The book includes nine essays about places in the Indian subcontinent. Five of them are about India and one each about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Tibet. Mishra writes about diverse trends in life in these places and finds a common thread in them, which he refers to by the book’s title. I enjoyed reading all these essays. But the ones on Allahabad and Benares were especially enlightening, after having a taste of life here.

One’s first questions, when one comes to Allahabad and Benares, are about how nothing works here. The banks won’t do what they should, post offices won’t do what they should, municipalities won’t do what they should, students won’t do what they should, teachers won’t do what they should, ad nauseam. Mishra had similar questions when, for example, he went to the University at Benares in 1988 and saw students and teachers doing everything but their job. The scene stood in contrast with the post-independence idealism at the universities and his own brahmin’s thirst for study.

Allahabad was even more intriguing for him. He was here at the university from 1985 to 1988 and now came again in 2000, during elections.

The long bone-rattling drive … to Allahabad on potholed roads, through calf-deep floods, past the tin-roofed shacks and rain-battered villages of mud and thatch—the cowering huts, so picturesque from the plane, now appearing frail, in danger of collapsing onto the sodden earth from which they had been so arduously raised , the low-caste women paving tiny courtyards with cow-dung, the men spinning ropes for the string cots, the sky low and grey over the flat fields and tiny huts and buffaloes placid in muddy pools—the long drive through a world that belonged to itself as fixedly as it would have done two centuries ago was a reminder of how far even the superficially good things of a globalized economy were from this heavily populated and impoverished part of India.

He stayed in the “only four star hotel in town,” where they have Mexican and Italian food on their coffee shop menu, and slums and dingy lanes all around outside. From his perch high up in this eight-storey building he could survey Allahabad’s colonial design. He could even understand the chronology in it: the little pilgrim district of Prayag centred at the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna and the railway strip dividing this from the Civil Lines, the university and the public library, both of which the British built after they came here in the nineteenth century. (One Colonel James Neill killed 6,000 “dirty Indian niggers” at that time.) This Allahabad, “Rudyard Kipling’s Allahabad,” had its differences cut and dried. With independence, this “romance had gone, but this distance hadn’t really diminished,” with the administrators immediately squatting on the British bungalow and perpetuate their difference from the “masses”. “Dignity, and how to hold on to it: that was what preoccupied these men, most of whom the civil service had rescued from a lower-middle-class shabbiness.” He goes on to describe sadly comical tales from his visit to such a city and the countryside around it.

Mishra also lays out many pages on the Nehru dynasty that came from Allahabad and half-returns to the original theme by telling of the bourgeois anxieties of the new upward mobile occupants of the Civil Lines. But now

the middle class that had depended for a long time on its close affiliations with the executive and legislative branches of the administration—and on its class loyalties, now weakened at a time when every man was for himself—the middle class in small towns and cities sees itself besieged. In this you could detect the beginning of the end of an India that thought itself safe in the cocoon of colonial privilege; an India that with all its inherited advantages had failed to create a democratic and egalitarian society.

The other three essays on India are about Bollywood, Hindutva and Kashmir—all three have the same skilful exposition in them. On the book’s blurb is the following testimony from the New York Review of Books for Mishra’s other book An End to Suffering:

With perfectly modulated lyricism, Mishra evokes a world few of us have seen from within. He is the rare writer who is at ease as a historian, philosopher, traveller, and memoirist, and the combination of roles allows him to produce a book that few others could even have attempted.

This surely applies to this book too.

We did a good 10 km hike at last! This was to a village called Kakara downstream the Ganga, up to the ashram of Durwasa, about which I had written in an earlier post. It was a great morning and we enjoyed walking a lot. With the autumn coolness and the Sunday there was also the feeling that we were going “off the beaten track.” In fact almost nothing can be obtained about this place from Google, and when this post goes on line, this will be one of the very few places that will do that job!

We set off pretty early in the morning—at five—and as the four of us walked under the almost full moon, I began wondering about who Durwasa was. It so happens that I hardly know of any of the mythology behind that name. I did not remember if he appears in the Ramayana or the Mahabharata or in any of the other stories. The only thing someone remembered was that the person was short tempered. Later in the day each of us was handed a booklet that contained a Sanskrit composition of eight stanzas by one Mahadev Prasad Goswami, which claimed to tell the story that “lies scattered in several books like the Bhagavata, etc.” I couldn’t gather much though, other than that he was intelligent and strong and was associated with one Raja Nahush and another, Sudyumna, and also with Krishna and other Yadavas, and used to live “four kosa” to the East of the Triveni in Prayag. (I really don’t know how much a “kosa” is, but the ashram is about 18 km away from Allahabad now.)

We walked till Nibi along our usual route through the Mahua groves (venue for this glorious sunrise!) and continued walking along the main street in the village to Chhibaiyya. This is a much densely populated town that lines this road. Kakara lies just beyond Chhibaiyya and the Durwasa ashram is at its edge, close to the Ganga. (See the route on Google maps; make sure you see the hybrid version.)

The place includes one Shiva temple, a defunct dharamshala (pilgrims’ lodge) and a Sanskrit school run by monks of the Giri order. People have further set up a primary school and an intermediate college near the temple. We couldn’t really gauge how old the structures could be but nothing apart from the idols looked more than fifty years old. The temple has a small corridor around a sanctum sanctorum of the size of a small room. Beside the corridor, in the alcoves in the wall, were kept around fifty idols. The biggest was that of the sage, with eyes convincingly indicating a short temper. A steady stream of old men and women of all ages kept passing in and out of the temple as we sat admiring the place. Outside the temple, which is connected by the dharamshala to the school, is a yajnashala with some fascinating stuff. The walls of the chamber had about eleven chaupais written on them. All of them were composed by one Ramsundar Das of the ashram about thirty years ago and—we didn’t notice this before a student of the school pointed it out—all of them were complete palindromes! Here is an example:

न तन तरन रस, सरन रतन तन ।
न छन तजत रत, तरत जतन छन ।

I found this unbelievable! The children also took us into their school, where I noticed rooms with labels “Modern section,” “Ayurveda section” and “Books section.” Their teacher looked at us hesitatingly from inside. He had arranged the booklets on Durwasa for us after we told him we were students too. We were then made to climb a floor higher, where their head swami—who presently was at Satna at a similar school—sat. And then on the roof of the building, from where we could see the whole village on one side and a huge desert near the Ganga on the other.

I wanted to go to the desert but we didn’t have much time; the walking alone had taken more than three hours. Instead we took a six seater to Hanumanganj, on NH2 and then took another to Chak, near our own Jhunsi.

“Common sense” models of human behaviour seem to predict a bleak face of humanity: that of independent agents working for their own profit, disregarding the “greater good” (if such a thing exists!). But there seems to be a yawning gap between these descriptions and reality. True, on the small scale we see corruption, trickery and single minded profiteering. In this chaos, we somehow lose the sight of the big picture: that humans have created civilizations. That humans have clustered together for centuries and despite their petty squabbles, have built huge, magnificent cultures.

Perhaps the most co-operative part of human civilisation is the passing of information. The discoveries made in our time are passed on to our children. We build up on what is already known. Seeking knowledge is inherently a very selfish act in that, it fulfills the individual’s own need and may not depend on outside rewards. But its result usually has wide-spread dissemination. Despite the clamour for patents, intellectual property rights and other such things, it would probably be difficult to find a discoverer who jealously guards the idea unto death. The thought that ones contribution has reached another soul is still a deeper satisfaction to most. The wide support for free educational resources (even on the cutting edge of research) is proof of this. Also significant is the open source movement in software technology. Thousands of high quality programs are now available to anyone who wishes to use them, all with the explicit condition that one is free to do whatever one wishes with the code. It is considered etiquette of this culture to acknowledge the previous authors and is mostly done willingly. What is most counter-intuitive in this mode of development is that a person you don’t know might voluntarily spend hours to solve your problems without expecting anything.

Many other examples of such “help your neighbour” behaviour exist. And I am certain almost every individual is helpful to a certain small group of individuals who are near. The trouble occurs when drawing the line between “ours” and “theirs.” Certainly, it is stupid to spend your energy for “them” when they do nothing for you in turn.

Perhaps, the answer lies in the awareness that the small effort each one puts in keeps the machine of civilisation going. The question is what brings this awareness? Wealth? Education? I think we have all seen enough recent counter examples to both these. What stops you from not playing your “responsible” part? Essentially, nothing!

If human beings only stopped reffering to cruelty in nature as a way of making excuses for their own! The human forgets with what infinite innocence even the most terrifying event in nature takes place. … [Nature's] consciousness consists in its completeness; because it contains everything, nature contains cruelty as well. Man, however, will never be able to encompass everything. … He is thus instantly condemned by his choice because it turns him into an exception, into an isolated, one-dimensional being no longer connected to the whole.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

We notice anti-social behaviour right away: like the man who pulls the chain to stop the train where he wants to get off. But we do not notice the ‘good’ behaviour of so many people who do not do it when they could have!

I did not quite know how to react to a statement like this. One could be annoyed at the silliness of this description or appreciative of the optimism in it. For those of us born in India and known from a young age it’s occasional (or at times blatant) lawlessness, for us who have become so used to vehemently criticising every such act with a deep seated nonchalance, such a statement would elicit (especially coming from a white skinned man) a mild dislike and defensiveness. But the thought that the speaker is not a distant observer but one who has lived in India—by choice!—for close to 30 years, stops you from this convenient dismissal.

For many of us, this is a curious tribe. An outsider, who has seen ahead of the filth, the poverty and corruption and found some kind of a home here. And perhaps because of our colonial past, even gives it a slight romantic aura. Most of us media fed youths are used to seeing India through a pseudo-western eye and happily accept it’s verdicts. It is such men therefore who make you think of what it means to be an Indian at all.

Jean Drèze, economist and currently a visiting professor at G.B. Pant Institute, Allahabad gave a colloquium on “Public Spiritedness and Development” here at HRI last Friday. The lecture was based mostly on mathematical models of human behaviour asking whether the co-operation required for social progress could be explained by game-theoretic arguments. A discussion that followed touched upon the new acts (specifically the Right to Information Act and National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) passes recently.

1. If Bob confesses but I don’t, I’ll get into trouble (C-D)
2. However, if I confess, then I get a light sentence no matter what Bob does

1. If you decide to fight and the other flees, you get the whole pie.
2. However, if the other player choose to fight back, you could end up losing the pie.

so the payoff for:

1. C-C: n-n (where n is some number between 0 and 1)
2. D-D: 0-0
3. C-D: 0-1
4. D-C: 1-0

When would the probability of your choosing to fight be very high? If the energy you need to spend in fighting would be much smaller that the value to the pie!

However one important variation is that instead of playing the game only once, it may be played repeatedly (called the “Iterative” Prisoner’s Dilemma). Here, however, a strategy can be made in which your response could depend on the previous responses of the other player. (Incidently, Dawkins mentions that the best strategy found was to defect on the first trial and then mimic whatever your opponent does.)

Both the ultimatum game and the single-trial prisoner’s dilemma excluded one important factor that also determines our social life. Something that can be loosely termed as “reputation.” Your behaviour may affect your later life. Is it this hard-wired sense that governs human behaviour? One rather depressing piece of the puzzle is the Stanford prison experiment. This experiment put two groups of students (guards and prisoners) into a prison like environment. Neither knew the other beforehand and were sorted into the two groups randomly. The guards had full authority over the prisoners (and were unlikely to be punished for their behaviour.) The experiment had to be disontinued because it was seen that the guards got more abusive at night when no-one was watching!

The simulation became so real, and the guards became so abusive, that the experiment had to be shut down after only 6 days rather than the two weeks planned.

The main study of this experiment was of course different from what we are looking at in this post. They were more interested in how the “system” affects the behaviour of perfectly normal, psychologically healthy people when given authoritative positions or put into humiliating situations. Moreover, the guards had nothing to gain from the abuse. But does this hint that in absence of consequential punishment, people tend to behave rather rashly? Would they behave the same way if at the end of the day, they had to take full responsibility for their actions?

Both of us have been busy with work after getting back from that long vacation, writing that story and admiring those pictures. With a swollen monsoon Ganga we don’t go for riverside walks these days. We had a single though interesting trip on our Chhatnag – Nibi – Bhatkar circuit—three villages that now are little dots on a vast green carpet that covers the doab. We met about fifty enthusiastic children on our way (they wanted their pictures taken) and one Hūblal Yadav (who is trying to build a Hanuman temple in his village). Yadav told us about a riverside ashram just 6 km away from here. It is said that this ashram was belonged the the sage Durvasa and we plan to go there on some weekend soon.

Between a lot of odd jobs and pending work I managed to scoop a little time out to read, and ended up reading three books, all related to the Himalayas. All three carry my recommendations for someone who wants to get a taste of those mountains. I particularly liked two of them.

You would like to read Jim Corbett‘s My India if you want to know about the people of Kumaon and Garhwal “as if they mattered.” You will find in it stories written on those people by someone who lived with them without the slightest awareness of his foreignness. And you will sit with the book as soon as you read Corbett’s dedication on the first page, to discover a world of simple men and women of the hills described with full respect for their idiosyncrasies and traditions. He describes the little boy whose father was killed by a leopard, the courageous woman who is also a deceased headman’s wife, the daciot whom he calls India’s Robin Hood and also all those marvelous people who helped him at Mokameh Ghat near Patna. You will soon want to buy a copy of the book. But if you do, I’d suggest you buy the one that appears as a part of The Second Jim Corbett Omnibus, which was published by Oxford about ten years ago. (Cover shown above.) Copies are hard to find, but are still available. Don’t even consider getting newer editions of the Omnibus or My India.

I had a chance to travel again after we returned from Gangotri and I picked up Vikram Seth‘s From Heaven Lake, that friends had given on my last birthday, to read in the train. Whenever I read Seth I feel like he is sitting besides me and enthusiastically describing his story as if I were a close friend. It was, at least in part, this feeling that made me finish the book in only a few sittings. The story begins in North-Western China, where Seth is traveling with his friends thanks to his studentship at the Nanjing university. “A song and a walk” result in his getting a rare pass to Tibet and an interesting travelogue follows. He reaches Delhi from Nanjing via Beijing, Quinghai, Lhasa and Kathmandu—hitchhiking most of the way. This is a great read, as all Seth’s books are.

I haven’t actually finished reading the third book yet. Stephen Alter‘s Sacred Waters in a story of his travels in Garhwal. He calls it a pilgrimage because he went to the places where one goes for the Char Dham Yatra. It is an honest chronicle, without excessive ornamentation in language, of an honest journey, without prejudice and without a camera! He describes the temples, the rituals, the people, the wildlife and nature in as much detail as possible. I liked the book for all this but still couldn’t keep myself at it for more than a little time in any sitting.

These three books are in a chronological order and and cover a huge Himalayan area. It is the oldest one that I like the most.

The clear day that we had waited for dawned after all. As soon as we stepped out the tent, we saw this. [In picture below.] Bluest of blue skies and crisp air. We took another long walk around the plateau, this time appreciating all the gleaming peaks and soaking in the darling sunshine.

We dilly-dallied the breakfast considerably and our crew was visibly restless. We merrily packed up. Photographed all the flowers we could find. And with no little regret, said goodbye to Tapovan. The trail further goes through the upper side of the meadow. It was bright and warm and the few minutes of walk was far too short. The Bhagirath stood, looking unconquerable [In the picture below]. The glacier was flooded with light – one can never understand the pleasure of bright light without spending a gloomy, foggy day in the mountains. The fog walls you in, makes you feel trapped; the sunshine set us free.

We had to descend the same kind of steep scree slope into the glacier as we has climbed. This was considerably difficult, but everyone was rather cheerful.

We had all heard the blah about Global Warming and the recession of the Gangotri glacier. Our guide had been climbing here for atleast twenty years. It seemed natural to ask him for first hand observations. He told us, “Ofcourse Gaumukh has gone back a kilometer or so. (Official figure is 850m in 25 upto 1999 .) But you see this slope we climbed down? And that one you see we need to climb up to Nandanvan, they were not so deep. (They are currently atleast 200m, from our experience.) One didn’t have to do this climb down-climb up. The whole glacier is settling down!” One of our team-members immediately remembered that our mythology says in Kaliyug, the river Ganga returns to heaven.

We had seen a solitary tent in the Raktavarna glacier (a tributary of the Gangotri glacier) that our guide said belonged to technicians conducting measurements. We imagined they would be of the kind that needed sensitive equipment capable of measuring small changes—what we saw were huge changes (The current recession rate is 30m/yr.) It is unimaginable that Ganga, the stuff of our legends and at times the unseparable component of Indian cultural identity could disappear.

The walk through the glacier was more like jumps through the glacier. One has to hop from rock to rock, testing that they are firmly supported. Occasionally, a large solid looking rocks moves under your feet reminding you to be extra careful. It is exhausting more because of this constant watchfulness than because of the physical exertion.

In places, the ice was thinly coved with mud, making it look like a deceptively easy climb. Our crew faithfully waited for us and pointed it out. (Thankfully! I have a rather unpleasant memory of slipping and bumping my nose on ice once.) Here and there, the water melting formed little pools of cool mineral water, much tastier than that bottled stuff one buys. [In the picture above.] In places like these, we rested and challenged each other to throw stones farthest into the water. The clouds were coming back, so we had to hurry. Monsoon was just around the corner and we wouldn’t want to get caught in a shower.

The climb at the base of Bhagirath wasn’t as steep but after the scree slope, one has to climb up the side of the mountain to come to the camping area. The Bhagirath is made up of entirely different rock than it’s neighbours and the trail winds through rock of deep red hue. On returning, I asked a geologist friend who told me that the Himalayas are the most exciting place in the world for studying geology and how it was his dream to go there once. Though at that time, we merely moaned at having no-one explain us all that we saw.

Nandanvan is the base camp for climbing Bhagirathi III. (The mountain Bhagirath is the mythological name for the Bhagirathi peaks I, II and III.) Even though there were no other camps that day, the site was littered with plastic wrappers. But nevertheless, one really did feel like one was in the lap of the great Bhagirath. In Hindu mythology, Bhagirath was a king whose 60,000 ancestors had been cursed by a sage and could only achieve salvation by the waters of the river Ganga. With great meditation, King Bhagirath was able to bring Ganga down from the heavens and release the tormented souls of his ancestors.

Nandanvan lives up to its name—paradise! We mourned that we had used up our extra day at Tapovan. The clouds were descending and it was colder, but the beauty was unparalleled. Through the clouds, one could now see Kedar Dome (6831m) covered with snow and a new peak Kharchakund (6632 m). The sunset was colourful, red mingling with blue. For a while, the clouds engulfed us completely and then settled into the valley, leaving a clear sky.

The night was clear and Venus shone so bright, it cast a faint shadow. It was a star filled sky that must have marvelled so many a man ever since man had cared to look up. All through our trek, the Bhagirath has been our companion. We felt he was our friend. The stars made familiar patterns in the sky. They were our friends too. And yet, both so great, so marvellous and so overwhelming. Great mountains and a star filled sky—they humble you and make you feel completely at home at the same time. This was the homecoming we had travelled to.

~

We trekked back the next morning, through the lateral moraine of the Gangotri glacier. We passed by the Chaturanga (four-coloured) and the Raktavarna glaciers whose terminal walls one could see at a distance, passed Gaumukh and camped for the night in Bhojwasa.

Leaving is difficult business. One has to think about the plains, the people, the politics and it was in all, quite painful. One forgets such things up there. All that matters is that this place exists and you exist to be able to see it. It reminds you of the pettiness of your life and how it means nothing to nature, whose greatness you cannot even begin to understand. And you are horrified that this place might, at some time in the future, cease to exist. The joking remark of Ganga returning to heaven suddenly fills you with terror. You can almost see a once patient, smiling Godess, irritated with mankind and fed up with waiting for understanding to dawn, giving up and returning to heaven, leaving man groping in his vain stupidity.

We woke up early morning in the freezing fog. The humid cold had given us all sore throats. After some warm tea, we took a stroll to the river before breakfast. The sun was coming out of the clouds and its cozy warmth brought back the cheer. Some bharals (Pseudois nayaur) were walking slowly on the other shore. Bhojwasa (3800m) is almost at the tree line and the bharals walk the precipitous slopes grazing on what little green they can find. The morning was calm and one could sit forever at the river bank. Bhagirath stood sternly at the head of the river. As we walked downstream, we came by a place where rocks, big and small, were balanced on other rocks in such strange looking ways, it seemed they had been glued. [In the picture.] I slowly poked at a rock, it moved. By now, the whole assembly was looking so magical, I was almost getting superstitious. Girish bent down and knocked a biggish rock off. Plop! Feeling slightly ominous, I walked back to breakfast.

By 8am, it had warmed considerably and we set off soon on the trail towards Gaumukh. Gaumukh (meaning the mouth or face of the cow) is the terminal glacial wall of the Gangotri glacier from under which the Bhagirathi emerges. The pilgrim trail goes upto a few hundred meters from Gaumukh. After that it’s a small trail that goes over the rocks right to the river. The dirty brown colour of the ice is deceptive and one doesn’t quite believe it’s ice till one is quite close and can see the blocks of ice floating in the water. By June, all the snow has already melted and the valley landscape is only rock and mud. Instead of going down towards the river, we walked up the side to the glacier. There is no definite trail at all now. The way goes over rocks and more rocks. Small flat rocks stacked to make a mini-pillars show the direction every few hundred feet. The trail deflects to the other shore towards Mount Shivling. The number of peaks visible now has gone up and we pester our guide for all their names. He is a rather old fellow who’s been climbing for more than 25 years and tells us he’s climbed almost all Indian peaks except the Nun-Kun and gone upto the sixth Everest camp.

There is a waterfall in sight near the other shore as we criss-cross the rock field. One can also see a steep face of scree and mud and even though we’d been told to expect a steep climb to Tapovan (4463m), it doesn’t look very inviting. After this point, the next couple of hours were spent in one thought and one thought only—to get to the top. There wasn’t much else one could bother to think of or even look around. Somewhere in the middle, we could again see the waterfall. Our guess is this comes from the Meru glacier. Meru lies just behind Mt. Shivling. Here, there was a small break in the climb and we ate, drank and revived our strengths best we could.

With the exhilaration of having reached the top, one is welcomed by a green mountain meadow with a foothpath snaking along a lovely stream. Little yellow flowers dot the green with some exotic looking blues once in a while. Shivling looms above as you settle into your tents. A foreigner baba walks along the trail deep in converstion with his companion in a heavily accented Hindi. A man following us on the climb has brought the suppplies for the few ascetics who live on Tapovan all year long. An old stone-walled ashram by a “Mata-ji” has been broken down by the forest authorities who discourage residence in the National Park area.

We decide to take a break and spend another day at Tapovan. It is really cold now. The clouds are coming up fast. We doze off. At midnight, the sky is clear. Bright stars shine happily.

The next day doesn’t dawn at all. We wake up late, but there is no sunshine. The clear skies promised to us last night when bright stars had shown are nowhere. One can barely see Shivling through the fog, let alone anything else. Padding myself with warm clothes as best as I can, I walk around the plateau. The stream turns and disappears somewhere near Shivling’s base. “Amarganga,” (Eternal Ganga) it is called and it features in all the photographs of Tapovan advertised by the tourist agencies. Another smaller ashram near the bend in the stream now houses Mata-ji and the foreigner-baba.

Around noon, the clouds lift a little and we walk to the stream. Sitting here, one knows exactly what a “bubbling brook” is. If the weather is fine, this place is almost heaven. The air is fresh, the sun warms you, the brook keeps you company. We daydream about spending afternoons curled up with a book here. After lunch, we survey the plateau. Tapovan is walled in on all sides by scree [In picture above] and we climb up one side to see a fantastic view of the Gangotri glacier. Our constant companion Bhagirath is now behind clouds and though none of the peaks can be seen, the glacier spreads before us as far as the eye can. [In picture below.]

The evening is harsh and the cold wind refuses to calm. Clouds settle down and one can see only a few feet ahead. We grudgingly retreat to our tents. It’s too stuffy in there, not to mention dark. We compromise by opening up the flaps and nestle among the sleeping bags and shawls, trying to read from Stainton and Polounin’s “Flowers of the Himalayas.” We haven’t yet seen many flowers and are quite disappointed. But we still have a long walk ahead tomorrow.

Before retiring for the night, we had visited the Gangotri temple. I hear that only the idol of the river goddess is what remains from the ancient shrine. The temple building itself is new, ugly and draped in electrical lights. We join the line of devotees waiting to enter the temple. Once inside, one has merely a few seconds to catch a glimpse of the idol before being whisked away by the crowd. But the crowd was sluggish now that it was night. A woman passes her baby to the pundit so that it can be blessed. As we made the traditional clockwise parikrama around the temple, the walls are dotted with bindis of all sizes. Women put their own bindis on the wall and put back one of the bindis on the wall on their foreheads. Outside, a family sings a devotional song and everybody claps along. The mood is almost picnicy. Somewhere in a back room, the pundits gravely continue their chants. [In the picture.]

We woke up early next morning to the crisp cold air and the roaring of the Bhagirathi which would accompany us most of the way. After a cup of tea, we walked around the town. Slightly downstream is the Suryakund [In the picture] where the water has made psychedelic patterns on the coloured rock. In summer, when the water is abundant, it is also muddy. But in the winter, the water clears and one is supposed to be able to see shivalingas in the kund. The town is surrounded by pine forests and one finally feels like one is in the mountains, away from the pettiness of the plains.

After breakfast, we pack and take a trail going into the mountains to the west. After a few hundred meters, we come to the forest check-post where the guard is scolding a few pilgrims for cutting some tree branches to make staffs. “Tell me what religion asks you to cut trees?”, he asks. We’re all suitably impressed. While registering ourselves for camping, there is with us a Brazilian tourist with a tiny day pack. He says he’ll only be going upto Gaumukh and be back within two days. We heave our own heavy packs and start walking along the trail. The Indian pilgrims do not acknowledge us. But once is a while, some foreigner greets us with a “Namaste” and we reply back with a “Hello.”

The trails follows the Bhagirathi and is wide enough for the heavily laden mules to pass through. [In the picture.] Small and largish streams from the mountain cut our trail and rush down to meet Bhagirathi. The boulders and soil are mostly ashen, a strange colour that one is not used to. There are Dhabas along the way: at Rajghat and then at Chirbasa. Chirbasa is 9 km from Gangotri and can be the first stop. We reach there at around 1 pm but decide not to stop. After a lunch of khichadi we move on. This stretch seems easier. After following the river for another 5 km, we reach our first camp at Bhojwasa.

Bhojwasa is a small town with one temple and a few houses. The temple advertises an aarti every evening, but we do not see any gathering. The GVMN buildings are derelict and the only humanly habitable looking buildings are laboratories of the National Institute of Hydrology. Their people come here throughout the year to take measurements on the glacier.

As the sun sets, the grand Bhagirath sparkles pink. [In the picture.] All becomes quiet. Even though one has now become used to the roar of Bhagirathi, every once in a while, it astonishes you. Our mostly untrained bodies are now complaining of the strain and we decide to let them rest. Between jabs and pokes and some more jokes, we fall asleep.

Finally, we have a short recall of our trek. Travel, for us is more than just the days spent on actual traveling. It begins much before, with the planning, anticipation and reading. And lasts many days after we’re back with all the photographs to sort, memories to be reinforced and of course some more reading—this time with a new eye that has seen the places in question. With Uttarakhand, one can be certain that travel is never solely about natural beauty. In a land so soaked in Hindu mythology, there are stories everywhere and sometimes one has to just draw a line at how many stories one wants to hear.

Among the many sources that make up the Ganga, four are thought to be the most important: Yamunotri, the source of the river Yamuna, which meets the Ganga at Allahabad; Gangotri, which is a few kilometers from the actual emergence of the Bhagirathi, the main stream of the Ganga; Kedarnath, from which flows the river Mandakini which meets the Alakananda in Rudraprayag and finally, Badrinath from which flows the Alakananda which meets Bhagirathi at Devprayag. It is after the streams of Bhagirathi and Alakananda are joined that the river gets the name Ganga.

These four places constitute the Char Dham (four abodes) which are the holiest pilgrimage in India. According to tradition, one starts at Yamunotri and moves eastward towards Badrinath. There used to be paths through the forests that pilgims followed, but with the building of motorable roads, those have all disappeared and now it is the Yatra companies that herd the pilgrims on their buses taking the shortest routes to the four places, all out of order.

Not to mention, Tehri, the capital of a large portion of Garhwal (called the Tehri Garwal) is now under water after the building of the much controversial Tehri Dam over the Bhagirathi.

(Day 1: New Delhi to Rishikesh : Train to Haridwar, six-seater to Rishikesh )

Starting from the Shiwaliks in Haridwar, the road winds and snakes higher and higher though the Garhwal Himalayas. Incidentally, the Shiwaliks (lesser Himalayas), which so indistinguishably merge into the Himalayas, are much, much older and geologically completely separate from the Himalayas. Our first stop for the night was in Rishikesh.

It is a curious town with two seemingly unconnected faces. One, which I had seen many times on day trips is that of a holy Hindu site. With temples, ashrams and bathing Ghats, crowded alleyways, stores selling rudraksha and religious paraphernalia and thousands of Hindu pilgrims. But while staying there for a night, this was a totally different town: cyber-cafes and Italian Restaurants (albeit very cheap ones) and foreigners in all shapes and sizes. We reached there after 2100h and there were almost no locals in sight. That is, except for the scouts who immediately surrounded us shouting “You want room?”

(Day 2: Rishikesh to Uttarkashi : Taxi)

We didn’t have much time to explore in the morning. We had been exhausted by the previous day’s travel and after an attempted dinner at the the only restaurant we could find open (Italian of course!) and a quick shower, we slept till a bit late in the morning. After a short walk and some breakfast, we dumped our rucksacks into a taxi and started another journey through the hills to Uttarkashi. Six hours and an anti-motion-sickness medicine overdose later, we groggily got down at Uttarkashi and made way to meet our trek contractor who would provide us with guide, porters, tents etc.

(Day 3: Uttarkashi to Gangotri : Taxi)
This was thankfully the last leg of the motor journey, the most picturesque 95 km yet. Uttarkashi was short of kerosene so we had to make several stops on the way to collect the required amount. One such stop was Harsil, from where one can detour to Yamunotri as well. Sitting of the banks of a gushing Bhagirathi and surrounded by pine covered slopes, this looked like a chaming little town and I was sorry to leave it behind. The air was cooler now and as one neared Gangotri, one could see some snow covered peaks in the distance.

Gangotri bus stand is a complete chaos and I could not make up my mind whether to be appalled or admire the fact that so many cars and buses managed to drop off and pickup their fares on time. This is the last point up to which vehicles can go. A paved road around 3m wide leads to the Gangotri temple. [In the picture.] On both sides of this road are hotels, restaurants, shops selling woolens, cassettes of praises to the gods sung in the tune of Bollywood songs and more tame religious stuff .

We had not had lunch and as we gorged ourselves, sitting at the window of a restaurant, we could see all of India pass. From the punjabans to south-Indian ammas and gujarathi bens to bengalis. The rich with their stylish sport shoes and the poor with nothing but a jhola.

The camping spaces were full, so we rented a room in a half built hotel instead. The plumbing wasn’t perfect, but the rajais were warm enough.

If you start walking downstream the river from HRI and reach the point where the river forks, you will see a sea of sand before you (see map) with a green horizon. This horizon is the kachhar. It is a uniform savanna that spreads between the sand here and soil there. I’m still not sure if it manages to remain above water in the rains. Most probably not. It is made up of up to eight feet tall grass, nothing else.

The first time I’d come to know about the kachhar was two years ago when we had risked entering the sands, lured by many Pratincoles (Glareola lactea) that were new for me at that time. We had bumped into a flock of people who were busy with sand mining and were very curious about what we were doing there. After that, I touched those sands again but hardly ever entered the kachhar. Many times we took pictures of the little gourd fields by the left stream and twice we crossed the right stream to reach another wonderful sandy place (this time spotting a nice Fish Eagle Haliaeetus leucoryphus). There was such haze one May evening that I imagined myself in a directionless nothingness like the one Neo and Morpheus stand in The Matrix.

Only once did we briefly enter the kachhar, only about ten meters or so. Reward: my first Nilgai (Boselaphus tragocamelus) near here, my first Thick-knee (Burhinus oedicnemus) and my first Eurasian Eagle Owl (Bubo bubo). The place was surely worth visiting again and again.

One thing that kept us from doing that was exhaustion. The grassland is about 5 km from HRI so going there is a two-hour project. Another was the warning we were helped to by every person we happened to meet on every visit to the sands. Sand miners with bikes and mobile phones, women collecting hay, old men squatting in the fields — everybody warned us not to enter the kachhar lest we loose our way. All of them emphasized we would never reemerge if we go in! “Sounds surprising,” I’d thought, “the river’s always there to tell the directions.”

Warnings by strangers have their effect nonetheless so it took us two years to decide to cross the kachhar. We did that this Sunday.

The heat was terrible eventhough it had rained the earlier night. Clouds helped till we entered the sands; I could admire the egrets, lapwings and comorants at the fork and the sand remained pressed down so walking on it was easy. We discovered a lagoon just before where the kachhar began. The sand looked an enormous brown silk cloth stretched in the wind and we could see a Black Kite (Milvus migrans) and a relaxed pair of Wooly-necked Storks (Ciconia episcopus). The grass itself was pretty uninteresting. The Sun had come out, wind was warming up. We kept walking with hares criss-crossing our way and cicadas buzzing all around. A beautiful Red Avadavat (Amandava amandava) and many drab prinias was all that we could see.

We had begun at around a quarter to six early morning and by the time we’d crossed the kachhar it was eleven. All of this 25 km landmass has no human settlement, probably because most of it is under water during the monsoons and infertile at other times. But when we emerged out of the grass into a ridge that had other more familiar bushes we saw five thatched huts. Four of them were abandoned and the fifth was fenced in such a manner that there was no way to get inside it. It had a mysterious old man inside with a teenager at whom he cursed violently. I tried talking with a loud bhaiyya but they didn’t come out. We returned.

We were dehydrated and our watter bottles were empty so for the journey back home we walked diagonally and reached the river first. Cooled ourselves a bit and cursed a lot for not having carried enough water or any food. But then we reached a gourd field soon and met a kind family having lunch. They gave us a melon and we shot pictures of the kids. It took another two hours in the heat to get back with a lot of sunburn.

It’s hardly possible, by the way, to loose your way in the kachhar. The tall electricity towers from Mavaiyya and Nibi are always visible from anywhere inside!