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On the now narrow highway, we saw wherever we turned a rush of pilgrims, we saw people wearing orange bandanas and orange clothes rushing to reach the Vaishno Devi Temple. We saw people loaded up in buses and trucks, we saw them in cars and taxis and rickshaws, we saw them on motorcycles and on bicycles, every one of them decked up in orange, every one of them drunk with the fervor of faith, every one of them shouting and singing ‘Jai Mata Di’, and every one of them heading to Katra, more than four hundred kilometers away. We saw people hitch-hike to Katra. We saw people walk to Katra. It was the season of the goddess. And I wondered again how faith works, how it gathers such force, such energy; how and what it does to us on the inside, how it replaces a lack of faith with the presence of faith. And again I wondered if it was possible that faith itself is god.
I used to do an unsure balancing act on the blade of a knife whenever I’d ponder these mysteries. Each passing day would bring a new conviction, which would later be shattered by an opposing argument. And both ideas would stay alive in me, pushing me forward on a narrow bridge along this blade of knife, bringing me closer to an absolute faith, but I didn’t know this at the time. Having been brought up in a Brahmin family, I grew up amidst the thickset rules of laws and bylaws of strict traditions and rituals. But I found that the more I enquired into the nature of god, which in my mind is the purpose of all religions, or at least should be, the more I came to realize that religion seemed to provide only half the answers. Religion these days is more focused on finding out how to gain from god, instead of gaining god. These days, we confuse belief with faith, and use the two words interchangeably.
On a long, enduring, nine-day road trip, Moham and I traveled from Mysore to Goa, and along the way found ourselves one, dark, dusk on Mangalore’s famous Harbor beach. There I retraced my twenty- year old journey to the edge of religious thought - it was a short retracing. But the journey I began then to understand the differences between my thoughts on god versus religious thoughts that are hundreds of years old, if not thousands, lead me to think that the path taken by religion and rituals is the path of an outward journey, a 'physical' road that involves you in the quest of god only on a physical level. You pray, alone or in a group, in a church or in a temple or in a mosque, you kneel before a god that has been defined for you by someone else, and you perform rituals that demand sacrifice and penance. I have come to believe religion involves you on a strictly physical plane. I have also come to believe that religion is an inspiration, but not a necessity, for the more personal spiritual quest. My need for that road trip stemmed from my need to come to terms with a growing personal faith, which took me to the edge of the physical plane and held me suspended as I pondered the sky of spiritual thought. I needed that journey because I realized that I had reached an impasse. I returned from the Goa trip a markedly different person. I am willing to dissect more and believe less, and in this way I have, over the years, strengthened faith through doubt.
From that point onwards, I started to look within and inside to find and to pursue god on a metaphysical plane. On the metaphysical plane, on the spiritual plane, all religious differences disappear. This is what Moham and I discussed over that faraway sunset. On the physical plane, we assign our human differences and quarrels to the nature of god while he watches mute and amused. We project our ego and our very humanity on to him and give him our shape. By this we personify, or humanize, something that predates humanity.
This impasse, I realized, was the start of a personal religion, and all personal religions are synonymous with spirituality. I realized then that the spiritual quest for god is a singular pursuit. This suited me better, because religion, in my opinion, involves too many people; there are too many people to get through before I am allowed to speak with my god. More and more the belief strengthened that it was important to find my own way to worship my god; that it was important that I don’t succumb to someone else’s ideas and rituals of worship; that I don’t allow someone else to speak to my god on my behalf.
From the seeds of the individual spirituality of men and women are religions of the world born. A spiritualist always seems to find his god, and in his tenderness and eagerness for his fellow beings to experience the same god, he gathers a few followers and takes them through the same path he took in his discovery of Him. Followers become believers and attract more followers, and slowly a path that should have been a spiritual path becomes a religious one; and what should have been a trail blaze to god becomes a highway. Spiritual ideas and ideals turn into rituals and laws, and the love for god is replaced by the fear of god. By this time the original spiritualist has died and has taken the secrets he tried to teach with him to his grave, and left behind written words that are interpreted by his followers, but not grasped, and things that shouldn’t have been lost are lost in translation. More and more people join this burgeoning religion; and the followers become the masters and begin altering the religion with their own perspectives. Hierarchies form within the core group of the religion, and hierarchies beget hierarchies beget politics, and from there it’s a downward spiral. These words makes it sound like I dislike religions, but I don’t - I believe them to be important stepping stones towards a higher calling. But what I am sad to see is the organization and institutionalization of something that must remain liquid. There is something to be said of the advantages of standing quietly over a narrow, wooden bridge painted white and red, watching the river flow beneath your feet, fast, sure and unlimited. There is something to be said of the advantage of watching – but what am I doing? I am becoming an outspoken spiritualist, and that is one step short of a prophet.
As a writer, I have experienced those very rare and breathtaking moments of dilemma when the words I write lead me to a crossroad between what I believe in and must write, and what I want to write but should not. And here is that dilemma. If I tell you the advantages of spirituality by giving you examples of things I do to share a moment with god, then I dissolve airy spiritual ideas and thoughts and practices into chunks of solid rituals, into mathematical and chemical equations. I am jumping now, from one kind of ego to another trying to tell you that I cannot assume to tell you. But I do want to provoke you into thought, and therefore my descriptions are about the abstract and the adjacent and the tangential and not the direct.
We go through a couple of carved tunnels, and the roads are different now. All around us the mountains rise – the road follows the curve of the river, and the river follows the curve of the mountains. We are riding through canyons, and the light is dull and gray even in the middle of the afternoon. The light seems almost porous, and accompanies perfectly the echoes of the flowing river in those massive halls. The roar of our motorcycles reverberates across the river, bouncing repeatedly between the walls.
That evening, we stopped and witnessed with a child-like wonder the rush of churning white water that gushed out of the open gates of the Pandoh dam. They poured out in thick walls of watery fury. Photography is not allowed, but Sumanth still managed to capture a few shots. The roads near the dam are dramatic, having been blasted and hewn and cut through an arm of the mountain. The grey, mangled visage of the brutalized mountain forms a wall to our left and above our heads to become a disfigured, half-hearted tunnel, and to the right is the hugging river. It is an enduring thing to ride alongside the gush of a singing river.
The river's whispers and its angry hush crashed against the mined walls of the highway and echoed through our senses. I remember the rush of adrenalin we felt when we saw these roads. They screamed of dynamite and danger and with the river so close, they seemed symbolic of living on the edge. With excitement we chased the road.
After you take a rather squarish hairpin turn, the road descends to run parallel with the river in a long, slow curve. At the end of the curve, the vista opens up and for the first time you see a thin, narrow bridge, connecting your side of the hill with the one on the opposite banks of the river. This is the Hanogi Bridge. We c
ame across a lot of different bridges in various states of disrepair, but Hanogi was the most spectacular in terms of both the view it offered and how well it was maintained. Its steel railings were painted black and white; it stretched into the other side of the hill like an elongated zebra. Except for hundreds and hundreds of pellets of goat poop spread across the length of the bridge – evidence of a large herd of goats and sheep having passed by – it was neat and looked like it was swept every morning. You walk down the low-hanging bridge, gingerly at first, avoiding the pellets, and slowly take in the view – you see the river flowing beneath your feet through the gaps in the wooden planks - fast, sure and perennial; you see the terraced hills on the opposite bank with houses and people and goats peppering them with random, moving colors, and far away, in the middle of a ‘v’ formed by the sloping faces of four mountains, you see a thin, white waterfall, the waters of which empty into the river right near the bridge forming a large, alluvial fan in the sand. We spent an inordinate amount of time at the bridge, and returned to our bikes grudgingly. But we immediately forgot our impatience when we saw the Hanogi Temple, and its location. The temple is built into the rock face of the hill on the other side of the river, and narrow steps, painted red and white and cut into the stone, lead you up and up until you reach the heights of the temple. We wanted to visit, but couldn’t without swimming across the rapid river. I am told that there is usually a man with a boat there who takes you to and fro, for a coin.
The twenty three kilometers from Pandoh to Aut are a breathtaking example of what man and nature can accomplish in tandem. At Pandoh, the fury of Beas is controlled to generate electricity, and just after Thalaut is a two kilometer long, underground tunnel to Aut that cuts under hills and mountains and ravines and saves a lot of time and effort. At a layby inside the tunnel, we stopped in the darkness to allow everything we had just seen to sink in. After the adrenalin of the last thirty kilometers, our conversation was halting, and we quickly fell into a strangled silence and watched the traffic pass us by.
On the other side of the tunnel is Aut. We entered Aut early in the evening, and were instantly entranced by the precarious sheet houses hiding one behind another, rising and rising with and into the hills surrounding the town. The highway passed along the river around which the town had come to form, connecting hills across the river with rows of bridges at frequent intervals. We were spellbound by the picture it provided - a river in torment disappearing into a range of distant, foggy mountains that seemed to gain a lesser shade of grey with increasing distance. The mountains themselves hiding behind hulking, grey clouds pregnant with rain, and the Sun somewhere amidst these elements, glowing like a firefly trapped in oilskin, leaving a brilliant rainbow in its wake. We stopped and watched. We stopped to breathe in the crude but colorful sheet houses crowding the hills - a picturesque, color-drenched favela - making the hills look like a landscape of green porcelain inlaid with tiny, colorful square tiles of blue and red and white. Near the river on thin footpaths, people milled about, and the air smelled like ice and morning and mud and rain and dew and wet grass. The clouds were the color of smoke and chalk, and a sharp, full rainbow completed the scene. I have never seen a rainbow spread out like that – we could see it completely, from one end to another.
There is a lot of silence and patience and waiting in a journey before you encounter nature’s absolute brilliance. Those moments can be brief, but unforgettable. For the most part, a traveler is on a perpetual quest to be amazed by nature, to be forced to surrender, to become weak in the knee in the force of nature’s majesty. He is willing to surrender, but only after being witness to the awe-inspiring aspect of nature.
In due time, the rainbow faded and we removed ourselves from the epic settings of the river. From Aut to Manali, one follows the way of the meandering Beas through narrow gorges and valleys amidst the Pir Panjal range of mountains, until one enters the smoking Kullu valley. One color dominates the landscape and the scenery – a particular kind of grey that seems stolen from a rain-pregnant cloud.
Pine trees stand like sentinels on either side of the highway and on the sloping hills, their very nettles hanging on to the rising fog. The highway near Kullu runs straight towards the horizon where the mountains and the river seem to converge behind the mist. Here and there grey alleys branch out to the left and right, and here and there the river rushes in to touch the road, so close that you can stop and dip your feet. Hundreds and hundreds of buildings un-decorate and crowd the highway, blocking the view from time to time, but you just turn your head and find another view. There is no dearth of nature and her charms in Kullu.
In the melting colors of twilight we reached Manali. Heading straight into town, we found The Tourist Lodge run by the HPTDC, and booked one room with four beds in it, at a surprisingly low cost of five hundred a night. We needed only a place to rest our tired legs, because we planned to ride to Rohtang and Sarchu early next morning. We were given a room on the first floor, with a view of the spectacularly crystal-blue Beas and the Beas Bridge, and a fireplace that was cemented shut. Wistfully I imagined a fire burning the winter away in days gone by. From my bed next to a large open window, I could see the Beas thundering below. The HPTDC Lodge is a common abode of the Ladakh biker in Manali. We saw many sojourners, tuning their bikes or packing their gear, preparing mentally and physically for the ride ahead. The Lodge thrummed with the excitement for tomorrow.
As night began to fall over Manali, Sumanth ordered a couple of buckets of hot water for his long awaited bath. The showers don’t have hot-water facility, so you have to ask for hot water especially, and I imagine they have one geyser running somewhere to heat the water, because they bring it up to you in twenty minutes or so. Sumanth was really looking forward to a shower and was surprised when we didn’t share his enthusiasm. The hot water arrived, and he lugged the two buckets to the bathroom. While he was busy, 3 tied a line of rope from the door of the room to the window overlooking the river. On this rope, we put to dry all the clothes that had become wet when we were splashing around in the river. A line of wet clothes stretched right across the room but when he returned, Sumanth never thought to question it. We still laugh over this one.
After our own quick showers, we locked the room and went down to breathe in the Manali air. The night was cold, and we were thankfully dressed warmly. The town center was alive with people and lights, and the main street was crammed with shoppers and shops. At the end of the street is a temple of a goddess, and her name I cannot recall. But she is beautiful, and diminutive, her nose small and sharp, her image carved from ivory-white marble. The temple itself is made from a deep-brown wood that shone in the night lights, and through the skill of the artist the marble goddess looks more delicate than the temple of wood.
We walked around town and I bought a couple of shawls made from the ‘finest wool’, I was promised. The shopkeeper insisted on proving to me that it was indeed the finest wool, the ‘Pashmina’, by showing me a trick – He said that the real test of fine wool is in its ability to compress itself into tiny spaces, and he borrowed my ring and proceeded to pull the entire shawl through its loop.
Walking out, we spotted a hotel on the first floor of a rickety, wooden building, and being hungry and tired, we walked up the building through its narrow, wooden staircase to reach Hotel Zanzibar. We went there because we liked the name, and because we liked the dim, yellow lighting we had seen from the outside. Its large windows provided a nice view of the town center beneath.
Dinner arrived, and I don’t remember at all what we ate. But I remember the night and the dull, checkered light of the yellow electric bulbs ensconced in hand-knit bamboo boxes shine against the deep brown lacquer of the furniture, and the four of us at the table, trying to allow the facts of our trip to sink in. We realized we were far ahead of ourselves; the fact that we were in Manali and that we had succeeded to come all the way from one destination to another hadn’t sunk in yet. We were simply delirious in the rea
lization that we had somehow skipped dimensions and stepped right into a dream.
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The Anatomy of Mist