Adventure Divas

by Holly Morris

  “Oh my, I think we’re being extorted by a diva,” I whisper to Julie.

  The room suddenly falls silent. Phoolan nods at me, and smiles. “Das muit ke liye, dosh hazar dena. Kal mera ghar ko telephone Karo,” she says.

  “Ten thousand dollars for ten minutes,” Raghu translates. “She says we should call her residence tomorrow if we want to set something up. We must go now so they can continue their meeting.”

  We leave, silent and demoralized.

  The seven-hour drive up into the Himalayas has given me ample time to stew on our interaction with Phoolan Devi. That we only had $462 left, rather than 10k, was moot. We could not feature Devi because highway robbery—literal or figurative—is not a trait we want to condone. From a production aspect, we were, for the first time, faced with the question of what to do When a Good Diva Goes Bad. Failure to land Devi exempted me from a quandary I would have eventually faced in the edit room: Would I fan the flames of her legend, mythmaking in the name of good TV?

  The money issue may have ended my pursuit of Phoolan, but the entire experience has led me to reexamine my motives for wanting her in the first place. I was caught up in her legend. I wanted to believe in a strong, female archetype, a leader who championed the lower castes and avenged atrocities against millions of women in India (and, by example, across the world).

  I was drawn to the sexiness of Phoolan Devi’s story, but overlooked the truth of her life—which lacked the character, the deep and examined moral inventory, that is a hallmark of divadom. Robbery, murder, bribery, deception—these are the words that now resonate as I read more about her during our long journey into the Himalayas. A master at reinventing herself, and with many who’ve known her now dead or in jail, Devi has a history that is hard to decipher. The more I read, the more it seems Rahgu might be right. Phoolan Devi is more bandit than queen.

  Then again, I wonder if it is fair for me to judge a low-caste woman who used whatever it took to revolutionize her life. If one is of low caste, must one be a bandit to become a queen? If every institution condemns you, is bloody vindication justifiable?

  Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sojourner Truth didn’t think so. And I have a feeling Alice Garg and Kiran Bedi and Ruchira Gupta—the everyday archetypes I was looking for in Phoolan Devi—wouldn’t think so, either.

  Kali may be ferocious, and slay the evil in her path, but she is not an earthbound deity, she is an ethereal myth that brings comfort to millions of people who drew life’s short sticks of poverty and caste oppression. And this is the way in which Phoolan Devi, too, is important and valid. What she represents is what matters, and she represents a challenge to the country’s most egregious atrocities. “She is tailor-made for the Indian imagination,” columnist Sunit Sethi says in an Atlantic article about Devi. “Since ancient times we have had an inordinate capacity to make myth out of any story, and to demythicize the most epic into the mundane. Phoolan is a do-it-yourself goddess who can rapidly demonize.”

  “It’ll be interesting to see if she has as much impact as a career politician as she did as a bandit,” I say to Rahgu.

  “You never know,” he responds. “We’ll see.”

  But we won’t.

  Three months after we met Phoolan Devi, she was shot dead by masked men in front of her Delhi home. Some say the assassination was politically motivated; others say it was revenge by the families of the men she murdered. Her death, like much of her life, is surrounded by mystery. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets at the funeral, to honor the now-martyred Bandit Queen.

  We continue to drive up a pilgrim route into the Himalayas, a range called the “abode of the gods,” to meet our final interviewee, a mountain climber. People come from all over the world to walk into the foothills to visit and worship at a series of Hindu temples. In a couple of months there will be thousands walking this route, but as it is now we are passing a pilgrim, usually dressed in white or orange and carrying a tin pail, every quarter mile or so. Traveling is traveling, but a pilgrimage is a spiritual act, an exercise in devotion. With each shoot—what with our deepening investment in the project and the people we’ve met along the way—creating this television series is beginning to feel closer to the latter. With each day, my respect for the women we are meeting grows (excepting Devi, of course), and, production challenges aside, my desire to bring their stories to a wide audience increases.

  We gas up our minivan and continue our loopy switchbacks into the foothills, shadowing the Ganges, and ours does feel like a progression filled with meaning, though of what kind I am not entirely sure. I blurt out one of the Buddha’s rallying cries: “You cannot travel the path until you become the path,” hoping it will inform our journey on this sacred route. It thuds like the non sequitur that it is.

  “You cannot catch a fish until you become a fish?” offers Cheryl, in one of her game attempts to understand my passion since we fished together in Cuba. We stop for a chai and sit by the river, not too far from its source, the Gangotri Glacier, a massive chunk of ice measuring five by fifteen miles. The glacier rests above us in these foothills, at about fourteen thousand feet above sea level, and melts into the river Bhagirathi, which flows into the Alaknanda River to become the Ganges.

  “Julie, what do you think?” I ask, nodding at the clean, wide, robust stretch of river.

  “Holly. It’s the Ganges,” she responds with a laugh. “Sacred.”

  And indeed, the towns that dot this stretch of the Ganges seem to attract spirit seekers from all over. Flyers for gurus, yoga, crystal readings, and chakra adjustments abound. ENRICH YOUR LIFE USING CRYSTALS AND GEMS! a cement wall entices. WELCOME ALL QUALIFIED SEEKERS OF THE TRUTH, says a billboard. HEALING THE SEVEN CHAKRAS and THE DIVINE LIFE SOCIETY blare out in primary colors on a sign that a sadhu is leaning against. My personal favorite is PIMPLES, WRINKLES AND BLEMISHES—with absolutely no follow-up sales pitch. Perhaps the sign painter was not unionized and walked off the job.

  Two young Western women with shoulder-length brown hair and gauzy skirts stop to chat. “This is where the Beatles met their guru,” they tell us.

  Another young Westerner named Daniel—shirtless, with long blond dreadlocks and a well-defined six-pack—pulls up on a beat-up motorcycle. Daniel is from Germany and spends two months in India every year. I try to imagine what molecular leap takes place when German chromosome meets Eastern chakra. When I did a shoot for Pilot Productions at a Native American sundance in Oklahoma, the only people sweating it out besides Native Americans were Germans. Are the Germans simply committed travelers, like the Aussies, or is there some stickiness to this Germano-spiritual trend?

  “Has your time in India changed you?” I ask Daniel.

  “Yes, of course it changes you, of course. You get much more open-minded like this, take things easier, not like running on a normal system like Germany.”

  Normal.

  “I am staying at a local ashram. Do you want to come to this afternoon’s yoga class?”

  My idea of an ashram is a swarm of middle-class white kids who padlock their trust funds and come here in their eagerness to find themselves.

  “Sure,” I say, and he hands me a flyer. I’ll be damned if I’ll be out-evolved by a German.

  ASHRAM RULES AND REGULATIONS:

  • No meat, fish, eggs, alcohol, tobacco and narcotics.

  • No personal checks.

  • No refunds.

  • Playing rock music is not allowed, only chanting.

  • No tight pants, shorts, or sleeveless dress allowed.

  • It is difficult to maintain the pure vibration, so we request that you abide by the above rules. If anyone disrespects them, serious action will be taken.

  My first-ever yoga class takes place at magic hour on a real live ashram on a gorgeous, red-slate terrace overlooking the Ganges. Hot damn. We grab our pads and fall in line with twelve other gringos warming up. A yoga veteran, Cheryl quickly engages in a contorted backbend warm-up thi
ngy.

  “Check that out,” I whisper to her, and nod toward Daniel, who is somehow balancing with his arms on a railing, suspended in midair with his legs crossed. His six-pack is a veritable half-rack. The pose and the abs both defy physics.

  That’s what happens when Germanic order meets tantric ambition.

  “Oh yeah . . . he’s serious,” says Cheryl, unwinding a leg from around her ear.

  A bell tinkles and the guru sashays in, wearing a flowing gold robe. “The breath comes in . . .” he says to begin class. My lower back crinkles with every Upward Dog, and something called a vakrasana sends me to the floor in a sprawl. I peel my cheek off the tile, embarrassed, and decide it is ruder and more disruptive for me to stay, so I slink out the back of the class.

  I trundle down to a deserted edge of a Ganges tributary, sort of bothered by the trappings of the sacred served up for gringos. An orange robe, a bunch of oms, and an excess of crystals shouldn’t annoy me so much. I sit by the water and worry about the loss of footage. I worry that persistent irreverence can be as constricting as blind reverence. I wonder if there’s a middle ground between the “dead” and the “sacred.” I focus on the river flowing by.

  We drive deeper into the Himalayas, passing an increasingly thick stream of pilgrims. We are heading for Uttarkashi, a village in the Garhwal region that is home to the mountain climber Bachendri Pal.

  Pal was raised on the backbreaking work known to all rural people of her low caste, yet time and again she resisted pressure from her family to leave school and go to work. Most village girls never get educated, much less manage to stay unmarried, but as a rebellious dreamer, she resisted arranged marriage and fought all the way to college, earning two bachelor’s degrees and a master’s degree. Along the way she kindled her love of mountains, and escaped to them regularly. At college she was trained to be a teacher and studied Sanskrit, knowing that its literature was rich with images of the Himalayan mountains that had bewitched her since she was a child. After graduating, she again defied expectation, tradition, and her family’s wishes. Rather than teach, she enrolled in mountaineering courses and was soon identified as an “Everest prospect.” Pal doubled her firewood and water loads. She trained relentlessly on the steep grades of her home village, leaving her fellow villagers perplexed and amused (though they worried when she started carrying rucksacks full of stones up nearby foothills). Pal excelled in a mountaineering world considered far beyond the grasp of rural village women, and eventually she was selected for an elite Everest team.

  Bachendri Pal would become the first Indian woman to summit Everest, which made her an instant celebrity and a folk hero for rural women and girls who live in the villages we are driving past. Pal has often said that her life’s hardest battle was not the grueling toe-kicks that got her up Everest, but what it took to transcend the limitations prescribed by her rural, low-caste place of birth.

  I am charmed by the small villages that nestle against endless circular terraced hillsides until I realize—“God, are these the villages drained of women between fifteen and forty-five—the ones Ruchira was talking about?” I say to Julie, who, like me, has been consumed by the sex-trafficking issue since our time in the brothel.

  “I bet so,” she says. “I bet they are.”

  Bachendri is wearing a black windbreaker, khakis, and light, generic sneakers when we arrive at a set of tents at the base of a river, next to a mountain. “Welcome to base camp,” says Bachendri softly, almost demurely. She is shy about her marginal English.

  Part of Bachendri’s work these days is to provide an Outward Bound–type experience for executives of the Tata Steel company. Bachendri takes away their PDAs and tosses these young manicured execs from major industrial centers into the natural world in order to build confidence in themselves, and one another.

  Bachendri and I set off for a hike along the Ganges to talk about the Everest summit that transformed her life. We are hopping over chunky gray boulders, making our way upriver to a trail that will take us to the top of a baby Himalaya. Bachendri moves steadily and delicately. She does not seem particularly tough or strong or well-versed in speaking in sound bites—all things I associate with elite veterans. I am fixating on her unlikely generic sneakers when a silver streak pans by in the water just to my right.

  “Bachendri,” I ask, excited, “are there fish in this part of the river?”

  “Yes,” she says quietly, then adds, “It is written in our sacred texts about the purity of the water. People worship the Ganges.”

  Figures. There are fish. But the river—definitely sacred.

  I ask Bachendri about her draw to Everest. She’d had a love affair with the Himalayas throughout her youth, but the big mountain must have been special. “When I first saw Sagarmatha [Everest], I bowed my head in reverence,” Bachendri says as we turn up a trail and start our ascent.

  “Did you think you would summit?” I ask, trailing her, my eyes on her sneakers.

  “No. I was not sure. But I was confident about my physical condition, and mentally I was very strong,” she says matter-of-factly.

  On Everest, she faced that moment every climber fears: avalanche.

  “It was midnight and I was sound asleep. I was hit on the back of the head suddenly, by something very hard. And I heard a very loud explosion, so then I realized there was a very big avalanche, and I was really waiting for the death, and I thought, ‘I am going to die. I am going to die.’ ”

  Bachendri’s limited English has conveyed the shorthand version of a harrowing experience. At twenty-four thousand feet, she and nine others in her climbing party were sleeping in their tents when they heard a thundering sound from the glacier above them. Enormous tumbling blocks of ice and snow developed into a massive avalanche that rumbled down the mountain and buried Bachendri alive in her tent. Fortunately, she was dug out by one of her fellow climbers.

  “I was carrying a small image of goddess Durga-Narishakti. Nari means woman, Shakti means power. Woman power,” Bachendri tells me.

  “But aren’t you supposed to carry a very light load?” I ask, knowing climbers are religious about every ounce they pack. “And you carried a goddess up there?”

  “Yes,” she says, laughing quietly, for the first time sweeping away a bug.

  My arms have been moving constantly to keep black biting gnats at bay.

  In the book Leading Out: Stories of Adventurous Women, Bachendri describes what the deity meant to her on the climb: “Well before dawn we began to dig out our equipment. I was terribly worried about the image of Goddess Durga which I had in my rucksack.”

  Durga, as I learned back in Delhi, is worshipped as an embodiment of female energy. She takes different female forms and goes by many names; one of them is Kali.

  “Every morning and evening I took it out and drew inspiration and strength from it. So my first act on finding my rucksack was to thrust my hand into the side pocket. To my relief my fingers encountered the ice-cold metallic image. I held the holy image tightly and, placing it on my forehead, felt that I had everything I wanted. I had Shakti in my arms—the Shakti which had saved my life a few hours earlier and the Shakti which, I was sure, would lead me onwards and upwards. The experience of the night had drained all fear out of me.”

  Miraculously, nobody was killed in that avalanche, but Bachendri explains that the team, injured and in shock, was in disarray. When the rescue crew arrived the next day, most of her team returned to base camp, abandoning their bid for the top. Bachendri took another route.

  “ ‘So what do you want to do?’ I say to myself. I am alive after this life-and-death situation. So I said, ‘I must try.’ And that decision was the turning point,” she tells me. Shaken yet determined, she kept climbing.

  “I was literally on top of the world,” she says of her summit on May 23, 1984, with climbing partner Ang Dorjee. After digging their ice axes in for security, Bachendri reported of her summit moment, “I sank to my knees, and putting my forehead on th
e snow kissed Sagarmatha’s crown.”

  Writer Alain de Botton explains how places such as the top of the world compel you to hit your knees: “Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves. This is the lesson written into the stones of the desert and the ice fields of the poles. So grandly is it written there that we may come away from such places not crushed but inspired by what lies beyond us, privileged to be subject to such majestic necessities. The sense of awe may even shade into a desire to worship.”

  Bachendri’s reverence in the face of success is refreshing compared to the bawdy swaggerers we get so much of in the media of today’s “extreme” sports. Competition and goal orientation too often muffle the subtler glories.

  “Did you enjoy the climb?” I ask. Except for the summit, it sounded like a miserable experience.

  “After coming back,” she admits, with a laugh.

  Bachendri Pal’s 1984 Everest summit was a beginning. “After that I wanted to promote adventure sport among youth and women. Why not rural women? Rural women work very hard. Adventure should be a part of everyone’s life. It is the whole difference between being fully alive and just existing,” she says. With the public support of India’s then leader Indira Gandhi, Bachendri began to put her philosophy into action.

  “The biggest hazard in life is not to take risk,” she continues, offering me some water before taking a small sip from her canteen. “If you want to achieve something you have to take risk. One of my big dreams was to lead an all-woman expedition up Everest.” Bachendri accomplished this in 1993 with several young rural women from her own home village. I notice she tells this story with considerably more pride than that of her own, first Everest summit.

  We are both panting now, and say less. The modest summit of this baby Himalaya is about a hundred yards in the distance. We scramble upward, and I am recharged by the burn in my thighs. For the first time in weeks the quease in my stomach is gone; I do not feel unmoored. We are scrambling, without ropes or protection, but I feel anchored.