Monday, January 22 2001
Return To The Source: Part One - The Road To Gangotri
Rasik Shah
Rasik Shah was born in the Indian diaspora in the colonial apartheid type society of Kenya in the early forties. Having grown up in a multi-ligual, multi-racial society, he studied law in the London of the early sixties and went back to Kenya, practising as a criminal lawyer. He migrated with his young family to Canada in 1974 and practised law in Vancouver till 1995. He has been conducting trekking tours to the Garwhal region of India in the last few years and is now retired from law, writing full time. He has short stories at the following sites:
1. "The Ngong Hills" at www.dorsai.org/~tjhubsc/ngong.htm
2. "At the Dentist's" at www.es.co.nz/~treeves/rasik.htm
3. "The Discreet Charm of Nairobbers" at: www.litnet.mweb.co.za
4. An article on magical realism at: http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu
5. A story called "The Display Suite" at:
http://www.mweb.co.za/litnet
He has written a novel set in Kenya and is trying to get it published.
The Gangotri trek is one of his favourite treks and he plans to lead a jeep safari to Ladakh in August, 2001. Please click at www.sawf.org/rasik to read his articles and view beautiful travel pictures of the Gangotri-Tapovan trek in the previous issues of Sawf.
Please address any queries to him at: rshah1878@home.com
Please click at www.sawf.org/rasik to read his past travel articles and book reviews on Sawf.
|
 |
<-- Kids In The Village
There they are. Ten sweet-looking kids in a row. On a log placed across the main village pathway. This village is perched up on a mountainside, the northern ridge running along the Bhagirathi as she gurgles down from the source up above at Gaumukh, past the holy dham of Gangotri and Dharali. The village is close to the roadside town of Hersil by the river. You had to cross the river on a footbridge that spans it, then up a steep path that zigzags along the mountainside, towards the upper reaches where a series of steps have been cut along the climb, so you get the feeling you are going up an enormous staircase with switchbacks that lead you up to the village at the top. We are visiting some distant in-laws of Dr. Anand, whose wife comes from these parts. We ask our way round and eventually are led into the long balcony of the second floor of a wooden house where an old man is resting beside some baskets of freshly picked apples, smoking a bidi. We are told that he is the relative that Dr. Anand has been looking for and we settle down along the long wooden bench that skirts the edge of the balcony. The old man invites us all to have an apple each and Dr. Anand and he indulge in a chat while each of us munches away at the sweet, juicy apple he has picked from the baskets. It is late afternoon and the very old and the very young are the only ones that are around. Presumably the others are in the fields and orchards along the terraced hillside along which we have come up.
Watching for eagles -->
I have been on this hillside before, walking back from the Dharali permanent camp on the river shore about 3 kilometers on the road we have come from. It has been the practice of our trek leader to take us for short hikes on the hills every day as we proceed to the starting point of the trek. A couple of hours of walking on the hills everyday has been a good drill to acclimatize us to the rigours of the trek ahead. On the way down we encounter the kids all seated on the same log where we first saw them, neatly dressed, looking as if they were members of fairly prosperous families. We have got here from Mussoorie, along the long, winding mountain road via Tehri, the dam site that was there last time under construction and still under construction, five years later. We will spend a night at the comfortable Dharali camp, in the stand-up size luxury tents, before moving on to Gangotri. We plan to spend one night also in Gangotri, at the G.M.V.N. Guest house, before launching on to the walking part of the trek.
Our bus is a diesel-engine sixteen seater that moves on the mountain roads with the tenacity of a donkey, unable to go beyond 15k per mile, sturdy as a mule, driven with skill and safety on the treacherously winding mountain roads. We stop often to take photos, looking out for eagles and stopping by at a village shop for chai.
<-- Mataji outside her home
The question why one comes to the Himalayas again and again has occurred to me. It has been asked by others. I have also been told that there are mountains nearby, at home. The piddling little peaks that we have in North America are actually not that accessible. Mt. McInley, a mountain that is 6638 meters high, is in far off Alaska, cold and aloof. Mt. Robson, in western Canada, is 12, 972 ft. These mountains are in northern latitudes and therefore the cold and the snow and the ice are predominant most of the year. I do not think that the stock mountain climbers give to the question why they climb a mountain "because it is there " is a sufficient answer here. I will deal with this matter further at the end of the concluding part of this series of articles.
The trekking routes to the four dhams, Badrinath, Kedarmath, Gangotri and Yamunotri are hallowed pilgrimage pathways and have therefore a special quality of sacredness attaching to them. What this does to them is what makes them interesting. The holiness of Varanasi ends up disgusting me, for example, because it is associated with the process of relieving the visitor of money. The priest who sits under a big umbrella at the ghats is there to put a tikka on your forehead and bless you in return for the cash gift you will leave behind. It is the most useless purchase you will ever make.
Arjun and the lamb -->
Anyway, at the end of the visit to the village on the hillside we come down to the river shore village where we are able to track down the person known only as Mataji to us. We had already heard that this lady whom we had first encountered up in Tapovan five years ago, and who I mentioned in my last series of articles on this trek on Sawf, had now come down from Tapovan to stay at this village.
By the look of her house, beauty surrounded Mataji still. We had heard that she had now retired from her abode in Tapovan at 14,000 feet and had come down to stay in this valley. We found her at her beautiful little house surrounded by a brilliant, happy, colourful little garden of cosmos flowers, which abound in this area along the banks of the Bhagirathi.
<-- Restored temple
She was as lovely and effusive as ever. She was dressed in a more elegant sari now, looked older but smiling and happy. She seemed to remember me from the last visit at Tapovan five years ago. She spoke in Hindi and told us excitedly about the discovery of a thousand year old temple on the river shore right by her house. Before she proceeded to take us there we took a peep inside her simple one room house. It was a veritable temple, with a statue of Vishnu, I think, on a little ledge at the end wall, adorned by flowers in the flickering light of a diva.
Outside, in the yard of the little house opposite Mataji's, a baby lamb was bleating away. The little black creature looked lovable, and Arjun from our party asked of Mataji if he could go in and pick the little lamb up. Mataji said it would be all right, and soon Arjun had crossed the barbed wire fence through an opening and was proudly holding and cuddling the baby lamb.
Melinda at Dharali-->
We proceeded now to the thousand year old shore temple that had lain buried beneath the sand of the river bank and dug up only recently and restored. I think there was a story related by Mataji about the dream she had about the site of the buried temple, and how digging at the spot that she had dreamt about had resulted in the discovery of the temple. As I write this now, I realize how much we all let our guard drop in India. Anywhere else on earth, I would have looked askance at such a story and cross-examined the person telling the story at length. But many visits to India had led me to accept the idea of the miraculous as normal in this land. We did not raise eyebrows at this tale and accepted it as simple truth. Here after all, was a woman from Kerala, who had, following some kind of a divine call, made it to the Himalayas and spent eight years or more in the "wilderness" , in the windswept, majestic theatre of Tapovan surrounded by those veritable gods, the peaks of Shivling and the Bhagirathi Sisters, weathering the cold and the discomfort in total, splendid isolation. To have survived intact, nay, to have emerged as a warm, loving human being from that ordeal, was a miracle itself.
Mataji led us to the site of the temple on the sandy river bank and showed us the temple, describing and explaining its architecture.
After this lovely visit to Mataji's new abode, we made our way back to Dharali, and spent a relaxing few hours by the river shore, lighting a little bonfire on the sandy bank shore where, five years ago, we had had a party with the visiting Major from the Indian army camp nearby.
<-- outdoor breakfast at Dharali - Dr. Anand, Neelu and Chilli standing
The next day we basked in the lovely morning sunshine as Chilli served a great lovely outdoors breakfast. We are no hurry today, as the next destination, Gangotri, is only a couple of hours away, where our bus will remain parked as we go trekking up to Gaumukh, the source of the Ganges.
We make it to Gangotri soon enough and park our bus in the bustling main square and walk to the other shore of the fast flowing Bhagirathi on a footbridge as it came roaring down the fall by the cottage of Swami Sunderananda. We checked in at the G.M.V.N.(Garwahl Mandal Vikas Nigam) guest house, planning to spend the day in Gangotri, where the road ends. From here we would start trekking tomorrow morning, after receiving the ashirwad of Swami Sunderananda, whom we will pay a visit to in the afternoon. After checking out the small busy town that caters to thousands of pilgrims who come from all over India by road to this spot we gathered together about four in the afternoon to visit Swami Sunderananda. His cottage lay on the same side of the river where our guesthouse was, by the roaring, gorgeous fall in the river that had been the result of a major earthquake in 1987.
Rasik and Melinda at the fall in Gangotri -->
Inside the wooden fence that surrounds the Swami's lush garden and apple orchard, surrounded by brickbats, painted, round Ganges rocks and driftwood, we were led to the open-ended meditation room of the Swami and got seated in rows facing the raised platform of the room that was adorned with a number of photographs that the "clicking" Swami had taken over the years. The Swami was a photographer of repute, and this was our second visit to the renowned man of knowledge, photographer, yogi, artist, collector of rare plants.
<-- Apple orchard
p>Rasik Shah is leading an overland jeep safari of Ladakh in the summer of 2001. See past issues of Sawf Magazine for Rasik Shah's articles on Ladakh and the articles on the first Ganges and Tapovan trek.
For further details or inquiries please e-mail him at: rshah132@home.com
In India his trek and tour organizer is:
Neelamber Badoni
Trek Himalaya Tours Pvt. Ltd.
The Upper Mall, Jhulaghar
MUSSOORIE (UP) INDIA
Ph. 011-91-0135-630491
Telefax: 011-91-0135-631302
E-mail: trekhimalaya@vsnl.com
Or:
neelubadoni@rediffmail.com
Credits
- Photographs taken by Rasik Shah.
 Comment on this article
|
