by George Black
Hillary’s boats bucked and thrashed in the turbulence of the prayag, but the decision had already been made for him. The deciding factor was not topography but national security. The Bhagirathi would have been his obvious preference. It was smaller water than the Alaknanda. It would take him to Gangotri, and from there he could make the trek to Gaumukh. But it was only fifteen years since India and China had fought a shooting war, and Gangotri, being so close to the border with Tibet, was still off limits to foreigners, so it had to be the Alaknanda. Hillary considered the sheer black walls that formed its gorge. “I never saw a less hospitable place,” he wrote in his account of the expedition, which he called From the Ocean to the Sky.
The monsoon rains meant that the river was high enough to follow into the mountains, but they also meant that the class II rapids on the Alaknanda were now class Vs. The jet boats plowed into boiling chutes, slammed against hidden rocks, were spun around in whirlpools. They made it another seventy miles from Devprayag, but that was still forty short of their destination. Scouting from the riverbank, Hillary heard a roar of white water as loud as a jet plane, turned a corner, and found himself face-to-face with a ten-foot waterfall beneath a wooden footbridge. It was September 29; they had been on the river for thirty-six days. Hillary was philosophical. “In a way,” he wrote, “Ganga had said, ‘You can go no further!’”
In Swargashram, I’d mentioned Hillary’s expedition to Brij Mehra. The old man had said there were rumors that one of the great explorer’s jet boats had ended up somewhere in the vicinity of Rishikesh. Later, I heard it had been acquired by a wealthy businessman who lived near an ashram on the road to a place called Jumpin Heights and liked to give his friends joyrides. I never found the ashram, or the businessman, or the boat, but I did decide to go to Jumpin Heights. What I found there was that Sir Edmund was not the only New Zealander who had been drawn to the upper Ganges to satisfy a craving for adventure.
GOING TO EXTREMES
From a rocky promontory at the north end of Rishikesh, I watched a flotilla of inflatable rafts rounding a left-hand bend in the river half a mile away. Some were sky blue and some were tangerine. They made it easily past a cluster of rocks and through a couple of mild class II rapids. Faint whoops echoed across the valley.
There were signs everywhere in Rishikesh and Swargashram for companies with names like Himalayan Brave, Adventure Valley, and High Waves Expeditions. My hotel offered a nine-kilometer white-water rafting trip for four hundred rupees, not much more than six dollars, or you could go three times that distance for twice the price. There were billboards advertising hang gliding and others that said, “Battle Zone—Paint Ball Activity,” with cartoonish figures that looked like a cross between ninjas and Navy SEALs. And there were posters here and there for Jumpin Heights, “India’s First Extreme Adventure Zone—83 Mtrs Bungy Jump—1 km. Asia’s Longest Flying Fox—Got Guts.…”
* * *
From Rishikesh it took almost an hour to drive the fifteen miles up a twisting mountain road to Jumpin Heights, which was on a steep, scrubby hillside above the Heval River, a modest tributary of the Ganges. The fixed jumping platform jutted out from a bright yellow gantry, eighty-three meters, as advertised—two hundred and seventy-two feet—above the rocky riverbed. In the waiting room, a little way up the hill, you could watch people jump on a live video feed.
“Before you will get butterflies,” said a young man named Rohan, who was wearing a Manchester United shirt with sponsor logos for Nike and Chevrolet. The video showed a woman stepping toward the edge. The jumpmasters checked the buckles on her harness.
“This is moment of truth,” said Rohan. “Just for five, ten seconds you must keep your peace of mind.”
The woman went over the edge.
A young couple sat at a table, sipping coffee from paper cups. They had already faced the moment of truth, although whether it was worth three thousand rupees seemed to be a matter of debate. “It was nice,” said the man, whose name was Gaurav. “It was okay,” said his girlfriend, Isha. “I was scared for the first split second, but then it was not as exciting as I expected. But the important thing is that we can go back home and tell people we did it.”
They were from the western state of Gujarat, where they worked at the giant Jamnagar oil refinery. “We also are from Gujarat,” said Rohan, “from Ahmedabad. We Gujaratis go everywhere. Everywhere you go in India you will meet Gujaratis.” Which turned out to be true, all the way to the ocean.
Rohan and his four friends had booked a two-day, three-night stay in Rishikesh. Brij Mehra’s nouveaux riches at play. “All of us are going to business school, so we wanted to have an adventure trip before we start that other adventure. One of my friends in Ahmedabad told me about Jumpin Heights. It is quite famous. We have done also flying fox, rafting, cliff jumping when we were rafting only. There is a place where it is twenty, thirty feet also, just to take out the goose bumps. There was rain, so the river had come up. There were some rapids, class IV. They have given names to them: Three Blind Mice, Double Trouble. And even one was Roller Coaster.”
“Lots of IT people fly in from Bangalore and Calcutta,” said one of the jumpmasters, a blond Swiss woman named Martina, who had perfected her skills in New Zealand and Nepal. “Indians are earning good money these days, but what can they spend it on? A car, a cell phone, a computer. But if you want a passport, it takes two years, and it’s expensive to go overseas. So they spend it on adventure sports. Weekends here are absolutely mad. We jump about a hundred people a day; that’s where we max out.”
Jumpin Heights was the creation of three retired military officers, and I called one of them, Colonel Manoj Kumar, on his cell phone as we waited for Rohan’s turn to be called. After leaving the army, he had worked for a while in the auto industry, but his fascination was extreme sports. “I have a friend, Captain Rahul Nigam,” he said. “We did basic training together. One day he asked me to quit my job so we could fulfill our dream. We spent almost two years looking for a site until we earmarked Rishikesh, because lots of trekking and rafting were already here. That was a different kind of adventure-seeking, and it added an attraction for people who come to Rishikesh for religious reasons. But we were not sure it would be safe in India. The only bungee jumps were in stadiums in Delhi and Bangalore, using cranes. But there was a safety incident.”
The incident in question was the death in 2009 of a twenty-five-year-old marine engineer at an unlicensed club at a paintball range in Bangalore called the Centre for Adventure and Rejuvenation of Environment. His safety belt snapped, and he fell 150 feet. The owner of the company absconded, and the operation was closed down.
“So we contacted the New Zealanders,” Colonel Kumar said. “That’s the world capital of bungee jumping. The government mountaineering institute did an inspection of our equipment and procedures. They said they were up to the mark, and we started in 2010.”
* * *
When Rohan’s turn came, we walked downhill together to the gantry, along a steep, rocky path that wound through the trees. The woods were alive with the loud, melodic trill of the long-tailed rufous treepie, Dendrocitta vagabunda. “It’s a beautiful paradise here,” Martina said. “The bird life is incredible. There are leopards everywhere, mountain lizards.”
Both the jumpmasters on the platform were Indians. Arun was from Rishikesh; Suresh was from the nearby village of Mohan Chatti. More than forty people worked at Jumpin Heights, and most of them were local. The captain and the colonel did most of the recruitment, and the New Zealanders did the training.
“There are forty families feeding off these jobs,” Martina said. “At first they thought it was absolutely crazy, but we’ve never had any safety issues. So these young people are staying; they’re not moving to Delhi and Mumbai. They can keep working in the fields, looking after the animals. If it’s harvest time, they just ring up and say, ‘I have to be two hours late because I’m in the fields.’ It’s family first.”
Rohan w
as getting ready to jump, and his friends were teasing him. Ten percent of visitors lose their nerve at the last minute, Arun said. The air was thick with testosterone.
“I don’t know what I would have done if this didn’t exist,” Suresh said. “I was thinking of networking, maybe hardware engineering. But this was kind of different, unique. I’ve done sixty, seventy jumps. I learned to do the jump backward from the roof, standing on one leg, holding a fifteen-kilo rock. At the bottom, you let it go, so you get a massive rebound. That was thrilling.”
Rohan leaped off the platform with a rebel yell and a “whoo-hoooooo!” when he hit the rebound.
Next up was a young man who could have made an excellent living as a fashion model. He was six feet tall, dressed in a tight black T-shirt and dark blue pants, and his shoulder-length black hair was combed straight back from a high forehead. He was obviously not Indian. Latvian, he said. His name was Raitis. He’d met his two companions on the road. They were Ukrainian.
“A friend was coming with me, but he injured his knee,” he said. “He knows India, knows the Ganga, worships some gods here, has a guru. The doctor said, ‘You’re crazy, with that knee you have to forget about going to India. Lie down and rest for two weeks.’ But first day he just went to the Ganga, he felt the pain, he takes the bath, swims for five minutes, throws his crutch away. That is what you have to do, go to the river, take Ganga water. The river has the power, like all nature, but our belief inside of us is making that magic.
“In Latvia, it’s very popular, Krishna and Shiva, there are little ashrams and restaurants and pujas. Of course yoga. It helps to keep my body in good shape. After thirty, I felt a little bit in my body, getting stiff.”
In Rishikesh, he’d finally found the India he was looking for. He’d been to Mumbai, traveled around the south, spent time in Goa, where he went kite-surfing. “But what all people do, they go there to Goa, they go to drink, they go to fuck, but I’m not finding myself if I go to bars and hang out. I like true places like the ashram where we stay in Rishikesh.”
He moved across to the edge of the platform, and Suresh and Arun fitted his harness. He paused for a few seconds, calm and serene, as I’d guessed he would be. Then he went over, executing a perfect swallow dive. He plunged two hundred feet, headfirst, then was hurled back a hundred feet on the rebound. He never made a sound.
GATEWAY TO GOD
Traveling with my nomadic friend Manto, I arrived in Haridwar in time for the start of the three-day Mahashivaratri, the Great Night of Shiva. A dozen miles downstream from Rishikesh, this is where the Himalayas taper off into the low Shivalik Hills and the Ganges begins its lazy meander across the boundless plains of North India.
Haridwar, one of the holiest cities in India, whose name means “Gateway to God,” was like a theme park of statues and effigies. A multicolored Ganga, with her four arms, sat cross-legged midstream on a lotus flower on the back of an alligator, her vehicle, the whole affair mounted on a concrete plinth that looked as if it might have begun life in some heavy industrial facility. Nearby, on the riverbank, Shiva stood more than fifty feet tall, though that didn’t qualify as the biggest statue of the great god in India. A Shiva in Karnataka, in the south, was more than twice as high. That one was shown in a sitting position; the Haridwar Shiva was standing. He was slim, vaguely androgynous, with a faint, almost Buddha-like smile, and his right hand was raised in a gesture of blessing. He had all his usual accoutrements: the raised trident in his left hand, the crescent moon on his head, the cobra Nag Vasuki coiled around his neck, the necklace of rudraksha beads, the hourglass-shaped drum, the damaru, which beats time to the rhythm of the human heartbeat and sounds out the mystic syllable of aum, or om. The first time I came to Haridwar, the statue was bronze-colored. The next time it was gray blue. Sometimes it’s painted in all the colors of the rainbow.
All along the ghats, there were innumerable miniature shrines, arranged around the bases of trees, with garlanded statues of Shiva, Parvati, Ganesha, Krishna, the monkey god Hanuman, and other deities I couldn’t immediately identify. Pilgrims were immersing idols in the river. Some of them had been dislodged by the current and damaged. A boy was looking out morosely at a life-sized Ganga who had lost her head and one foot. The back of his shirt was imprinted with the image of an eagle and text that seemed to have been composed by someone sticking a pin in the dictionary at random. LIFE GUARD—FORCES OF URBAN STREET—IN THIS PLACE YOU WILL FEEL 4TH ANNUAL DEATH RALLY.
All roads led to the main bathing ghat of Har Ki Pauri, where Lord Vishnu is said to have left his footprint. Even in February, with the water at its lowest, the monsoon long past and the snowmelt yet to begin, the current was strong enough to raise whitecaps, and the bathers kept close to the edge, clinging on to metal chains and posts topped with the sacred swastika. Even so, some teenage boys were moving around in midstream, launching diyas, small floating lamps of leaves and flowers. No matter where they waded, the water level remained constant, waist-deep. I imagined the current must have scoured the riverbed flat, but the next morning, I learned I was wrong.
As night fell, flames leaped from the camphor lamps that the priests were lighting for the evening worship of the river, the Ganga Aarti. Manto paid a boy a few rupees for a diya and let it slip away into the current. Then I did the same.
When the ceremony was over, the Mahashivaratri became less an act of devotion than a raucous, ecstatic dance party. The bazaar was filled with a discordant blast of trumpets and tubas from competing brass bands in uniforms of orange, silver, and gold: the Heera Band, the Raja Band, the Shiv Band. Water buffalo plodded through the crowds, pulling carts with statues of Shiva and Ganga. Pilgrims clustered outside the Chotiwala Restaurant for a free meal, ladled out from giant vats of rice and dal. Others dropped coins into the charity box at the Shri Ganga Maa temple. A woman ran at me with a small basket, whisked off the lid, and a cobra lunged out in my face, its hood flaring. She cackled. The endless gullibility of the foreigner.
* * *
The goddess Mansa Devi is the sister of Nag Vasuki, Shiva’s cobra, and the next morning we took a cable car—Indians call it a ropeway—up to her temple, which is perched six hundred feet above the river on a bare pinnacle of rock, like a crusader castle. I handed over some small bills for a plate of flowers, the prasad, my gift to the deity. In return, I would be granted darshan, an auspicious sight of her effigy. An attendant channeled the crowd into a snaking line, organized on the same principle as an airport check-in line but with metal fences, head-high, that forced you to inch forward in single file. There were signs warning against pickpockets. Sticky bodies were crushed up against me. It was easy to imagine a stampede. We passed four exit doors, but three of them were padlocked. “Oh, those are for VIPs,” Manto said.
Eventually we reached the goddess. I handed my prasad to the priest, who gave me a perfunctory blessing and passed the flowers back to another man, who would pass them back to the vendor at the entrance to be sold again.
Outside on the rocks, there were more monkeys than I’d ever seen in one place, even more than at the truck stop in Rajasthan, and a vertiginous view over the river and the city. Before it reached Har Ki Pauri, I could see that the Ganges split in two. A sluice gate on the east side of the river channeled part of the flow into its original bed, while another two diverted a larger volume to the west, where it ran swiftly along the ghats. I realized that the boys at the Ganga Aarti had not been wading in the river but on the level bed of an artificial canal, the start of an irrigation system that feeds tens of millions in the plains of the Doab, the arid triangle of land between the Ganges and the Yamuna.
Sir Proby Thomas Cautley was the man who built the canal. He was a disputatious polymath with a bald head, rimless glasses, and the mild face of a poet. He was also a humanitarian, bent on avoiding a repetition of the periodic famines that plagued the Doab. The most recent, in 1838, had taken eight hundred thousand lives, one in every seven of the population. Cautley broke
ground four years later.
First, he scouted every inch of the terrain in the Shivalik Hills, “wandering into every accessible ravine, valley, or river, that I could find, with my gun and geological hammer as companions.” His fossil discoveries included a saber-toothed tiger and an ancestor of the elephant with a trunk ten feet long. His critics said he was mad. Building dams in the fast mountain currents would be too difficult, not to mention too expensive; they should be built only in the flat, sandy plains, as the East India Company was doing in the south. “Idle calumny,” Cautley replied. The prodigious floods on the Gangetic Plain would sweep them away. Agreed, the spring torrents of snowmelt in Haridwar were “a constant source of anxiety,” but he designed his sluice gates in such a way that an alert operator could throw them open in time to prevent a catastrophe.
To the priests of Haridwar, all this was sacrilege. The mad Englishman was desecrating their goddess. But he listened to their complaints and offered concessions. He would refurbish Har Ki Pauri and the other bathing ghats to make them safer for pilgrims, and the inauguration ceremony would honor Ganesha, who removes obstacles and blesses new projects. This “may be received by the Hindoo as some atonement for the liberties taken with the Ganges,” Cautley wrote. By the time his great project was done, it ran for more than 350 miles, all the way to Kanpur.