Part 1: Kedarnath
Later that day...
The glacial lake was empty. Girlface Buddha and I had walked up a long stone trail above Kedarnath to a sacred lake on the edge of the mountainside, one of the various places to have been distinguished by the sprinkling of Mahatma Ghandi's ashes. We reached the end of the trail, and it was about as definitive an ending as there could be because beyond the lake was nothing but sheer faces of ice and rock. If you were very determined you could equip a full-scale expedition to cross the glaciers, but you wouldn't get anywhere but even more isolated mountains and glaciers to climb over. Nevertheless, reaching the end was slightly irritating seeing as this lake has gotten the shit global-warmed out of it.
Everyone in Uttarakhand believes in global warming. You don't have to tell them about complicated observations of glacial meltage and carbon emissions and such, because they will just point out across the rocks and say "When I was a whippersnapper the glacier used to be here, now it's there. It's global warming." In the lowland city of Dehra Dun one man told me "Did you know it used to snow here in the winter?"
Cue the cries of a million Republicans: "Global warming? But it's sooooo coooooooooollldd." Cold? You shut the fuck up and you shut the fuck up NOW; that's what the fuck you do. Let Ghostface Buddha tell you some stories about cold. For instance, falling into a glacial river, that's pretty cold.
Well, I didn't so much fall into the river as slip into a shin-deep creek I was crossing on the slopes of the snowy ridges whence the water tumbled. In any event, the frigid waters soaked my legs and flooded my shoes, and though it was not miserable it was certainly unpleasant. When it really became ugly was when we realized that because of laundry issues I had made the 14-km hike up to Kedarnath the previous day without bringing a spare pair of socks. Not so easily discouraged, I planned on walking around town looking exaggeratedly miserable until someone agreed to let me dry my socks by their chai-boiling fire. Then we got kicked out of Kedarnath.
Once again, I may need to clarify: we were merely kicked out of our hotel. The owner, who I did not like, was upset with us for two reasons. 1) I had been repeatedly ignoring his angry bangings on our door on the assmuption that he was a member of the pilgrim group that was having exceptional difficulties keeping track of which four of the eight rooms in the lodge they had rented. 2) It was four hours past checkout time and nobody had informed us that we were supposed to vacate the premises in favor of a group of huddling pilgrims. The man was livid and within five minutes we were on the streets of Kedarnath village looking around very anxiously at a donkey-train of pilgrims passing through town that definitely outnumbered the amount of available hotel rooms. Girlface and I looked at one another in despair. She realized before I had to break it to her that we were about to have to make an unexpected and rapid descent of the Kedarnath trail before nightfall.
"OK, we must go" she said in a no-nonsense manner. Trying to lighten the mood she added "It's no problem, we're the fastest people here!" There actually was one problem: I had no socks and a sheet of ice had formed in the bottom of each of my shoes. But then, rummaging through my bag, I remembered I still had my emergency hot-floor socks I take everywhere! Except there was only one sock. I then had one of those perverse flashes of inspiration that come to me from time to time. I may not have had any more socks, but I did have two pairs of clean underwear. I tried to decide which I liked less. "Alright," I thought, "It's going to be the last flight of the Scotch Red," and tied the ill-fated pair in a knot around my right foot and began hobbling down the mountain.
In no circumstances are boxer shorts the ideal footwear for rough stone trails in the mountains, but the experience was made all the more unpleasant by the now-pervasive coating of dry, pummeled shit of three thousand donkeys on the entire length of the trail. Or at least it was dry, pummeled shit until it started to rain. And it least it was merely cold, squelching shit rubbing on my bruising feet through my much-abused underwear until it became goddamn freezing, squelching shit when it started to snow. Four rushed hours of this torment and one failed attempt at squeezing into Girlface's petite spare loafers later, we arrived in a darkened Gaurikund and went to retrieve the bulk of our luggage, to discover that the hotel we had hoped of returning to was now full. Fortunately, we found a place nearby in a closet-sized box to sleep in, and the hotel boy brought us down to the manager to check in. "Room is OK" I said. The manager looked at me with a face somewhere between fear, confusion, and contempt. I realized what the problem was, and decided to clear up matters so he wouldn't think I was crazy. "OK, Girlface, translate this very carefully into Hindi so the man understands...."
"You must know... that I did not shit my pants... I was just wearing my underwear as shoes... and this is donkey shit... and I promise to throw them away."
It did not help at all.
Intermission
Travel in Uttarakhand is a huge pain in the ass, and getting from one place to another takes days. Besides the fact that vehicles can rarely exceed 25 miles per hour on the dangerous, narrow roads, one frequently comes to a chokepoint where two buses are extremely slowly inching forwards and backwards to clear each other on the one-lane roads without sending one of them and its fifty passengers for a thousand-foot plummet into the nearest sacred river. Furthermore, you can only even travel for half the day because for some reason the people of the highlands are loath to depart any town in the afternoon. Even if you get out at seven in the morning and arrive in your transfer point in midafternoon, too fucking bad, you're spending the night, because the last bus out left at 11:30. It's partly because they don't want to travel after dark, but this is hogwash because the scheduled trips always end up hours late anyways and crawl through the dark whether they like it or not.
All this assumes the transport actually leaves. Often, you can sit in a stationary jeep for hours at a time waiting for more customers to fill up the 'departure quota', only for the driver to decide he doesn't really feel like working today. The locals take this bullshit in remarkably good spirits and I always wondered what gave them this zenlike composure in the face of such intransigence. Over the course of some recent conversations I've realized it's because they never leave the state and have spent their entire lives assuming that this is the best you can expect from the operators of motor vehicles. I don't find any fault in this provincial attitude; attempts to leave the state are doomed to near-certain failure.
For these various reasons, it took me no less than three days of travel to cover the 250-odd kilometers (155 miles, seriously) between Gaurikund and Gangotri. The last transit point, the rather uninspiring town of Uttarkashi, marked a sad moment for this blog: it was as far as Girlface Buddha could continue on the journey. Alas, despite all my arguments that gainful employment is wildly overrated, she felt obliged to end her vacation and return to her accounting job as scheduled and not get fired.
Wait till she finds out I switched the pocket calculator in her purse with a similarly sized glow-in-the-dark, plastic-framed mini poster of Lord Ganesh.
Part 2: Gangotri and Gaumukh
In Kedarnath I walked 14km down a mountain on a shit-strewn pilgrim trail, some of it in a snowstorm, wearing a pair of boxer shorts on one foot. Oh, I can hear myself telling the grandkids now. But it was on my next adventure that shit really got...real.
There I stood, at the source of the Ganges, looking upstream at another 18 or so kilometers of the Ganges river. Gangotri isn't really the source of the Ganges, they just say it is. I really can't figure out why, because to get here you have to pass along an very long and dangerous gorge whose foot would quite happily be identified as a 'source' by Hindus anywhere else, and beyond Gangotri to the actual source is actually much easier terrain. However, for those pilgrims whose piety trumps both their curiosity and their negligible desire to walk up to 4000 meters above sea level at the end of a glacier, the holy waters of Gangotri are quite satisfactory.
The Ganga temple of Gangotri marks the spot where King Bhagirathi meditated for the goddess Ganga to descend to Earth in the form of a river. You see, the king's wife had 60,000 sons, but the king sent them on a mission and they, like, pissed off this sage and he turned them all into ashes, so the king was like, please, we need a really big holy river to perform funeral rites and/or restore my 60,000 sons to life, and Ganga was like, yo, that sounds reasonable, I'ma come down, but wait, I'm too powerful, I'll destroy the Earth so someone has to catch me, and all of a sudden Shiva was like, yo, no worries, I'll meditate over here and I'll catch you with my dreadlocks.
And that's how it went down.
Gangotri is a beautiful place and on such an obnoxiously long, inconvenient route into the mountains that it is much less pilgrim'd than the first two Char Dham temples we've visited. It's a narrow valley full of pine forests and a small pilgrim town, with little stone hermitages dotting the edge of the wilderness. Right through the middle of it all, the upper reaches of the Ganges river roar through a deep, pitilessly vertical gorge where the water leaps through holes and crevices in the the smoothed stone walls, gouging it ever deeper like a taut wire cutting through a block of cheddar. The temple itself, however is not much to look at, and whoever has been going around publishing the common claim that the roof is "gilded" obviously has some difficulty distinguishing between a sheet of gold leaf and a sheet of gray metal that one of the gods left to be battered in an asteroid belt for a few cosmic cycles.
My real purpose in coming to Gangotri was to begin the hike up to the actual source of the Ganges, the ice-cave of Gaumukh, the "Cow's Mouth", the legendary formation at the bottom of the Gangotri glacier way up in the mountains. The trail is actually quite gentle and easy, but it is long, and there are several points that would appear difficult to the squeamish who don't want to cross icy creeks on slick logs or pause and cling to dusty cliff-faces when gusts of wind threaten to blow you off the extremely narrow footpath. Midway through the hike, you leave the forest and the trail really deteriorates as it becomes exposed in the whistling expanse of rocks and scraggly grass above the treeline. Rocks tumble onto the trail with bursts off wind and waterfalls crashing down from the snow-capped ridges directly overhead carve fresh little chasms in the loose dirt of the spindly path.
After many hours of walking you arrive at a place called Bhojbasa, which people have the audacity to call a village. Bhojbasa consists of: 1 restaurant with dormitory tents for hire, 1 police barracks, 1 ashram, 1 utility shack, and 1 utility manager's shack. Just beyond Bhojbasa is the massive pile of rocks left thousands of years ago when the Gangotri glacier reached its greatest length and didn't push no further. Neither the restaurant nor the ashram had anywhere for me to sleep, and I had a feeling the weather that night would be distinctly, well... glacial.
I decided my best chance was to wait for nightfall and look miserable so that someone would take me in, and that in the meantime I might as well hike my ass up the last five miles to the end of the glacier. From there on out the path was a mere track through the sand and boulders winding its way through the massive, barren gouge left in the mountain rocks by the ancient glacier. After a while, even the grass disappeared, and I was walking amid nothing but the multi-tonne boulder scatterings of the last ice age. Occasionally I would see a carving in the rocks, marking the toll of global warming, as the scientific and religious authorities had collobarated to mark the spots where the Gaumukh ice-cave stood in 1935, 1966, and so on. These glaciers are definitely melting. Finally, around the last mighty pile of rock deposits I saw it, the source of the Ganges, the Alpha, the holy spring whence flows forth the timeless life-giver of Indian civilization.
It looked like shit.
I'm not saying that Gaumukh doesn't possess a certain majesty; indeed, it is spectacular, but you would be hard-pressed to call it gorgeous. You see, the thing about glaciers that I had forgotten is that in addition to being rivers of ice, they also carry along incredible amounts of rock and dirt, especially at the ends. It took me a while to realize I was not going to climb up the giant pile of filthy rubble I saw before me to get to the glacier; it was the glacier. Right in the center, in the gaping hole that must be the Cow's Mouth, you could discern that indeed it was a huge mass of greyish ice, but that the ice, like solid stone beneath soil, was obscured by a thick coating of ugly brown crap. And from that gaping hole emerged a surprisingly large and powerful Ganges river.
It must be said that Gaumukh doesn't look a damn thing like a Cow's Mouth. Of course I didn't expect any more than the most passing resemblance on a geological feature, particularly one that spends centuries moving and melting. However, Gaumukh looks about as unlike any part of a cow as it possible to be. The most important part is called the "Snout", which on every cow I have seen is an outwards projection of the head, whereas on the glacier the snout is a gargantuan indentation in the ice. It wouldn't look like a cow's face unless they were to find a cow that had recently confronted a sledgehammer. (A note to the Hindu priesthood: I have a suggestion for a service I could render...)
Some pilgrims caught up and began clambering over to the riverside to collect the holy water in big plastic jugs. They dipped into the freezing torrent and emerged with a proudly-filled containers of yellowish sludge. Far from being a pristine source of ever-clear melted ice poured from the heavens that many expect, even at its very source the revered Ganges is visibly disgusting, and doesn’t become clean for a single inch of its epic journey. I felt that this threw a new perspective on the last eight months of my life.
I stayed up at the glacier to watch the sun fall behind the mountains and cast massive shadows across the valley, and had half a mind to get to some serious plant-extract-assisted “meditation” only to find that it was impossible to keep a light in the whirling winds. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t see any saddhus up there. I trudged back to Bhojbasa for my delayed confrontation with homelessness. I made a point of befriending everybody who was huddled in the Spartan mountain canteen, and as the diners dispersed I stood with my day-pack near the front gate of the compound, very exaggeratedly and slowly changing my clothing in the chill alpine air. One person after another became alarmed and would say “Oh, please see for room at the ashram!”, the ashram being full, and people from the ashram would say “Best you look at the lodge!”, which was of course full. When this dilemma was pointed out, nobody really had anything to say.
Finally, the last diners tucked off to bed and I was forced to resort to plan 2, or rather, plan 2x10^99, where all other plans were “Say ‘fuck’ repeatedly.” I was going to sleep outside.
About a kilometer into the old glacier-path I had spotted a boulder with an Om sign painted on it, and had peeked around and discovered a cleft of sorts in the rubble where a Shaivite trident and some rusting butter-lamp trays marked the long-abandoned refuge of an unknown saddhu. Well, if the babas can do it, so can I. I put on every item of clothing I had and nestled into the rocks, found a way to shield a lighter from the wind, and decided that if I was going to curl up to sleep at 4000 treeless, windswept meters in the Himalayas at the end of a glacier behind a fucking rock like a deranged, frostbitten mystic, at least I was going to get high first. If a man has no principles in the face of hardship he has no principles at all.
It was, without a doubt, the coldest night of my life.
The next morning I shuffled down to the café for an overpriced potato breakfast. “Oh, where did you sleep?” the manager inquired. I answered first by brushing the coat of dust and small pebbles out of the fold in my wooly hat, sniffed a wet dribble up into my nose and added verbally, for clarity “Fuck You is where. Give me that chocolate bar or we’re both going to fucking die.”
That evening I was back in Gangotri. I hiked down that very morning despite my weariness because I refused to take a bed for the second night and give those people any money. Hot noodles awaited me, and after devouring three orders of them I creaked my body to a pay phone.
“Hi! How was Gaumukh!” Girlface said on the other end of the line.
“It was spectacular…” I said (and I meant it), “…oh, and how do you say cumming on the face of adversity in Hindi?”
“I’m at work. Don’t be disgusting. AND WHERE’S MY CALCULATOR?”
Showing posts with label Kedarnath. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kedarnath. Show all posts
Jun 1, 2010
May 30, 2010
No Donkey For The Honky
Morning in the village of Chopta; you rub your eyes and are faced with a problem of Choice: do I want potato-breads with rice and lentils for breakfast, or do I want potato-breads with lentils and more breads for breakfast? Neither, you decide, you would rather just take a shower and...HA! Too bad. Try that hustle somewhere with running water, punk.
I stumbled about Chopta's street (it has just the one) early in the morning to make sure we didn't miss an oppurtunity to escape. Our luggage was already packed and we had our daytime clothes neatly folded at the foot of the bed in case of an urgent departure to get the hell out of Chopta with little warning. As it turned out, there was probably going to be a jeep coming by later for passengers, and if it did it wouldn't be leaving until 11:30 anyways. Remembering Girlface's recent outburst in a hailstorm, I decided it was time to teach her to properly curse, especially since this would help her decrypt about two-thirds of my spoken utterances. We began with such staples as the trusty "shit" and "fuck" in all their myriad forms, and then tackled the more contextually-challenging case of "bitch". It was time well spent.
Meanwhile we began to miss having Santoosh around, because Santoosh would have driven us immediately the fuck out of Chopta. We were on our own now, and completely at the mercy of the Garwhal transport system, a mystifying and infuriating assortment of buses so infrequent their schedules are illustrated by phases of the moon, and crazily-packed "jeep-taxi" services that are under no obligation to actually go anywhere if they don't feel like it. When we finally did get on the promised midday jeep we were reminded of another fact: on any given moving vehicle in Uttarakhand, at least 25% of the occupants will vomit out of the window more than once. Buses and jeeps in the Himalayas are absolute puke-wagons. The winding mountain roads combine with the bizarre Indian prevalence of carsickness (even on the plains one would do well to drill oneself in rapidly raising hand-cranked windows behind sudden pukers) to make the roadside a de facto gutter for lentil seasonings from all over the subcontinent. Of the twelve passengers in our jeep that day, eight threw up.
Our destination was Kedarnath, the most important of all the Himalayan temples, by some accounts the spiritual "north" of India (though there are other, much more northerly places that are revered for similar rasons). The temple also contains a rock of no less significance than being the earthly remains of Shiva's fat, bull-metamorphosed ass. Kedarnath is, however, a 14-kilometer hike up into an alpine valley so we were compelled to spend the first night, like everyone else, in the roadhead town of Gaurikund. (For the information of readers concerned about such practicalites, Gaurikund is crowded and filthy and it is very hard to find a bed to sleep in or a plate of noodles without flies buzzing around it without making prior arrangements, but if you want to go to Kedarnath, you're staying here at least once, so tooooooo bad).
We began the long walk to Kedarnath early in the morning. The sight of the start of the trail was astonishing. Never before had I seen such an expansive, rumbling sea of shitting mules. Since the way is quite long and steep, many pilgrims can't be dicked to do the walking themselves. The wealthiest take helicopters, while elderly or stuck-up people of means get themselves slowly hauled all the way up in wooden chairs on the shoulders of four grunting men. There are also porters with basket-chairs on their backs for carrying small children, though all too often they are enlisted to hunch and bear a fully-grown adult larger than they are in their little basket all the way up the mountain. Most prevalent of all, however, are the fucking mules. I'm actually not sure if they're mules in the strictest sense. Their Hindi name is gora, which the drivers rather generously translate as "horse". Whether they be actually donkeys, mules, ponies, or something else, there are thousands and thousands of them and they are shitting everywhere. Though the droppings are quickly dried and pounded under the feet of the constant river of pilgrims, and the resultant brown powder is swept from the trail every so often by tip-seeking youths, the areas where the donkeys concentrate as their owners jostle for business are pervaded by an unmistakable donkey stench. You could almost say it smells like...ass.
We stopped in the donkeyzone for a bit. I wanted to offer Girlface the option of going to the top on donkeyback as I was afraid I had subjected her to enough mountain hardships lately, but she quickly yelled back at me "Donkeys are for bitches!" *sniff* I've never been so proud.
The walk was indeed 14 steep kilometers, first of forest in the Mandakini gorge, and then in the high alpine terrain above the trees. It all kind of blended into one as we tried not to focus on the passage of the six to eight hours we were assured it would take. Finally, we reached the upper valley, a stark basin of empty grass surrounded on two sides by surging rocky cliffs marked every few minutes by rushing cascades of frigid snowmelt, and on the third side by a very snowy mountain winged by inpenetrable ridges and gleaming glaciers. I looked at my watch, and to my amazement saw we had come up in just four hours. How long it took you to climb the trail inevitably figures into every conversation you have with the other pilgrims up there, and Girlface and I found no end to satisfaction in boasting about our feat to anyone who proffered the excuse. We have after all been spending just about every day schlepping up some forsaken pinnacle and were feeling a little smug at our rapid transformation into pilgrimagein' machines.
Even pilgramagein' machines need to nap, but when we were done I set off on some photo-seeking expeditions and then we walked together up the Bhairava cliffs, where there is a teeny outdoor shrine to Shiva as Lord Of Being A Fearsome Motherfucker, and an unidentified ledge somewhere where crazy Hindu people used to jump off for instant, grisly Liberation. We stayed on this ridge above the town for sunset and it was well worth it. The sun sank behind the mountains long before it 'really' set, and rather than the familiar combinations or pink and orange, the mountain sky in that direction glowed with pristine and otherworldy blues and whites. As the sun set, the idol arrived. We had timed our arrival in Kedarnath to be the night before the annual opening ceremony, and the brilliant, extremely excited entourage carrying the idol's palanquin arrived at the temple door as we were looking at the town from above. When we got down much later in the night there were still groups of people banging drums, 'dancing' around on pivots in their own little universes, and waving their fingers in the air in that oh-so-familiar silly Indian manner.
I took a look at the shrine behind the main temple, which was the tomb of the great guru Shankara. You don't see many Hindu tombs because only the greatest of sages are buried rather than being burned, and Shankara was one of the greatest of them all. Shankara lived way back in the 9th century, and was remarkable in many ways. For starters, he was an obvious child prodigy and supposedly attained Enlightenment at the age of 12 beneath a mulberry tree in Joshimath. He also got Liberation pretty quickly, because he died young in his early thirties, but not before he had penned the most influential Indian theo-philosophical treatises since the Buddha, established a plethora of temples in every corner of India, and more or less single-handedly defined the core of mainstream modern Hinduism and giving it the push it needed to finally overcome its old rival, Buddhism. So that's why he gets to be buried.
Around the corner from there, I met the Naga Saddhus. The Naga Saddhus are a sect of wandering Hindu mystics who most famously show up to all the major festivals not wearing any clothes, and are considered to be the hardcore of the hardcore among Hindu ascetics. Apparently, this is their festival comportment only, for when I found them up in the mountains they were not naked but wearing leopard-skins (some of them fake) over their loins and around the coils of their beehived dreadlocks, while their entire bodies were covered in ashes. Girlface froze in her tracks. Indian people are generally a bit scared of the Naga Saddhus, because they are obviously very strange and also because they are credited with great and dangerous powers and are not to be trifled with. I however am quite familiar with the ways of saddhus in general, and decided to test if the Naga Saddhus could also be so easily befriended. I was right. I simply eased up to an opening in the circle around their fire and began to warm my shivering hands. They shifted to make more space and I invited Girlface over as well. Some of them spoke English and we had a rather normal conversation about my country, my work, and so on. Once the ice was broken Girlface began asking a great many questions in Hindi, and from the tone of the conversation I guess she was surprised by their normalcy as well. However, this could not go on forever because we were getting hungry. The saddhus directed us to the army station where we could eat for free. I found this appealing. We crept into the entrance of the army canteen and sat on the floor, and were quite indifferently received by a combination of about a forty saddhus of various types and some fifty muscular, uniformed soldiers of the crack mountain brigades all sitting around and shoveling small paper bowls of chickpeas into their mouths. It was probably the most bizarre dinner company of my life.
The temple opened at 8 the next morning. The police were already stationed to ensure order, with the mustachioed officers holding position at the main gate with their customary wooden sticks. As the moment drew nearer the crowd swelled more and more, though mostly they clambered for elevated positions with unhindered views, leaving Girlface and I quite comfortable with a half-obstructed front-row view. The peace wouldn't last long, as we were dealing with Indians in a crowd. Inevitably someone eventually tried jumping the blockade and got away with it. From that moment on the police were pressed by a constant surge of entitled, mostly middle-class young men who felt it their god-given right to cut the cue and swarm into the temple grounds by climbing over the locals' fragile shops and any ledge with enough clearance to offer a boost over the perimeter. Poor pilgrims from far away who just assumed they could walk up through the front door were politely but firmly turned away by the officers, but there was little to be done about the cocky urbanites, whose numbers prevented them from being turned back even by having some of them shoved off the ledges with sticks. A group of people pushed against my shoulder. I turned to glare at some rude pilgrims, only to see it was a team of commandos. About ten men in all-black uniforms with black berets, bulging body armour, and folded submachine guns with extra ammo clipped over their battle dress cut an efficient swathe through the cloud. One of them, a handsome Sikh commando, has a gritty black beard to complement the outfit, and instead of a beret wore a tight, jet-black turban; he was quite possibly the most badass-looking motherfucker I have ever seen. Not that I was entirely impressed. Appearances are just appearances. Some people take the manner of the lion; Ghostface Buddha is a harmless log floating down the river, but if you jab me with an oar I'll bite your fucking arm off.
At precisely 8, the temple door opened, and all hell broke loose. Whatever tension kept the crowd relatively in check snapped. The crowd rushed the temple perimeter from every direction, swarming around and through the massively-overpowered police who could do no reasonable thing to stem the tides. As hundreds of people vaulted the metal fence from ledges and the pilgrims who actually had gotten into qeueue as directed became more agitated, another surge pushed right up into the front stairway, and the dignified officers couldn't do anything but turn back one unlucky soul at a time as dozens of others effortlessly rushed in. Even the commandos looked around in some hope of restoring order, but everyone knew that this was one of the few times it would be inappropriate for Indian cops and soldiers to start beating the mob with sticks. One officer clearly thought about it for a second, then saw the European documentary teams in the front row and saw the headlines "Pilgrims Beaten At Ceremony" flash before his eyes. All hope was lost.
Girlface rather optimistically decided to go to the back of the queue on the assumption that when the brainless assholes were finished the ordinary people could proceed as normal,and I decided to go say hello again to the Naga Saddhus, who for all their fanaticism at least take up a course of reflection that grants them the rather un-Indian trait of self-restraint. While the chaos continued on every side and donkey-trains of provisions pushing through the alleys added to the confusion, I remained in the oasis of the 'saddhu corner', blissfully discussing techniques of physical self-discipline, mental empowerment, the meaning of Action, and Ghostface Buddha's "diagnosed" future of Changing the World over a warm fire and a perpetually-restocked chillum of hashish with the some of the most infamous and elusive mystics in the Hindu world. As sneaker-shod pairs of feet occasionally violated the saddhu corner by jumping dangerously close over our heads, we merely muttered mantras, passed the drugs from one ashen hand to the next and revelled in the power of the towering Himalayas under the glowing blue sky of morning.
It was fucking awesome.
I stumbled about Chopta's street (it has just the one) early in the morning to make sure we didn't miss an oppurtunity to escape. Our luggage was already packed and we had our daytime clothes neatly folded at the foot of the bed in case of an urgent departure to get the hell out of Chopta with little warning. As it turned out, there was probably going to be a jeep coming by later for passengers, and if it did it wouldn't be leaving until 11:30 anyways. Remembering Girlface's recent outburst in a hailstorm, I decided it was time to teach her to properly curse, especially since this would help her decrypt about two-thirds of my spoken utterances. We began with such staples as the trusty "shit" and "fuck" in all their myriad forms, and then tackled the more contextually-challenging case of "bitch". It was time well spent.
Meanwhile we began to miss having Santoosh around, because Santoosh would have driven us immediately the fuck out of Chopta. We were on our own now, and completely at the mercy of the Garwhal transport system, a mystifying and infuriating assortment of buses so infrequent their schedules are illustrated by phases of the moon, and crazily-packed "jeep-taxi" services that are under no obligation to actually go anywhere if they don't feel like it. When we finally did get on the promised midday jeep we were reminded of another fact: on any given moving vehicle in Uttarakhand, at least 25% of the occupants will vomit out of the window more than once. Buses and jeeps in the Himalayas are absolute puke-wagons. The winding mountain roads combine with the bizarre Indian prevalence of carsickness (even on the plains one would do well to drill oneself in rapidly raising hand-cranked windows behind sudden pukers) to make the roadside a de facto gutter for lentil seasonings from all over the subcontinent. Of the twelve passengers in our jeep that day, eight threw up.
Our destination was Kedarnath, the most important of all the Himalayan temples, by some accounts the spiritual "north" of India (though there are other, much more northerly places that are revered for similar rasons). The temple also contains a rock of no less significance than being the earthly remains of Shiva's fat, bull-metamorphosed ass. Kedarnath is, however, a 14-kilometer hike up into an alpine valley so we were compelled to spend the first night, like everyone else, in the roadhead town of Gaurikund. (For the information of readers concerned about such practicalites, Gaurikund is crowded and filthy and it is very hard to find a bed to sleep in or a plate of noodles without flies buzzing around it without making prior arrangements, but if you want to go to Kedarnath, you're staying here at least once, so tooooooo bad).
We began the long walk to Kedarnath early in the morning. The sight of the start of the trail was astonishing. Never before had I seen such an expansive, rumbling sea of shitting mules. Since the way is quite long and steep, many pilgrims can't be dicked to do the walking themselves. The wealthiest take helicopters, while elderly or stuck-up people of means get themselves slowly hauled all the way up in wooden chairs on the shoulders of four grunting men. There are also porters with basket-chairs on their backs for carrying small children, though all too often they are enlisted to hunch and bear a fully-grown adult larger than they are in their little basket all the way up the mountain. Most prevalent of all, however, are the fucking mules. I'm actually not sure if they're mules in the strictest sense. Their Hindi name is gora, which the drivers rather generously translate as "horse". Whether they be actually donkeys, mules, ponies, or something else, there are thousands and thousands of them and they are shitting everywhere. Though the droppings are quickly dried and pounded under the feet of the constant river of pilgrims, and the resultant brown powder is swept from the trail every so often by tip-seeking youths, the areas where the donkeys concentrate as their owners jostle for business are pervaded by an unmistakable donkey stench. You could almost say it smells like...ass.
We stopped in the donkeyzone for a bit. I wanted to offer Girlface the option of going to the top on donkeyback as I was afraid I had subjected her to enough mountain hardships lately, but she quickly yelled back at me "Donkeys are for bitches!" *sniff* I've never been so proud.
The walk was indeed 14 steep kilometers, first of forest in the Mandakini gorge, and then in the high alpine terrain above the trees. It all kind of blended into one as we tried not to focus on the passage of the six to eight hours we were assured it would take. Finally, we reached the upper valley, a stark basin of empty grass surrounded on two sides by surging rocky cliffs marked every few minutes by rushing cascades of frigid snowmelt, and on the third side by a very snowy mountain winged by inpenetrable ridges and gleaming glaciers. I looked at my watch, and to my amazement saw we had come up in just four hours. How long it took you to climb the trail inevitably figures into every conversation you have with the other pilgrims up there, and Girlface and I found no end to satisfaction in boasting about our feat to anyone who proffered the excuse. We have after all been spending just about every day schlepping up some forsaken pinnacle and were feeling a little smug at our rapid transformation into pilgrimagein' machines.
Even pilgramagein' machines need to nap, but when we were done I set off on some photo-seeking expeditions and then we walked together up the Bhairava cliffs, where there is a teeny outdoor shrine to Shiva as Lord Of Being A Fearsome Motherfucker, and an unidentified ledge somewhere where crazy Hindu people used to jump off for instant, grisly Liberation. We stayed on this ridge above the town for sunset and it was well worth it. The sun sank behind the mountains long before it 'really' set, and rather than the familiar combinations or pink and orange, the mountain sky in that direction glowed with pristine and otherworldy blues and whites. As the sun set, the idol arrived. We had timed our arrival in Kedarnath to be the night before the annual opening ceremony, and the brilliant, extremely excited entourage carrying the idol's palanquin arrived at the temple door as we were looking at the town from above. When we got down much later in the night there were still groups of people banging drums, 'dancing' around on pivots in their own little universes, and waving their fingers in the air in that oh-so-familiar silly Indian manner.
I took a look at the shrine behind the main temple, which was the tomb of the great guru Shankara. You don't see many Hindu tombs because only the greatest of sages are buried rather than being burned, and Shankara was one of the greatest of them all. Shankara lived way back in the 9th century, and was remarkable in many ways. For starters, he was an obvious child prodigy and supposedly attained Enlightenment at the age of 12 beneath a mulberry tree in Joshimath. He also got Liberation pretty quickly, because he died young in his early thirties, but not before he had penned the most influential Indian theo-philosophical treatises since the Buddha, established a plethora of temples in every corner of India, and more or less single-handedly defined the core of mainstream modern Hinduism and giving it the push it needed to finally overcome its old rival, Buddhism. So that's why he gets to be buried.
Around the corner from there, I met the Naga Saddhus. The Naga Saddhus are a sect of wandering Hindu mystics who most famously show up to all the major festivals not wearing any clothes, and are considered to be the hardcore of the hardcore among Hindu ascetics. Apparently, this is their festival comportment only, for when I found them up in the mountains they were not naked but wearing leopard-skins (some of them fake) over their loins and around the coils of their beehived dreadlocks, while their entire bodies were covered in ashes. Girlface froze in her tracks. Indian people are generally a bit scared of the Naga Saddhus, because they are obviously very strange and also because they are credited with great and dangerous powers and are not to be trifled with. I however am quite familiar with the ways of saddhus in general, and decided to test if the Naga Saddhus could also be so easily befriended. I was right. I simply eased up to an opening in the circle around their fire and began to warm my shivering hands. They shifted to make more space and I invited Girlface over as well. Some of them spoke English and we had a rather normal conversation about my country, my work, and so on. Once the ice was broken Girlface began asking a great many questions in Hindi, and from the tone of the conversation I guess she was surprised by their normalcy as well. However, this could not go on forever because we were getting hungry. The saddhus directed us to the army station where we could eat for free. I found this appealing. We crept into the entrance of the army canteen and sat on the floor, and were quite indifferently received by a combination of about a forty saddhus of various types and some fifty muscular, uniformed soldiers of the crack mountain brigades all sitting around and shoveling small paper bowls of chickpeas into their mouths. It was probably the most bizarre dinner company of my life.
The temple opened at 8 the next morning. The police were already stationed to ensure order, with the mustachioed officers holding position at the main gate with their customary wooden sticks. As the moment drew nearer the crowd swelled more and more, though mostly they clambered for elevated positions with unhindered views, leaving Girlface and I quite comfortable with a half-obstructed front-row view. The peace wouldn't last long, as we were dealing with Indians in a crowd. Inevitably someone eventually tried jumping the blockade and got away with it. From that moment on the police were pressed by a constant surge of entitled, mostly middle-class young men who felt it their god-given right to cut the cue and swarm into the temple grounds by climbing over the locals' fragile shops and any ledge with enough clearance to offer a boost over the perimeter. Poor pilgrims from far away who just assumed they could walk up through the front door were politely but firmly turned away by the officers, but there was little to be done about the cocky urbanites, whose numbers prevented them from being turned back even by having some of them shoved off the ledges with sticks. A group of people pushed against my shoulder. I turned to glare at some rude pilgrims, only to see it was a team of commandos. About ten men in all-black uniforms with black berets, bulging body armour, and folded submachine guns with extra ammo clipped over their battle dress cut an efficient swathe through the cloud. One of them, a handsome Sikh commando, has a gritty black beard to complement the outfit, and instead of a beret wore a tight, jet-black turban; he was quite possibly the most badass-looking motherfucker I have ever seen. Not that I was entirely impressed. Appearances are just appearances. Some people take the manner of the lion; Ghostface Buddha is a harmless log floating down the river, but if you jab me with an oar I'll bite your fucking arm off.
At precisely 8, the temple door opened, and all hell broke loose. Whatever tension kept the crowd relatively in check snapped. The crowd rushed the temple perimeter from every direction, swarming around and through the massively-overpowered police who could do no reasonable thing to stem the tides. As hundreds of people vaulted the metal fence from ledges and the pilgrims who actually had gotten into qeueue as directed became more agitated, another surge pushed right up into the front stairway, and the dignified officers couldn't do anything but turn back one unlucky soul at a time as dozens of others effortlessly rushed in. Even the commandos looked around in some hope of restoring order, but everyone knew that this was one of the few times it would be inappropriate for Indian cops and soldiers to start beating the mob with sticks. One officer clearly thought about it for a second, then saw the European documentary teams in the front row and saw the headlines "Pilgrims Beaten At Ceremony" flash before his eyes. All hope was lost.
Girlface rather optimistically decided to go to the back of the queue on the assumption that when the brainless assholes were finished the ordinary people could proceed as normal,and I decided to go say hello again to the Naga Saddhus, who for all their fanaticism at least take up a course of reflection that grants them the rather un-Indian trait of self-restraint. While the chaos continued on every side and donkey-trains of provisions pushing through the alleys added to the confusion, I remained in the oasis of the 'saddhu corner', blissfully discussing techniques of physical self-discipline, mental empowerment, the meaning of Action, and Ghostface Buddha's "diagnosed" future of Changing the World over a warm fire and a perpetually-restocked chillum of hashish with the some of the most infamous and elusive mystics in the Hindu world. As sneaker-shod pairs of feet occasionally violated the saddhu corner by jumping dangerously close over our heads, we merely muttered mantras, passed the drugs from one ashen hand to the next and revelled in the power of the towering Himalayas under the glowing blue sky of morning.
It was fucking awesome.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
