Monday, March 6, 2000
Gangotri-Gaumukh-Tapovan Trek Concluding Part
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 published a couple of 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
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 group to Gaumukh again in September, 2000. Please address any queries to him at: rshah132@home.com
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Mataji
 By five-o-clock, we have made it to our tents. It is bitter cold and I organize my gear, finding the small torch that I will need to carry, putting on the extra sweater under the down waistcoat, my sleeping bag set up for snuggling into. It is too cold and lonely in my tent; I hear voices emanating from the kitchen tent and at about six, I join the women in the kitchen tent. They have huddled in there for the little warmth that Surbir's kerosene stove is generating. We chatter away until dinner time, lapping up the hot soup, chapatis and daal that Surbir miraculously produces. Back in the tent, it is impossible to sleep. I have experienced this before. We are probably at over 14,000 feet. Up on Mount Kenya once, when I was about sixteen, I spent a night at 15,000 feet in a shelter called the Top Hut by Two Tarn Lake. I found it impossible to sleep then. My feet never got warm enough and I kept coughing out for lack of oxygen, jerking out of sleep, the thin dry air irritating the lungs. Every twenty minutes or half an hour the coughing would wake me up, making it more and more difficult to fall asleep again. The heavy socks and the sleeping bag still failed to keep the feet warm. The sleeping bag was supposed to be good at temperatures of -7 degrees. In fact it was close to -10 degrees tonight, I realized later. The girls in the other tent had a bad time too; I could hear coughing all night, people fumbling in and out of the tent. I had to get up in the night a couple of times. Bright moonlight had lit the whole area, Sivlingji shimmering in white snow. The frozen ground was hard to walk on -- getting out of the sleeping bag, putting on boots, getting out of the tent, painfully difficult chores.
Never again I told myself, and somehow made it to morning, to the cheerful sound of Surbir offering a hot mug of chai and a bowl of hot water to wash in. Our plan was to spend one more night at this spot. During the day we would explore the area and visit two of the interesting denizens of this strange land -- a man called Simlababa and a woman simply called Mataji.
By the time I got up in the morning I had caught a bad cold. So had Lucinda. None of the others of the group were in good shape. By about ten, the sun was bright and warming up things. We all felt better and walked around the narrow canal that runs right around the meadow. At eleven, we were at the little stone hut of Simlababa.  He was clearly eccentric, welcoming us with an offering of roasted peanuts. We caught him in the act of feeding his birds, something that occupied him most of the time. He would throw peanuts on the wooden board of the platform on which his hut was built. Soon the crows and an assortment of high-altitude birds descended and ate out of his hand, as it were. He had this very strange habit of cursing the birds, using Hindi swear words, much to the delight of all of us, for he clearly loved the birds and took care of them, feeding them. It was more of a matter of gentle chiding of naughty children. He kept on doing this act continuously for the hour that we were there.
Later, after lunch, we walked to the simple stone hut of Mataji. She, it turned out, was the woman I first saw as we entered, a simple woman in a rough cotton sari in the act of peeling off the husks of some dry beans, exactly as we would have seen a servant maid do in other parts of India. In fact, I assumed it was the maid or the servant woman of Mataji, who was reputed to be the holiest of women. It took some time bedfore it dawned on me that this was Mataji. She welcomed us and attended to serving warm, roasted peanuts. She had two other visitors who were staying in the tents outside the hut. Mataji was a very dark, thin woman. We were told she was from Kerala, the hot state in the south. She spoke some Hindi, which she had learnt late in life, after she had come to stay in Tapovan. We were told she had been here for seven years, including all the time of the winters. How she managed to survive, cut off from the world in the cold long winters, goodness knew. In fact, one of her visitors, a young army captain, from Kerala himself, later offered us the theory that Mataji went into 'hibernation' (he spoke English well, as most Keralans do) during the winters and survived on next to nothing. He attributed this ability to her spiritual power. The other guest of Mataji was a middle-aged retired ayurvedic doctor, who, he said, had taken vanaspratha in the last two years, having renounced all family and social life and taken to a life of a hermit, in keeping with the traditional Hindu practise of spending the fourth stage of life in contemplation. As it happened he was very knowledgeable about traditional herbal medicine and he noted that Lucinda and I had heavy colds. He prescribed an immediate remedy for both of us and guaranteed that our colds and coughs would be gone in twenty-four hours. Rudrawanti was the herb growing all around us, he said, and all we needed to do was to make a paste of some dried rudrawanti leaves, mix it with lime and honey and gulp down the syrup. He actually produced some dried rudrwanti grass that he had in stock and borrowed some honey from Mataji's pantry and concocted the cure right in front of us. He made both Lucinda and me drink some of the potion down. It felt warm as it went down the gullet, I remember. Later, he gave us some more rudrawanti to take away, advising us to get our staff to pick some kilos of the stuff from the ground around us and take it home with us.
 Anyway, the power of Mataji became obvious to us as time passed, more in the form of the kind of visitors she attracted than anything she actually did. While we were with her another tall, blonde, blue-eyed Nordic young man turned up to visit her. He was from Colorado and visited her every year or two for solace and counseling, whatever that meant in the circumstances. His marriage in America had fallen apart a few years ago, and he had been coming to India, and in particular Mataji, to resolve his life problems. He was here this year on his annual visit, and was camping somewhere nearby in the meadow.
We ourselves had long talks with the Mataji. I found her a very simple, loving woman who gave out a lot of motherly love to all who came to her. She had come to this place from Kerala some seven years ago, in answer to some kind of divine call. She appeared to be in her forties; it was not clear to me whether she had left a family of her own behind. Anyway, the way the economics of the situation worked seemed to me a kind of barter system of spiritual love and blessings in return for food and other help. No cash changed hands, as far as I could see. Her followers, devotees -- whatever, brought her things and help, such as repairs to her home, fuel, wood, charcoal, dry food that stayed for a long time. Her own needs were simple. She survived on the love and support of a pious population that lived around or visited these hallowed pilgrim grounds.
The rudrawanti certainly cured Lucinda's cold in a day or two. Mine lasted longer. The handsome guy from Colorado seemed to have found someone who cured his problems. I do not see anything miraculous in any of these things. There are many traditional herbs whose medicinal powers we know little about because the big pharmaceuticals have not turned their attention to them yet. And simple love and trust may be the biggest secret of all, which modern me-me society has been ignoring. If one needs to go to the Himalayas to find these miraculous things, why, indeed, not?
We were back in Gangotri in two days and drove on to Dharali for one more delightful day.
The events described above happened in 1995. Except for one or two names, the characters in the story are real people. Members of my group have tried in vain to contact the wonderful Major Jai Parkash whom we met at Dharali. If anyone reading this has any information as to his whereabouts, or has any other comments, please contact the writer, Rasik Shah at: rshah132@home.com
"Rasik Shah is leading a trek to the source of the Ganges and Tapovan this year in September. The two week journey will start from Delhi on 15th September, 2000. There will be other journeys such as an overland jeep safari of Ladakh in the summer of 2001. See future issues of Sawf Magazine for Rasik Shah's articles on Ladakh and other treks and tours.
For further details or inquiries please e-mail him at:
rshah132@home.com "
Credits
- Editing : Reeta Sinha
- Photographs : Judi Hopkins
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