Garwhal Days - 2

Karma Chameleon

It was a crisp morning in Gangotri. A little bit of chill was in the air along with the dreary promise of a long day on the road – with four adults and two kids in an SUV that can seat six plus the driver. As I walked to the not-so-crowded parking lot with a far more than fair share of burden on my shoulders, I noticed a woman in some visible sort of distress. (Truth be told, I only noticed her heavy makeup.)
After securing the luggage, I was about to get into the front seat, when she approached me and asked if we could accommodate her and her husband in our vehicle. Her husband was feeling the effects of altitude and had developed some sort of breathing trouble. Their team (obviously, some tour group) had left them there and gone ahead. I peered inside the car and saw just faces of objection. Ours is a family vacation, you see, and the kids and women make the rules.

I told her that it would be tough with the kids and the luggage. She insisted thrice – the last time bordering on imploring. But each time I looked inside the car after speaking to her, I met a sense of resistance that was rising exponentially. Finally, I curtly told her – Ma’m sorry, it will not be possible. Deep inside, I felt much less of a man than I was a minute ago. Shutting that thought out, I plonked my butt on the front seat and the car rolled on. Fifty meters ahead, I saw her husband, leaning on a vehicle, visibly in not-so-good-shape, adding to the number of daggers in my heart.

Ajay, our driver for the trip, one whom we hated from the core of our souls, for poor driving and rowdy behavior, stopped the car a little further and asked another taxi driver how much he would charge to take someone in trouble 90 kms down the road. "Someone with health issues? Just pay me the return fuel," the other fellow replied. I was delighted by the answer... Ajay backed the car to where the husband-wife duo was standing and told the couple that he had found a reasonable deal for them. I too got out of the car, relieved, but with my guilt very much intact.

The couple took their luggage (a huge one) - one strap for each person - and walked slowly to their newfound transport. I stood right in front of them, to foolishly show that I had some part in the arrangement....may be to also communicate that I too wanted to help, but...but... She did not even look at me as she walked past. Truth be told, I was scared to ask her if she wanted help with the luggage.
As ill-luck would have it, a few hours later, one of our team members who were going uphill to Gangotri the same day, developed symptoms of altitude and exhaustion. He was not in any serious trouble, but the doctor with our group advised caution given his cardiac history and asked us to take him down to the plains with us. He and his wife aborted their onward journey and joined us in the car and we went downhill packed like sardines without self-respect. This time I encountered no objection…the elderly couple belonged to one of our families.

On second thoughts, was it punishment? Or was it fate's way of taking a stance, coz if we had taken the other couple early on, we would have been in a charitable soup, so to speak.

But then, such is life, and such is karma.

World's Goodest 

From the Clock Tower in Dehradun, Prince Chowk is about ten or fifteen minutes away. It was a pleasant monsoon morning that refused to rain, so I decided to walk, rather than taking an auto. Five minutes into that reverie, she decided to show up...clad in a slogan T-shirt (if that is what they are indeed called).

On it, in blazing blue, were printed the words "World's Goodest Teacher". I blinked and made sure I read it correctly. Yes, it was indeed the "World's Goodest Teacher". I felt an intense yearning in me to find out the proud owner of this outfit... and I looked at her face and found her glaring at me.
I glared back in defiance and anger for a second as she walked past. I wanted to turn back and yell at her, "Hey #@$head, I wasn't checking you out. I just wanted to know whether you printed it at home or bought that off-the-shelf." Instead, I just yelled for an auto.

Little did I know then that this was a T-shirt thingie. So much angst for nothing. Sigh.

Meet Linguda Green
On your treks, you may happen to walk past this weirdly-shaped plant thinking it’s an overgrown piece of vegetation made possible because of George Lucas – just like I did – for months, if not years. Till the day someone asked me whether I had tried Linguda, pointing his fingers at this excuse for a plant. (I had tried what? Why on earth would anyone want to eat it, was my reaction.) For the record, Linguda is a plant that grows high up in the hills near aquifers or water sources where the moisture content is consistently high. The shape of the edible part of this plant undergoes a major transformation during its lifetime. It starts with fern-like leaves that gradually fold up a bit till they curl into a neat coil towards the end and that’s when the world takes the hint that it’s begging to be plucked.

Collecting Linguda is no easy task. In our part of the planet, we need to trudge uphill for a mile or so into the forest (braving curious mosquitoes and similar fruits of evolution) to reach its natural habitat. We then snap the round head off making sure that there’s a little bit of the stem attached, over and over till we have gathered enough. Like most greens, we need quite a bit to make up a volume healthy enough for a meal for few people. Then comes the downhill walk, and cooking - which is the easy part. Chop and clean the pieces and boil in hot water for about 10 minutes and allow it to dry for a bit. All you need to do now is to sauté it (with oil and mustard in low flame). Feel free to add a dash of salt, a hint of red chilli and your lunch/dinner companion is ready to eat – with either rice or roti.

Post-gorging, people, based on their frames of reference, have compared it to a lot of things, like palak, tender chicken, beans, or soy, for example. I beg to differ. Linguda is a class apart – it does not have a strong flavour nor is it bland, it is neither crunchy nor chewy, nor does it have anything called an aroma. It just sits there in a place of its own, curled up somewhere in the middle of this gastronomic continuum, making you wonder where-have-you-been-hiding-all-this-while, almost challenging you to not roll your eyes in delight and go mmm!

Linguda grows during March-August and is at its tastiest best between May and July, post which it slowly loses its much-touted qualities rendering it useless for the discerning chef. Plus, incessant monsoons swell the plant up a bit making it an ideal target for pests and long-form worms you would never associate with anything edible. If you travel in Uttarakhand during May-July, make sure you keep an eye out for this delicacy. A few basic eateries way up in the hills (very few, mind you) may have it as part of their lunch-spread in the form of hara sabzi (leafy/green vegetable). Unless you are travelling to Cafe Buransh, in which case we will proudly ask you if you would like to have a go.

NB: A hardcore no-vegetarian wrote this piece.

One Night at Kali Shila
Kali Shila is a serrated rocky outgrowth on the edge of a hill just above the forest cover. Looks like the claws of an eagle, if you ask me. From a village pleasantly named Raun Lekh, it is a three-hour steep uphill climb.

Barring the temple and a makeshift ashram, the place looked desolate when we reached, with the evening cloud cover adding to the eeriness. Quite contrary to the information we had received earlier, there were no restaurants or “options” for overnight stay. Thankfully, the Baba at the ashram invited us in. “Ithar hi so jao, ab neeche jaane ka koi matlab nahin,” (Spend the night here, there is no point in walking down) he said, pointing to the floor. A guy who had already booked his spot on the floor grinned at us. He was an ambulance driver, but at that moment, he was too high on chillum without a steering on things.

Baba, Barkha Giri, two dogs and two kittens were the only permanent inhabitants of the place. Barkha Giri was in his nineties and had a resume that boasted of forty years of meditation up in the mountains. Unfortunately, we did not get to meet Ma Saraswati Giri, a German lady who had made Kali Shila her home for years. She had gone back home to sort out her visa.

All that said, we were hungry as hell. The last meal we had was at noon, and our tummies were seriously starting to complain. To start with, nothing was easy...not the merciless Himalayan September sun beating down hard, nor the villagers who tried to dissuade us from walking up. People kept warning us that the route was arduous, but I assume that they were mostly judging us by our umbrellas. Or maybe because it was Shraddh, that inauspicious time of the year earmarked for our forefathers.
Huddled inside the makeshift enclosure, we watched the Baba cut vegetables and make preparations for dinner. The ambulance driver was clearly famished...I could sense it from the way he was kneading the flour. At around 8 in the night, Baba surprised us with an announcement that he will be making the sabji (veg dish) after he finished his prayers. Hoping it would be a quickie, I asked him how long his prayers would last. “30-40 minutes if I rush it,” he said. “The real pooja with all the incantations would last a little more than an hour.” With great difficulty, I maintained a poker face.
"Instead of sitting around, why don't we go inside and participate in the pooja?" asked the ambulance guy. I was happy to just sit around, but Randeep too agreed that it would be polite to go...out of gratitude if not anything else. Whatever!

We milled into a small room where the Akhanda Jyoti (permanent fire) was lit. My eyes initially watery from the fumes got adjusted in a few minutes after we sat down on the ground. Baba stood inside the dimly lit room with his back to us, like some sort of an apparition, chanting hymns; his left hand constantly ringing a small bell while the other performed the aarti over various idols stacked up against the wall, some that I recognized, some that I could not. Barkha Giri sat opposite to us across the fire in a silent meditative posture. There was something extremely raw and ancient about the whole performance, quite unlike any prayer ceremony I had ever witnessed.

I felt someone touching my leg and looked down to see a kitten carelessly walk over my lap and onto Randeep's before circumnavigating the fire. The other kitten seemed to come out of nowhere and the two of them finally plonked on a blanket placed to the left of Barkha Giri and lay there silent and peaceful. There were now seven of us.
At some point, the 90-year old baba joined the chanting contributing a word here and a word there with seeming difficulty. But it was only a matter of time before he took full control....his hitherto frail voice morphing into a powerful baritone booming inside the room overpowering everything and everyone else. We chipped in occasionally when some hymns sounded familiar.

The whole affair lasted little more than an hour. My legs would have normally gone to sleep much before, but they surprisingly held steady. Sitting through an hour of pooja without fidgeting was also a personal record of sorts.

Soon enough, the sabji was cooked. Baba handed us two rotis each. The rotis were tough and thick...as thick as a blanket you would use for the harshest winter night. Despite the hunger and the tasty sabji, I could barely finish one, and looked around helplessly to see if anyone would alleviate my burden of a roti. Sensing my predicament, Baba asked me to keep it outside for the dogs. There were two of them, one of which was on its last legs. The ambulance driver grieved for it, in between his bouts of dry hacking cough. Some people just can’t handle chillum, I guess. “Kuthe ki padi hi...apni haalath toh dekh,” (Worried about the dog it seems...look at your state) Baba admonished.

“I used to smoke chillum like crazy, cannot take it now,” Baba said. To prove his point, he fished out a photograph from a box and showed it to us. “That was me, in Kedarnath. All those years standing naked in ice and snow destroyed my health. Now, I cannot even smoke,” he rued. The picture was a bit old, frayed at the edges, but it clearly showed the Baba standing on snow - naked. There cannot be too many instances in life where grown-ass men display their wares to other men with impunity...this was one of them.

As we lay down on the floor to sleep, Baba threw two or three extra blankets at us. He switched on two solar lanterns and kept them outside the door (a curtain, actually) in order to ward off any wild animal bold enough to cross the ashram boundary.

In between the ambulance guy’s coughs, Baba rattled off the story of his life.....about him wanting to become a railway engine driver in the 70s...his experiences inside the coal fired cabin...families that adopted him….finding his Guru in Barkha Giri...his icy escapades at Kedarnath. “I wanted to prove that I could endure the worst,” he said. The stories seemed to pour out without an end in sight and at some point weariness forced me to shut out both the sound and the light by throwing a thick blanket over my head and drift off into a pleasant slumber.

There was a bit of disorientation in the morning as i tried to get a grip on my coordinates...a feeling soon laid to rest by the sound of crackling firewood and the welcome smell of tea being brewed. All was still well with the world!