*
We started our slow climb to Baralacha, the view becoming increasingly distant and large. A deep valley opened up on one side of that mountain path. We crossed a few more streams that weren’t too strong. Our pace became gradually slower and slower as we tried to keep up with Sumanth who was falling behind. It looked like something was wrong with his motorcycle; it was struggling to pull up the incline.
Right beneath a high hairpin turn where the road was parallel to the empty sky and the earth no longer visible, his bike gave a final groan and stopped. The lack of oxygen was palpable in the way it choked and struggled to ignite when we tried to kick start the motorcycle. Moham, who fancies that he is good at these things, set about trying all he knew to fix the motorcycle, which was imperative because without it we were going nowhere. For one brief minute, it came to life and we yelped in celebration, and Sumanth got on and rode it fifteen feet before the engine died for the last time.
The sight of a road slanting straight into the sky gives a certain elation that was sadly missing this time. We were high up on the mountains, on our way to Baralacha Pass, and eighty-five kilometers from the nearest town - Keylong. After forty-five minutes of all kinds of experiments with the engine, we contemplated returning to Keylong to get the motorcycle repaired. We also contemplated pushing it off the road and into the valley beyond and be done with it. The lack of oxygen and the beating it had taken on Rohtang had done something to the engine, and crossing the nallah must have been the last straw.
Whatever the reason, Sumanth’s bike refused to budge another feet, horizontally or vertically. We had hoped someone would come along and help us with the bike, but in the hour since we had been there, not a single soul went by. The tranquility and the solitude and the serenity of Baralacha were astounding, but we couldn’t focus enough to enjoy it.
Ninety minutes later a truck came inching down the hairpin turn above us, and as it took its time negotiating the curve, we almost laid down flat on the road in an attempt to stop the truck from passing by without at least listening to us. But it turned out just a wave of the hand was enough, and a thin and wiry Punjabi man stepped down. He had gathered that we were in trouble, he said, by the way we had stared at his truck with hungry eyes. He said he couldn’t help us fix the bike, but he could transport it back to Keylong, where we could find a decent mechanic. But, he said, he had barely enough space for one bike and one person.
We looked at Sumanth, and Sumanth looked back at us balefully. It was a sad thing to do, an unthinkable thing to do, but in the toughest decision we had to take on that trip, we parted ways, suddenly, surprisingly, and without any premonition. We loaded the bike onto the back of the truck along with Sumanth, and watched sadly as he readied himself for what he later described as the three most uncomfortable hours of his life. We promised to wait for him in Leh, and he in turn promised to reach Leh as soon as he could.
Only three of us now – Moham, 3 and I. Saddened by the sudden turn of events, especially after the adrenalin-inducing high of Zing-Zing Bar and the nallah, we breached Baralacha pass and spotted the few tents of the seasonal village of Bharatpur in the dying light of the afternoon. The shadowy light and the sadness mingled and reached into me uncomfortably, like a drink of water too early in the morning.
This set of polar events added another piece of evidence to a theory that I had at that time, and still have, which I did not want to believe back then but in a certain way I believe in now; the theory that all things lead to their opposites, that all things are in a constant migration towards their opposite states. In my mind, this holds true for many things, and I consider part of a universal landscape of laws. At that time I did not want to believe in it because I was in a good place in my life, especially during the trip, which according to my theory meant that I would soon end up in a bad place, and because I believed that believing in something makes it true, and this I still believe. I went on and found enough evidence to believe in this theory, and now it is one of my core philosophies. This acceptance came to me only after I acknowledged that swinging between good and bad is also good, because wisdom is gathered this way, and because all knowledge is good in the end. It came to me only after I acknowledged that to be stuck in a constant state of good or bad is the only real negative, and the most important thing to imbibe is the absoluteness of change.
As we walk into one of the tents, I spot a tree. For a minute, let’s consider this tree that is growing - surprisingly - at this altitude, and examine the idea of change.
How different is a tree from fall to fall, from spring to spring? Is it really a different tree when fall comes in and all its leaves slowly turn from green to yellow to gold to a crunchy brown? Is it really a different tree when in spring the leaves return in tiny, lime-yellow sprouts that grow into strong, green leaves? Is it a different tree now that all its branches spent a season brown, nude and bare? Is it really a different tree that stands watching the sky as seasons change?
No, it is the same tree.
But what is it in this tree that makes us believe that it is the same tree? It’s position? If I move that tree one day to a different place, would it be a different tree?
No.
You come back home after years and years and the tree in your backyard has grown through the years and has doubled in size and it’s fruiting now and it’s canopy is as wide as the backyard, but you still know it’s the same tree.
So then the question is - what is it in a tree that makes it the same tree?
The answer – Life, and the inescapable quality of change.
Let’s now look at a stone. It does not shed with changing seasons. It does not grow with passing time. It does not change, and in not changing it does not gain from or lose to nature, and by not involving in a dialog with nature it remains lifeless. It is paradoxical, and a wonderful irony, that the only things that attain an unchanging identity are things that change form constantly, that somehow partake in the cyclic rhythm of nature. It is this underlying pulse we acknowledge when we recognize a tree.
The more I delve into these theories of mine, the more I realize that they themselves are not absolute, meaning a theory of mine that is true for me and may ring true with someone may not necessarily be true in their life. I am learning now that it is possible for different people to be governed by different laws of nature. That we as individuals carry a set of omens, a set of personal legends and laws that must not be broken. That is another theory of mine – okay, so I have a lot of theories. But that one leads me uncomfortably close to the discussions of fate and destiny, in which I don’t completely believe in, and so perhaps that knowledge is blocked from me. I know, however - and I know this one for sure, absolutely – that all knowledge is shared with everyone. It’s just a matter of time. I believe in what Walt Whitman said, ‘All truth wait in all things, they neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it’, and I wait for my knowledge to come.
At Baralacha pass, as in other places on this route, there is a small, travel-season community that lives in huts and tents. They provide exhausted travelers a place to stay and eat; a place to warm themselves against the increasingly freezing elements. At Baralacha-La, exhaustion hit us finally. We dragged our bags into a large tent and dropped them. I sat down and stared at Moham’s face, at 3’s face, and wondered how they had aged so suddenly, so quickly. What smiles we had were frozen and slow and only half-filled with energy. We still managed to smile at each other, the kind of silly smile you smile when you know you have been browbeaten relentlessly and all you can do is smile.
Baralacha has the uneasiness of grey, Scottish moors. The melancholy is not helped by the sight of Tibetan women, young and old, descending the rough mountain in the failing light to collect firewood from frail trees and water from the gushing river, and then return, their lungs out of breath, to wash dirty clothes and vessels in the chill of the gathering gloom. It is as if we have forgotten to inform them that the world has moved on; that they don’
t need to live like this; that they can, with conscious and intelligent decisions, improve their lot in life, and to give others near them hope.
I sit beside an old lady washing dishes behind the tent and speak with her in the soft tones demanded by the howling winds. She tells me her hands shiver in the night, involuntarily. It comes and goes, this affliction. Saying this, she dips her hands again in the arctic waters to continue washing the dishes. I wince. This is the only time of the year we have to earn enough money to get us through the year, she says. So we come up here, we find a suitable place and set up camp. And we try to earn enough to make it through the winter. This has been a good year. I wince again, watching her dip her hands into the frigid water. She smiles at me and says she is used to the cold. It’s not the cold that bothers her, but staying away from her home hidden in the folds of the Zanskar range, and staying away from her two toddlers, who live with her sister when she is away, and at the end of every season when she returns to them she realizes she has missed a great chunk of their childhood.
After speaking with her I realize that I was arrogant in assuming that I could inform them to lead a better life; they already know. They know that the world has changed, that they can move to the plains and escape the mountains and escape the cold, but they also know that that would mean changing a way of life that has been passed down like an heirloom from one generation to another. It would mean breaking a bond with the mountain and the river; it would mean using taps and dishwashers instead of rivers and streams and I cannot argue which one is better – it is absolutely a matter of perspective and perhaps, conditioning. More importantly, it is a matter of the soul.
We ate a quiet supper, only talking to decide if we should spend the night there, at Bharatpur. The man who ran the place seemed intent on making us stay overnight. We looked around the tent, which was like all the other shop-slash-motel-slash-circus-sized tents we had seen in Ladakh – one corner dedicated to the shop section, where old ladies boiled tea and rice and cooked instant noodles, and sold cigarettes and toilet paper and soap and shampoo; the rest of the main tent dedicated to twelve to fifteen beds overwhelmed by layers and layers of thick, warm quilts that invite you to huddle and hibernate, so overwhelmed that you cannot separate the beds anymore, so that it looks like one giant semi-circular bed of patch-work colors. And then inside, into the ‘bedroom’ tent, boldly introduced by a cardboard cutout in the main tent, with an arrow and a jolly ‘Joley’! Into the bedroom then, where there are more beds and more quilts and ropes tied from one end to another to hang clothes. It felt like sanctuary. The haphazardness, the lack of concrete and cement, the lack of a television blaring from a corner, it all felt like sanctuary.
We realized, as we slurped the hot, yummy water that was left behind after we had finished all the noodles, that the last time we had seen concrete was in Keylong, almost a hundred kilometers away. And it felt good, both the hot soup and the cement-lessness, and we tried to smile again. But the skin on our faces cracked and we stopped halfway, and then tried not to laugh out at the mangled expressions of pain on our faces.
Twilight on Baralacha was an apocalyptic scene. We huddled ourselves in more layers of clothes against a raging wind. The grey sky ended the twilight early, and night began as soon as we started our descent from Bharatpur. Riding in the darkness, I can never forget the strange feeling of being haunted through those hills. Nothing supernatural, but I felt as if I was being chased by memories and by the past. The twilight, the loss of a companion, the dull sound of splashing water from a nearby river and the echoing call of mountain birds returning home raised a strange sensation in me. It was not until we saw the first signs of civilization near Sarchu were these feelings quelled. The mind is as dangerous a place to get lost in as it is a wonderful thing to discover.
The thirty-five kilometers from Bharatpur to Sarchu we covered in two hours, which was more than what we had anticipated. But the darkness, the treacherous roads and the constant shift in altitude slowed us down, until we finally descended into a massive valley, and spotted the first of the tent camps spread sweeping across the dry valley. The tents glowed in the night and showed us the way. There is a check-post at the entrance of Sarchu where bikers need to register themselves, which I did for the three of us, while 3 and Moham looked for a tent to spend the night in. I came out of the tent to find them waiting for me – they had found a tent for a hundred rupees, by far the cheapest accommodation of the entire trip.
We skipped dinner and went straight to bed, three of us packed inside the tent. In our exhaustion we slept in the wrong direction, so that the wind that descended from the walls of the valley hit our heads directly for the rest of the night. It was an uncomfortable and a cold one. We didn’t realize it yet, but the altitude was getting the better of us. Sarchu is a flat, flat land between two lines of high mountains on either side, and the cold wind sweeps down bouncing off the face of these mountains and meets in the middle. The tent was repeatedly whipped by that wind. Inside, we were tired, too tired to even speak, defeated by the day and the elements. But as we removed our shoes, the low strength of our voices under the yellow lamp of the tent gave warmth. And when we finally crawled into bed with our heads towards the wrong end of the tent, we fell asleep instantly, tired, exhausted and without dreams.
*
Xession: Illusions