to walk to Malana from Naggar, a village propped high up on the Kulu valley’s eastern wall. Our guidebook said it could be done in a day. Our hotelier wasn’t so sure, and he warned of labyrinthine paths leading to animal pastures, and of false summits along the five thousand-foot climb to Chandrakani Pass. He recommended that we take a guide, because there was no map. But we’d always been able to find our own way to places before, learning to wait at a fork in the path until someone came along to set us on course. We opted for an early start. Alone.

  Like her Victorian predecessors, Dervla Murphy had to suspend her travel plans because of family obligations. At fourteen she was confined to the family home to care for her mother and remained there another fourteen years. But since then her life has been lived at a pace true to the title of her first book—Full Tilt—in which she recounts a bike tour of India and Europe. The Irish-born author has written thirteen other books, eight of them about travel.

  —Mary Morris, Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers

  Almost thirty years ago, Irish author Dervla Murphy wrote that her trek to Malana (“Valley of Refuge”) involved “such a remarkable concentration of hazards that the business of avoiding death occupied 90 percent of my attention and the beauties of the ravine impressed me only during our rest halts.” I was determined to find and follow her route. Like Hansel and Gretel, Michael and I followed Frooti juice boxes and Amul chocolate wrappers that littered the trails. Higher and higher we climbed, through pine woods and juniper-sweetened valleys. A counterpane of rhododendrons in party-dress pink, pearl white and valentine red covered the hillsides. From alpine meadows we could see back to the peaks above the Kulu Valley. But six hours of steady trekking in thin, high-altitude air exhausted us, and the pass was still nowhere in sight.

  We’d hoped to reach the pass before the rain started, which it did like clockwork at two p.m. We weren’t prepared for hail. Descending a ridge ahead of us, a party of India Youth Hostel hikers told us they’d left the pass four hours ago, and Malana was four hours beyond that. Daunted, we decided to rest and take up the final leg the next morning. We had no tent. A shepherd’s stone lean-to--the only one we saw along the trail--appeared like a mirage to provide shelter. We whisked the cow dung off the uneven floor and huddled under the leaking slate roof. I triumphantly hauled a dozen large plastic bags out of my pack, taking advantage of a brief pause in the rain to slit them open and anchor them with stones over the breaks in the roof. It was cold, but it was beautiful. We slept well.

  We reached Chandrakani Pass the next day at noon, after five hours of hiking. The razor-thin strip of ridge fell steeply off to both sides. Whichever way we spun, snowcapped mountains dwarfed us and kept us spinning, like dervishes, spellbound. We stayed for hours, until clouds gathered and stole our view. Around a simple trailside shrine of pebbles, flowers, and incense, eerie upright stones stood like a miniature Stonehenge. We left a few coins and pressed on. We reached a fork: a goat path plunged to the right, a wider trail meandered left. A crude arrow indicated the goat path.

  The goat path turned out to be for goats. It narrowed until it disappeared, leaving us to negotiate boulders and an incline so steep that we had to slide on our stomachs and grab tufts and spiky shrubs to keep ourselves from falling. Just as that afternoon’s downpour began, a Malani shepherd girl about ten years old appeared on the trail. We followed her under a rock ledge to wait out the rain. I offered her a biscuit from my pack, then another. When the rain eased she slipped away, back to her flocks.

  We reached Malana just before dark. We’d heard we could sleep in the school that doubled as a medical clinic and tea stall, a place already tainted by outsiders. Impassive villagers in rough, home-spun robes tied with cords, caps embroidered in zigzag patterns, and Day-Glo plastic shoes motioned the way.

  Malana isn’t a valley but a mere shelf on a nine thousand-foot-high mountain, guarded by seventeen thousand-foot peaks. The village outgrew the shelf long ago; now its houses cling to the brilliant green slope. The medieval two- and three-story houses built of stone and hand-hewn timber also serve as mangers and granaries. Intricately carved wooden balconies laced with ancient spider webs and next winter’s herbs hold looms and farming implements, with space left over for knots of men to gossip and smoke their hookahs.

  Perhaps five thousand years ago, the Malanis’ ancestors, a mysterious people fleeing a long-forgotten enemy, migrated over the mountains to this place. Later they may have intermingled with some of Alexander’s troops, who found their way here after they mutinied in northern India in 326 B.C. Some linguists link Malani, the villagers’ unique language, to Magyar and Finnish; others see similarities to Persian. Almost self-sufficient, the Malanis sell or barter medicinal herbs and hashish, refined from plentiful ganja.

  The barbarians from Central Asia came as conquerors, and when not beaten back by the Aryan hero behaved as conquerors. Their domination intolerably humiliated the proud Hindu order, and it was in dealing with them that it added to its intense pride of race and culture, that violent xenophobia which henceforward became a fixed trait of the Hindu outlook. The compound of fear, hatred, contempt, and humiliation was embodied in the notion of Mlechchha, the unclean and uncivilized foreigner.

  --Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe

  Three low-caste families live at the edge of town. None of these blacksmiths, weavers, and potters interact socially with Malana’s upper-caste Thakurs. They exchange greetings, but Ram Lohar, a member of the “untouchable” ironworker caste, said he’d never been inside a Thakur home or shared even a pot of tea. His grandfather had brought his smithy tools from Simla, the state capital of Himachal Pradesh, decades ago and never left. This was the only home Ram Lohar had ever known, and he accepted the ostracism. In fact, he benefits from it. Unhindered by the taboo against touch, his family earns money cooking for outsiders, and now he is building Malana’s first visitors’ lodge. He learned English from travelers, people like Dervla Murphy, who’d slept in his haystack.

  Although Thakurs disdain the touch of tourists, they pose eagerly for photographs. From a few feet away, I could show women the little jewelry I had and admire their bejeweled noses and their multi-ringed and studded ears, fashionable centuries before trendy Western youths started piercing. Like most rural Indian women, they coveted the silver ring I wore, shaped like a miniature belt, and could barely contain their curiosity as to whether it unbuckled. Their rules prevented them from trying to pull it off my finger, as women elsewhere had attempted.

  Ram Lohar showed us Malana’s lower and supreme courts--worn rock platforms—where a rotating jury of eleven men handled disagreements. (Theft is unknown in the village.) State police and government prosecutors are banned from the proceedings, even for rare criminal cases. Jamlu, the Malanis’ demon-god, decides the verdict for hung juries, making his wishes known through a ritual involving a couple of sheep. Ancient wooden friezes and scores of antlers nailed up at rakish angles cover his windowless temple. The deity is represented by a slab of rock zealously guarded from outsiders’ touch. The god forbids leather in Malana. Ram said Malana’s first tourists were required to leave their leather hiking boots outside the village gate. The dogs made off with so many boots that, for tourists, Jamlu relaxed the no-leather rule.

  The god’s pragmatic streak also seemed to express itself in allowing the village to accept mail from outside. In a further attempt to draw Malana out of the dark ages, the state had deemed the village worthy of a post office. No villager had enough education to meet the state’s qualifications, but the rules were bent. Someone who could barely read got the job. That morning in the school building, as I rolled up my sleeping bag, a few Malanis filed in and ceremoniously arranged a box of rubber stamps, a till and a stack of ledgers: I witnessed the painfully slow inauguration of Malana’s first post office.

  Instead of backtracking over Chandrakani Pass we decided to return to Naggar via Jari, a town at the end of an eight-mile-long ravine
through which the Malana River raged. To reach it, the Malanis had chiseled hundreds of steps down a sheer three thousand-foot precipice. Skittish villagers on narrow stairways and around stony bends demanded wide berth. As they pressed against the cliffside to avoid our touch, we coped with the crumbling edge. Blood-red signs painted on rocks at regular intervals proclaimed: “In Jari, stay at Ratna Guest House. Toilet, separate rooms, and homey atmosphere.” These garish trail markers led us over rockfalls and to monsoon-soaked steps that leaned precariously over rapids. Following writer Dervla Murphy’s hair-raising trail, we crossed the torrent on a primitive plank bridge with gaping holes.

  Again and again the trail climbed high into the ravine through damp pines and summer wildflowers, only to plummet back down again. Finally it reached the riverbank and stopped altogether. Before us was a sheer cliff that could not be scaled. We’d made a grave error. In the Himalayas, snowpacks melt in the morning sun, and by late afternoon streams and rivers rise dramatically. We’d left Malana too late and now suddenly understood the concerned gestures of the last Malani we’d passed. The swollen river had submerged a segment of the trail. We had two choices: wait there until morning, or pick our way along the vertical rock face to where the path continued farther downstream.We had no rock-climbing experience but couldn’t face a night in the clammy canyon. The twenty-foot traverse presented a handful of slippery inch-wide toeholds, some under water. Our heavy backpacks upset our balance, but we made it to the middle of the cliff, both of us hanging just above the torrent.