Heaven or Hill?

8/2/18

Our first experience of travelling around Nepal began early one morning as we made the journey west out of Kathmandu towards Gaunshahar, a small mountain village in the centre of the country, where we would be working at a school for a couple of weeks. We left around 5am, leaving plenty of time for what we had heard might be a chaotic and challenging journey.

Travelling around Nepal is a vague and nebulous affair. There are many, many buses, but no such thing as a bus stop, nor a timetable. Whatever route you are taking, the general rule seems to be that most buses leave early in the morning, so best to turn up before breakfast time. If you are going somewhere major then there may well be buses going through the day, but they’ll probably taper off after lunch time, dependent perhaps on whether somebody with a bus reckons it’s worth their while to make a run that day. If you get there at the right time – ideally when one bus has just departed, and the next is yet to fill up – then you will be given a seat. Once all the seats are filled, the driver’s assistant will judge how many more people can be squeezed in, with buckets, planks, cushions and carpets laid out to seat a few extra, and a final couple of able-bodied souls will squeeze into the remaining standing room.

Once on the road, progress is inevitably slow – the roads are rough and rutted, and in many areas permanently congested for most of the day. After a few hours of bumping along, at some point there will be a rest stop, at a roadside restaurant/shop seemingly chosen based on the driver’s personal preference. On this particular journey, we were headed for Besisahar, a town in the centre of the country, between the main cities of Kathmandu and Pokhara. We heard that Besisahar had seen rapid expansion in recent years – previously a small village only notable for being the starting point of the Annapurna Circuit trek, it had become a sort of an Inverness, the only metropolis in a large and scenic rural area.

On the bus we pass through endless quarries and dust, and see glimpses of impossible mountains. We chat to a Nepali man who works in Dubai and Bahrain and only gets home once a year (‘It’s too short, I miss my family’). Clusters of corn are drying on racks, tiny goats lep about, women are washing, men brushing their teeth, spitting. Out over the ridge visions of mountains drift in the clouds. Terraced fields glow with golden mustard flowers, vibrant tatties, children on yellow buses. In the stifling heat which makes me mind drift and my heart miss a beat we swing uphill forever. Nepali pop music blares from the on-board TV, narrating stories of love lost and found and denied, pensioners doze, the door clatters open and closed. 

Our journey to Besisahar was apparently unusually fast and smooth at only six hours long, and we arrived in plenty of time for the one daily bus up the mountain to Gaunshahar. After treating ourselves to lunch, we wandered over to the waiting bus and got on with a few minutes to spare. We then waited on the bus in intense heat for an hour as locals lackadaisically filtered on board, and the driver repeatedly got into his seat, thought about setting off, and then got off again. When we eventually did move, we stopped again around the first corner. The driver beeped his horn, and another man hurried out of a shop and onto the bus. He opened a compartment, removed a handful of remote controls and pressed several buttons, at which a TV mounted behind the driver’s seat sprang into life and began blasting saccharine Nepali pop songs at high volume, accompanied by their melodramatic colour-saturated videos. The sensory assault of the on-board entertainment system may have been intended as a distraction from the perilous journey up the mountain, as the rickety old coach wobbled and struggled up and around hairpin bends for another hour – but eventually we arrived at the village.

We help make dinner scrubbing gnarly tatties and chopping moolas, and meet the other volunteers. An ex-lawyer from Chile who swears a lot, a French girl who doesn’t know where she is going, a Danish man who has already been everywhere and another a German. They introduce us to evening ‘sharing and appreciation time’ (a bad sign, but we go along with it.) This is like a volunteer factory, we are all the same. Quit ma job man, want to see the world ken?)

Our fellow volunteers at Heaven Hill Academy were from all over – Brazil, France, Australia, Germany, Chile, Denmark, and we seemed to fit a recognisable pattern. Most had spent time in India before coming to Nepal, and were working at the school for a while before going on to spend some time trekking, just as we were. However, there were some ways in which we differed. We learned that most had chucked in their jobs in disgust or despair and decided to travel the world – one had been an accountant, one an auditor, one a lawyer, one an administrator – and were now embracing their new hippy lifestyle wholeheartedly after years of feeling constrained by the man. We couldn’t entirely join in with this ethos, sheepishly admitting that we’d both quite liked our jobs back home, and weren’t seeking spiritual enlightenment in Asia, just exploring new cultures and different parts of the world.

Neither were we able to muster much enthusiasm for the crowd-pleasing, toothless scraps of music, art, conversation and culture that drift together to make the shared campfire fodder of the travelling set. I left the UK with a vague impression of Ed Sheeran as an inoffensive redheaded singer who was popular among my old school pupils – now I have developed a full-blown allergy. It is doubtful whether Bob Marley will ever recover from the overexposure he has suffered, his omnipresence becoming a clichéd running joke. People volunteering at a rural school in Nepal don’t generally want to engage in a critical and analytical discussion of educational theories or funding models, they want to have fun with the cute kids, flirt with each other and feel good about themselves. And I don’t want to be cynical – they were all good people with good intentions having a good time and doing good things. But, just… Bob Marley around the campfire turned out to not really be our thing, any more.

 

9/2/18

The mountains are enormous and elusive, they’re like huge gods crouching, watching. At breakfast, the founder and headmaster of the school appears. He tells us we will be moving stones today, and then demands money for his new classroom. ‘We ask all the volunteers to donate something, you can choose’, and he shoves a list of items he needs under our noses. We are already paying 500Rs a day each to stay here, plus extra for lunch, on top of volunteering.

We arrive at school to choruses of hellos and namastes and rounds of high fives before standing for the national anthem, which one wee boy belts out harshly and passionately with eyes screwed shut. Some of the others are less enthusiastic. We introduce ourselves to the teachers, who eye us wearily and warily. I help the German guy with Grade 3, who are good craic and insist on stopping the lesson every few minutes to have races outside, sing a Nepali song or listen to their classmate recite his newest English love poem: ‘My love, we have known each other for three weeks, I walk to your village and in one week we will be married!’

Teaching the kids was one of the highlights of our time there. Since I was the only volunteer who worked as a teacher back home, I was mostly given the ‘Grade 3’ pupils to teach – the oldest and most advanced class in the school, aged between 9 and 12. In some ways it was just like teaching back in Scotland, and in some ways very different. The kids seemed delighted to come to school every day, which was one major difference, but their attitude to uniform was familiarly hit-and-miss. While the whiteboards, markers, pencils and books were fairly similar, the mud floor and bare stone walls were not. And while their English grammar understandably needed some help, they surprised me with a vocabulary which may well rival many kids of a similar age brought up in English-speaking countries. On the whole though, they substantiated my impression that kids are pretty much the same wherever you go: some shy, some bold; some honest, some sly; some more into books, some more into sports. Seemingly universally, sweeties take on a mystical quality engendering the strongest of emotions, and the possibility of doing something more ‘fun’ than what you’re supposed to be doing is worthy of more effort than it would take just to do it in the first place.

 

10/2/18

On our day off T and I head up the hill, zigzagging until we find a path we like. Suddenly the trees are speaking to us! ‘Namaste! Namaste!’ Wee lads are up the trees, hacking firewood! We come to a ridge and follow it north, pausing at hidden temples, adorned with garlands of dried flowers and straw, to peer inside. The floor is littered with offerings, wee oil lamps, flowers, red paste. The mountains tower behind rhododendron trees, the first red flowers just appearing.

11/2/18

The headmaster tells the story of the creation of Ganesha. ‘Shiva likes to smoke the marijuana, you know? A lot he smoke, and then he sleep, for many days, weeks maybe even. One time he smoke a lot a lot, and he fall asleep. Anyway, Shiva wife Parvati, she having a shower. And with all the dirt that come from the shower she make a statue, and she put in the doorway. And so this statue come alive, and is a guard. So then, Shiva he wake up and he go to his house. But this guard, not letting him in. So… Shiva very angry, and cut off the guard head! And he go into the house. Parvati see Shiva and she ask ‘How you get in? I put a guard in the door?’ And Shiva, he say, ‘I cut off his head!’ Parvati she very very sad, she cry, and she say ‘Why you cut off his head? He is my son.’ Then Shiva see some soldiers coming, and he say to them, ‘The first thing you find, that is alive, you cut off the head, and you bring to me.’ And the soldier go into the jungle and the first thing they find is elephant! So they cut the head, and bring to Shiva and Shiva put the head on the body of the guard and he come alive and he is a god, he is Ganesha!’

A wee boy in school pretends to be Shiva. ‘I am Shiva!’ He shouts, showing his muscles. ‘I am power!’

 

12/2/18

Reading The Three Little Pigs to some of the young kids. They are genuinely scared of the wolf, and cower when he knocks on the door. The French girl reads, ‘Well then I will ‘Hoooof and I will poooof and I will blow your house down!’

‘You are very fat!’ A wee boy says to me. ‘Well, you are very thin!’ I reply.

‘What is your name?’ ‘Cat.’ ‘Cat? I am rabbit!’ one shouts, and ‘I am mouse!’ ‘I am tiger!’

As we walk through the village a lady shouts from her shop ‘You are couple? You are married? When you will get married?!’

 

13/2/18

Shivaraatri. Shiva’s birthday. A huge bonfire roars outside the temple, chants come and go from within, the cow is adorned with flowers and red paint, huge quantities of marijuana, men singing and dancing on the path home.

14/2/18

The fire is still smouldering.

At night I think it’s raining, but it’s just an unusual wind in the trees. I go out and see more stars than I have ever seen before.

 

15/2/18

Walking in the quiet morning and it’s already hot. Mountains clear beyond the pink blossoms and oranges. A strange paradise, where every day is the same, every meal is the same, there are no young men, the old men are drunk, the women are working, and the children are (mostly) happy. The kids learn about the five senses, and climate, and spelling. Some of them skip to a hundred. Grade 1 do races, and I play rock, paper, scissors with the wee boy with a broken leg.

In the evening, the mountains turn pink and then fade in the dust. We play music under the holy tree and a drunk man staggers past, demanding that we dance.

Later, the headmaster says; ‘I know this a man, I know him. Many men like this in the village, very many. You must be a careful of him, a little bit…. The future is not bright for these children, I don’t know what will happen to them.’

The headmaster tells us that both private and state schools in Nepal still use corporal punishment liberally, and that this was one of his reasons for setting up Heaven Hill Academy. ‘You cannot hit the child’ he says, ‘inside him is a little man, and he remember, and he hit others.’

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16/2/18

On days when school was closed, our job was to pitch in with building the new classroom, and there were a lot of these days because, since Nepal became a secular republic in 2008, the religious festivals of all major religions are observed as national holidays. The school  started a few years ago with only very small children, and building work had essentially kept up with the oldest class, as they moved into a new classroom each year and new nursery-age kids arrived. 

These days largely involved manual labour, but in a surprisingly fun way. There was a fairly large group of volunteers, and it gave great satisfaction to form a team or chain and see a huge pile of rocks move from one place to a more useful place, or a patch of ground cleared, flattened and prepared to become a new classroom. One day we had the fun job of collecting empty beer bottles from the whole village, and then fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle to form an insulated floor for the new building, before concrete was poured in. We used the school’s PA system to play music while we worked, and there were plenty of breaks to chat about where we’d been and would like to go, and to learn words in each other’s languages.

The undoubted star of these days, though, was not one of the volunteers, but a local man named Dillu. Dillu was not an obvious labourer – tiny, scrawny, and seemingly constantly drunk. The headmaster employed him partly to help him out, as there didn’t seem to be any other work for him in the area. His payment was partially in food. But this man could carry more than anybody, even the massive French rugby player who had worked on construction sites for years and must have weighed twice as much as Dillu. He would carry 50kg bags of cement – probably heavier than he was – using just a piece of rope pulled over his forehead, and he’d do it all day long. It took two of us just to help get the sacks onto his back, but he would ferry them for hours with a smile. He was delighted when it was volunteers’ pizza night and we made some for him, and one night when we were asked to share what we were thankful for that day, the French builder was almost overcome with emotion talking about the marvels he had witnessed working with Dillu – ‘zis fucking guy! He is incroyable!’

17/2/18

Almost back in town after a walk we see a band of white-faced monkeys, just outside the village. Suddenly, the village lads come hurtling down the path screaming and shouting. The monkeys leap from the trees and flee in terror. A wee one takes a huge jump from a tree just behind us, about 40 feet high, and lands with a crash on his side. He doesn’t move. ‘Fuck, I think he’s dead!’ The lads are still running towards him, screaming, and miraculously he picks himself up and lopes off into the forest.

The Chilean tells us about Iran around a camp fire. How it’s a dry country, so the youngsters party with no alcohol, and recite poems in the dark. ‘Are there women?’ ‘Of course there are women. I stayed with some. A few. I actually had sex with one’ he whispers. ‘And the bread in Iran, is huge, huge, so good, beautiful, just beautiful.’

19/2/17

Final Dahl Bhat. Unemotional farewells. We are perched on the edge of the spare tyre in the back of the jeep, hanging onto the metal frame. As we bump over the bridge into Besisahar my bum goes completely numb and man glancing up from the road sees us flying about and bursts into laugher!

The driver pulls up beside a wee micro-bus which is about to depart. He screams out the window in Nepali ‘…. Kathmandhu?’ T jumps out and it’s the end. We have been together  every day, for three months, but now I won’t see him for a week as he is traveling back to Scotland for a family funeral.

I wait on the side of the road. Strangely alone. A bus casually pulls up about every five minutes, but none of them say Pokhara. Then I see a bag on top of a micro-bus which looks just like T’s bag, and then T himself is knocking frantically at one of the windows and he manages to pull it open and is just beginning to tell me something when it pulls away. ‘Goodbye’ ‘Goodbye!’ The bus disappears into the dust and I feel a lump in my throat.

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Kathmandus and don’ts!

From the activity on our blog you could be forgiven for thinking we had disappeared into the Indian ether. Perhaps we have joined an ashram and at this moment are teetering on the edge of enlightenment, or maybe we fell prey to an international jewel hoax and are withering away in an Indian prison, or maybe we are clutching our sides after months of Delhi Belly, too weak to move, too weak to write.

In truth, we left Delhi in early February and made our way to Nepal…

4/2/18

On the overnight bus to Delhi, the winding darkness makes me sick, and the man next to us snores to high heaven, while his wife, swaddled in her sari, dreams peacefully. I can’t sleep. At a checkpoint on the motorway I look out the window and see a huddle of men sleeping in the back of a truck which speeds off into the night.

5/2/18

When we arrive in Delhi it’s 5am and still dark. At a junction we see a worrying car squashed by a jack-knifed truck and wonder if the driver survived.

We are exhausted after the terror of the snoring man, and fall into a hastily arranged bed at our friend Firoz’s guesthouse. The toilet is leaking and as we pull up the blankets I put my foot in something squidgy in the bed. Luckily, it’s only the remnants of the previous occupant’s dinner. (Pre-digestion!) We are woken a few hours later by a clattering at the door. Firoz is explaining to someone (presumably the occupant) why there are two people in his bed. We make a hasty exit.

In Lodhi gardens an Iranian drummer comes up to us; ‘Are you musicians? Where are you from? Don’t tell me you play traditional Scottish music?!’ We nod. ‘Ah man, I love that stuff. How long are you in Delhi for, do you live here? Or just passing through?’ ‘We’re flying to Kathmandu tonight I’m afraid!’ ‘Oh well, if you are ever back here let me know, maybe I can get you a gig!’

From the plane we see Delhi huge and sprawling, in all directions, forever. It sparkles orange in the haze, and seems to rise up into the sky.

We flew out of Delhi airport in the dark, exhausted and full from our three months in India. We knew we were flying towards and around incredible mountains, but they were completely invisible to us. The flight attendants brought us curry and beer, and we landed late into the night in Kathmandu.

The place immediately struck us as peaceful, friendly and quiet, low-key and relaxed. Where Delhi airport had been hot, loud and teeming with travellers on an enormous scale, Kathmandu airport was cool and calm. After India, the terminal reminded me somewhat of the airport in Barra, or a CalMac ferry port – small-scale, a little run-down, and nobody too worried about that or anything else. The carpet was a little shabby, the desks were wood panelled, the card machine wasn’t working. No visa organisation required in advance, just turn up, have a chat and get a stamp in your passport. Friends who later joined us in Nepal fresh from Scotland reported feeling similarly upon arriving in Kathmandu as we did about Delhi – but coming from Delhi, Kathmandu was a peaceful haven.

It was well after midnight when we finally arrived at the Airbnb house we had booked, staying with a family in the north of the city, but one of the family’s daughters, who had to get up for college at 5am, came out to welcome us anyway. It was only herself and her granny living in the house at the time, and the next morning they filled us in on a bit of history over breakfast, both family and Nepali. The granny came from a small village further west in Nepal, but her son had moved to Kathmandu to work as a journalist (currently posted in Myanmar, where the rest of the family were during our visit), and she had come to help look after the children. While Kathmandu has grown rapidly, and is still doing so, 85% of the population of Nepal still live in small towns and rural villages. Country living is still very much the norm, and everyone who lives in the city has family connections in the farms or mountains. They were wonderful hosts, despite the granny not knowing any English whatsoever – she got her message across with gestures and taught us our first few words of Nepali, while her granddaughter Samu’s English was completely fluent. They offered to make dinner for us as well, which is how we got our first taste of Dal Bhat, a constant presence during our time in Nepal.

6/2/18

We walk into town, but we can’t get across the busy street. Two colourfully dressed grannies grab us and pull us over, laughing on the other side.

Everything is covered in dust. It swirls up from the road in great towers, everyone is coughing and spluttering and spitting. It’s like walking back in time. Women with wrinkled faces sell dried fish by the side of the road. Carts of vegetables – peas, cauliflowers, tatties, onions, garlic, orange ginger, wee carrots, great brown tubers, long white courgettes. Shops selling gold Buddhas, and bronze pots and pans, rope and every outdoorsy and hippie item imaginable, all under a canopy of Buddhist prayer flags. 

Smells waft along with the dust. The dank smell of the ‘river’ – stale washing powder, plastic, sewage, incense, fumes, spices, fresh meat, dead and alive chickens, fresh and dried fish.

A man kisses his toddler’s hand over and over. Schoolgirls take selfies at the temples. A sadhu nods to us. Dogs sleep in piles of rubble, on the pavement, at Buddha’s feet. A scraggy white cat, pink blossom, knackered looking buskers scratching away on a sarangi, women selling orange flowers, lighting oil lamps, deities on wee shrines everywhere smeared with red and orange, huge mounds of clay pots, great tangles of electricity wires. 

Although it shouldn’t be remarkable, it was refreshing to see women out and about everywhere we went – working in shops and cafes, chatting and laughing with each other, riding mopeds, getting their shopping. After wandering the streets of Kathmandu for some time, we made our way towards Durbar Square. As Samu had explained to us, this was the traditional royal palace area of the old city, until Nepal had got rid of its monarchy, only ten years previously, after a long civil war. Now Kathmandu Durbar Square is a UNESCO world heritage site, and one of the main attractions in the city, but it suffered huge damage in the massive earthquake of 2015, and restoration work is still very much in progress. The richer and brasher nations of the world seemed to be waging a passive-aggressive aid war in the hoardings and scaffolds that surrounded the ravaged ancient temples – ‘US AID – proudly restored by the American People’, ‘Restoration work carried out by the Chinese Government’, and that sort of thing. The UK government appeared to be sponsoring a small information board. We saw huge fierce stone gods, a Hanuman statue smeared in oily orange, tiny fairy houses built into the roots of an old tree, risqué carvings in the eaves of the temples, incredibly detailed wooden door and window frames, bigger than the doors and windows themselves. A beautiful place, with its sense of majesty after centuries of veneration doggedly holding on, but deeply damaged by the disasters which had befallen it in more recent times.

17/3/18

After travelling through Nepal for over a month we return to Kathmandu just in time to see the first ever Nepali St Patrick’s Day parade! Five girls from Northern Ireland and one older man, marching along shouting “Namaste St Paddy’s Day!” Later we buy the most extortionate Guinness of all time and chat to a guide we met while trekking about being a porter and working in the mountains.

18/3/18

A friend of a friend takes us for an authentic Nepali breakfast in a wee shack full of old ladies spitting. We have spicy tatties and chickpeas, and a sweet deep fried battered thing wrapped in fried bread. It’s beyond sweet, like eating a toffee as a big as your hand. And tea. Stupas, and prayer flags and dogs, and Buddhas, and monkeys. It’s hot. We walk over a grey excuse for a river, filled with rubbish. ‘When I was young this river was beautiful clean’ the friend of a friend mentions. ‘And from the top of the hill you could see the whole Kathmandu valley, the hill was covered in trees. But now, with the dust…’ We walk down the far side of the hill to a dirty green pool surrounded by monkeys. It’s a monkey swimming pool! The wee monkeys fling themselves in from all sides, emerging gleaming and sodden and skinny, scrambling back out, hauled up by bigger monkeys before flinging themselves in again. Just for the fun of it. One tiny monkey clings nervously to the edge of the pool and dips one foot in to test the water. Dogs lie in the shade.

We flitted among the cafes and restaurants of Thamel, surrounded on all sides by the same rotating items of tourist tat – felted trinkets, embroidered bags and cushion covers, supposedly marked-down outdoor gear, commemorative t-shirts, incense, thangkas, tea, hats – and above, by the ever-present Buddhist bunting, the prayer flags which seemed so reassuring and important when spotted high up on a mountain top, but here were simply an aesthetic indicator that you were deep in tourist territory.

On the day our friends left, we went to visit Boudhanath stupa, one of the largest Buddhist stupas in the world, on the outskirts of the city. As in Dharamshala, large numbers of Tibetan refugees had settled here, bringing their religious devotion as well as their food, clothes and languages. The huge pure white dome of the stupa is topped by the firm but benevolent gaze of the Buddha eyes, which watch you as you complete the mile-long kora – the clockwise procession made around Buddhist holy sites. We stopped to see the temple behind the stupa, bringing sights, sounds and smells which took us back to our first days in Dharamshala and our nunnery. Monks hummed and chanted, banged drums and cymbals and blew conches, blessing the marriage of a young couple who sat in the centre of the temple. Huge golden statues of Buddhas and deities stood around the edge of the temple, in front of bookcases of holy texts wrapped in bright cloth. Offerings were piled at the back of the room, while detailed murals depicting teachings lined the walls around the door. Now we were nearing the end of our time in India and Nepal, and it seemed fitting that this place felt so familiar to us – without ever visiting Tibet, the country and its culture had proved to be a constant presence in our travels throughout India and Nepal. The closest we would come to it would be a glimpse of some snowy peaks during a trek, when we were within a few miles of the border. Here in Kathmandu it was present once again.

20/3/18

T is ill.

21/3/18

So am I. 

We eat orange mentos and stare at the ceiling, trying not to be sick. I go into Thamel in search of plain food. All the streets look the same. I sit on the side of the road as the dust swirls and the hippies amble by. A man throws a jug of water onto the dust. Another tries to sell me mini chess set and a banana., In the guesthouse we spend hours in the bathroom where the water from the tap runs brown, or sometimes yellow. In the end, still feeling wobbly, we decide to go back to the mountains.

8/4/18

After spending a few weeks in the mountains, we return to Kathmandu for a couple of days, before flying back to Europe. We walk to Pathan Durbar Square. Intricate door jambs, smeared ganeshas, monkeys posing, tourists in lanyards talking loudly, piles of rubble, an enormous bull bent in worship, dust, a cat the colour of dust.

Walking through Thamel a man with a pock marked face jumps in front of me. ‘You buy flute? Yes, very nice flute, flute, flute, flute?’ I actually do want to buy a flute. He has various bamboo and wooden flutes in a satchel and I try some. Naively, I ask if he has one in D. He grins. ‘D? yes, yes, D very good. This D and this.’ He hands me two random flutes and I look suspicious. The man selling mini chess sets appears from nowhere. ‘Oh yes, this D’ the chess man agrees. I play The Bag of Spuds and the two men clap and we haggle and I walk away with one bamboo flute and one wooden flute decorated with silver bands, and a wee toggle on the top end.

Of course, when we check on the tuner, it turns out both the flutes are in A. ‘Feck, what use are two flutes in A?!’ As we are walking home the man pounces on us again – ‘You buy flute? Nice flute!’ ‘I already bought a flute from you! And I need to swap it!’ I try every flute in the bag as the man looks on bemused and emerge puffed and triumphant with a huge bamboo flute in D!

9/4/18

Last day in Kathmandu. Walking to Swayambu. Headless chickens and chickens with heads, glittering slimy fish piled high, red bundles of innards, bones, bones, bones, sandals, sparkly dresses, men with wooden trolleys, smoking, one light illuminating padlocks, keys, pencil cases, toilet plungers, brushes, a lady selling tatties and garlic, men on bikes with watermelons and mangos, shops full of shimmering fabric, ladies discussing saris, a man with a moustache buying a bag of meat, a hopeful dog. Dusk at the monkey temple. A man feeding biscuits to the monkeys and puppies. Old cailleachs lighting candles, young lads doing press ups, monkeys swinging on prayer flags, tourists taking ‘serious’ photos, locals tossing coins into the middle of a pool, dogs stretched out under the stupa, the sun setting in the dust, candles lit in prayer. 

 

Agra: Egrets and Eejits

10/1/18

We found our coach to Agra, although not before unintentionally filling one of our final India-bingo slots. While C went to look for the petrol station that was to be our bus stop, I spotted three lads riding an elephant down the motorway. With tuk-tuks and vans swarming around them, they ambled over behind me to their own refuelling stop, a patch of grass.

After being politely informed by a very nice hotel two minutes from the Taj that in fact we were not booked in with them, but with another hotel by the same name, and then after a bit of a hunt to find this less prestigious address, we got there. Then we went back out for a wander. The street sellers were the most annoying we’d encountered, but we were also getting very good at ignoring them. We took a side road down past the Taj Mahal on a whim, arriving at the river behind it just as the sun began to set. It turned out to be one of the all-time great spontaneous detours. We ignored a big threatening looking gate to get down to the bit of temple and waste-land by the river, and then talked to a boat man who at any other time we probably would have ignored.

By the shores of the Yamuna rubbish is enmired in sludge, glum egrets perch on coiled barbed wire, pink and orange petals stick to the mud and float out into the still water, swallows in their thousands are reflected like insects in the river, the sun is setting behind the Taj Mahal. We wander over to a man bailing his boat, agree on a price and hop in. It’s made of metal lined with wood, he steers with a long bamboo pole, a wee shrine at the stern, a dubious packet of bread at the bow. There’s no one else on the river. The Taj Mahal is magic reflected. It feels good to be on the water. The boatman points down the river ‘Delhi that way. This good?’ A flock of egrets take off, a fish rises, a puppy prances along the shore, three peahens scuttle by, oystercatcher-like-birds wade in the water. It’s calm, and quiet. Relief. We have seen it! We have seen the Taj Mahal from a wee boat in the middle of the river at sunset. I mean hell, can it get much better than this?!

We sit on the steps to the wee shrine as bells ring, chanting to Ram comes in bursts. An agile brown puppy leps up the steps and eats a bone under a bicycle, a monkey flees with a chapati in its mouth, a lady all in shawls goes down to the river and feeds the dogs and the birds, another monkey wipes seeds into little piles then bends down and nibbles up the lot.

After this, blissed out, we wandered into an excellent dhaba (Hindi for, roughly, “greasy spoon”). Only a few hundred metres from the Taj, this place had a sort of invisibility cloak by lacking any garish lighting, English writing or aggressive touts, and only Indian people sitting at its terrace. The food was incredibly cheap and incredibly good, and the people incredibly friendly. The whole evening showed that, even at one of the most popular, touristy attractions in the world, with a bit of pluck and a bit of luck you can have a genuinely great time. Up early tomorrow to go inside the Taj itself!

11/1/18

Well, the pluck-luck combination paid off again today! In the end we dismissed the plan to get up early and queue for several hours. Instead, we slept in and then went for brunch, eventually arriving at the gate around 11am. There was barely a queue! The poor Germans we met in Amritsar advised us to arrive before 6 and queue for five or six hours as they had. Even then, they said, it had been too smoggy to see much and the main mausoleum had been closed. We spent 15 minutes queuing and then were in, it was a warm, sunny day, busy but not stupidly so, access all areas. We even managed to surreptitiously pirate a tour guide’s spiel by tactically choosing the right bench. So we spent a lovely few hours there marvelling – it’s absolutely beautiful, but there isn’t a whole lot more you can say about it!

It’s busy, everyone is in their finery, sparkly hats and floppy hats and big heels, pressed trousers and silk dresses glittering with sequins and golden thread. I wait for T to get through security, and chat to an Australian lady who camped through India in ’78, ‘there was none of this then, well I don’t remember it, I only remember the Taj.’ She tells me her two sons are currently doing a rickshaw race for charity, and accidentally scuffed some paint off a lorry, the driver of which then slapped them around the head and demanded $1,000, they gave him Rs2,000 and fled. ‘But if you’re ever bored, google rickshaw race, it’s crazy!’ And with that she left with her husband Pat.

“I aways say, it’s the most beautiful building in the world. Our poet Tagore he called it ‘a teardrop on the cheek of eternity.’ It was built by Emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his third wife Mumtaz Mahal (the other two wives only political marriages, no children) after she died giving birth to their 14th child. (8 died very young, 6 survived) From the behind, from the river, it’s 91 metres high, and I am telling you it took 20,000 men 20 years to complete. It is made of white and yellow marble, from near Jaipur. After Shah Jahan died in captivity, this was in Agra Fort, his body was floated down the Yamuna river and buried next to his wife.” A guide pauses for breath, his group look dazed “I always tell people, I say, it’s very easy, you see, it is a building of love, he really loved her, yes arranged marriage, but 95% of arranged marriages they work out, love marriages only 25%. Nowadays the towers are closed, this is because in 1996 two young couple from Chennai went up to the top and throw themselves right into the river. You see?” He pauses again “The outside it is decorated with floral patterns and different sacred scripts from the Quran, it is identical on all the sides, but different script.’

It is mesmerising, from every angle, perfect whichever way you look. Its symmetry is calming; domes, riddled with geometrical stars, curving inwards and outwards, lotus and jasmine flowers clamber up its walls in great sweeping arches of semi-precious stones, a crescent moon sacred in both Islam and Hinduism perched on the roof. It is perfect as a whole, and each tiny detail is wholly perfect.

At sunset we walk amongst dusty dunes, body swerving amorous couples. We see peacocks courting and the Taj Mahal over a sea of trees and a hoopoe scrambling in the dirt.

12/1/18

The Taj Mahal is closed on a Friday. The incessant shopkeepers and tuk-tuk men read newspapers by the side of the street. It’s quiet. Lines of dogs stretched out, sleeping in the sun. We walk down a road for the craic. Through a wee village where a toddler in dirty pants holds a massive knife in front of his face, two tiny baby goats nibble by the side of the road, everybody stares and shouts ‘hello!’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘We’re walking, just walking’ This is strange, but accepted.

On a bit and two men on a motorbike pull over, the motorbike man weaves slowly next to us. He decides ‘Scotland’ means ‘England’ and seems happy with that. We visit a Ram temple with him, but cannae go in because of the dreaded shoes, he insists on some selfies. Then he points down a wee lane – ‘this river, this back Taj Mahal, this photo, photo!’ Up the lane is a little village, the man tries to get his wife to take pictures with us, but she is fully veiled and not inclined and neither are we. Wee boys half dressed scamper after us, a very pregnant goat munches next to a man selling puris. A young girl in pigtails is making earrings with her Granny. Down a sandy path and we are at the Yamuna and the Taj is reflected in the still water and it’s still beautiful. Suddenly, something hits me on the neck, it’s just a bit of a stick, but I don’t know who has thrown it, and there’s a big group of men and boys walking towards us down the river, the motorbike man shouts at someone, but I don’t wait to see and we walk quickly back up the path, past the smiling pigtail girl and her Granny and the wee boys washing and the goat still munching, past the great turf-like mounds of cow pats drying, and thatched roofs. In the next village we are accosted by wee boys and bigger boys again, one comes up to me and says ‘nice boobs’. I tell him to ‘fuck off’ and he does. Everywhere men stare and women don’t. Every day I try not to be prejudiced against Indian men, but every day my prejudices are affirmed.

Fed up of being on edge and on guard all the time, we plodded back down to the relative peace and safety of the river bank from the first evening. We sat there for over an hour, barely talking or moving, calming down and observing the behaviour and rhythms of the animals – shoogles for supremacy among the rubbish-dump dogs, monkeys and cows, both passive-aggressive and aggressive-aggressive; cyclones of birds over the river; groups of buffalo and goats gently grazing on the far side. Finally it was time to go – packing up the bags again, stuffing everything into a tiny tuk-tuk, and waiting once more for an overnight train to take us to a new part of the country.

A Close Shave in Delhi

5/1/18

First train to Delhi cancelled. Second train delayed by nine hours. We pile into the unreserved carriage. People sit on the luggage racks above us, in the aisle, on each other, anywhere. The lady next to us gives us some peanuts. The man from Bombay opposite says in Gujarat they only eat salads and that’s why they are so pale, in Chennai they eat lots of masala and that’s why they are called ‘black diamonds’ (or does he say ‘demons’?). He laughs uproariously and tells us he has just returned from Russia where he was commissioning a gold mine. He says Russian girls are very beautiful and Indian wives are becoming more demanding.

At every stop chai lads pace up and down the train rumbling ‘chai chai chai’ ‘pane a bottle pane a bottle’ ‘puri puri puri’ ‘samose samose samose’. We get what turns out to be a deep fried sandwich and a wee paper poke of spiced peanuts with raw onion and lime.

Two bodachs sit beside us, one wrapped in a massive shawl, the other in an orange turban with a massive spear. The spear man has wild eyes, and stares at me fiercely. I stare back. A girl in an orange jumper and green dress comes onto the train and pushes people sitting in the aisle out of the way so she can do a handstand. A pregnant lady all in red smiles at her. As we get closer to Delhi more and more people pile on. The Bombay man sees us watching the incoming crowds, shouts ‘India is the second biggest population in the world!’ and laughs heartily again.

Out the window I see giant puddles of water and rubbish, street pigs with ravens on their backs, cricket games, fires, a huge Nestle factory, dirty egrets, a man walking amongst yellow mustard seed fields, cows on the railway tracks. There is a latent smell of pee everywhere.

The train pulls into Delhi. A kind Sikh man plonks my rucksack onto my back and to shouts of ‘cello cello cello’ we are out!

Motorway elephant and palm squirrels – wildlife of Delhi

6/1/18

A long, long walk through Delhi today. Choosing one of the biggest cities in the world to indulge the flaneur’s urge might not be the best idea, but we saw some amazing places. First to Connaught Place, the central spot of New Delhi, its wide shopping arcades crammed with brand names, hawkers and wealthy tourists – and we even spotted a Marks and Sparks. Then, more authentically, to our first Baoli, or step-well, a deep chasm cut into the earth hundreds of years ago until they hit ground water, then elaborately decorated with natural motifs and religious icons. They are dramatically beautiful, inverted buildings, and sure to provide a cool place to shelter from the heat of the day if you can find one!

After this we visited Jantar Mantar, another impressive piece of building which would be baffling if you weren’t told what it was. To walk around it feels a little like being in a surrealist painting or MC Escher print – staircases lead to the sky and then stop dead; shadows overlap as they fall through the latticed bars of a circular tower with no door but hundreds of windows. In fact, before modern mechanical instruments were invented, this was a state of the art observatory, designed and built with painstaking precision to measure and calculate the positions, paths, sizes and speeds of stars and planets.

From here we walked past the massive, sprawling Indian parliament and associated ministries, and then along a huge boulevard to the India Gate, which I assume must have been named after the Indian restaurant round the corner from my grandparents’ house. This section of the walk was uncannily like walking along the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, right down to the eternal flame and armed guards around the monument.

So far, my walking masterplan had been a success, but hubris got the better of me; I didn’t know when to stop, and it became a case of walking too long in the sun, rather than flying too close to it. The next destination was the marble shrine to Hazrat Nizamuddin, a Sufi saint. From the map it looked like it was just down one straight road, but this turned out to be several miles long and a busy dual carriageway with only intermittent pavement and no safe way to cross. The shrine is full of the perfume of flowers, elegant decoration and holy chanting, but by the time we got there we were dusty and knackered, and C was rightly unimpressed at the exclusion of women from the innermost shrine. We left quickly and dispirited, hardly even buoyed by the now-familiar relief of finding your shoes still where you left them. To top it all off, in my desire for a bit of comfort, I neglected to haggle for the tuk-tuk we took to Lodhi Gardens, after we had agreed we would ‘play the game’ a bit better.

The gardens cheered us up right away though, starting with the street food at the entrance. We arrived at the perfect time, just as the sun started to go down, and wandered contentedly around the intricately adorned tombs and peaceful open spaces there. Tired but satisfied, we headed for home.

I am swept off the metro in a crowd of leather clad Delhi-men, there are no women, they have a separate carriage because it’s not deemed safe for them to travel in the same carriage as men. After being elbowed and trod on I fight my way back onto the train and proclaim ‘This country sucks!’ A man overhears me, raises his eyebrows and shrugs with a small smile. But, in some ways, it does. This is not a good country for women. A country where women have been burnt for not paying their dowries, a country where women are habitually abused at home, a country with traditions of sati and purdah, a country where female foetuses are so often aborted that the population is thrown out of shape. It’s a misogynist’s dream of a country, where men can do what they like and even when they do something wrong it’s a woman’s fault.

 

7/1/17

Sad news received from home this morning – my Nonno (Italian for granddad) passed away in the early hours at his nursing home in Alloa. On top of this, other illnesses in the family mean the funeral arrangements will take some time and everyone’s stuck in limbo – all very cruel and difficult. I am thankful that C and I had a good last visit with him before setting off, sharing memories from his time in India 70 years before. As we wondered what to do next, starting to think over some hard questions that would be with us for the next few weeks, we ordered breakfast to the room, and what arrived — three plain butter toasties, one jam one and three cups of tea — while functional as a breakfast, was confusingly distant from what we thought we had asked for.

Thrown into slow perseverance and acts of continuing. T very sad. He is going home for the funeral, not sure if we should both go, and if we do, would we come back? Or should I stay here and wait for him to return?

We go to the National Museum and see old games of Jain snakes and ladders set out in squares of nine by nine with ivory playing pieces, where the snakes represent vices like anger and lust and the ladders are virtues like gratitude and humility. The aim is to reach the moon, representing the upper realms of enlightenment and moksha, freedom from the cycle of suffering.

We learn that painters used to feed sunflowers to cows to make their dung yellow which was then used as pigment (like Chef’s Table’s Dan Barker feeding chickens red peppers to get eggs with red yolks!).

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We see the relics of Lord Buddha and I rejoice in learning about the wonderful Sharan Rani, a world famous Indian musician who dedicated her private collection of Indian classical instruments to the museum. There are gopichands, ektaras, and teentaras (meaning one-string and three-string), rudra veenas, a rare right-handed-swirl conch shell, massive flutes, wee flutes, flutes with elephant heads, snake charmers’s flutes, Bengali bagpipes, bone trumpets, inlaid sitars, gottuvadyams, rababs, sarangis with hundreds of strings, dilrubas with harmonic strings, tanpuras, ouds with comic faces, sarods with glass and metal finger boards, banjos that look like typewriters, drums of all dimensions.

We see demon masks, and ducks adorned with jewels; we see betel boxes, and boxes for bees, boxes for tiffin and boxes for pendants and bangles; we see head hunters’ hats adorned with the hair of hunted heads, and shadow puppets of Rama and Sita. We see early Buddhas and old Buddhas and Buddhas still to come, Buddhas in thangkas and gold and wood and stone, Buddhas that look Roman (2nd C A.D) and sit under trees and smile and frown.

Before heading home, we found an authentic Italian restaurant, honouring nonno through going for a good meal out — which he said was his second favourite thing to do –toasting him with a pizza and a big glass of red wine.

8/1/18

After being deflected by locked gates, adamant men and falling trees we make it into the Jain Bird Hospital at Chandhi Chowk. ‘Only vegetarian birds are admitted, although birds of prey can be treated as outpatients.’ It’s a no shoes scenario. We walk down a narrow marble corridor lined with wee cages on the right and big open air cages on the left. A group of green parakeets rummage slowly around a huge tray of carrots and lettuces. A man squeezes past us with a box of small grey chicks, and even smaller light brown ones. Some pigeons scamper around while others huddle away, their necks bent, their eyes staring wildly upwards, their tail feathers wrangled out of shape.  A lone turkey struts along a window ledge. A huge white cockerel pecks, a cage of budgies chirp in blue and green and yellow and white, intermingled are wee brown birds, one with hardly any feathers. A pigeon with his wing in a sling, a tiny parakeet bare but for his wings, another pigeon pacing on the operating table, and, as we leave, a small parakeet covered in sores and hardly any feathers shivers in a cardboard box, newly arrived.

Then we struggle through the spice market, huge sacks of nobbledy dusty yellow turmeric roots, long long quills of cinnamon, bags of rose petals, and chilis, and star anise, and sneezing men carrying massive bags on their heads.

On our way home this evening we spotted a barber, and having been meaning to get a shave, I popped in. The shave went according to plan, and we had agreed on 100 rupees – but afterwards the guy asked if I wanted a face wash. I honestly answered “not really”, and when he insisted I asked if it would cost extra, which he waved away nonchalantly. I naively thought it might just be a quick application of aftershave, but after 15 minutes and the third coat-and-rinse, I was getting very suspicious. By the time I thought to speak up, another 15 minutes later, I had on a clay mask which refused to dry, even after he turned on the fan and wafted a magazine over me. I was getting impatient, and when he washed off the clay and started to suggest hair oil and head massage I stood up and called it to a halt. He scribbled on a bit of paper and showed me a figure around 1000 rupees, inevitably leading to aggrieved voices on both sides. C appeared from her patient kerbside wait, and with a bit of stern help from her we put 200 in his hand and marched away – nobody followed us, so he must have felt he got a fair deal out of it in the end.

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Jaipur Literature Festival: From Charlotte Square to Diggi Palace

We intended to rise early and make our way to the first day of the Jaipur Literature Festival in plenty of time to register, find our way around, maybe get a coffee and have our pick of seats for the start of the talks. We didn’t manage it, exhausted from overnight travel and lingering illness, and grateful for the joy of a proper bed and a kitchen we could use to make our own food. This was probably more in keeping with the bohemian spirit of the event in any case, and set a pattern for the week — sleep through the first talk of the day, make some porridge, hop in a tuk-tuk, turn up mid-morning, pick up a cappuccino and make it just in time for the first thing you really want to see. The atmosphere was very much like Charlotte Square during August at the Edinburgh Book Festival; even more packed, and much warmer, but with the same big tent bookshop, refreshment stalls, book signing queues, and lanyard oneupmanship. The festival is co-organised by North Berwick’s very own William Dalrymple, who, after writing a number of insightful books about India, has earned the life of a literary maharaja here. Over the course of the festival we saw an incredible range of excellent talks from faces weel-kent and less so, and when Willie himself appeared at the very end to announce some of the highlights of next year’s programme we immediately began to wonder if we could possibly make it back to Jaipur for next January.

The Daily Tuk-Tuk

We begin with an auspicious recitation from the Rigvedas and ‘Eating God’, a collection of Bhakti poetry. The Bhakti poets were on such intimate terms with their God that they could laugh at him, insult him, make love to him, eat him. The editor, Arundhathi Subramaniam, herself a poet, says she draws strength from this poetry as it went against social norms, questioning everything, something vital for India’s women today. Gender roles are reversed, gods become human and humans are divine, love is fluid. This poetry of seekers explores eroticism, longing, yearning, rage, loneliness and divinity, and is especially strong in the female voice:

Better than meeting

and mating all the time

is the pleasure of mating once

after being far apart.

Also prevalent is the idea of the body as a temple, as something divine in all its forms. 

…If menstrual blood makes me impure,

Tell me who was not born of that blood.

This blood of mine fertilises the world.…

Later in the day we see Rupi Kaur, who came to Instagram and Facebook fame as a poet and artist when Instagram repeatedly removed pictures of her showing menstrual blood. Her debut collection of poetry, ‘milk and honey’, was America’s top selling book of fiction in 2017, and she is a big deal in India. They love her. The audience — mainly young Indian women — are ecstatic, as she performs pieces from her first book and her second collection ‘the sun and her flowers’.

it is a blessing

to be the color of earth

do you know how often

flowers confuse me for home

Her poetry talks of race, immigration, womanhood, bodies, sexuality, sexual violence, rape and love. It is simple, to the point, floral, sometimes hard-hitting, hardly ever deep.

how is it so easy for you

to be kind to people he asked

milk and honey dripped

from my lips as i answered

cause people have not

been kind to me

It’s not, I don’t think, very good. But maybe that’s not the point. 

Due to the controversy surrounding the film Padmavaat a scheduled event is cancelled and replaced with India’s favourite Delhi girl Mallika Dua. The audience are wild and she is funny and smart. She is known for her witty posts on Snapchat and Instagram and discusses the hardships of finding an apartment where your landlady will let you bring home your boyfriend, being a modern Indian woman, drinking sparkling wine and why she isn’t married.

Women, violence against women, women in science, women in positions of power, women and the law, women and art, women and poetry, young women, tribal women, Indian women, women writers… the festival is alive with these ideas, and yet the queues to get into the festival are predominantly made up of men.

One idea that is not widely stressed is that of women and class or caste. There are very few women (I think) of lower class at the festival. The whiter your skin the more likely you are to be on a stage, taking about your work. Sujatha Gidla, the Dalit author of ‘Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India’, alone seems to represent India’s Untouchables. An international socialist, she speaks out against Gandhi, against capitalism, and talks about how Untouchables still live in segregated villages with little access to education. She looks uncomfortable.

Mamang Dai, a poet from a tribe in Arunachal Pradesh, discusses the ideas of women and work and Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist working on dark matter, talks of all the women scientists who were left unrecognised while their male counterparts were awarded Nobel prizes. Angela Saini points out that the prevailing ideas in our patriarchal society influence science funding. She cites an important study on male and female brains, which supposedly proved a biological difference between genders but was in fact fundamentally flawed. We treat children differently from the day they are born: boys get trucks, girls are given dolls, she stresses. A wee girl next to us sits on her daddy’s knee, playing with a worn-out barbie. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the head of a bio-technical firm, emphasises the necessity for women to be in positions of power in science.

One of the venues – just like Edinburgh

As seemed appropriate to our current adventures, we attended a few sessions related to travelling. In fact, before one of these sessions I bumped into Hugh Thomson, a travel writer who had been one of the guest speakers on the Moniack Mhor travel writing course I discussed in the previous post. One theme that emerged from the various speakers’ remarks was the idea of ‘same same but different’ – that as much as you experience and learn about new cultures, landscapes, stories and traditions in travelling, you also discover how similar the dynamics and needs that underpin societies are. Redmond O’Hanlon appeared to be a boisterous Victorian explorer, and gave a stirring reading of a Congolese guide’s furious condemnation of Western and Christian hypocrisy in viewing their beliefs as perfectly reasonable but tribal Africans’ as barbarous and ridiculous. William Dalrymple echoed this idea of misplaced religious certainty in the words of a Greek-Orthodox-monk-cum-conspiracy-theorist he had met in the Holy Land. Hugh Thomson told a familiar story of government incompetence and heavy-handedness in the reasons why his expedition to Nanda Devi was such a rare opportunity, and why his book on the subject was only now coming out in India.

Pico Iyer spoke passionately about how moving to a simple Japanese apartment after his Californian house burned down had allowed him to adopt a quieter and more contented lifestyle, where distraction-free mornings and evenings stretched out languidly for his enjoyment. (He also spoke about how his friendship with the Dalai Lama since infancy had affected his thinking – a prominent theme of the week was just how privileged and unbelievable the lives of many of these authors were.) On the last day William Dalrymple, Nicholas Shakespeare and Redmond O’Hanlon — all of whom knew the man personally — give an affectionate and ribald tribute to Bruce Chatwin, whose notorious name cropped up repeatedly during my travel writing course. For many years shunted from the canon amid accusations of embellishment and inaccuracy, they want to rehabilitate him and reassert the cult status he once held, and while I sympathised, they sadly didn’t hold the festival rapt – the only question at the end came from a confused lady looking for the following session about elephants.

In a strange twist of reality we find ourselves sitting on the ‘Bank of Baroda Front Lawn’ listening to Adam Nicolson talk about puffins. It’s surreal. Nicolson does his utmost to engage the audience in a topic which is, understandably, pretty obscure to them. He talks with aristocratic passion about the fate of seabirds, which are in rapid decline. He draws the audience in with cute pictures of puffins, fulmars in flight, bird skeletons filled with plastic, and statistics showing the ratio of bird brain size to bird monogamy. He reminisces about childhoods in the Shiants (which his father bought) and emphasises that these beautiful creatures should be saved for their own intrinsic worth and not just because they are a vital part of the earth’s eco-system, keeping the oceans alive and fertile.

In a discussion of nature writing Alexandra Harris talks of her fascination with weather, Adam Nicolson aptly regurgitates his passion for seabirds and Hugh Thomson recollects walking through England. They posit that the recent explosion of nature writing in the UK, sparked by Robert MacFarlane’s work, is due to the nation’s detachment from and destruction of the natural world.

This idea is further dealt with in speedy and heart-breaking depth by Victor Mallet, who travelled the length of the Ganges from source to mouth. ‘It is still a living river’ — he emphasises the note of hope — ‘we can still save it.’ He talks about the constant pollution pouring into the river; raw sewage, chemicals, fertilisers, rubbish. People see a distinction between the river as a spiritual entity which they worship, and a physical entity for which they have little regard. They don’t connect the spiritual and the physical and they should. He discusses the political systems and corruption which mean that, despite many grand plans to clean the river, none have come to fruition. He talks about seeing river dolphins, India’s responsibility for the creation of super-bugs and mass pilgrimages of over 70 million people. He speaks of the political nature of silt on the border between India and Bangladesh and of great stretches of river where no water runs at all for weeks at a time. But he is hopeful. ‘You don’t actually have to clean a river. You just have to stop putting rubbish into it and it will clean itself.’

Alka and Dinesh, our hosts in Jaipur

Another topic which popped up again and again throughout the festival was the current state of India. This was no surprise – the subject has been on the minds of many people we’ve met around the country. One will tell you with pride that India will soon have the highest population in the world, while another will lament the lingering power of old conservative men, and a third will stress the revolutionary modernity they see as sweeping the nation. Cleanliness is a major preoccupation, with some hailing the progress that has been made while others lament the litter and pollution that affect large parts of the country. One thing that has become very clear is that India is a vast country not only in terms of area and population, but in many other ways – culture, landscape, climate, religion, language, education, wealth, age, gender, caste, class and many other factors are spread across a huge spectrum and make it impossible to talk consistently for the country as a whole. India is acutely aware of its international reputation in terms of efficiency, corruption, cleanliness etc., and major efforts are being made in difficult circumstances to modernise and improve the lives of its citizens; at the same time, India is rightfully proud of its unique cultures and traditions – one speaker spoke of being the oldest extant civilisation on earth – and resists the idea that progress necessarily means Westernisation.

The most prominent current such campaign is Swachh Bharat, meaning ‘Clean India’, a nationwide drive to dispose of waste responsibly and encourage sanitary personal hygiene habits. At the talk I attended on this subject, everyone agreed on the principle, but nobody could agree on the causes of or best solutions to the issue. Education, caste, overpopulation, corruption, legislation and comparison to other countries were all fervently supported or attacked, with no clear outcome – seemingly a microcosm of the situation across the country. More specific areas of conservation and culture were discussed in talks on saving the Ganges and India’s neglected stepwells, incredible structures which we’ve seen a few of, and the same conflicts arose again and again. Many better-off Indians already live a life of comfortable modernity, and one talk I saw on ‘Youth and the Age of Anxiety’, featuring an ex-heroin addict turned writer and a child psychologist, made me feel that the lifestyle and concerns of middle-class people across the world are in many ways more similar to each other than to their own poorer compatriots, as did hearing the internet comedy sensation Mallika Dua, or watching the crowds of young Indians attending the event. Finally, we attempted to attend one session on English-language elitism and the public use of Hindi, but had to leave when it turned out the whole thing was in Hindi and we wouldn’t understand it – absolutely a fair cop!

‘Zakir Hussain, I mean how many times have people heard him, and still they want more! It helps that he is so handsome. Well he is!’ I smile. I don’t want to tell her I have neither heard or heard of him. He is India’s most famous tabla player, and according to the professor next to me ‘the world’s greatest percussionist.’ He played with the greats — Ravi Shankar, Miles Davis — and talks about growing up in a multi-religious India. Getting up at 3am to study tabla with his father, learning of the spirits and myths that make music, going to the mosque for prayers at 6am, and an hour later trotting over to the Catholic school. There was no contradiction in all of this, it was just part of life, he says. When he was a baby and brought home from the hospital his father whispered tabla rhythms in his ear, instead of a prayer.

Of course, there were also a few talks which dealt more directly with literary matters, and we enjoyed a few of these. On the first afternoon we went to see Tom Stoppard being interviewed on the front lawn, as you do. The questioning wasn’t up to much, but he drawled on amusingly about writing and the difficulty of letting a play which you have perfected in your mind be interpreted differently by actors and directors. A big panel discussion on ‘The Art of the Novel’ included Amy Tan, Michael Ondaatje, Helen Fielding, Joshua Ferris and Chika Unigwe, and was encouraging if daunting on the subject of bringing something so substantial into existence. Another panel on book adaptations followed up on many of the same ideas with many of the same people – Stoppard, Tan and Ondaatje all appeared again, alongside Nicholas Shakespeare and Mira Nair. They spoke about the challenges and rewards of making your written work into a film or play – among the happy few who ever manage to complete a novel, these were the further lucky few whose novel is then picked up by Hollywood!

One of the last talks we saw was an eclectic but engaging ‘Between Genres’ event – four books and authors who were worthy of a showcasing, but lacked any obvious thread to tie their work together. Nupur Paiva, a child psychologist, spoke eloquently on families and relationships in modern India, with a real understanding of what children need from their parents – primarily honesty and support. Sujatha Gidla talked about the rare experience of coming from a Dalit family and yet gaining a university education and moving to work in the USA, the disadvantages in contacts and resources she had experienced as a result of her caste, and her powerful convictions about workers’ unity, Marxism and the injustice of the caste system. Lathika George told a romantic but important tale of the ups and downs of the lives of rural farmers across India, and Humphrey Hawksley, the only fiction writer on the panel, linked all these threads – family, class and the land – in promoting his latest future-counterfactual novel, about Inuit people living on an island disputed between America and Russia.

It’s a hard old literary life

The Closing Debate on the last afternoon of the festival is packed. The topic: #MeToo: Do men still have it too easy? One of the founders of the #MeToo movement, Ruchira Gupta, starts the debate. She is fierce and inspiring and eloquent. ‘Do men still have it too easy?’ she asks. ‘I can’t believe we are even asking this question. Men DO still have it too easy.’ Women, from the moment they are born, if they are even born, face harassment, sexual violence and inequality. She cites cases in India where women were raped while bystanders did nothing, raped when they were already dead, she talks of honour killings, sex trafficking, and emphasises a case where a judge found a man convicted of rape not guilty because the woman had protested with ‘a feeble no’. ‘A feeble no’, he said, ‘is a yes.’ 

‘Do you consider women to be human beings? If you do, you are a feminist’ concludes Bee Rowlatt. Pinky Anand talks about the power of law and its place in protecting women. Sandip Roy says most men are not criminals, most men are not rapists, but that this is a movement which must involve all of us, and being a passive bystander also makes you guilty. Manu Joseph causes controversy when he says he feels uncomfortable in the new world order where everything is P.C. and you can no longer tell a woman she is attractive. But he faces an inevitable backlash.

Vinod Dua, a well-known journalist and Mallika Dua’s father, stresses that, until these ideas filter through from the class of English-speaking intellectuals to the Hindi-speaking working class, until there are co-educational schools, they cannot become reality.

These are the ideals and ideas of the future.

Back to the Very Beginning

Right now we’ve been in India for well over two months, and it can be hard to remember that not so long ago we had no plans to go travelling, and no idea of the places we would end up seeing. I wrote about how we came to the decision to go last spring, when C encouraged me to apply for the Mairi Hedderwick Travel Writing Bursary at Moniack Mhor. Moniack Mhor is Scotland’s creative writing centre, a beautiful, tranquil spot tucked away on a hillside a few miles outside Inverness, where writers’ retreats and specialised creative writing courses are held throughout the year. We had looked through their brochure with envy and awe in the past, marvelling at the scenery, the writers who came to teach the courses, and the promises of all-inclusive Highland hospitality. So this bursary sounded like a wonderful chance to attend a course there, and to prepare for writing about the adventures to come.

Just looking at the headings on the application form was daunting: ‘please tell us a bit about your proposed work or work in progress’, ‘what is your previous literary experience/publication history’ – that sort of very reasonable question. I put off filling in the form for a few weeks, but one Sunday afternoon I grabbed the bull by the horns, completed it and sent it away. I didn’t hold out much hope, as we didn’t have much of a proposal, let alone a work in progress – but I wrote an honest account of our lives in Edinburgh, how we’d come to the decision to go travelling, and what our plans and hopes were for the journey. So, to give an idea of how we got started on all this, here is that section of my application:

In early January of this year, my partner and I met for a pint after work. Our local overlooks the River Forth, with beautiful views across to Fife, the place I grew up; to Inchcolm Island, where she has worked for the past two summers; up to the bridges at South Queensferry, and out to the North Sea. It is particularly beautiful at sunset, but, on this midwinter’s evening it was already pitch black outside at barely 5pm. Thankfully, a roaring fire provided a passable substitute in warmth and fascination. I felt tamely content to be back at work, dutiful and secure in a dour, resolute, Scottish kind of a way.

A couple of weeks previously, just before Christmas, we had had a serious discussion about what it meant to be happy, what we needed to be happy. I thought I had come out of it well, settled some matters in a way which, while unexciting, seemed sensible and secure. Catriona had been agitating for some time for a big plunge, a shake-up of our routine lives, but I had made my point well – I thought – that making rash decisions, destabilising your hard-won perch, taking for granted the comfort and small joys of the life you have put together was potentially very foolish and was anyway no guarantee of supercharged happiness, increased consciousness, connection to the mother earth et cetera. She had smiled acquiescently as I implored ‘what about Edinburgh?’, suggesting that after ten years there was still as much to discover and enjoy here from the comfort of a small flat and salary as there would be in the whole showy world out there. The question was settled for a generation.

Two hours and three pints after meeting in the pub, we had sketched out a plan to travel the world on a handful of paper napkins, with the distended outlines of continents crossed with curved arrows, and large numbers such as “3000” and “5000” scribbled in columns in corners. A sudden and abundant rejection of previous adventure austerity. By the time we wandered home, I was thoroughly convinced – this was our one big chance, and it was time to seize it.

 

And it worked! A month or two later, as we were at C’s parents’ house in Ireland, loading the car for a holiday in Connemara — which is a travel experience to write about another time — I got a call from Moniack to say I had been awarded the place. So at the end of September I took a week off work and travelled up north to learn all about travel writing. This was an amazing opportunity, and I am grateful to the Moniack staff for selecting me, and to Mairi Hedderwick for her generosity in funding my place. Her beautiful writing and illustrations have been a source of delight my whole life, but I never imagined I would be sending her thank-you postcards from the Himalayas! Following the course, and just as we were getting ready to leave, I was asked to write a piece for the Moniack Mhor blog about my time there; the link to this is below.

T

https://www.moniackmhor.org.uk/first-inverness-india-getting-ready-go/

 

Photos from my time at Moniack Mhor

Gellasenheit

27/12/17

We leave the nunnery early. It’s dark. The Christmas tree glitters, the lights above us twinkle. I hold Dolker’s hands without saying much in case I cry again. The wee nuns walk with us to the gate and Small Ladon and I sing ‘You are my sunshine’ for the last time. I give Big Ladon back her om pendant. She smiles, her eyes unblinking. I hug them all, T shakes their hands. I can only leave now by some will outside of my own. My heart is breaking.

We climb onto the bus for Chamba and bump along the road for approx 90 miles, 6 hours, for £2.50 each. Men are lathered in soap washing by the side of the road, a tiny girl grins as she steals rice from a pot, a dead cow lies in the road amidst a crowd of onlookers, a dead monkey lies alone, a huge bridge, cracked in two, lies in the river. Shops selling only coconuts and rope. Same same but different haystacks, taller, with wee woven bobbles on the top, sometimes hung from trees, like great straw sculptures all across the valley. The Pir Panjals appear and disappear, we’re on the other side of the mountains.

Arriving in Chamba, we climbed a very steep hill towards the guesthouse, sweating with the strain of carrying our big bags properly for the first time since arriving at the nunnery. Luckily the guesthouse was easy to find, and after haggling 100Rs off the price we settled in. A distant, empty feeling hung around us as we dumped our stuff and opened the curtains and shutters of our first room together since our travels began, tired and missing our familiar nunery home and new friends there. Although we began sitting up in bed, we slouched lower and lower, before dozing off in the hazy afternoon sun.

We woke while it was still bright outside, and decided we should do something before the day was gone. We left the room behind — suddenly everything was our responsibility again, suddenly we had to hide our valuables, check our pockets, lock and test the door — and went for a stroll around the centre of Chamba. It’s a lovely, quiet little town, friendly and not too busy, at least by Indian standards – just the baseline level of noise and chaos. We wandered into an ancient Hindu temple complex, Laxmi Narayan, where idols hid in every niche, daubed in oil and orange pigment. The minor anxiety of leaving one’s shoes behind in a public place, a vulnerability compounded by then having to walk around barefoot, has become an everyday experience on this trip. After regaining our shoes — never lost a pair yet, although we’ve met people who have — we walked through crowded, narrow market alleys, and around a wide, empty village green, surely a British remnant, which no-one was able to get into due to barbed wire covering every entrance. They had held fast to the ‘keep off the grass’. A jolly samosa-maker made us a bargain of some delicious fried treats, which we ate at the barbed edge of the park before heading in for our first night alone.

That night, to soothe (or maybe irritate) our nunnery-homesickness, we watched a film the Brazilian cook had given us, named ‘Himalaya, a Path to the Sky’. (Not easily available online, but get in touch if you really want a copy!) The film follows a young Buddhist monk from Zanskar, the region of Jammu & Kashmir where our little nun friends come from. The film, only 10 years old, showed a mesmerising and incredible lifestyle of prayer, debate, resourcefulness and hardship, all through the cheeky and intelligent perspective of this small boy, the hope and pride of his family. Zanskar is fascinating, with influences from India, Tibet, Pakistan and China, from Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism, all coming together in one small, harsh, sparsely-populated, high-altitude desert. It is more-or-less inaccessible at this time of year, but if we ever come back here again, and even if it’s only to see how our little nuns are, it will be top of our list.

28/12/17

The next day started slowly, C quiet with missing the nunnery, and both of us adjusting to the loss of our previous routine, which generally involved working all morning. We spent hours reading on the terrace outside our room, before eventually heading out when hunger got too much and leftover Christmas stollen was becoming sickly. We strolled back around the forbidden green, but the first place we hoped to get lunch was currently a building site, and the next was non-existent. Our best bet looked to be a large, State-Government-endorsed hotel, but behind the heavy doors and dusty brass and marble foyer, there was nobody there. Picking our way down to a seemingly abandoned dining hall, we eventually spotted a man in a tracksuit and asked him if lunch was available. “Yes, of course” he replied, as if it was a stupid question; it turned out that most of the menu was not in fact available. However, what we did manage to order turned out to be delicious and welcome.

In search of Chamunda Devi temple we stroll into a man’s backyard and duck under his washing line to see him shaking his head ‘Where are you going? Follow me!’ So we follow him: ’These stairs, up up, main road, cross cross, more stairs up up!’ Thank you! The rice fields are glowing green and and a rope bridge twinkles in the sun. A huge Indian flag flutters over the town below, towards the mountains the river swirls turquoise. We make it to the temple. Two sets of two men stare at us. We sit in the shade of the huge Bodhi tree. A lion in a red and golden cloak, thousands of bells, a beautiful wooden carved ceiling with winged faces and gods and goddesses on horses. Obligatory selfie with random Indian man. A stony imprint of two feet adorned with trishula and flowers.

We find the Presbyterian Church of Scotland adorned with Christmas lights. But it’s locked. A neatly dressed man who could have been a minister walks by. ‘Excuse me!’ I ask, ‘what time is the Church open?’ He points down a tiny laneway opposite, ‘go straight straight down there, could be that father can give you the key.’ We knock on the open door and shout ‘hello’, and a man half dressed in a grey tunic comes to the door ‘Hanjee?’ ‘We were wondering about visiting the Church?’ We ask. He smiles, his eyes are wide. ‘You will have to wait. I will ask the priest’ he says, taking out his phone, ‘but it may take some time.’ ‘We could come back tomorrow’ we say. ‘Tomorrow?’ He looks astonished. ‘Yes. About ten?’ ‘No, no! Eleven?’ We leave it at that.

In the Buri Singh museum we see old manuscripts and sutras written in mustard oil lamp soot and carved incarnations of Vishnu as a Buddha and the fish matsya. We marvel at beautiful miniature paintings, some domestic, some disturbing, some beautiful. My favourite is of three women. One stands on a swing hanging from a mango tree. Mangos fall all around her as she smokes a hookah. The information board is effusive: “[Miniature painting] is an art of the line and the line is lyrical. It is an art like a song that sings itself.”

That evening it was more street food for dinner: some wonderfully unhealthy triple-deep-fried potato burgers (fry the potato; smash it into a patty and fry that; put it in a roll and fry it again) and a tasty but dodgy roadside fresh lime soda we probably should’ve known better than to have tried. Another turn around the park at dusk, and then home again to play a few tunes on the terrace. A neighbour walked right up to us and invited himself to listen in, then left after two seconds. We played on regardless.

29/12/17

The sun comes up over the Dhauladhars. The river churns white over huge boulders down in the valley, early sunshine glows into the pine trees on the far away ridge, green and golden. My heart is broken. I can hardly speak. We are unmoored and marooned. I miss them.

The priest is a no show, so we walk out the road by the river and hop on the wrong bus, jump off, hop on another and get to a village called Kiani, on the shores of Chamera lake. We follow a wee path past the local vet’s to a towering statue of Hanuman. There are wild witch-hat haystacks everywhere. Locals stare at us from shops selling crisps and rope and buckets. An older man and his wife wave at us from a garden glowing green with onions and palak. The man shouts; ‘sit down, sit down!’ So we go in and sit on his porch, he apologises that he can’t offer us chai, he points at a brown cow next to a white goat; ’Milak finish!’ His wife grins. ‘Where you from?’ ‘Scotland’ we reply. ‘Scotland? Is near Germany?’ ‘Mmmm, kind of.’ ‘Ah, near Greenland?’ ‘Em, in between Germany and Greenland!’ He smiles, he has very few teeth. ‘I am ex-health inspector. Now I am retired, so I am working in garden! Organic gardening you know? I sell these things.’ We go for a tour of the garden, and then walk on, to smaller roads, past a trio of women carry bundles of firewood on their heads. We all nod and smile. Later, sitting on a wall, fortifying ourselves with some bananas and crisps we meet the trio again, one laughs and says ‘cello, cello!’ (come on!) Enough sitting around! We turn at a wee temple and we meet the ex-health inspector on our way back ‘Ah hello again! How many years are you?!’ ‘Twenty nine and twenty five.’ He seems impressed, (are we old, or young?) ‘Ah, I am very proud of you, walking the roads in a foreign country, very proud!’

30/12/17

The next day we were moving on again, to Dalhousie – with a name like that, it had to be good for Hogmanay. We were told to put our big bags on the bus roof rack – a nervy experience both because it involved climbing up a rickety ladder on top of a coach with massive backpack on, and because the whole journey was then spent enduring visions of all our stuff flying off on one of the hairpin mountain bends and tumbling down a cliff. On the way we talked about new year’s resolutions; as well as the perennial “write every day”, an important one for me was to be more open: to chance encounters, unknown circumstances and new people. The bags made it, but when I clambered up to fetch them, the bus began to pull away with me on top; C had to bang on the side and shout at the driver to stop me being carted back to the depot.

We had picked out a cheap and friendly looking guesthouse, and figured that, much as we’d done in Chamba and Mcleod, we would just turn up and ask for a room. However, we were soon scuppered: “no room, no room, all book”. Never mind, we thought, google showed plenty of others around. The next turned out to be an army barracks, with an armed guard who just shook his head at me. Next, C minded the bags while I asked all along a promising street – all completely booked out. We began to notice a lot of flashy, touristy looking people around and it dawned on us that this was a popular New Year’s destination for wealthy Indian people. When the tourist information official couldn’t even get us into the youth hostel, we began to worry.

Of course, this couldn’t be allowed to get in the way of lunch, so we found a dhaba and regrouped. Our next strategy was to split up, taking it in turns to go and ask at hotels (expanding our remit and budget) and guesthouses one street at a time, while the other looked up information on a dying smartphone and attempted to call promising leads. We were frustrated at every turn, clumping into increasingly posh hotels to either be told “no” or that only exorbitantly expensive “Maharaja suites” were available. Finally, after an incredibly anxious couple of hours, I got a guy on the phone from the improbably-named Hotel Gellasenheit, who said he had a room! He wasn’t around, but he said his guy would call me back. I waited and waited by a flickering charging screen until I got the call – we could have a room for two nights, not even at a ridiculous price, and a taxi driver would bring us there. C was still out doing her rounds, phoneless, and I was so excited and relieved that I ran out of the cafe and up and down the street, and wrote “Found!” on my hand.

The hotel turned out to be just a couple of minutes away from the main action of the town, a narrow market street lined with cafes and trinket shops, full of middle-class families and young men up for new year in the snowy highlands – we likened the place to an Indian Aviemore. We walked around in a daze of relief, collected a bunch of snacks to take back to our room, and tucked ourselves away in comfort, planning what to do the next day, the last day of 2017.

31/12/17

We wake early, eat paranthas and hop on the local bus to Alha. It climbs up through Dalhousie Public school, ‘In pursuit of excellence’, echoes of the British era. The Pir Panjals circle the whole horizon to the north. We jump off the bus and start to climb. Snow glistens in the crevices as the sun comes up through the deodars and pines. The air is cold and smells of resin. We come out of the trees onto a ridge and look down onto the wavering lines of terraced fields below and the Dhalaudhars to the south east. The path leads up the entrance of a huge air force station on a hill. ‘Trespassers will be shot’ Feckin great. We skirt around the outside wall of the station, at points the path disintegrates away into nothing and we slither down a dusty cliff before regaining the path.

Then we come to the party mountain! Lines of white taxis block the road. Punjabi music blares. A group of Indian men scream ‘Happy New year’ and jump into a small patch of snow. We eat crisps and watch. The holy mount, Manimahesh Kailash, rises above a red temple. At the top of Dainkund we find a topless man posing for photographs.

On the way down we are overtaken by a man with two rabbits in a basket. We stop to ask a woman selling walnuts if she knows when the next bus will be, she doesn’t understand English, but a group of lads tell us that the bus is stuck in a New Year’s traffic jam and there is little hope of it appearing. We hitchhike but all the cars are packed, and we we’re not sure if Indian folk even know what hitchhiking is as some of them just give us a thumbs up back! We are resigned to walking when a beast of a car pulls over, and the driver motions for us to get in. We squash into the back beside two Indian guys. The guy in the passenger’s seat points to his phone, ‘Haryana song, yes?’ We drive down the hill, speeding round corners, to Punjabi and Haryana tunes and the occasional Justin Bieber; ‘English song, yes!’ The driver strokes his beard, fixes his sunglasses and dances, both hands off the steering wheel. The car swerves, the lads in the back yell and the driver resentfully takes the wheel again. At one point the driver pulls over, ‘Ok, ek minute, one selfie friend ok?’ We shrug and pose for selfies.

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As soon as we recognised that we were back in reach of our hotel, we shouted “ok good, stop, thank you!”. The driver hopped out of the car with us for one last selfie; we wriggled away and ducked in the back gate of a churchyard, giving them, the traffic and the crowd the slip. When we emerged from the front gate and looked back, we saw the driver being seized by policemen; a couple of the other lads were engaged in a brawl with a group of locals. We melted into the crowd and quickly trotted back to our room.

There were still several hours until midnight, and we didn’t have much of a plan, beyond a bottle of local apple wine we had found to toast with at the bells. To kill some time, we began watching Sholay, seemingly an absolute classic of Indian cinema, a 3-hour genre-blending melodramatic tragicomic epic. It’s wild, but definitely worth a watch. It took us through to 11pm, and we decided to head back out and join the crowds to ring the new year in.

Except now the streets were empty! With midnight quickly approaching, almost all the shops and cafes were closed, and very few people remained outside. A small group were huddled round a bonfire outside the churchyard gates, there was a healthy quota of policemen, and some groups of drunken, screaming young men – but no happy congregation of revellers ready to count down from 10, share hugs and smiles and think of the year to come. A little disappointed, and not wishing to hang around the drunks and coppers, we walked back the way we had come. On the way, we spotted some steps up to an e*loßmpty roof terrace, with views across the valley and music from mountainside resorts travelling across to us. We waited there, sipping our apple wine, dancing to the music. When the bells came, there was no great change, but we toasted each other, the year gone by and the one to come. We sent messages home, although it was only early evening there, and a few minutes later a few fireworks lit up the valley.

Back in the room we finished our wine and set an alarm for 5.30am, so we could wake up briefly for midnight at home. Just before nodding off, I finally remembered to look up the meaning of that strange name, Hotel Gellasenheit. It is an idea of openness to and acceptance of the world as you find it.

1/18/17

On the bus to Pathankot, from Aviemore to Glenrothes! It’s rammed. At random intervals a huge mustard coloured belly whacks me on the head as its owner bumps along with the bus. The young Indian guy next to us is a tired graphic designer from just outside Delhi. We drive forever in twists and turns downhill. Tiny monkeys scamper out of the way of the swaying bus as we drive past two car crashes and one man yelling. The deodars give way to tall slim silver trees and we enter Punjab.

The sun is setting as we come into Pathankot. It’s grimy and heavily militarised with a great luminous blue river gushing through it. We drive over a dead dog and past men selling oranges and garlic and apples. Men polishing shoes and roasting peanuts. Men in the street. Men sitting, smoking, talking, frying chicken and sweeping paths. Men staring. Men selling socks. Men in rickshaws and tuk-tuks and taxis. Men shouting. Where are all the women?

We wind our way along the dirty road to the guesthouse, past signs advertising ‘Alive Chickens’ and ‘Boneless fish.’ The full moon glows yellow through the dust. We eat a thali, finish Sholay and sleep in a green room.

Christmas in the Nunnery!

23/12/17

We plant tiny kales, thin the leeks and sing Christmas carols. The electricity is out all day. We play and sing with the wee nuns on the roof. They teach us a Ladakhi song about a horse which goes ‘dora dora dora dora!’ and I teach them the Gay Gordons now known as ‘1, 2, 3, 4’ and the Military Two Step now called ‘Heels toes, heels toes.’ T shows them how to play ‘Jingle Bells’ on the selenki (mandolin) and Big Ladon and Tenzin Palmo practice their notes on the flute. We help them with the pronunciation and timing of ‘Jingle Bells’, ‘What fun it is to ride and sing a sleighing song tonight’ is particularly hard for them and little Sonam Palmo’s face is frowning in concentration.

We make shepherd’s peh and apple crumble for dinner and just as we put them in the oven the back up generator fails. Then a wee while later the electricity comes back on for half an hour, we manage to cook dinner, but as we are eating it the lights begin to flicker ‘No, no no!’ shouts the Abbess but they dim and die and we eat crumble by the light of our phone torches.

24/12/17

It’s our last morning in the garden, we water the beds and make a new garden Bible for the Abbess with lists of what’s growing and then it’s over. I help in the kitchen. ‘Is there anything I can do?’ The Brazilian girl and Baba are grating hundreds of carrots. She points at a bowl full of green cabbages, ‘You can grate those!.’ So I grate cabbages, ad infinitum. The Brazilian girl is learning English and asks ‘What is the different between filling and feeling? And thought and taught? And posh and fancy? And flavour and taste?’ The Indian office lady comes in, ‘You are making 200 momos? Are you crazy? The Brazilian guy shrugs. ‘You don’t have time!’ I help roll the momo pastry, but its never thin enough; ‘Maybe we can use the pasta machine?’ and then T appears, and gets the much anticipated machine in motion.

We spent most of the rest of Christmas Eve in the kitchen. Specifically, I spent most of the day on the pasta machine. Seemingly I was the only experienced pasta-hand on hand, so when I came down to help with lunch I was tasked with setting up the machine and using it to roll momo dough for 30 people into long strips that were thin enough to steam and wide enough to fold and twist into the right shape. This was proving Sisyphean done by hand against the clock, but was speedy enough in the machine. I later found out that I arrived just at the point when the kitchen tension was threatening to boil over.

After the momos were eaten, it was shoulders to the roller-wheel again – this time I had an order for Christmas day spaghetti, again for 30 people. This required a good 3kg of flour, and ended up taking over 40 eggs to get the right consistency. It’s always amazing how beautiful fresh pasta emerges from only these two ingredients, plus a variety of different types of squeezing. C and I went to fetch the biggest clothes horse the nunnery had, in preparation for drying the spaghetti to come. The Brazilian cook and I soon settled into a rhythm – cutting the dough, automatically knowing who would feed it through and who would turn the handle, rolling it thinner and thinner before finally sweeping the cut spaghetti onto the clothes horse with the help of a wooden spoon – and starting all over again. After doing this maybe 50 times, we’d gone through a real bonding experience, the huge ball of dough was gone, and tomorrow’s main course was prepared.

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I make mincemeat with raisins and ginger and dried apricots. It smells like Christmas. The Brazilian girl swirls up a pot of chocolate Brigadeiro mixture and spoons it into wee silver dishes. The Abbess kneads her Christmas bread dough. I roll pastry and pop the little circles into silicon cases. T and the Brazilian guy whizz the pasta machine, hanging hundreds of strands of spaghetti on the clothes horse to dry. The Abbess takes four loaves of almond paste filled baguettes out of the oven. I try to prebake the pastry, but they all melt into little puddles. The wee nuns appear and play and sing, at least six of them are hanging out of my arms as I try and reconstruct the part-baked pastry puddles that smell of silicone into something vaguely edible. Tenzin Palmo points ‘This, cake?’ ‘Yes’ I say ‘maybe.’ I reconstruct and fill them, make little tops and pile them into the oven. We make glühsaft with special sticks of Sri Lankan cinnamon which smell of the divine.

We bring a big silver plate of mincepies up to the classroom with a pot of hot juice. ’Thank youuuuuu! Veree tasty!’ We sit and watch The Snowman, the wee nuns laugh when the snowman swaps his orange nose for a pineapple and dresses up in trousers and braces and puts on rouge. ‘Tomorrow Christmas?’ they ask. ‘Yes, tomorrow!’ Ok, Goodnight! Thank you for the picture! Thank you! Zhim chin a go!’

Later that evening we set up the classroom as a cinema – a bedsheet clipped over the board, and laptop plugged into the projector – to show the little nuns ‘The Snowman’. C’s Christmassy treats were handed round and joyfully received, and we settled at the back of the room to watch as well. I hadn’t seen the film for several years, and realised for the first time how beautiful it is, how naive the drawing style, with frames at times simply a single-coloured pencil scribble, as well as how universal it is – at least for people who have seen snow before. Coming from freezing Ladakh, a Himalayan plateau, the little nuns certainly knew about snow, and they loved the film – for me, sitting at the back with a mug of mulled juice and the snow-people band playing it suddenly really felt like Christmas.

25/12/17

Christmas! We wake up at 5am to the sounds of the Abbess clattering in the kitchen. ‘Good morning, merry Christmas!’ We eat beautiful Dutch almond paste filled Christmas bread. The little nuns file in dressed in their best hats and socks and jackets with gold buttons. They look like Christmas elves. After breakfast the German nun presents them with a wee Christmas tree, and they crowd around it, hanging little gold presents and glass baubles and wee plastic Santas. They do their performance of ‘Jingle Bells’ as choreographed by Big Ladon and then sing ‘Ni jey, oh ni jey…’ a song in Ladahki, about how a mother’s kindness is more precious than chocolate or cinnamon.

After the best breakfast we’d had in weeks, we met at a quiet table in the garden to swap presents, and open the few things that had made it to us from home. (We have calculated a roughly 1 in 3 success rate over all letters and parcels sent to and from India in our time here.) The sun was shining, birds chirping, and we were warm outside – something I’ve never experienced before on Christmas Day. After we had opened our gifts and carefully sorted all the remnants to adhere to the nunnery’s strict recycling policy, the little nuns found us at the table and were delighted by the wrapping ribbons and little tree decorations we had. Together we strung a button Christmas tree, tied ribbons and wreaths to our heads and laughed together.

Then it was time to finish the job we started yesterday, and cook up all that pasta. With the abbess’s mum’s special chicken sauce (with no chicken) bubbling away, we took the two biggest pots we could find and brought them to the boil. Even then it took three rounds in each pot to cook all the spaghetti – heaving, sloshing, piling, re-boiling. But eventually it was done, and dinner was served!

We peel tomatoes and slice peppers and crush garlic. Baba scrapes the offcuts into his cow bucket. The Brazilian guy chops vast amounts of spinach and brings the ends to the chickens for their Christmas dinner. The German nun brings us coffee. ‘All these people bustling and chopping away, it must be Christmas!’ All hail the man from Manali! The man from Manali has delivered the cheese and T slices it into great wedges. We roll out home-made puff pastry and start assembling ‘The Abbess’s cheesy spinach pockets’ brushing the tops with egg. The Indian gardener pops his head in the door ‘very good, very hard work!’ The Abbess takes four huge homemade french baguettes out of the oven. New nuns scuttle in and out of the kitchen, visitors sit around drinking cups of tea. The Brazilian girl sprinkles her Brigadeiros with chopped walnuts and bananas. And then we eat sitting outside in the sun. Tenzin Palmo helps herself to a second huge plate of spaghetti and glancing up sees us watching her, she giggles and runs away.

After Christmas dinner, stuffed and sleepy, I did just as I would at home and retreated to bed for a couple of hours, reading and dozing. Most Christmases this would be accompanied by a glass of wine, but a cup of tea did the job just as well this time. Then it was time to skype home, just as they were waking up for bucks fizz and breakfast. The little nuns, always fascinated by skype and images from our home, burst in again and helped my family wake up by singing their rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’ once more, much to everybody’s delight.

We play a few tunes and then the little nuns give us their whole rendition of Ladakhi, Hindi and English songs, poems and dances! Dolker is very graceful and Big Ladon sings loudly while Small Ladon and Sonam argue over the order of play. In the end they bow and say ‘Thank you’ and we all go and watch ‘Winnie the Pooh’s Christmas’ and eat popcorn. T slips out. Tenzin Palmo whispers to me ‘Tom is sleeping? Tom is laptop?’ and helps herself to a third bowl of popcorn. Small Ladon sleeps on a cushion on the floor. Sonam studies the film with a puzzled face. Dolker laughs whenever Tigger falls down. Fireworks burst outside and the film finishes. ’Thank you, thank yoouuuuu. Goodnight! Goodnight, Many Many Christmas!’

26/12/17

After breakfast I go up to the roof and watch the morning unfold. Big Ladon is chanting from her new prayer book, walking the kora she appears every few minutes between pink flowers. The horse man arrives followed by three ponies laden with gravel. The Austrian nun picks a red rose. Dolker scampers down off the roof. Sonam walks pensively in the garden below. Tenzin Palmo joins Big Ladon. Tiny birds flutter in the bamboo. Walking past I glimpse the Brazilian girl crying in her room.

Our last day in the nunnery, a sad and subdued feeling going round, after the elation of Christmas the day before. The Brazilian girl volunteer had planned to leave in the afternoon, but because of a last-minute travel panic she burst in as we were all sitting down to lunch, bags packed and in floods of tears, rushing away. She had been especially friendly with the little nuns, playing, hugging and sharing sweeties with them as if she was a kid herself. She was distraught at leaving them, and they glumly led her out to the gate, as far as they could take her, returning to finish their leftover spaghetti in silence. They are incredibly mature children, in particular one of them who had been a special friend of the departed Brazilian.This nun’s very sad day got even harder, as she discovered around the same time that she had come down with chickenpox, which had been going around between them since they had arrived. Still, although her eyes were red and puffy, we never saw her shed a tear – brave and wise well beyond her age.

All of this was going to make it very hard for us to leave early the next morning. Still, that was something to worry about later, and since we all had the afternoon free, C, the remaining Brazilian cook and I asked if we could take the little nuns out to the village and treat them to chai. We cheered them up playing silly games – tricking them into thinking I had pulled my own thumb off and swallowed their noses, swapping hats, glasses and scarves around the table, and that kind of thing. I taught them how to suavely hand over money in a handshake – surely a vital skill for a life of Buddhist devotion – and they taught us words for basic items in Ladakhi and Hindi.

I hold Deachen’s hand as we walk home from chai: ‘We are very very very very sad. And tomorrow we will be very very very sad.’ We talk about animals in Zanksar and Scotland ‘No bear? No balloo? No lion? No tiger? No elephant? Only sheep?! No yak? No buffalo?! No snake? Only small small snake!’ We stop at a wee shop on the way home and Dolker buys some spicy crisps and we talk about our families. ‘I am the smallest, she is middle, you are middle? No I only have one brother, younger brother. They nod, ‘no middle in your family’. Tenzin Palmo tells me she has a small small brother, only two years old.

After dinner on our last night there was a puja – Buddhist offering service – and it seemed a fitting end to our stay there. Everybody gathered in the temple, but nobody mentioned to us that this was a special bumper edition double-bill puja! It lasted about two hours, as each of the 21 incarnations of Tara was praised individually, but it’s enjoyable too, so nobody minded. During the puja prayers are chanted and sung in Tibetan, in a series of very basic, rhythmic and repetitive melodies, during which you can either join in when you can find your place in the English transcription, meditate or zone out and follow your thoughts. On this evening it gave time to think back over everything we’d done while we were there, and since it was our last time at puja, we gave a game attempt at joining in some of our favourite chants as well.

We all know it’s the end. Sonam has chickenpox. It is a very sad day for her. I hold Deachen and lift her up to the tree, she points at the two Santas and the Christmas fairy. ‘Tom, Catriona and Deachen.’ We try to touch our noses with our tongues. We all sing ‘You are my sunshine.’ You will come to Zanskar? They ask. I say we might not have enough money. ‘I will give 100Rs’ says Dolker, ‘I will give 1000’ shouts Small Ladon, ‘2000’ says Skitzom ‘but you share.’

It’s time for them to go to bed. I try not to cry. ’Sleep well, sweet dreams, zhim chin a go.’ Big Ladon gives me her om pendant, the one she always wears, and long look. I hug her close. It is one of her only possessions and the most precious gift I have ever been given, too precious and I decide I will give it back to her. They scurry out the door waving and blowing kisses. I lean against the stove and cry. But they come running in again and T shows them pictures of our parents and dogs and homes on his phone. They laugh and shriek when they see a picture of him without a beard.

When I go down to my room Dolker and Tenzin Palmo are still awake and hand me a box. Inside is a packet of crisps and 20Rs ‘so you can come and visit us in Zanskar.’ I hug them and hug them and bring the present back up to T and we watch the mountains burning from the roof and he walks me to my room for the last time. I sit on my bed and stare into nothing. How has the end come so suddenly?

Where Tibet meets India (meets Scotland)

During our time at the nunnery, we visited nearby Mcleod Ganj several times.

We get the bus to Dharamshala for 7Rs, (approx 10p!), then onto the bus to McLeod Ganj, 15Rs. The bus is packed. I can’t tell if the woman next to me thinks I am part of the bus, or is just unabashed at using my leg as if it was part of the bus; I suspect the latter. T looks straight into the armpit of a Buddhist monk whenever he turns around. The bus jolts and weaves its way uphill, through military compounds and sandy pine forests. ‘Even the air we breathe is motivated’ reads a military sign, below which two turbaned soldiers lounge, eyes alert, in a roadside hut. At points the road has collapsed and we drive over rubble. My least favourite moment of the journey is a particularly bad stretch of lack-of-road where the driver opens his door to check there is still ground under the bus. ‘Every accident is an act of negligence.’

After chai in Nick’s we walk to Bhagsu; through the stalls, past the swimming pool and the temple, to the river. As we climb the hot white steps to the waterfall we see monks washing their robes in the stream down below and laying them out on the boulders to dry. We are adopted by a Tibetan Buddhist monk, who says talking will make the (short) climb easier. We reach the waterfall, totter across a wee wooden bridge where we sit in the shade and discuss the cultural differences between the East and the West. Tiny, blue, red-breasted birds swoop and flutter over the pool at the base of the waterfall. The monk chats away. ‘People in the west, no happy inside. Only happy outside. Buy a new car, and after one or two years, car not new anymore, not happy. In East we make happy inside, long time, thinking, meditating, this make happy inside. No lose this… Very many difference between China and Tibet… for example, in China, this very small bird, they put in a bowl, with many birds, and they eat this, yes, if I eat this it make me vomit. Why you eat small small bird? In Tibet a mother sees tiny bird,’ and he motions a picking up a wee bird, and placing it out of danger’s way, ‘she teaches her child to do this, and the child learns, this is what we do. They get this habit. In Tibet, we no eat bird, or fish, only sometimes some people they eat an old yak, this is the only thing.’ He says he is trying to learn English, and until recently had the help of an American lady who was staying in McLeod for five moths. ‘One day I ask her how old she is, and she do this’ he shakes his finger ‘“No, Longsan, you cannot ask this, it’s very rude!” Why is this rude? In Tibet, you can ask this! Then another time, I look at her, and you know, she has a very fat face, so I say, “why you so fat?” and again she do this finger shaking and laugh and say is very rude!’ He tells us the Tibetan for waterfall is ‘babchu’. We leave him sitting in the shade, and wander back down the river.

After coming back down from the waterfall, we visited the Dalai Lama’s home temple. Having thought of it as the sort of Vatican for Tibetan Buddhists, I was surprised at first that it didn’t actually seem very grand. A dusty forecourt led up to a large building whose colours were bright, pushing garish in the inner temples and — as has been the constant case everywhere we’ve been — building work was crawling along in corners and corridors. In Europe, a major visitor attraction might close entirely for renovations, or hide the unsightly labour behind elaborate scaffolds and barriers, but here the process is ongoing and demystified, a small group of men and women with a bag of sand, a dish of concrete and a trowel patching away at the fabric of any building you visit.

However, after getting used to the humble first impression the place made, I started to notice other things about it. The location is beautiful, with views down the pine-covered hillside far down into the Kangra Valley, as far as distant mountains and lakes to the south on a clear day. There is a sense of peace and friendliness pervading the place, with groups of smiling visitors padding clockwise in their stocking soles around the temple to pay their respects. A sign outside the inner temple doors made us chuckle with its forthright paradox: “Make sure that your shoes are not stolen by someone”. OK, thanks. Inside the incensed hall we marveled at the gigantic golden Buddha, surrounded by other statues and their quotidian offerings: cartons of juice, browning bananas, packets of oreos. I left a few rupee coins by the golden man’s feet and we sat to listen to the monks’ mesmerising chanting. The leaders’ constant low rumbling mantras were amplified through pop star radio mics, vibrating the floorboards. Every couple of minutes, at some signal obscure to us, the ranks of monks would erupt in a few seconds of clattering praise, pink conches blown to the rafters, bells, gongs, shells and cymbals jangling into life – then back to the drone. A chai monk passed through the room to sustain the chanters, and we slipped back out into the cool fresh air, relieved to find that we had succeeded in making sure that our shoes were not stolen by someone.

Back on the crowded streets we realised how tired and hungry we were, and after a quick meal we steeled ourselves for the bus journey back. But we must have amassed some merit for the temple offering, because as we walked through the town square towards the bus stand, C spotted a couple of our nunnery’s nuns getting into a taxi. In my extreme Scottish reticence, I almost ignored the sign and pushed on towards the bus, but C hurried over to greet them, I trotted sheepishly behind. Of course, it was a far superior plan – we were treated to a door-to-door ride, during which one of the nuns gave us a strange, sweet, brown fruit to try and they both told us the stories they had heard about Findhorn and the deep divine calling that had led to its foundation. We were able to contribute our experience of their nice cheap campsite, grey water treatment greenhouse, delicious almond croissants and whisky vat houses.

***

The next time we visited we were able to take advantage of another side of Mcleod. Large numbers of Western tourists entail a selection of fancy cafes, selling near-authentic brunches and cakes, imported coffee and cheese at prices that are extortionate for Indians but still cheap for Europeans. Of course we’d love to pretend we’re not really tourist-tourists, but also, of course we’re tourists. And even when feeling a little silly or guilty about it, waking up in the sun and writing some postcards over some comfort food is a wonderful thing.

After this we had a beautiful walk up to another waterfall. Everyone calls it the Dharamkot waterfall, but in fact it is up well beyond Dharamkot, and still a good bit beyond Gallu, the highest and most remote of Mcleod’s satellite villages. At the waterfall a few brave souls were slipping in and out of the freezing pools – not for us this time, but we promised ourselves that, at some vague point before leaving the area, we definitely would come back with towel and cozzies. Back in Gallu we quickly checked out pre-trek guesthouse options: half-built structure with barking dogs and poker-playing workers, probably not; balcony overlooking the mountains and quiet, friendly owner, probably yes. The we shared a taxi back to Mcleod with a strange French girl, who obliviously sang along to Hindi songs she didn’t know on the radio to bemused glances from the driver. Finding ourselves suddenly zapped once again, we half-heartedly tried to find a fabled shortcut walk back to Dharamshala, but lacking the energy for perseverance in the face of difficulty, we succumbed to the allure of the taxi rank to get back to the bus station.

On another visit, we go to the 22nd Himalayan Festival, which commemorates the conferment of the Noble Peace Prize on his Holiness the Dalai Lama. It’s held in a big billowing tent in a car park opposite the temple and has the feel of Scariff Harbour festival, or Nethy Highland Games. We get minute thimbles of chai and some aloo puri, and watch tiny Tibetan girls with immaculate black fringes bop and dance. Four Indian dancers with red eyes painted on their feet, mad eyes, tongues out, re-enacting Hindu stories. Circle dancing to the simple plucking of the Tibetan banjo – the dramyin; men and women adorned in different but equally wild straw and fur hats. There is a band with a Tibetan kind of hammer dulcimer and a wee blue wooden flute. A troop of local Gaddi guys come on to do a regional dance, in which they lep about, circling blue Shiva who blows flour over everyone, to much whistling and cheering. The Tibetan woman next to me, with a sleeping toddler bundled on her lap, dozes through the whole thing, even through the heavy metal folk dancing, much to the amusement of the children in the rows all around. Cool young monks in maroon hoodies hang out with groups of admiring girls and an old monk with no teeth grins and films the whole thing on his iPhone.

That night brought the first proper rain we’d seen since leaving Scotland over a month earlier, and it battered the region for two days solid. The festival persevered bravely into its second day, but it was held in a tent mostly made of floaty silk banners, and the water draining from the roof looked to be pouring straight onto the mixing desk. Despite the power cutting out every few minutes, the acoustic acts soldiered on (no mixing desks needed for Tibetan shepherd music), and it ended on a flourish, with the crowd-pleasing appearance of Shiva.

On the third attempt to post the packages I make it to the wee stall selling thangkas where a jolly Tibetan sews up parcels for the post office. I sit on an upturned crate and wait my turn. The Indian man next to me has an internet business and is sending about 50 parcels. The sewing Tibetan man does one of these every now and again, but mostly they seem to chat. The Indian man tells me he used to run a hotel in McLeod, about five years ago. He said it was the best time of his life. ‘People from all over the world would stay in my hotel, they’d come for breakfast, lunch and dinner and then we’d stay talking through the night. You can learn so much, by talking to people, many things, it’s wonderful, and it’s all for free, talking to people! Now this town has changed so much, now there is wifi, people just sitting on their phones, no more talking. It’s completely different. It’s not the town I knew.’ The Tibetan man sews a wee cloth pouch with red thread on three sides, then bundles in the contents, hand sews the last side with stout white string and seals it with red wax. I write the addresses in black marker. ‘Can I just take these to the post office now?’ I naively ask the Indian man. ‘Hah, no, you have to fill out two of these forms, CN22, for each package and you need to bring two copies of your passport for each package.’ India!

***

By our last visit, the town felt friendly and familiar. We happened to be given the same room we stayed in on our first visit, and this time the weather couldn’t have been better – the week before Christmas, and it was still getting towards 20C in the daytime. We took a long walk out to Naddi, another peaceful village outside Mcleod, past Dal Lake, which is on all the tourist to-dos, and might be quite impressive on its holy day, when all the locals jump in, but on our visit had the feeling of an unloved park paddling pool – small and murky, with a couple of battered pedalos abandoned at its edge, and a couple of teenagers half-heartedly trying to push them in. Up in the village, opportunistic roadside sellers offered a variety of services, all for 10 rupees: have a look through my ancient telescope, weigh yourself on my bathroom scales, borrow my exotic hat for your selfie. The views of the Dhauladars from Naddi were spectacular though, and we took a forest path back via Dharamkot, which was thankfully shady and took us to a picturesque clearing which was strung thickly with multicoloured Buddhist prayer flags and dotted with waist-high cairns.

We walk the kora, clockwise around the temple, as the sun sets, glinting off the golden prayer wheels spinning. A wee monkey swings upside down from a tree, a minute one crouches by the side of the path, others sit still up in the cedars, silhouetted against the white of the hills. A sign begs visitors not to feed the monkeys, cows or dogs. A young monk casually hands a bit of bread to a waiting monkey. An old old Tibetan nun staggers along slowly. All around the prayer wheels spin. We stop to watch the sun disappear behind the smog of the distant hills.

A Pass in the Dhauladhars

The night before the trek we wander around Gallu at night. We puzzle over barrels of pitchforks and start walking the trail in the dark. Down below Mcleod and Dharamashala twinkle. Suddenly ahead of us two green eyes blink out of the blackness. Momentarily I think ‘Fuck me, it’s a bear. It’s definitely a bear.’ But it was a cow, of course!

Day 1

We woke up to the beautiful, freezing view over the valley at Gallu, where the quiet, friendly man who runs the Horizon guest house offered us breakfast from a hand-written menu. Ready with time to spare, we pottered round into the sunshine of the village square to warm up and wait for the guide we had booked to lead us to the Indrahar Pass. After a few minutes two men and at least ten ponies, laden with pallets of water bottles, gas canisters, sacks of flour and other supplies trotted up to us – we stared at each other in sudden horror at the thought that this might all be for us! The awful decadence, the pampered privilege. We had been cautious and opted to pay for an experienced guide from a reassuringly professional company; while the walk started on a popular tourist route, we were going beyond this to a 4000m+ mountain ridge, and the price, while high in Indian terms, seemed very reasonable to us – especially when we were emailed a copy of the meal list they had planned for the three-day trip.

Our guide was called Sunny, and there was also a cook called Vishnu, who both turned out to be very good company. Sunny was also a mountain rescuer, knew the landscape and its history intimately, and treated it seriously and respectfully, so we couldn’t have hoped to be in safer hands. Vishnu was impish and gregarious, leaping straight into practical jokes and telling us that the only Scottish people he’d met before sounded like they were fighting every time they spoke. Now, though, we were torn between feeling sensible at having a guide on a potentially difficult and dangerous climb, and feeling embarrassed among groups of Westerners and tourists from Delhi, casually plodding up the path with flip-flops, ripped jeans and mobile speakers. Sunny took us over to a rusty tin police box to check in to the mountain in typically bureaucratic style, visa number, ancestral occupations, DNA samples and the rest of it – then we set off towards Triund, our first stop.

We’re watching a young cafe lad throw water on the rising dust outside, one dribble at a time. Sunny takes our dry bag to attach to the donkey. Vishnu perches on the steps. ‘I am a God, you know me, Vishnu?’ he laughs. Sunny comes back followed by about twenty donkeys all heavily laden with water and Red Bull and Limca. ‘My God, they don’t think we’re going to drink a crate of Red Bull each in two days do they?’ I whisper. T laughs and shrugs. For about five minutes we are unsure if this huge entourage is purely for our benefit. But it turns out to be the daily delivery van for the cafes all the way up to Triund. Phew!

Sunny turns out to be THE mountain rescue guy and has an unnerving habit of pausing at particular spots along the trail and pointing out where people have fallen taking selfies or crashed paragliding. He has uncles all over the mountain, and bends to touch the leg of an older man in a prayer hat that we overtake. He points out the wee huts that the monks rent from local people to meditate in, and the huts the local farmers use in monsoon when they can’t stay the valley below. We climb through pines and brown oaks, the valleys drifting away in mist below us. At Triund we are faced with the mountains closer than we have ever seen them. There are cafes dotted everywhere, selling toothbrushes and renting out tents. Sunny unpacks the most ridiculous mountain meal I have ever seen. Rice, dhal, saag paneer, curries of all dimensions. Along the way I spot an old scabby page of a newspaper with some sudokus and puzzles on it, T pockets it for night-time entertainment. We climb further up, to a wee temple, where Sunny stops to ring bells and explains that the trident or ‘Trishula’ is a sacred symbol in Hinduism. We are joined by a sweaty German man who collapses outside the temple. ‘Am I half way?’ He asks. Sunny nods. But half way to where?

After lunch we walked on for a couple more hours, and after a chai stop at the Snow Line Cafe we reached our base camp at Laka Got. Vishnu had already set up our tent, the kitchen tent and the loo tent, and had fresh coffee and vegetable pakora waiting for us – we were now well out of tourist range, and began to feel we had made a very good decision! After admiring the beautiful sunset on the mountains and the clouds rolling in the valley below us, it was into the kitchen tent for far too much delicious dinner, Vishnu turning chapatis in an open flame and continually piling them in front of us, then singing by the fire before an early night before an early start, to climb to the summit of the pass.

The mountains are spectacular and we can see their true colours, which are always changing, up close. As the sun sets through the gap in the valley the clouds rise and burn golden yellow, the ponies graze in the drifting mist. When we turn the mountains are glowing pink and orange as if the light came from within them. Slowly the colours fade upwards until the last light leaves even the highest tops. Moon Peak. Campbell’s Peak. The Matterhorn. And tomorrow the Indrahar Pass. We look up. I think it seems impossibly far away. T doesn’t! Vishnu cooks up a feast and is appalled when we only eat two chapattis each ‘I can eat ten, fifteen, in one time!’ We sit by the fire and try to remember songs about mountains.

Day 2

Having shivered and dozed for a few hours, we were woken before sunrise for a “light breakfast” of porridge and French toast, and quickly set off for the day’s walk. It was hard going, a few hours of gradually zig-zagging step-by-step up the steep face as the air got thinner and breathing got harder.

We’re up before dawn and start climbing in the cold blue light. Wee holes dotted across the mountains are filled with tiny circles of frost. T says they’re like the jagged mouths of lampreys (see Colin Stafford-Johnson: Wild Ireland), but I think they’re pretty. Suddenly Sunny says ‘Quick, click click, take photo!’ he points to a wee group of fat birds sitting on a stony ledge. I click just as they take off. ‘These are wild chicken.’ They are delighted! We stop at a shrine to Krishna and his cow, where both their footprints are embedded in the rock. Despite this, Vishnu says that they worship Shiva, because they’re Gaddi people, shepherds, and Shiva is the God of the mountains. We see wild goats on the far away horizon.

Wild Chickens & Krishna’s Shrine

We climb up. Sunny spots a wild ibex on the far ridge. Slower and slower. The sun pours into the hill. Sunny entices us upwards with promises of oranges. ‘Twenty minutes, then orange break!’ When fruit no longer seems to be doing the trick he takes my hand and drags me up for about ten minutes. I cannae breath. Because of lack of fitness or lack of oxygen I can’t tell. I am resigned to the mountain. We see the minute red flag of the summit seemingly miles above us. Then I have to put it out of my mind and believe only in the present steps. (Very Buddhist now innit.) Eventually through mounds of grey slate and stone and patches of snow, we make it to the top! Around the corner mountains unfold in all directions, abstract brown hills giving way to blue mountains and snowy peaks, jagged and immense. The Pir Panjal range, and on the other side Jammu and Kashmir. We’re at 14,320 feet. It’s as if the whole world is mountains. I feel as if I could just keep walking forever into them.

After the summit, there was nothing for it but a steady plod back down. This took longer than expected, but we made it with only slightly achy legs, and the luxury treatment continued as we were presented with bowls of hot water to wash our faces and soak our feet in, strictly in that order. We had opted not to bring any books or entertainment, and as it was still several hours until nightfall, we had to make do with the meagre diversions we had – a sheet of sudoku scavenged from a newspaper in a cafe we had passed the day before, and attempting to name every US state. We got 48 – the only two we didn’t get were Virginia and Rhode Island, and we did get West Virginia… so really Rhode Island was the only one we didn’t think of at all. This was enough to put anyone to sleep, and after another feast we settled down for the night.

Only to be woken at 1am by the incessant prayer-bell jingle of one of the camp ponies’ bells. I am sure he is going to trip over one of the guy lines and come crashing down on us. (The ponies here are wee, but not that wee) We shoo him downhill. Pointless. Eventually I take him back up to the stone-walled pony fank where his pals are sullenly munching on leaves and we sleep.

Day 3

The next morning we were given a lie in, not getting up until 7am. After breakfast we said our goodbyes to the ponies, Vishnu and the pony man. We thought their send-off was a little chilly, and were mortified when, at a dramatic hilltop temple diversion, Sunny carefully worked it into conversation that, really, we should have tipped them before we left. This gave an unfortunate sour note to the next leg of the walk, as we hung back and fretted over our mistake, debating how much we should give. Happily, it all worked out in the end; when we reached the bottom we left a tip with Sunny to share with others, and he shared a taxi back to Mcleod with us, leaving us with the (surely false) compliment that we had a very good pace – the ultimate endorsement from a mountain guide.

We climb up to a wee Hindu temple and Buddhist knoll above Triund. Looking back at the mountains it’s impossible to think how tiny we were up there, how massive the mountains are. We’re guilty as we descend, the prayer flags fluttering sending prayers out over the whole mountain. We leave the high hills and climb back down into the thoroughfare of Triund. Lower there are cows, and nuns, back to normality!

Then, as we cast around for the bus we needed to get back home, whose head should we see poking out of a window but Vishnu! Turned out we needed the same bus, so he kept us company on the journey, we gave him a couple of pennies to add to his world coin collection (and made sure he knew there was a proper tip for him with Sunny), traded numbers and planned to meet up again.

Arriving back at the comfort of the nunnery, the soporific effect it had begun to exert over us was gone, replaced by a welcome homeliness, as everybody there asked us how it was, if they could see our photos, glad to have us back.