Non-Fiction
Location – Melbourne, Australia
Written - December 2008
[I started sending out my work to publishers only recently - after I returned from India, in July 2008. This story was written about an experience I had during that time. It doesn’t have all that much going for it, it was written quickly and then sent out to the same magazines I was writing about....]
I’ve been submitting my writing to Overland and Meanjin magazines for the past six months. So far, nothing published. But when I hear they have their combined Christmas party coming up, I figure I’ll go along. It might be a good chance to meet some people. I don’t have the knack for networking. I don’t have business cards in my shirt-pocket. But I’m curious to see the faces of the people I’ve been sending my work to.
When the day comes I’m wracked by nerves. My girlfriend Amy persuades me to go. “It’ll be a good opportunity for you, Tom,” she says. “I’ll come with you.” I put on my best black shirt. It’s unwashed from some previous occasion, so I spit on my finger, and rub at a grey stain of cigarette ash. I smoke furiously in the car, and more ash spills into my lap.
I’m not usually nervous about parties. I can happily banter with almost anyone. But this is somehow different. We park the car and begin walking through the Edinburgh Gardens. Sunday is living up to its name. There’s frisbees in the air, and the dogs are unleashed. We scan the parklands for the gathering. There’s plenty of them around. We pass a group of beer-swilling boys with bellies out - probably not the ones. What does a group of editors and writers look like? Do they, too, have ash-stains on their shirts?
“Just relax, Tom,” Amy says.
“But we don’t know anyone,” I say. “How will we know which group to approach? I
feel like a stalker.”
“We’ll have to go up and ask.”
“Nah, give it a bit. We’ll walk awhile.”
Delaying tactics. We’re not really invited to the party. Usually at a party you’d know at least a face or two. I only know a few names. I’m not even a regular reader of their magazines - but of course I’m not about to tell them that.
We come across a trio of people who look similarly lost. I approach them. “Are you looking for the Overland and Meanjin party?”
“Yeah,” they say, and introduce themselves. “So are you with the Overland or Meanjin?”
“Um, I’ve been sending my work to both,” I say.
“Sitting on the fence!”
One of the girls rings someone, who directs us to the gathering. It’s a young crowd. There’s eskies and picnic blankets laid out on chequered blankets. The sunny clink of hands rummaging through ice, in search of beer bottles.
Amy spreads out her jumper on the grass as a blanket, and we kneel on it. We wonder what to do next. A lady approaches us with a platter of sandwiches. I thank her, and take one. It’s a good sandwich. And, for the moments I’m eating, it makes it impolite to talk. I eat another.
“What do we do now?” I say quietly to Amy. She’s usually good with social situations, but my nerves must be contagious. She fidgets with her phone.
“I don’t know. We should talk to someone.”
I roll a cigarette.
One bloke approaches us, and introduces himself. As soon as he says his name I forget it. I take it this is not good networking form.
“I’m Tom,” I say, blowing my smoke away from his face. “I’ve been sending in work to Overland and Meanjin for a few months. I thought this might be a good chance to put some faces to some names.” A dog runs past, barking. “Are you a writer, or an editor?”
I read somewhere, it might have been Helen Garner, describing this as the most often heard line at writer’s festivals. ‘Are you an writer or an editor?’ Most here seem to be both, making the line not only cliched, but largely redundant. I’ve never been to anything like this before. I suppose all cliches exist for a reason - they’re handy when you’re not in the mood for thinking.
A group nearby bursts into uproarious laughter.
Say something, Tom. Say something insightful, or witty. Say something Memorable. Say... something... But thoughts like that only clog up the works, and make it more than likely that you don’t say a damned thing.
Silence.
The bloke spots someone he knows and goes over to say hello.
My throat is dry. “We should’ve brought something to drink,” I say to Amy. “I’m gunna get some orange juice.” My stomach isn’t ready for the beers being passed around. Amy says she’ll stay, I set out to find a shop. As I walk, I reassure myself that there’s something inherently weird about turning up to a party where you’ve never met anyone. It is perhaps stranger again to go to a party where your only contact with the crowd has been consistent rejection over a period of months. I smile to myself as I write down the thought into my notebook. I put the notebook back in my shirt-pocket, where my business cards aren’t.
When I return, Amy is talking to a young lady about Sweden. I set the orange juice out in front of me, just so far away as to not claim ownership of it. Damn, I didn’t remember to get any cups. I scan about for some. There’s some plastic cups by an Esky, set just so far away from a nearby circle as to not claim ownership of them. I approach and take one, awkwardly, expecting at any moment to be exposed as a thief.
A bloke turns to me. “So you’re Mister Ones And Zeroes,” he says, referring to something I’d sent to his magazine. I wrote it about my job in market research. As a non-fiction writer it’s also, unfortunately, my life. I ask him what he liked about it. It’d be more useful to ask what he disliked about it, but it’s too early in the day for criticism. As I listen, his mobile phone rings.
I pour another cup of juice.
Amy is faring well. The song of her laughter is punctuated by my ringtone. It’s a mate of mine, who, by sheer coincidence, is also in the Edinburgh Gardens. He joins us, and begins ranting and cussing. His boss has cancelled all his shifts for the next week. As I cringe at his trucker’s talk, so I smile at his unaffected realness. Perhaps I should inject more cuss-words into my conversation: “so you’re a fucken’ editor, eh? Awesome mate, fucken’ awesome. I need a good fucken’ editor, to edit out all my fucken’ cuss-words. Us bastards should collaborate, eh? Eh?”
I shouldn’t think so much.
We’re going to see C.W. Stoneking play at the Corner. After checking the time, Amy says it’s time to go. I’d rather slink out, unnoticed. But we say some sudden farewells. I shift on my feet as Amy explains why we can’t stay for the soccer game. “I’m not wearing the right shoes!,” she says, raising one foot demonstratively. It would have been good to stay for the soccer game. It’s harder to be calculated when you have a litre of beer in your belly and you’re trying to dribble a soccer ball about.
“Uh.... Bye,” I say. I don’t look anyone in the eyes. I’m about to joke, maybe I might see you all next year, but I don’t.
I take my bottle of orange juice, and leave the gathering. The crowd of people who’s stories I don’t know, who’s stories I may never know. They may be wife-beating assholes for all I have learned, there may be infidelities, torments, or triumphs. We could have spilled cigarette ash on our shirts, together. I’ve been so lost in my own caverns of concern that I have missed it all.
What was I thinking? They’ll probably think I’m some antisocial bastard. The afternoon has been so surreal, so odd, that all I can do is write about it.
Friday, July 03, 2009
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Big Things
Non-Fiction
Location – India - Ladakh
Written - May 2008
[Reading back on this my trip to India feels like a long time ago. But the final line still stands, and the return trip is still planned.]
We set out at 2am to cross the Himalayan Range. The journey from Manali to Leh will take us around twenty hours, in one long-haul. There’s an Israeli couple sitting up front, the boyfriend is furious. “My girlfriend doesn’t have enough room!” he yells, “she has a gear-stick in her leg!” I can tell they haven’t been in India long. A gear-stick in the leg is the sort of thing only new arrivals complain about - when it comes to Indian transport, the old hands appreciate that they're not standing in urine with a goat smothering their face. The Israeli demands their money back, and the Indian driver fires up with shouted garble of his own. I turn to Rick, the Kiwi sitting next to us, and say, “it’s a bit of basic outback wisdom that you don’t start heated arguments five minutes into a long road journey.”
The driver stops the jeep . There’s more screaming. The Israeli bloke declares he’s going to roll a joint and stomps off into the night. When they return they slump into the jeep, defeated by the stone, and fall asleep. The driver collects our five other passengers – all Ladakhis. Four of them climb into the back, one of them squeezes into our middle row of three, so we now have four full-grown adults on our seat. That makes eleven of us in the jeep. And the two sleeping Israelis up front end up with enough room to stretch their legs.
We hit the road. You can’t see much. I don’t sleep, I’m far too wide awake. In the headlights I catch glimpses of steep slopes, wooded with deodars. As we rise towards Rohtang La ("La" means "mountain pass," in Tibetan) we’re caught in a high-altitude traffic jam. The dirt road is only wide enough for one vehicle, and there’s a long line of Indian cargo trucks coming our way. Our driver pulls over as close as he can to the hillside. One by one the trucks edge forward centimetres at a time, in jolting stops and starts as the driver revs the engine, belching fumes into the night, before slamming on the brakes centimetres from the abyss. It takes them some time. Drivers stand out front barking instructions at the drivers (“cello… cello… parava! parava!”) in puffs of fog. I get out to smoke a cigarette and I’m almost crushed between our vehicle and one of the trucks. I won’t make that mistake again.
By the time we move it’s almost dawn. The sun is rising behind the snowy peaks, which change colour as the sun rises to greet them. The Israelis begin snapping photos. I know that in a fast-moving jeep the light is too low to capture anything but blur. I simply look. Patches of snow decorate the sharply triangular arrowheads of black rock, like the skin of a killer-whale. As we descend from Rohtang La into Keylong the road creeps along the side of the valley. Keylong is the last town along the way, for the next 300km we will cross the Himalayan range. The driver declares it wise that we stop for breakfast.
We heed his wisdom. We eat fast, and return to the road. The morning light is dazzlingly bright in my sleepless eyes. It’s time to pull out my camera. It isn’t easy to take photographs from a jeep that’s barrelling along rocky roads and taking hairpin turns at a dizzying speed. They don’t have instructions on this in the manual to my camera. But the trick, I take it, is lightning-fast shutter speeds. Otherwise the movement makes the pictures blur. The catch is that in order to use these speeds you need light that is particularly bright, and clear. As we rise into the Himalaya the morning gives way to a beautiful day. God, if nothing else, is a provider - so long as you recognise Her gifts.
We begin the series of sharp hairpin turns that lead slowly up to Baralacha La, at 4,883 metres. The driver slows on the precipitous turns and I photograph the roof of the world. I gape at a mountain lake of the most brilliant green, resting like molten emerald. From the top, from Baralacha La, you can see all the way to Ladakh – the ‘land of high passes.’
The air is clear over Ladakh. The weather is different north of the Himalaya. At this time of year, the monsoon is being blown up from the south of India, until it covers most of the country in clouds and lashing rain. But the clouds get caught up in the mountains. The Himalayan range is so massive that it literally blocks the clouds from moving further north. And so, Ladakh comes as a revelation. The skies are a distilled blue, as we enter the mountain desert of the Tibetan Plateau. In Ladakh, it is summertime.
The scenery changes quickly. There’s a sprinkling of snow on only the tallest of peaks, the rest of the mountains are awash with shades of ochre and gold. I know I will remember this journey for the rest of my life – cruising through the Lingti Chu River valley at four-and-a-half thousand metres with the wind in my hair, and my head full of delirious fatigue. We snake our way up the switchback roads towards Lachlung La at 5,060 metres. I’m sitting against the window on the side of the drop. Just past the edge of our tyres. The drop mesmerises me like a cobra. Forever close to the edge. Falling from this height, you’d have enough time to acknowledge the view on the way down.
After crossing the pass we enter the Gorges of Pang. The landscape becomes decidedly odd. Natural statues rise from mountains weathered smooth by the wind. Some look like Martian faces, massive artifacts on the mountainside. Others look like rock cities – outcrop colonies inhabited only by the dry wind. I haven’t slept in 36 hours, and the sight has the same textureless sheen of a vision. The journey is not easy. I develop bruises on my right-hand side, I begin to know each of the door’s metal bumps and ridges very intimately. At times we become claustrophobic and ask to stop. As it turns out, one of those occasions is at the ferocious Taglang La – the second highest motorable pass in the world. We take a rest-stop, at 5,328 metres.
I almost fall out of the jeep. The dizziness makes me too groggy to walk. But I'll go higher, in time, higher into the Big Things.
After twenty hours in the jeep we arrive in Leh. Leh is the capitol of a desert kingdom, high in the mountains. Its isolation holds it still. The laneways are made of weathered stone, you get the sense you could have walked the same alleyways a thousand years ago. The stone buildings are the colour of the mountains that surround us. Old Leh is an ancient labyrinth, a city built stone by stone beneath the ferocious sun. An oasis of life, sustaining itself on the sliver of green that springs from the Indus River.
The word ‘Hindu’ is derived from the name of this river. It wasn’t a term the Indians gave to their own brand of religion, and Indians to this day will point this out to you. It was the Persians who referred to India as ‘the land beyond the Sindhu,’ or ‘Indus’ (pronounced ‘in-doose’) River. And so, Indians became known to the world as ‘Hindus.’ To be north of the Indus River does, indeed, feel like a different land. The map may deem Ladakh to be part of India, but in terms of culture and landscape it is far closer to Tibet, 150km east of here. But the majority of people I meet don’t call themselves ‘Indians,’ despite what the map says, and they don’t call themselves ‘Tibetans,’ despite how we might describe their religion. They call themselves, simply, ‘Ladakhis.’
Amy and I come down with mild cases of altitude sickness. Leh is at an altitude of 3,500 metres, but apparently that’s enough. We can’t walk to the shop before needing to rest. Altitude sickness stems from the fact that the higher you go in altitude, the less oxygen there is in the air. Above 5,000 metres there’s about half as much oxygen in the atmosphere as there is at sea-level. I’ve never had asthma, but perhaps it feels similar – a slow asphyxiation. You get headaches. Dizziness. I drink plenty of water, and yet you wake up with a mouth as dry as sand. We’re both distinctly affected, though only seriously enough to remind us to take it easy. If you rest, your body will acclimatise.
I overhear someone talking of flying to Srinigar, rather than braving the roads. The woman says, “but I probably shouldn’t fly if I’m sick at this altitude.” But plane cabins are pressurised to sea-level, and oxygen is pumped in, so ironically she’d feel better in an aeroplane at 34,000 feet than she would here.
So, we rest. When we’re ready, Rick and I – the Kiwi we met on the journey to Leh – formulate a wild scheme to get higher than we’ve been in our lives. We hire a jeep. On the drive I smile to myself at the road-signs. Whoever came up with their anti-speeding slogans had a sense of humour. In Australia, the anti-speeding campaigns consist of stern slogans and terrifying imagery. In Ladakh they take a different approach, seducing you rather than scaring you, with signs like: “I am curvaceous, be slow,” and “I like you, darling, but not so fast.”
Our driver heeds their advice. On these roads, you’d want to. He eases us out of Leh, past the chortens and the Tibetan Buddhist gompas (monasteries) perched upon rocky hills as if they’ve grown out of the barren earth. We begin our ascent to Khardung La. Khardung La is the mountain pass that serves as the gateway to the Nubra Valley, and Central Asia beyond. It’s touted as ‘the highest motorable road in the world,’ crossing the Ladakhi range at a whopping 5,602 metres – over 18,000 feet. That’s higher than Everest Base Camp. The drive does little to allay my nervousness at what is to come. You can feel the change in air-pressure as you go up, it feels like someone lightly pressing their fingers against your temples. My cigarette lighter stops working every time I go above five thousand. I’m now familiar with these things, and I know we won’t be up there long.
So what do you do when you’re on top of the highest motorable road in the world, at an altitude higher than most mountain-climbers reach in their lives? Well, it might be the boys in us, who never truly grew too big for their BMX, but our way of thinking is that you pull a couple of mountain-bikes off the roof-rack of the jeep, and you ride back down.
When I was a boy, growing up in Boolarra, the steepest mountain in the world was Bastin Street. We knew, because we’d careen down every hill in town, whether on billycart or BMX. I still have clear memories of some epic accidents, and even clearer memories of racing at top speed with the wind howling in my ears. I had a mate called Adam Rockall, who lived at the bottom of Bastin Street, and we’d push our bikes to the top, under the belief that we were soon to set a new land-speed record. It was a quiet town, so we were largely unconcerned about the dangers of a car cleaning us up on the T-intersection at the bottom of the hill. You’d usually be going to fast to brake in time anyway, and we’d flash through the intersection to come to a bumpy halt in the paddock over the road. Now, looking down from the mighty Khardung La, at the forty kilometre downhill stretch into Leh, I think of Adam Rockall, and I kind of wish he was here. I think he’d get a kick out of it - I’ve found The Mother of all Bastin Streets.
For several minutes Rick and I are deeply absorbed in the task of checking our brakes. Then without saying a word, breathing open-mouthed in the thin air, we kick off.
Whilst I’ve been a passenger in vehicles crossing some of these passes, I’ve had the thought that no matter how skilled your driver, you’re never entirely comfortable with the idea that your fate is so comprehensively in the hands of someone else. The roads are only wide enough for one vehicle, and the jeep tyres always seem too close to the void below. Now, my fate is in my own hands. As I build up speed on the rocky surface I stay well clear of the lowside of the road. There’s slushy ice-puddles and sharp rocks to avoid. When I glance up I see the icy peaks of the Ladakhi range, with the golden desert-mountains below. You don’t get roads with a much better view than this. I remain tentative on the rocky road, but a few kilometers from Khardung La the road changes to a smooth bitumen. There’s fewer landslides around here, due to the lack of rain, so the road is as good as you’ll find anywhere in Ladakh. On the bitumen I release my grip on the brakes, and I’m eleven years old again.
The corners can’t wait to get to me. My helmet is blown up high on my forehead by the wind. My clothes ripple around me. I keep pace with a white 4WD just up ahead, braking only into the hairpin turns and coming close enough to see the bemused faces of the Indian family watching me through their back window. It’s handy to have the 4WD up front, it helps clear the path of donkeys that amble out onto the road. I have to be careful not to brake in the patches of fine dust and gravel, a tiny shift in weight on the bike and I weave through them. Around each corner I am enchanted afresh by the vastness laid out before me, like the world from an aeroplane. I ride the forty kilometers into Leh in a touch under an hour. As I enter the ancient city I reacquaint myself with the brakes. Rick and I only break our wide grins to down a beer or two at the bottom.
After a few weeks in Ladakh, Amy and I make our final journey towards Kashmir. We’d been hearing of the current problems there. The Indian government granted a patch of land to the Hindus, along the route of the Armanath ‘yatra,’ or pilgrimage, which invoked the fury of the Shiite Muslim majority in Kashmir. There were shootings, bomb-blasts, and strikes, which prompted the government to retract the land-offer, thus invoking the violent fury of the Hindus. We have a flight from Srinagar booked for the 18th of July. Amy spoke to a Kashmiri who assured her that “it’s been blown out of proportion.” It becomes her favourite line, whenever the topic of the recent problems comes up, she tells people dismissively, “it’s been blown out of proportion.” My response is “yeah, well, maybe we can go to Kashmir and get ourselves blown out of proportion.”
The road past Kargil follows alongside a branch of the Indus River, with frothing rapids that surge in a continuous flow of foam. The area is what a newspaper would call ‘militarised.’ We pass long convoys of identical army trucks, khaki with tinted windows. The road is narrow so we dutifully pull over to let the convoys past. Their cargo is a mystery, covered by camouflage netting. We pass our first artillery camp, ‘Tiger Battery,’ with dozens of artillery pieces, some fortified in dugout bunkers, some out on plain view with their long, black barrels glinting in the sun, but all pointed in one direction – Pakistan. In this northernmost pocket of India there’s no official borders, there is the ‘Line of Control.’ In Ladakh, the ‘Line of Control’ is with China. In Kashmir the 'Line of Control' is with Pakistan, marking the point where previous wars cooled. Neither India nor Pakistan recognises this Line of Control as a border, it is a line in the sand across which the nuclear-armed states eyeball each other. At regular intervals there are road-signs which read: ‘Caution! You Are Under Enemy Observation.’
We come to checkpoints where we show our passports to the soldiers. As our vehicle approaches the checkpoints I can see heavy machine-guns trained upon us through gaps in the sand-bagged bunkers, tracking our movements. I've never had a gun pointed at me before.
On a later stretch of the journey we take the bus. When the bus pulls into the station we're slow off the mark, wasting precious seconds for our luggage to be hauled up onto the roof. The locals rush straight onto the bus to secure their seats. By the time we board the bus has become ensnared by politics. Every seat is staked out by a coded system of bags placed on seats and stern sentries guarding the valuable real-estate from all challengers. It is only when we attempt to take a seat that the intricacy of this political network becomes apparent to us. As the bus prepares to leave we park ourselves in one (apparently) empty seat with a lone bag by the window. We presume the one bag indicates one ‘reservation,’ in the local style, which would leave room for Amy and I on the seat. Several Ladakhis rush to tell us that the lone bag in fact represents a reservation for two.
I’ve found the Ladakhi people to be scrupulously friendly and compassionate, and what follows is incongruous with this perception. We remain in the seat for the time being. At the next stop a new horde tramples each other to board the bus. I know we’re in for a six-hour bus journey. By now I’ve developed a stubborn resolve to protect our turf. That is, until a frail elderly woman carrying a newborn infant approaches us, to claim the seat which a friend of hers had strategically reserved with the bag.
The grandmother and the mother of the infant – the two reservees – ask us to move, I stand and the grandmother shuffles across to the window seat with the infant. As I stand, another man, a middle-aged Ladakhi, tries squeezing past me to claim the seat I’d been sitting in. I’ve been in India long enough to know that politeness is ruthlessly punished on local buses, and I stand my ground, pushing sideways to block him. I figure I’m willing to stand for the mother to claim my seat, but I’m not letting this upstart steal it away. He keeps pushing. I turn to him and let fly. When I lose my cool here, I don’t vent an hour or a day’s tension, I ejaculate a month’s worth of it. I shout. I make a scene. I believe I use the words, “here, take the seat you fuckin’ idiot.”
I stand with my head bumping against the railed roof of the bus. I stare with hatred at the back of the man’s head. I can’t stand for long, so I kneel on the floor of the bus. As the kilometres roll by I am calmed by the scenery. I begin to feel ashamed. The man turns to me. He offers me the seat back. I say, “no, you just have it.” I hadn’t noticed until now that he’s an older man himself, with kind, wrinkled eyes. Perhaps he’s as embarrassed at the scene as I am. He asks where I’m from, in a voice that acknowledges my anger with humility. I realize that he speaks English well enough to have understood what I called him. At the next village a few people get off the bus, so that both myself, and the mother who’d missed out on her rightful seat, are both able to sit down. When the bus stops for a lunch-break the old Ladakhi man and I end up side by side. “Chai?” I ask him, and we sit in the plastic seats outside the busted-up old restaurant. I order three chais, but Amy has gone off somewhere and fate decrees that I sit alone with the old man. I ask him about Ladakh, and he tells me of his life in Lamayuru.
Two grown men, perhaps both not without our stubbornness, making their peace through the realisations that only come in the absence of pride. The bus driver blares his horn and we board the bus once again, all seated, rolling towards Kashmir, where perhaps the conflicts of the world will blaze on until both parties become ashamed at their own foolishness.
I guess I’ve been doing a few ‘big things.’ I’ve craved altitude, and high places. But perhaps what we need is smallness, a return of what Arundhati Roy calls ‘The God Of Small Things.’
We sometimes learn via opposites. Perhaps I wouldn’t appreciate the low, humble ground if I hadn’t so passionately sought out the highest places in the world. If I hadn’t played, ‘wow, look at me,’ even in these emails, in some egoistic quest for adventure. But now I’m ready for home. I’m ready to embrace the small things. I only want to sit on a beach somewhere, at sea-level, and drink a beer with my friends. To eat a simple ham-and-cheese sandwich with my family.
The day before leaving India we fulfil a promise we'd made to ourselves - to go and see a Bollywood movie at an Indian cinema. We arrive at the cinema late, the usher tells us “no problem, no problem! Just ten minutes started ago! This film has the actions, the romances, the singing and dancings!” We pay our Rs30 admission (about 75 cents) and enter the darkened cinema. The man in front of us is falling asleep amidst the insanity, his body slowly tilts sideways until his head strikes the shoulder of the person next to him and wakes him up. It is, of course, in Hindi, so we can't understand much of it. The movie is on celluloid, and in the middle of one scene is suddenly cuts out and jumps to an entirely new scene. The crowd begins howling and waving their fists in the air with indignation, before a psychedelic song-and-dance routine comes on and they burst into applause. Some members of the audience seem to know the words and sing along.
At intermission I smoke a cigarette in the lobby. I happen upon a sign that’s been posted up for the staff: ‘Management is knowing that ushers are sleeping during the films. Management is hearing that the staff are drinking the whiskey. There is to be no sleeping and drinkings of the whiskey during the hours of working…’ We debate whether or not to go back in for the second half and then think what the hell. The movie is overwhelming. It makes no sense. The soundtrack is loud enough to make it at times excruciating. And yet, like India itself, it is utterly, stupifyingly wonderful.
The movie is too colourful for this world. The romance is too dramatic – too powerful and heart-felt to exist in real beings. The people are too animated to be find in the outside world, bursting with passions that spill upon everyone in their orbit, and compelling them to dance, calling them to sing. There’s elephants and cows and monkeys popping up in improbable places. The plot is too wild and jaggedly nonlinear to be borne of real life. And then, after the film, you step outside and it’s pretty much like that in real-life, out on the streets of India.
These emails have been self-indulgent, but if they have in any way inspired an interest in the culture, the landscape, or the peoples of India, then I’d feel I’ve done my job. It is not an easy country to travel in – it may well, as people say, be the hardest of countries to travel in – but for my time in India I have experienced life at a sustained intensity unmatched by any other place I have ever known. I feel smaller for having been here, somehow humbled by the extremities of the place. I’m flying home tonight. I’m eager to return home. But before we sit for a beer together I must warn you – don’t ask me about India if you don’t want me to rant on for some time. There’s a lot to say.
So thanks to anyone who’s stuck it out with me and read these things, and I’ll be seeing you all shortly. I might even try recruiting some of you for a return trip.
Location – India - Ladakh
Written - May 2008
[Reading back on this my trip to India feels like a long time ago. But the final line still stands, and the return trip is still planned.]
We set out at 2am to cross the Himalayan Range. The journey from Manali to Leh will take us around twenty hours, in one long-haul. There’s an Israeli couple sitting up front, the boyfriend is furious. “My girlfriend doesn’t have enough room!” he yells, “she has a gear-stick in her leg!” I can tell they haven’t been in India long. A gear-stick in the leg is the sort of thing only new arrivals complain about - when it comes to Indian transport, the old hands appreciate that they're not standing in urine with a goat smothering their face. The Israeli demands their money back, and the Indian driver fires up with shouted garble of his own. I turn to Rick, the Kiwi sitting next to us, and say, “it’s a bit of basic outback wisdom that you don’t start heated arguments five minutes into a long road journey.”
The driver stops the jeep . There’s more screaming. The Israeli bloke declares he’s going to roll a joint and stomps off into the night. When they return they slump into the jeep, defeated by the stone, and fall asleep. The driver collects our five other passengers – all Ladakhis. Four of them climb into the back, one of them squeezes into our middle row of three, so we now have four full-grown adults on our seat. That makes eleven of us in the jeep. And the two sleeping Israelis up front end up with enough room to stretch their legs.
We hit the road. You can’t see much. I don’t sleep, I’m far too wide awake. In the headlights I catch glimpses of steep slopes, wooded with deodars. As we rise towards Rohtang La ("La" means "mountain pass," in Tibetan) we’re caught in a high-altitude traffic jam. The dirt road is only wide enough for one vehicle, and there’s a long line of Indian cargo trucks coming our way. Our driver pulls over as close as he can to the hillside. One by one the trucks edge forward centimetres at a time, in jolting stops and starts as the driver revs the engine, belching fumes into the night, before slamming on the brakes centimetres from the abyss. It takes them some time. Drivers stand out front barking instructions at the drivers (“cello… cello… parava! parava!”) in puffs of fog. I get out to smoke a cigarette and I’m almost crushed between our vehicle and one of the trucks. I won’t make that mistake again.
By the time we move it’s almost dawn. The sun is rising behind the snowy peaks, which change colour as the sun rises to greet them. The Israelis begin snapping photos. I know that in a fast-moving jeep the light is too low to capture anything but blur. I simply look. Patches of snow decorate the sharply triangular arrowheads of black rock, like the skin of a killer-whale. As we descend from Rohtang La into Keylong the road creeps along the side of the valley. Keylong is the last town along the way, for the next 300km we will cross the Himalayan range. The driver declares it wise that we stop for breakfast.
We heed his wisdom. We eat fast, and return to the road. The morning light is dazzlingly bright in my sleepless eyes. It’s time to pull out my camera. It isn’t easy to take photographs from a jeep that’s barrelling along rocky roads and taking hairpin turns at a dizzying speed. They don’t have instructions on this in the manual to my camera. But the trick, I take it, is lightning-fast shutter speeds. Otherwise the movement makes the pictures blur. The catch is that in order to use these speeds you need light that is particularly bright, and clear. As we rise into the Himalaya the morning gives way to a beautiful day. God, if nothing else, is a provider - so long as you recognise Her gifts.
We begin the series of sharp hairpin turns that lead slowly up to Baralacha La, at 4,883 metres. The driver slows on the precipitous turns and I photograph the roof of the world. I gape at a mountain lake of the most brilliant green, resting like molten emerald. From the top, from Baralacha La, you can see all the way to Ladakh – the ‘land of high passes.’
The air is clear over Ladakh. The weather is different north of the Himalaya. At this time of year, the monsoon is being blown up from the south of India, until it covers most of the country in clouds and lashing rain. But the clouds get caught up in the mountains. The Himalayan range is so massive that it literally blocks the clouds from moving further north. And so, Ladakh comes as a revelation. The skies are a distilled blue, as we enter the mountain desert of the Tibetan Plateau. In Ladakh, it is summertime.
The scenery changes quickly. There’s a sprinkling of snow on only the tallest of peaks, the rest of the mountains are awash with shades of ochre and gold. I know I will remember this journey for the rest of my life – cruising through the Lingti Chu River valley at four-and-a-half thousand metres with the wind in my hair, and my head full of delirious fatigue. We snake our way up the switchback roads towards Lachlung La at 5,060 metres. I’m sitting against the window on the side of the drop. Just past the edge of our tyres. The drop mesmerises me like a cobra. Forever close to the edge. Falling from this height, you’d have enough time to acknowledge the view on the way down.
After crossing the pass we enter the Gorges of Pang. The landscape becomes decidedly odd. Natural statues rise from mountains weathered smooth by the wind. Some look like Martian faces, massive artifacts on the mountainside. Others look like rock cities – outcrop colonies inhabited only by the dry wind. I haven’t slept in 36 hours, and the sight has the same textureless sheen of a vision. The journey is not easy. I develop bruises on my right-hand side, I begin to know each of the door’s metal bumps and ridges very intimately. At times we become claustrophobic and ask to stop. As it turns out, one of those occasions is at the ferocious Taglang La – the second highest motorable pass in the world. We take a rest-stop, at 5,328 metres.
I almost fall out of the jeep. The dizziness makes me too groggy to walk. But I'll go higher, in time, higher into the Big Things.
After twenty hours in the jeep we arrive in Leh. Leh is the capitol of a desert kingdom, high in the mountains. Its isolation holds it still. The laneways are made of weathered stone, you get the sense you could have walked the same alleyways a thousand years ago. The stone buildings are the colour of the mountains that surround us. Old Leh is an ancient labyrinth, a city built stone by stone beneath the ferocious sun. An oasis of life, sustaining itself on the sliver of green that springs from the Indus River.
The word ‘Hindu’ is derived from the name of this river. It wasn’t a term the Indians gave to their own brand of religion, and Indians to this day will point this out to you. It was the Persians who referred to India as ‘the land beyond the Sindhu,’ or ‘Indus’ (pronounced ‘in-doose’) River. And so, Indians became known to the world as ‘Hindus.’ To be north of the Indus River does, indeed, feel like a different land. The map may deem Ladakh to be part of India, but in terms of culture and landscape it is far closer to Tibet, 150km east of here. But the majority of people I meet don’t call themselves ‘Indians,’ despite what the map says, and they don’t call themselves ‘Tibetans,’ despite how we might describe their religion. They call themselves, simply, ‘Ladakhis.’
Amy and I come down with mild cases of altitude sickness. Leh is at an altitude of 3,500 metres, but apparently that’s enough. We can’t walk to the shop before needing to rest. Altitude sickness stems from the fact that the higher you go in altitude, the less oxygen there is in the air. Above 5,000 metres there’s about half as much oxygen in the atmosphere as there is at sea-level. I’ve never had asthma, but perhaps it feels similar – a slow asphyxiation. You get headaches. Dizziness. I drink plenty of water, and yet you wake up with a mouth as dry as sand. We’re both distinctly affected, though only seriously enough to remind us to take it easy. If you rest, your body will acclimatise.
I overhear someone talking of flying to Srinigar, rather than braving the roads. The woman says, “but I probably shouldn’t fly if I’m sick at this altitude.” But plane cabins are pressurised to sea-level, and oxygen is pumped in, so ironically she’d feel better in an aeroplane at 34,000 feet than she would here.
So, we rest. When we’re ready, Rick and I – the Kiwi we met on the journey to Leh – formulate a wild scheme to get higher than we’ve been in our lives. We hire a jeep. On the drive I smile to myself at the road-signs. Whoever came up with their anti-speeding slogans had a sense of humour. In Australia, the anti-speeding campaigns consist of stern slogans and terrifying imagery. In Ladakh they take a different approach, seducing you rather than scaring you, with signs like: “I am curvaceous, be slow,” and “I like you, darling, but not so fast.”
Our driver heeds their advice. On these roads, you’d want to. He eases us out of Leh, past the chortens and the Tibetan Buddhist gompas (monasteries) perched upon rocky hills as if they’ve grown out of the barren earth. We begin our ascent to Khardung La. Khardung La is the mountain pass that serves as the gateway to the Nubra Valley, and Central Asia beyond. It’s touted as ‘the highest motorable road in the world,’ crossing the Ladakhi range at a whopping 5,602 metres – over 18,000 feet. That’s higher than Everest Base Camp. The drive does little to allay my nervousness at what is to come. You can feel the change in air-pressure as you go up, it feels like someone lightly pressing their fingers against your temples. My cigarette lighter stops working every time I go above five thousand. I’m now familiar with these things, and I know we won’t be up there long.
So what do you do when you’re on top of the highest motorable road in the world, at an altitude higher than most mountain-climbers reach in their lives? Well, it might be the boys in us, who never truly grew too big for their BMX, but our way of thinking is that you pull a couple of mountain-bikes off the roof-rack of the jeep, and you ride back down.
When I was a boy, growing up in Boolarra, the steepest mountain in the world was Bastin Street. We knew, because we’d careen down every hill in town, whether on billycart or BMX. I still have clear memories of some epic accidents, and even clearer memories of racing at top speed with the wind howling in my ears. I had a mate called Adam Rockall, who lived at the bottom of Bastin Street, and we’d push our bikes to the top, under the belief that we were soon to set a new land-speed record. It was a quiet town, so we were largely unconcerned about the dangers of a car cleaning us up on the T-intersection at the bottom of the hill. You’d usually be going to fast to brake in time anyway, and we’d flash through the intersection to come to a bumpy halt in the paddock over the road. Now, looking down from the mighty Khardung La, at the forty kilometre downhill stretch into Leh, I think of Adam Rockall, and I kind of wish he was here. I think he’d get a kick out of it - I’ve found The Mother of all Bastin Streets.
For several minutes Rick and I are deeply absorbed in the task of checking our brakes. Then without saying a word, breathing open-mouthed in the thin air, we kick off.
Whilst I’ve been a passenger in vehicles crossing some of these passes, I’ve had the thought that no matter how skilled your driver, you’re never entirely comfortable with the idea that your fate is so comprehensively in the hands of someone else. The roads are only wide enough for one vehicle, and the jeep tyres always seem too close to the void below. Now, my fate is in my own hands. As I build up speed on the rocky surface I stay well clear of the lowside of the road. There’s slushy ice-puddles and sharp rocks to avoid. When I glance up I see the icy peaks of the Ladakhi range, with the golden desert-mountains below. You don’t get roads with a much better view than this. I remain tentative on the rocky road, but a few kilometers from Khardung La the road changes to a smooth bitumen. There’s fewer landslides around here, due to the lack of rain, so the road is as good as you’ll find anywhere in Ladakh. On the bitumen I release my grip on the brakes, and I’m eleven years old again.
The corners can’t wait to get to me. My helmet is blown up high on my forehead by the wind. My clothes ripple around me. I keep pace with a white 4WD just up ahead, braking only into the hairpin turns and coming close enough to see the bemused faces of the Indian family watching me through their back window. It’s handy to have the 4WD up front, it helps clear the path of donkeys that amble out onto the road. I have to be careful not to brake in the patches of fine dust and gravel, a tiny shift in weight on the bike and I weave through them. Around each corner I am enchanted afresh by the vastness laid out before me, like the world from an aeroplane. I ride the forty kilometers into Leh in a touch under an hour. As I enter the ancient city I reacquaint myself with the brakes. Rick and I only break our wide grins to down a beer or two at the bottom.
After a few weeks in Ladakh, Amy and I make our final journey towards Kashmir. We’d been hearing of the current problems there. The Indian government granted a patch of land to the Hindus, along the route of the Armanath ‘yatra,’ or pilgrimage, which invoked the fury of the Shiite Muslim majority in Kashmir. There were shootings, bomb-blasts, and strikes, which prompted the government to retract the land-offer, thus invoking the violent fury of the Hindus. We have a flight from Srinagar booked for the 18th of July. Amy spoke to a Kashmiri who assured her that “it’s been blown out of proportion.” It becomes her favourite line, whenever the topic of the recent problems comes up, she tells people dismissively, “it’s been blown out of proportion.” My response is “yeah, well, maybe we can go to Kashmir and get ourselves blown out of proportion.”
The road past Kargil follows alongside a branch of the Indus River, with frothing rapids that surge in a continuous flow of foam. The area is what a newspaper would call ‘militarised.’ We pass long convoys of identical army trucks, khaki with tinted windows. The road is narrow so we dutifully pull over to let the convoys past. Their cargo is a mystery, covered by camouflage netting. We pass our first artillery camp, ‘Tiger Battery,’ with dozens of artillery pieces, some fortified in dugout bunkers, some out on plain view with their long, black barrels glinting in the sun, but all pointed in one direction – Pakistan. In this northernmost pocket of India there’s no official borders, there is the ‘Line of Control.’ In Ladakh, the ‘Line of Control’ is with China. In Kashmir the 'Line of Control' is with Pakistan, marking the point where previous wars cooled. Neither India nor Pakistan recognises this Line of Control as a border, it is a line in the sand across which the nuclear-armed states eyeball each other. At regular intervals there are road-signs which read: ‘Caution! You Are Under Enemy Observation.’
We come to checkpoints where we show our passports to the soldiers. As our vehicle approaches the checkpoints I can see heavy machine-guns trained upon us through gaps in the sand-bagged bunkers, tracking our movements. I've never had a gun pointed at me before.
On a later stretch of the journey we take the bus. When the bus pulls into the station we're slow off the mark, wasting precious seconds for our luggage to be hauled up onto the roof. The locals rush straight onto the bus to secure their seats. By the time we board the bus has become ensnared by politics. Every seat is staked out by a coded system of bags placed on seats and stern sentries guarding the valuable real-estate from all challengers. It is only when we attempt to take a seat that the intricacy of this political network becomes apparent to us. As the bus prepares to leave we park ourselves in one (apparently) empty seat with a lone bag by the window. We presume the one bag indicates one ‘reservation,’ in the local style, which would leave room for Amy and I on the seat. Several Ladakhis rush to tell us that the lone bag in fact represents a reservation for two.
I’ve found the Ladakhi people to be scrupulously friendly and compassionate, and what follows is incongruous with this perception. We remain in the seat for the time being. At the next stop a new horde tramples each other to board the bus. I know we’re in for a six-hour bus journey. By now I’ve developed a stubborn resolve to protect our turf. That is, until a frail elderly woman carrying a newborn infant approaches us, to claim the seat which a friend of hers had strategically reserved with the bag.
The grandmother and the mother of the infant – the two reservees – ask us to move, I stand and the grandmother shuffles across to the window seat with the infant. As I stand, another man, a middle-aged Ladakhi, tries squeezing past me to claim the seat I’d been sitting in. I’ve been in India long enough to know that politeness is ruthlessly punished on local buses, and I stand my ground, pushing sideways to block him. I figure I’m willing to stand for the mother to claim my seat, but I’m not letting this upstart steal it away. He keeps pushing. I turn to him and let fly. When I lose my cool here, I don’t vent an hour or a day’s tension, I ejaculate a month’s worth of it. I shout. I make a scene. I believe I use the words, “here, take the seat you fuckin’ idiot.”
I stand with my head bumping against the railed roof of the bus. I stare with hatred at the back of the man’s head. I can’t stand for long, so I kneel on the floor of the bus. As the kilometres roll by I am calmed by the scenery. I begin to feel ashamed. The man turns to me. He offers me the seat back. I say, “no, you just have it.” I hadn’t noticed until now that he’s an older man himself, with kind, wrinkled eyes. Perhaps he’s as embarrassed at the scene as I am. He asks where I’m from, in a voice that acknowledges my anger with humility. I realize that he speaks English well enough to have understood what I called him. At the next village a few people get off the bus, so that both myself, and the mother who’d missed out on her rightful seat, are both able to sit down. When the bus stops for a lunch-break the old Ladakhi man and I end up side by side. “Chai?” I ask him, and we sit in the plastic seats outside the busted-up old restaurant. I order three chais, but Amy has gone off somewhere and fate decrees that I sit alone with the old man. I ask him about Ladakh, and he tells me of his life in Lamayuru.
Two grown men, perhaps both not without our stubbornness, making their peace through the realisations that only come in the absence of pride. The bus driver blares his horn and we board the bus once again, all seated, rolling towards Kashmir, where perhaps the conflicts of the world will blaze on until both parties become ashamed at their own foolishness.
I guess I’ve been doing a few ‘big things.’ I’ve craved altitude, and high places. But perhaps what we need is smallness, a return of what Arundhati Roy calls ‘The God Of Small Things.’
We sometimes learn via opposites. Perhaps I wouldn’t appreciate the low, humble ground if I hadn’t so passionately sought out the highest places in the world. If I hadn’t played, ‘wow, look at me,’ even in these emails, in some egoistic quest for adventure. But now I’m ready for home. I’m ready to embrace the small things. I only want to sit on a beach somewhere, at sea-level, and drink a beer with my friends. To eat a simple ham-and-cheese sandwich with my family.
The day before leaving India we fulfil a promise we'd made to ourselves - to go and see a Bollywood movie at an Indian cinema. We arrive at the cinema late, the usher tells us “no problem, no problem! Just ten minutes started ago! This film has the actions, the romances, the singing and dancings!” We pay our Rs30 admission (about 75 cents) and enter the darkened cinema. The man in front of us is falling asleep amidst the insanity, his body slowly tilts sideways until his head strikes the shoulder of the person next to him and wakes him up. It is, of course, in Hindi, so we can't understand much of it. The movie is on celluloid, and in the middle of one scene is suddenly cuts out and jumps to an entirely new scene. The crowd begins howling and waving their fists in the air with indignation, before a psychedelic song-and-dance routine comes on and they burst into applause. Some members of the audience seem to know the words and sing along.
At intermission I smoke a cigarette in the lobby. I happen upon a sign that’s been posted up for the staff: ‘Management is knowing that ushers are sleeping during the films. Management is hearing that the staff are drinking the whiskey. There is to be no sleeping and drinkings of the whiskey during the hours of working…’ We debate whether or not to go back in for the second half and then think what the hell. The movie is overwhelming. It makes no sense. The soundtrack is loud enough to make it at times excruciating. And yet, like India itself, it is utterly, stupifyingly wonderful.
The movie is too colourful for this world. The romance is too dramatic – too powerful and heart-felt to exist in real beings. The people are too animated to be find in the outside world, bursting with passions that spill upon everyone in their orbit, and compelling them to dance, calling them to sing. There’s elephants and cows and monkeys popping up in improbable places. The plot is too wild and jaggedly nonlinear to be borne of real life. And then, after the film, you step outside and it’s pretty much like that in real-life, out on the streets of India.
These emails have been self-indulgent, but if they have in any way inspired an interest in the culture, the landscape, or the peoples of India, then I’d feel I’ve done my job. It is not an easy country to travel in – it may well, as people say, be the hardest of countries to travel in – but for my time in India I have experienced life at a sustained intensity unmatched by any other place I have ever known. I feel smaller for having been here, somehow humbled by the extremities of the place. I’m flying home tonight. I’m eager to return home. But before we sit for a beer together I must warn you – don’t ask me about India if you don’t want me to rant on for some time. There’s a lot to say.
So thanks to anyone who’s stuck it out with me and read these things, and I’ll be seeing you all shortly. I might even try recruiting some of you for a return trip.
The Golden Temple
Non-Fiction
Location – Nepal/ India
Written - May 2008
[More travel writing….]
I first decided to go to the Golden Temple on the advice of a lunatic. I met him in a Nepalese bar, the sort of bar with deep lounge chairs and the sweet smell of charras hanging thickly in the air. His name was Brian. I overheard part of his conversation. He proclaimed, in the broad Aussie accent that I hear so rarely these days, “I've been to all the big, polluted Indian cities, and plenty of the dead-end towns, but in my opinion, the absolute worst of the worst, the most unpleasant bloody Indian town of the lot, is a place called Gorakhpur.”
I catch his eye and say, “sorry to interrupt there mate, but I entirely, whole-heartedly agree with you.” He turns and gives me the smile of a man who isn't used to people agreeing with him. He introduces himself as Brian, and welcomes us to the conversation. “I'm crazy,” he says, “I have P.T.S.D - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was in the Vietnam War. The doctors have me on all sorts of bloody anti-depressants.”
He looks like a politician. It’s the shirt and tie, and those jowls that come with age, and stress. He was a John Howard supporter, he remains a blue-blood conservative. When we tell him of our time in the Kimberley, he is not shy in expressing offensive views about the Aboriginal people. He does most of the talking, pausing only to sip at his glass of red wine. “I don't usually drink,” he says. “After half a glass of wine I'm not legally allowed to drive. With all the tablets I'm on. I could run a truck right through the side of a building.”
I like him. He's abrasively honest. I very foolishly ask Brian if he can watch movies about the Vietnam War, or if it's too painful for him. He doesn't answer, his face crumples into tears. He cries for five minutes without saying anything. Then, he tells us he was a medic in the war, and he nursed dying friends whilst under fire. He says to this day he can't go anywhere where there's mosquitoes, for the sound of them - and the smell of mosquito repellent - takes him right back there. I'm struck by the tremendous weight about him. He's a man so weighted by the past, and by his memories, that his face literally sags under the load. In some ways, he reminds me of a certain Aunt I have. And, like my Aunt, he's as tragic as he is utterly hilarious. The secret to comedy is telling the truth.
He tells ocker tales of his life in Pokhara that have us crying with laughter. The thing is - he doesn't intend for them to be funny. With a deadpan face he tells us of a night where he took too many painkillers. His supply ran out, and he went for a walk to the ATM so that he could buy more. His card ended up stuck in the ATM machine. In a fit of rage he began striking and shaking the living shit out of the ATM, in a fruitless attempt to retrieve his card. At that point the Nepalese police showed up. They couldn't speak a word of English, or understand his frantic explanations, so they threw him in the cooler for the night until the painkillers wore off and he went home to feed his dog. He tells his tales of everyday insanity in the same tone that someone else would use to talk about the weather.
Before he left to go home, he told us about a nearby restaurant that serves the best food in Pokhara. He raved about it - “you just have to try this food, best food in Pokhara!” he said. The next day I bump into him down the street, and asked how he's going. He told me he ate a late dinner at the restaurant he'd been raving about, and that today he has what he calls “explosive diarrhea.” With a straight face he says, “don't go there mate, the food is bloody terrible.” I nod, acknowledging the gravity of the statement. I invite him to have a beer with us later on, he says he can't, he needs to stay close to a Western-style toilet. But before he goes I say to him, “so Brian, if Gorakhpur is the worst place in India, what's your favorite place?” He seems pleasantly surprised by the question. “Amritsar,” he tells me, with a slow nod that smiles at the memory. “The Golden Temple.” I file the name away in my memory. I'll go there.
After almost five months on the road I've learned how to find the trail, even when it is obscured by grass. Amy and I make a long, overland journey west, through Nepal. We travel through the lowlands. We return to India near Rishikesh, where Amy wants to go. Rishikesh was made famous by the Beatles' visit in the 60's, they stayed at the Maharishi's ashram before growing disillusioned with him and leaving in disgust. Perhaps not grasping the implicit message in this tale, the herd of Western hippies have flocked there in droves ever since.
We take a long walk along the Ganges, which runs through Rishikesh. Cows mingle with the Indians. The cows have this distinct air of serenity amidst the chaos. They seem to have a clear destination in mind, which they are entirely unhurried about reaching. Or perhaps they are peaceful because they have no destination in mind at all. They plod with a dignity which is absent in the jostling pedestrians and the mad, honking traffic. Even the largest, most intimidating bull will simply amble along its way. You can reach out to place a loving hand on their forehead as they pass. Amy finds a stall selling sliced cucumbers and begins feeding them to the cows. They gratefully accept the gift, pulling it into their mouths with long tongues.
The other herd in Rishikesh dress in Rastafarian beanies, anklets, sandals, budding facial hair, dreadlocks, billowing pants, psychedelic shirts and fixedly serene smiles. They're making the scene and living the hippie dream. We pass signs that advertise ‘crystal healings,’ ‘astrological gems,’ ‘healing with Reiki,’ and myriad styles of yoga. A million ways to be healed. Amy is a believer. I rib her, saying, “perhaps I should start up my own stall here, advertising: ‘Healing Through Shamanic Cow-Dragging.’ People will pay me a hundred rupees to be tied up and have a cow drag them through the streets of Rishikesh. I'll tell them it's to realign their ass-chakra. Could be a good little earner.”
As the days pass I grow increasingly frustrated. I speak of those who are on a frantic search for inner peace. I speak of the readiness with which people would seek out others, would seek out gurus, on their quest for an understanding of self. I speak of the gurus demanding big dollars to teach people how to be less materialistic. I speak of the earnest, poker-faced seriousness with which our brothers and sisters would seek to be more joyous in life. I speak of those who would grasp onto the idea of non-attachment. As I give vent to my frustration with Amy over a coffee and a cigarette, overlooking the Ganges, I know I'm being too harsh, and I know that I'm generalizing. I know it's easier for me to do this when I look on from afar and ardently insist upon avoiding the whole scene. But my antennae for bullshit just twitch too violently when I contemplate becoming immersed in it. Sometimes in my imagination I see the Westerners in Rishikesh as playing an adult version of ‘dress-ups.’ You know, dress-up as a monk, dress-up as a yogi, dress-up as a sadhu. It all seems to me, as Holden Caulfield would say, phony.
I see a sea of self-improvement. I see people in real pain, wearing a Technicolor grimace. And I can't be a part of it. Some of the most miserable people I know are those who are obsessed with the idea of improving themselves. Their bookshelves are filled with books on ‘self-help.’ I feel that if you spend all your time trying to 'improve' yourself, ruminating on your flaws and analyzing your pain, obscuring your mind - that precious lens to the world - with endless thoughts of what is 'wrong' with you, and thus which needs to be 'improved,' then it'd be little wonder that you'd end up miserable. Nuts to that, let it slide. Go fishing. Tend the garden. Go for a walk in the mountains.
I leave Rishikesh. Amy wants to stay and stay on an ashram. I catch a train alone, to Amritsar. On the train I take my seat next to a man and a teenaged boy. I talk to the man, his name is Ranjeet. The younger bloke is his nephew, who wears one of the head-wraps worn by Sikhs. They're visiting family in Ludhiana. The conversation plods along at the meandering pace of small-talk, and when this pace fades we sit without speaking. Then the man turns to me asks insistently, “have you had more than the one girlfriend in your life?” I tell him yes, I'm in my second relationship. He says, “so you have had your heart broken then also?” I reply that yes, I suppose you could say that. He shifts in his seat to face me more fully. He asks, “so do you have any advice for someone whose marriage is in the ending, any strategies to be reducing the stress?”
I can tell he's talking about himself. I'm momentarily startled by a man ten years my senior, and who I've just met, asking for my advice on ending his marriage. I know that divorce is exceedingly rare in India. Maybe it's different for Sikhs. Arranged Marriages (as opposed to ‘Love Marriages’) are the norm in India, and the taboos about breaking this arrangement are strong. For whatever criticisms one may make about the idea of arranged marriage, the arranged marriages do seem to work, and they protect the Indians from any experience of heartbreak in their lives. Perhaps this is why Indians retain such an endearingly romantic view of love, and a genuine open-heartedness, as opposed to what sometimes becomes a hardened attitude of cynicism in the West. The flip side of this is that, as I can see in Ranjeet, when a relationship does go bad, the Indians are babies in the wilderness. “I'm sorry to say this Ranjeet,” I say, “but I think that some degree of stress is inevitable.”
He offers his story without me probing for it. He says the problem is not really between him and his wife. They love each other, he says. The problem is with their parents. They've had a falling out, her parents don’t ‘trust’ him, he says, for reasons unknown to him, and they've been pressuring her to end the marriage. This pressure has been causing them both a tremendous amount of anguish. His wife said she wants two months to think it over. I smile, “this is not an uncommon tactic when it comes to women,” I say. He tells me, “but I have my pride. I tell her she can have fifteen days - if she cannot be making up her mind in fifteen days then she cannot be making up her mind in two months, I think so.” He’s booked two tickets to London, for a holiday they’d planned, but now he has them on hold. “If we are no more then I will go to London alone,” he says. I can see the raw sadness in his eyes. He wants to be with her. I say to him, “perhaps you cannot change what her parents think. Perhaps you cannot change what your wife thinks. But you will feel less stress if you can feel good about the way you’re handling things. Be the man she fell in love with in the first place.” Ranjeet fidgets in his seat. He’s doesn’t look reassured.
The train arrives in Ludhiana. Ranjeet and his nephew gather their bags. “Will you do one thing for me?” he says, before he leaves. “When you go to the Golden Temple, will you pray for my marriage?” I shake his hand. “I promise you I will do this, Ranjeet.”
Sometimes it’s funny how things work. I’ve never prayed before in my life. I left Rishikesh to get away from Westerners play-acting religious rituals. And now, rolling towards Amristar, I’m on a mission to fulfill a promise to pray at the holiest Sikh temple on earth.
I take off my shoes and step through the pool at the entrance of the Golden Temple, to wash my feet. Stepping through the pool makes me think of the childhood joy of splashing in puddles. A man puts a head-scarf around my head. Near the front entrance Sikhs kneel and touch their foreheads to the marble ground in devotion. The Golden temple itself is in the centre of a pool, brilliant in the midday sun. Dozens bathe in the holy pool, washing, or simply gazing around, submerged up to their necks. The causeway to the temple is packed solid with hundreds of devotees awaiting their moment inside the shrine; they fan themselves with bits of cardboard to stay cool in the Punjabi sun. I decide not to join their ranks. There's a shaded area where people sit before a group of four musicians. One plays a violin-like instrument, one plays the tabla, and two are singing. They sing the hymns of Guru Nanak. I cannot understand the words, but I don't need to. I take a seat. This is the place, with the music surrounding me, to say a prayer for Ranjeet's marriage.
Later that night I brave the streets to find a restaurant, and come to a place that's fancier than I'd usually eat at. I order the chicken, the ‘Chef’s Specialty’ no less. I enjoy the meal, it feels like a luxurious treat. Then, as I'm about to take my final bite, I see a single dead fly sitting on the plate.
Prayer doesn’t come naturally to me.
I return to the mountains. The Golden Temple may glitter, and beautifully so, but these mountains are, to me, the glow. On a mountain trail I see a Tibetan monk, walking ahead of me. I watch as he comes to a small bird that is sitting on the path. The monk treads lightly, gently, trying not to frighten the bird. The bird begins to hop, just in front of him. They walk together like this for several moments before the bird suddenly takes flight, away into the mist. The monk, without knowing that anyone sees him, looks up with pure joy, with the joy of a child.
I can breathe again, in this air of simplicity. In the Himalayas, where I remind myself that you don’t really need to go looking, in this life, for it is enough to simply see. We catch an overnight bus to Manali. I don’t sleep, I know we’re returning to the big mountains. The bus stops somewhere, in some town. I climb off the bus and sit on an old wooden bench beneath a bright, fluorescent light. I’m too tired to think, my mind is still. I see a thousand insects flying around the light. As they fly, and beat against the light, I see a wing fall off, and flutter to the ground. I look down to see those with one wing, and those with no wings, flapping about helplessly, flapping about in a field of a thousand fallen wings. Jesus, they’re killing themselves, I think, they’re dying in this frantic effort to touch the light. But then I see the fallen, the wingless, walk away on tiny legs. They're not ants, they’re something I've never seen before. And when their wings fall off they begin to walk. Even as they’re dying, they’re being born.
Some people will tell you the Himalayan Range was born of an upthrust, a slow and massive collision of tectonic plates. Don’t believe them. This only delivered the raw materials - just a particularly large mound of rock, and earth. The sculptor is giving birth to the Himalayas, as art, works using nothing but water. It is the rivers that shaped the Himalaya. Rivers are the fingers of God, sculpting, with the Himalaya made beautiful by what is stripped away.
I may never find my temple. I may never feel comfortable enough to pray. But in the Himalaya I feel okay about that. In the Himalaya I may delight not in looking, but in seeing, and my every footstep is a silent prayer.
Location – Nepal/ India
Written - May 2008
[More travel writing….]
I first decided to go to the Golden Temple on the advice of a lunatic. I met him in a Nepalese bar, the sort of bar with deep lounge chairs and the sweet smell of charras hanging thickly in the air. His name was Brian. I overheard part of his conversation. He proclaimed, in the broad Aussie accent that I hear so rarely these days, “I've been to all the big, polluted Indian cities, and plenty of the dead-end towns, but in my opinion, the absolute worst of the worst, the most unpleasant bloody Indian town of the lot, is a place called Gorakhpur.”
I catch his eye and say, “sorry to interrupt there mate, but I entirely, whole-heartedly agree with you.” He turns and gives me the smile of a man who isn't used to people agreeing with him. He introduces himself as Brian, and welcomes us to the conversation. “I'm crazy,” he says, “I have P.T.S.D - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was in the Vietnam War. The doctors have me on all sorts of bloody anti-depressants.”
He looks like a politician. It’s the shirt and tie, and those jowls that come with age, and stress. He was a John Howard supporter, he remains a blue-blood conservative. When we tell him of our time in the Kimberley, he is not shy in expressing offensive views about the Aboriginal people. He does most of the talking, pausing only to sip at his glass of red wine. “I don't usually drink,” he says. “After half a glass of wine I'm not legally allowed to drive. With all the tablets I'm on. I could run a truck right through the side of a building.”
I like him. He's abrasively honest. I very foolishly ask Brian if he can watch movies about the Vietnam War, or if it's too painful for him. He doesn't answer, his face crumples into tears. He cries for five minutes without saying anything. Then, he tells us he was a medic in the war, and he nursed dying friends whilst under fire. He says to this day he can't go anywhere where there's mosquitoes, for the sound of them - and the smell of mosquito repellent - takes him right back there. I'm struck by the tremendous weight about him. He's a man so weighted by the past, and by his memories, that his face literally sags under the load. In some ways, he reminds me of a certain Aunt I have. And, like my Aunt, he's as tragic as he is utterly hilarious. The secret to comedy is telling the truth.
He tells ocker tales of his life in Pokhara that have us crying with laughter. The thing is - he doesn't intend for them to be funny. With a deadpan face he tells us of a night where he took too many painkillers. His supply ran out, and he went for a walk to the ATM so that he could buy more. His card ended up stuck in the ATM machine. In a fit of rage he began striking and shaking the living shit out of the ATM, in a fruitless attempt to retrieve his card. At that point the Nepalese police showed up. They couldn't speak a word of English, or understand his frantic explanations, so they threw him in the cooler for the night until the painkillers wore off and he went home to feed his dog. He tells his tales of everyday insanity in the same tone that someone else would use to talk about the weather.
Before he left to go home, he told us about a nearby restaurant that serves the best food in Pokhara. He raved about it - “you just have to try this food, best food in Pokhara!” he said. The next day I bump into him down the street, and asked how he's going. He told me he ate a late dinner at the restaurant he'd been raving about, and that today he has what he calls “explosive diarrhea.” With a straight face he says, “don't go there mate, the food is bloody terrible.” I nod, acknowledging the gravity of the statement. I invite him to have a beer with us later on, he says he can't, he needs to stay close to a Western-style toilet. But before he goes I say to him, “so Brian, if Gorakhpur is the worst place in India, what's your favorite place?” He seems pleasantly surprised by the question. “Amritsar,” he tells me, with a slow nod that smiles at the memory. “The Golden Temple.” I file the name away in my memory. I'll go there.
After almost five months on the road I've learned how to find the trail, even when it is obscured by grass. Amy and I make a long, overland journey west, through Nepal. We travel through the lowlands. We return to India near Rishikesh, where Amy wants to go. Rishikesh was made famous by the Beatles' visit in the 60's, they stayed at the Maharishi's ashram before growing disillusioned with him and leaving in disgust. Perhaps not grasping the implicit message in this tale, the herd of Western hippies have flocked there in droves ever since.
We take a long walk along the Ganges, which runs through Rishikesh. Cows mingle with the Indians. The cows have this distinct air of serenity amidst the chaos. They seem to have a clear destination in mind, which they are entirely unhurried about reaching. Or perhaps they are peaceful because they have no destination in mind at all. They plod with a dignity which is absent in the jostling pedestrians and the mad, honking traffic. Even the largest, most intimidating bull will simply amble along its way. You can reach out to place a loving hand on their forehead as they pass. Amy finds a stall selling sliced cucumbers and begins feeding them to the cows. They gratefully accept the gift, pulling it into their mouths with long tongues.
The other herd in Rishikesh dress in Rastafarian beanies, anklets, sandals, budding facial hair, dreadlocks, billowing pants, psychedelic shirts and fixedly serene smiles. They're making the scene and living the hippie dream. We pass signs that advertise ‘crystal healings,’ ‘astrological gems,’ ‘healing with Reiki,’ and myriad styles of yoga. A million ways to be healed. Amy is a believer. I rib her, saying, “perhaps I should start up my own stall here, advertising: ‘Healing Through Shamanic Cow-Dragging.’ People will pay me a hundred rupees to be tied up and have a cow drag them through the streets of Rishikesh. I'll tell them it's to realign their ass-chakra. Could be a good little earner.”
As the days pass I grow increasingly frustrated. I speak of those who are on a frantic search for inner peace. I speak of the readiness with which people would seek out others, would seek out gurus, on their quest for an understanding of self. I speak of the gurus demanding big dollars to teach people how to be less materialistic. I speak of the earnest, poker-faced seriousness with which our brothers and sisters would seek to be more joyous in life. I speak of those who would grasp onto the idea of non-attachment. As I give vent to my frustration with Amy over a coffee and a cigarette, overlooking the Ganges, I know I'm being too harsh, and I know that I'm generalizing. I know it's easier for me to do this when I look on from afar and ardently insist upon avoiding the whole scene. But my antennae for bullshit just twitch too violently when I contemplate becoming immersed in it. Sometimes in my imagination I see the Westerners in Rishikesh as playing an adult version of ‘dress-ups.’ You know, dress-up as a monk, dress-up as a yogi, dress-up as a sadhu. It all seems to me, as Holden Caulfield would say, phony.
I see a sea of self-improvement. I see people in real pain, wearing a Technicolor grimace. And I can't be a part of it. Some of the most miserable people I know are those who are obsessed with the idea of improving themselves. Their bookshelves are filled with books on ‘self-help.’ I feel that if you spend all your time trying to 'improve' yourself, ruminating on your flaws and analyzing your pain, obscuring your mind - that precious lens to the world - with endless thoughts of what is 'wrong' with you, and thus which needs to be 'improved,' then it'd be little wonder that you'd end up miserable. Nuts to that, let it slide. Go fishing. Tend the garden. Go for a walk in the mountains.
I leave Rishikesh. Amy wants to stay and stay on an ashram. I catch a train alone, to Amritsar. On the train I take my seat next to a man and a teenaged boy. I talk to the man, his name is Ranjeet. The younger bloke is his nephew, who wears one of the head-wraps worn by Sikhs. They're visiting family in Ludhiana. The conversation plods along at the meandering pace of small-talk, and when this pace fades we sit without speaking. Then the man turns to me asks insistently, “have you had more than the one girlfriend in your life?” I tell him yes, I'm in my second relationship. He says, “so you have had your heart broken then also?” I reply that yes, I suppose you could say that. He shifts in his seat to face me more fully. He asks, “so do you have any advice for someone whose marriage is in the ending, any strategies to be reducing the stress?”
I can tell he's talking about himself. I'm momentarily startled by a man ten years my senior, and who I've just met, asking for my advice on ending his marriage. I know that divorce is exceedingly rare in India. Maybe it's different for Sikhs. Arranged Marriages (as opposed to ‘Love Marriages’) are the norm in India, and the taboos about breaking this arrangement are strong. For whatever criticisms one may make about the idea of arranged marriage, the arranged marriages do seem to work, and they protect the Indians from any experience of heartbreak in their lives. Perhaps this is why Indians retain such an endearingly romantic view of love, and a genuine open-heartedness, as opposed to what sometimes becomes a hardened attitude of cynicism in the West. The flip side of this is that, as I can see in Ranjeet, when a relationship does go bad, the Indians are babies in the wilderness. “I'm sorry to say this Ranjeet,” I say, “but I think that some degree of stress is inevitable.”
He offers his story without me probing for it. He says the problem is not really between him and his wife. They love each other, he says. The problem is with their parents. They've had a falling out, her parents don’t ‘trust’ him, he says, for reasons unknown to him, and they've been pressuring her to end the marriage. This pressure has been causing them both a tremendous amount of anguish. His wife said she wants two months to think it over. I smile, “this is not an uncommon tactic when it comes to women,” I say. He tells me, “but I have my pride. I tell her she can have fifteen days - if she cannot be making up her mind in fifteen days then she cannot be making up her mind in two months, I think so.” He’s booked two tickets to London, for a holiday they’d planned, but now he has them on hold. “If we are no more then I will go to London alone,” he says. I can see the raw sadness in his eyes. He wants to be with her. I say to him, “perhaps you cannot change what her parents think. Perhaps you cannot change what your wife thinks. But you will feel less stress if you can feel good about the way you’re handling things. Be the man she fell in love with in the first place.” Ranjeet fidgets in his seat. He’s doesn’t look reassured.
The train arrives in Ludhiana. Ranjeet and his nephew gather their bags. “Will you do one thing for me?” he says, before he leaves. “When you go to the Golden Temple, will you pray for my marriage?” I shake his hand. “I promise you I will do this, Ranjeet.”
Sometimes it’s funny how things work. I’ve never prayed before in my life. I left Rishikesh to get away from Westerners play-acting religious rituals. And now, rolling towards Amristar, I’m on a mission to fulfill a promise to pray at the holiest Sikh temple on earth.
I take off my shoes and step through the pool at the entrance of the Golden Temple, to wash my feet. Stepping through the pool makes me think of the childhood joy of splashing in puddles. A man puts a head-scarf around my head. Near the front entrance Sikhs kneel and touch their foreheads to the marble ground in devotion. The Golden temple itself is in the centre of a pool, brilliant in the midday sun. Dozens bathe in the holy pool, washing, or simply gazing around, submerged up to their necks. The causeway to the temple is packed solid with hundreds of devotees awaiting their moment inside the shrine; they fan themselves with bits of cardboard to stay cool in the Punjabi sun. I decide not to join their ranks. There's a shaded area where people sit before a group of four musicians. One plays a violin-like instrument, one plays the tabla, and two are singing. They sing the hymns of Guru Nanak. I cannot understand the words, but I don't need to. I take a seat. This is the place, with the music surrounding me, to say a prayer for Ranjeet's marriage.
Later that night I brave the streets to find a restaurant, and come to a place that's fancier than I'd usually eat at. I order the chicken, the ‘Chef’s Specialty’ no less. I enjoy the meal, it feels like a luxurious treat. Then, as I'm about to take my final bite, I see a single dead fly sitting on the plate.
Prayer doesn’t come naturally to me.
I return to the mountains. The Golden Temple may glitter, and beautifully so, but these mountains are, to me, the glow. On a mountain trail I see a Tibetan monk, walking ahead of me. I watch as he comes to a small bird that is sitting on the path. The monk treads lightly, gently, trying not to frighten the bird. The bird begins to hop, just in front of him. They walk together like this for several moments before the bird suddenly takes flight, away into the mist. The monk, without knowing that anyone sees him, looks up with pure joy, with the joy of a child.
I can breathe again, in this air of simplicity. In the Himalayas, where I remind myself that you don’t really need to go looking, in this life, for it is enough to simply see. We catch an overnight bus to Manali. I don’t sleep, I know we’re returning to the big mountains. The bus stops somewhere, in some town. I climb off the bus and sit on an old wooden bench beneath a bright, fluorescent light. I’m too tired to think, my mind is still. I see a thousand insects flying around the light. As they fly, and beat against the light, I see a wing fall off, and flutter to the ground. I look down to see those with one wing, and those with no wings, flapping about helplessly, flapping about in a field of a thousand fallen wings. Jesus, they’re killing themselves, I think, they’re dying in this frantic effort to touch the light. But then I see the fallen, the wingless, walk away on tiny legs. They're not ants, they’re something I've never seen before. And when their wings fall off they begin to walk. Even as they’re dying, they’re being born.
Some people will tell you the Himalayan Range was born of an upthrust, a slow and massive collision of tectonic plates. Don’t believe them. This only delivered the raw materials - just a particularly large mound of rock, and earth. The sculptor is giving birth to the Himalayas, as art, works using nothing but water. It is the rivers that shaped the Himalaya. Rivers are the fingers of God, sculpting, with the Himalaya made beautiful by what is stripped away.
I may never find my temple. I may never feel comfortable enough to pray. But in the Himalaya I feel okay about that. In the Himalaya I may delight not in looking, but in seeing, and my every footstep is a silent prayer.
Annapurna
Non-Fiction
Location - Nepal
Written - May 2008
[One of my current goals is to get one of my more upbeat pieces out there. So far it’s only been the more depressing ones, and I like to think I can capture other moods than just the shitty ones. I’m particularly fond of this particular piece, partly because I’m writing about one of the most beautiful times in my life.]
Amy doesn’t even like to walk. She’d rather catch a cycle-rickshaw than walk to the bazaar. But for whatever reasons she has, she says she wants to walk with me into the Himalayas. I don’t ask her reasons. I don’t question my own reasons, either.
We busy ourselves with the eager minutiae of preparation. We think we’re ready. We catch the wrong bus and end up at some windy village in the Himalayan foothills. The driver shrugs his shoulders at us. From his broken English and sweeping gestures we establish that we’ll have to walk down the valley, to a main road in the distance. There we can catch a bus to Nayapul – our starting point. The driver follows us for a few minutes, and points the way one last time before vanishing back up the path in long, swift steps. So we walk.
We’re headed to the Annapurna Base Camp, about 60 kilometres’ walk north of Nayapul, in Nepal. No-one knows the exact distance, because no-one has ever measured it. Our route will be longer than most. At the main road we’re told the bus union has called a strike against the new Maoist government, so we hitch a ride on the back of a tractor to Phedi. My map tells me we can start from there instead.
Amy struggles. The path climbs steeply through terraced rice paddies and fields of corn. The farmers have dug wedges out of the hillsides to create flat ridges, and on each ridge is a crop of glowing vegetables, in humble little patches that complement the countryside, rather than detract from it. Amy wipes at the hot sweat that drips into her eyes. At a juncture I start up the stone steps – the tractor driver told me it’s a shortcut. Amy wants to take the jeep track, which isn’t as steep. She’s being difficult. There’s a tyrant in me without an empire, but Amy represents my balance of power. We take the jeep track. Amy plods along slowly, stopping frequently to rest or take a photograph. She begins turning red from the sun despite lathering on sunscreen. I’m worried about how she’ll survive the next eight days of this. By the late afternoon we’ve only made it as far as Dhampus – no more than four kilometres. We find a room for the night at a guesthouse. We discuss it calmly. I say that I doubt she’ll be able to make it all the way. I’m happy to go on alone. I say we can wait to find a group heading back down, and she can join them and bow out now, if she likes. We resolve to see how she goes tomorrow. It doesn’t occur to me at the time that doubting her ability is the surest way to spur her on.
In the morning the sunlight comes out to dance. It plays upon the rocks. The rocks used to make the steps of the path are infused with flecks of mica, and the path glitters before us. The path rises up and over a ridge. When the sunlight strikes it the steps glint, as if sprinkled with celestial dust. This glint becomes entrancing, hypnotic. It reassures me for no good reason, like heavenly breadcrumbs along our way.
The light is different up here. It’s brighter, somehow. Clearer. I’ve spent the last few months under the smog-haze of India, without realizing it until now. Every now and then we come up over a small rise to be greeted by a stone cottage, with smoke rising from a small cooking-fire. I pace an empty cobbled street. A gust of wind is blowing through. I saunter into the small village feeling like I’m in the Wild West - only my slow saunter is borne less of a gunslinger’s sense of supreme self-confidence than it is of the rising fatigue in my legs. The mountains are whispering to me. They first invite, and then demand that I move to their rhythm, to the rhythm of the mountains. Not to any other pace that our minds might prefer.
I look up to see a Nepalese man. He walks hunched over like an ancient one. He has two full backpacks on his back, their shoulder straps are wrapped around his forehead in the Nepalese style. He must be a porter. He’s overloaded, he’s been made into a beast of burden. He doesn’t respond to my ‘namaste!’ as he trudges up the steps with fifty kilograms or so on his back. His chest heaves with every breath. The image stays with me. Ten minutes later, we meet the couple who’ve overloaded him. They’re Americans, maybe fifty years old. They’re on a package tour, they tell us, and they seem entirely oblivious to their porter who trudges up ahead of them. I will them to see. I don’t want them to come to a particular conclusion, or feel bad, I just want them to feel the earth at the end of their spiked walking poles.
I turn to wait for Amy. We pass through another village. A large flock of mountain goats trots around the corner like a living avalanche of fur and feet and horns. As they flow past Amy picks up a baby goat and cradles it a moment. The mother bleats – she’d halted when Amy picked up the infant – and only proceeds when the infant is safely beneath her once again. We stop in a small valley to rest. The old Nepalese bloke who lives there beams, and says, ‘today is a very lucky day for me.’ He says his goat just gave birth to two baby goats. An hour ago. We ask if we can see them, and he leads us down some steep stone steps to a wooden stable. There we find the mother and its two newborn infants. They stand unsteadily, and the old Nepalese man props them up on their feet, helping them to suckle. He grins at us and says again, ‘today is a very lucky day for me.’ His face ripples with lines when he smiles, like contours, the sort of lines that some would cover up, or operate upon, yet which others wear joyously, and with unblemished radiance. ‘Yes,’ I smile back in agreement, ‘a very lucky day.’
These moments are the breadcrumbs of food for Amy’s spirit, as the mica is for me. She’s always been a people-person, more so than myself. She’s looking strong and determined now, she’s found her own steady pace. There aren’t many tourists on the path, but when we come across a group of professional-looking trekkers Amy strikes up conversation. They have walking poles made from the same material they use to construct the Space Shuttle, and that sort of thing. Amy and I approach them with towels and shirts wrapped around our heads to keep the sun out. We’ve been getting very badly burned, very quickly. We’d picked up some SPF-50 sunscreen in Pokhara, but it isn’t working. One of the professional-looking trekkers - the sort of tall German you can imagine marching into Poland - tells us that this particular brand of sunscreen is a common Indian scam. It’s nothing more than cheap moisturiser, he says. We bond over this piece of Indian trickery, it kindles an animated exchange of subcontinental experiences that we recall with the weighty solemnity of soldiers, recollecting some terrible battle. I offer the story of a Nepalese man I met, who was fond of acronyms. He told me that N.E.P.A.L. is an acronym for ‘Never Ending Peace And Love.’ I.N.D.I.A, he said, is an acronym for ‘I’ll Never Do It Again.’
We awake to the sunrise. The last remnants of cloud waft away to reveal the Himalayan peaks, away in the distance. I’ve been observing the weather closely for several days now, watching the patterns. The air is at its clearest in the early morning - all but free of clouds. Then the mid-morning haze begins to settle, culminating in mid-afternoon rains that last until early evening. The monsoon is coming. It’s best to do the bulk of your walking before midday. And with each new day our legs get a little stronger.
We meet a pair who walk at a similar pace to us. A Swiss Jew, and his Nepalese guide. The man from Switzerland is twenty years old, not long out of high school, and he’s going home in a week to study Literature and Philosophy. My ears prick up – we might have something worth talking about in the silence of the mountains. Adrian was born in the mountains, and has been walking and climbing in the Swiss Alps since he was a kid. He has a watch that tells you the altitude. He takes a no-nonsense attitude towards it all. His sensibility is only tweaked by the impish influence of Ram.
Adrian met Ram on a dope-deal in Pokhara. And, travelling alone, Adrian was on the lookout for a guide to take him to Annapurna Base Camp. Ram is a thirty year old Nepali from Kathmandu, who has five years’ trekking experience. He tells us this with a tiny smile, and the slightest glimmer of pride in his eyes. He’s doing exactly what he wants to be doing with his life. I listen carefully to his tales of trekking in Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, and Ladakh. At the memory of these treks he puts two clasped fingertips to his lips, kissing them, as if recalling the taste of a rare delicacy. ‘Beautiful, my friend,’ he says. Ram’s other great love is for heroically strong hashish. At every other stop he silently rolls up a number, smokes, and has passed it to you before you even realize what’s going on. ‘No problem,’ he says, with somnolent eyes, ‘hashish is meant to be smoked in the Himalayas, my friend.’
Amy never touches the stuff. But she says that when I smoke it helps us to harmonize our walking pace. I keep my eyes on the path and take things just a little slower. Since yesterday the path has taken us north through a long, steep valley. For some time we have followed the western face of this valley. There’s a strong-flowing river at the bottom, full of fresh melt-water from the mountains, and its constant hush wills us to be silent, and listen. I assume the path follows the western face of the valley because it’s slightly less steep than the alternative. The path follows the smoothest, flattest contours of the mountains. And this means that the path cannot, for mere human convenience, rise in a slow and steady incline to base camp. It must follow the places where the mountains will permit us to go. Up and down – in a brutal rollercoaster of steps.
The slightest glance to the right, over the low-side of the path, is greeted with a drop. Sometimes this drop is twenty metres. Sometimes it is several hundred - sickening - metres down. At other times the drop is obscured by dense vegetation, until a break in the undergrowth reveals the abyss once again. It isn’t just the size of these mountains which is staggering. It’s also their style. Back home I’m used to rolling hills that rise upon each other, gently. But these mountains are sheer bolts of electricity that flash upwards from the ground. And, sometimes, a mountain will not let us wind around it, it blocks our path and demands that we must go up, and over it. This is no ordinary walk.
As we approach Chomrong, the last village along the path, we’re already tired. We’ve walked for seven hours today. The map tells me we must ascend 500 metres into Chomrong. That’s five hundred metres, up. One eminently careful footstep after another. I’m not sure of how I can describe something like this. The Rialto tower, in Melbourne, is 250 metres high. We have to climb twice the height of the Rialto Tower, on zig-zagging steps about the same steepness and width as the staircases in a high-rise building. Only our steps are large, loose stones, and grey earth. Now picture this climb up the Rialto staircase is done without walls surrounding you, and with the occasional gust of wind ruffling your hair. At times I foolishly glance down, and become dizzy for a step. For just an instant my mind goes completely limp. Back to the path. We have to haul ourselves up each step. Slowly, slowly. On a small plateau Amy begins dry-retching. We stop and drink some water. When she recovers I make her laugh by saying, ‘now, I’m not a genius, but couldn’t they have thought of a better spot to build their fucking village?’ On the opposite ridge are vast landslides, open gashes of grey rock against the green of surrounding trees. I begin to wonder just what we’re getting ourselves into.
We stop in Chomrong for the night. A few times during the evening I step outside and spend a few moments alone, gazing up at what lays ahead. The valley just keeps...rising... into the unknown. These mountains are unimaginable - and I use the word deliberately. In the last year, and in all my imaginings, I didn’t come close to picturing their true scale. I understand now that this is because their scale is so vastly beyond anything in my experience. The first time I saw the Himalayan range from a distance, I said to Amy that it looks like the exaggerated, painted-on background scenery of old Hollywood movies. As we get closer, slowly, they begin to seem more real. And for the first time, I feel the icy touch of fear. Just how insane is this path going to get? Are we acutely stupid to be attempting this walk without a guide?
The other night I asked Russ – the Aryan Superman who’s knowledgeable about mountaineering - whether it’s possible that a Nepali might have climbed Mount Everest, hundreds of years ago, seeing as people have since done it without oxygen bottles. He said it’s unlikely, as before the onset of ambitious Westerners, traditional Nepalese culture held the peaks as sacred, as places of the Gods, and they stayed away from them. Looking above that inhospitable ice-line, I know exactly where they were coming from.
The ascent to Chomrong has drained us of energy. But I have an idea. I watch carefully, and I order the same thing that the guides and the porters eat. ‘Dhal bhat’: an all-you-can-eat Nepalese feast of rice, dhal, pickles, and curried vegetables. I eat several rounds. Every mouthful brings new energy to my body. I’m getting fitter. My body is no longer the water on which my mind floats - it is the rock on which my mind rests. A miraculous machine, so poorly neglected, which my mind can now rely on, and so devote its awareness solely to that next step. To that next rock.
We wake at dawn. I eat muesli with hot yak’s milk. It has become clear to me what the greatest danger is. It isn’t landslides, that distant crack of falling rock you hear sometimes. It sounds like long thunder, mixed with the sound of rock splitting apart. Ram has been close to one, once. It killed a Frenchman in his group only ten steps behind him. He doesn’t lead tourist groups in the monsoon season any more. The landslides are caused by rain loosening the earth, but you can’t waste your time being paranoid about the unlikely event of being caught under one. You’d have to be unlucky. And the greatest danger isn’t altitude sickness, either. If you begin feeling the symptoms – headaches, dizziness, nausea – then you go back down in altitude a few hundred metres and rest, if you’re sensible. The greatest danger, so far as I’m concerned, is simpler and less grandiose. It is a misplaced footstep. A lapse in concentration that leads to a slip and a broken leg. Or, a slide and a long fall that ends up breaking your everything. We’ve been walking for four days now. Help is not so easily available out here, at this time of year you have the path to yourself for long stretches of time. And so you watch every footstep. You test rocks to see if they’re loose. You step carefully over the suspension bridges. And, most of all, you stop before gazing up at the hypnotically epic view. Sometimes the path turns sharply.
On day five we prepare to make our final ascent to Annapurna Base Camp. I've started calling it ‘A.B.C.’ by now, just like the in-crowd of trekkers and guides. At first I disliked what sounded like a gimmicky acronym, preferring the sweetly rounded sound of ‘Annapurna.’ Now I call it A.B.C. It saves breath.
We’re at an altitude of 3,270 metres, according to my map, about a kilometre higher than the tallest mountain in Australia. And certainly higher than I’ve ever been. But we’re headed up, baby, we’re headed up. I let Amy set the pace, walking a step behind her. We set a good pace to the outpost at Deurali, through rhododendrons and jungle foliage. The jungle gives way to barren rocky landscapes. When I pause for breath I simply gape at the walls of rock on either side of us. I’ve learned that photography is almost entirely inadequate for capturing this landscape. The tiny frame of a photograph cannot do justice to the epic panorama before us. I crane my neck to see wispy waterfalls that etch their way down the sheer cliff-faces. We cannot see the peaks, for the peaks are above the clouds. Every now and then a break in the clouds will reveal tantalising glimpses of their jewelled-white grandeur. It’s almost impossible to over-estimate how high they are – you crane your neck to some ridiculous angle, some impossible height, and it is only the still, jagged permanence of the things that reminds you that they are of the earth, and not of the heavens.
We reach the ice. At the base of a waterfall a tiny glacier has formed, no more than ten metres across. It’s flat, no problem. Further along, we come to a big one. The glacier is sloped at a 45 degree angle at our height, steepening to a drop further down. It’s about a hundred metres across. I’m genuinely scared. Ice is not my element. Even at heights there’s something reassuring about the firm crunch of my hiking boots into dirt, or rock. But ice is, of course, the very epitome of slipperiness. It’d be easier to climb the sloped glacier, but skirting across it feels unnatural. I take a diagonal route up and across it, kicking my boots into the ice for decent foot-holds. It becomes too steep and I walk on all fours, the biting cold of the ice reminding me of exactly where we are. As frightened as I am, I am infinitely more terrified to glance back at Amy. There’s little I can do to help her, other than kick in some decent footholds for her to use, and this feeling of powerlessness makes my legs shake. I say ‘slowly! slowly!,’ feigning control. But she seems less fazed than I. She has her walking stick, and digging it in helps her to retain her balance. I admire her, wordlessly, her raw gutsiness helps put me at ease. We make it across and pause, panting. We pass on in silence. My boots and hands are streaked with a slushy mix of mud and ice, and, when it dries, the tiny flecks of mica glint in the sun. My boots and my hands are like jewels.
There’s no stone steps now, just a narrow path. We reach a sharp incline before Machhapuchhre Base Camp. We’re up around 3,500 metres and climbing. I keep my eyes on the path. The path is dotted with round, red insects. Ladybugs, I think distantly. Or are they called Ladybirds? Or is it Ladybeetles? My mind is going just a little…strange. The question obsesses me, crazily. Ladybugs, ladybirds, or ladybeetles? My mind can't find purchase on the question, as if scrabbling on ice. I avoid stepping on the insects. They’re the only source of colour in this place, and to see other life up here is reassuring. Ladybugs, ladybirds, or ladybeetles…?
I look back to see that Amy is still behind me. She is. It looks like she’s walking in slow motion. It reminds me of footage I’ve seen of astronauts, walking on the moon. One step, one breath. We walk at our own pace now. We’re over 3,800 metres and everything becomes blurred. I’m shaken from my robotic stumble. A mist descends all around us, cutting visibility to twenty metres. The rocky landscape is completely silent. Only scattered patches of bright purple flowers enliven my senses. We cannot see the mountains, we can only see the path in front of us. And I realize, like a glint of mica in the greyness, that this isn’t mist. I’ve been gazing up at these peaks for the last five days, and I've seen what happens at this time of day. They’re clouds. We’re walking in the clouds.
I smile at Amy as if we’ve walked into each other’s dream. We’re here. Amy doesn't even like to walk. Ordinarily.
We walk together into Annapurna Base Camp, at 4,130 metres. The clouds obscure everything. There’s a couple of permanent buildings and scattered tents. It isn’t just a destination for trekkers like ourselves, it’s a functioning base camp for mountaineers - particularly mountaineers with their eyes on the south-face of Annapurna One. All 8,093 metres of it. As I’m smoking a foolish cigarette, a hulking figure emerges from the clouds and asks to bum a smoke. I guess from his frost-bitten hands and cracked voice that he’s a climber. I sense it best not to ask too many questions, the man looks as if he’s just seen his own ghost. I’ve read that forty percent of people who attempt to climb Annapurna One die. I’m later told that his party made it up to 7,000 metres before coming down, due to the bad weather.
There isn’t much to see outside. It’s too cloudy. It’d be anti-climactic if I had the energy to be disappointed. I have my faith that tomorrow morning the sky should be clear at dawn. I go to our dorm room to rest. I read some Krishnamurti. There’s a knock at the cabin door. It’s Adrian who beckons me outside, and I can tell by the look on his face that he’s serious. The floor is icy cold in bare feet. I put on my boots once again.
The clouds are clearing. We can see where we are, and we are among the Mountain Gods.
There’s no paths up here. I half rush, half-stumble around in our vast, natural amphitheatre, surrounded on all sides by the peaks of the Himalaya. As high as we are, the peaks tower four kilometres above us. I laugh out aloud, a crazed, wild laugh. Unashamed tears of joy come to my eyes. I wipe them away out of a distant concern that the icy temperatures will fuse my eyelids shut, and I’ll miss out on the living, breathing canvas that unfolds around me. The clouds are clearing, and I see the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life. And I can’t bring myself to say it’s ‘like’ anything, there’s nothing I can compare it to. It’s like the Himalayas, baby, it’s like the Himalayas.
I come to a grave, covered in Tibetan prayer flags. It’s a monument for the Russian mountaineer, Anatoli Nikoliavich Boukreev, who died on the south face of Annapurna One. On it are etched his words:
‘Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve,
they are cathedrals, where I practice my religion.’
We have fifteen minutes among the cathedrals, these cathedrals in the sky. Then the clouds descend once again, and in the whiteness I am transfixed by the sight of Amy. Amy, with a doona wrapped around her and her head tilted up, savouring the air of this place. Amy, floating upon the clouds that waft past us with steady, inexorable speed. Amy, who has a fundamentally different style of walking to myself - she likes to walk slowly, soaking in the scenery as she walks, I walk fast, only to stop and sit and imbibe a particular scene - but it doesn’t really matter too much because we always meet up again, just a little way down the path. Forever alone, and yet forever together, at the same time.
The mountains stand silent. Outside of the thin web of meaning which we call our lives, outside of ourselves, our being here is of no significance.
It only takes us three days to walk back. I’m grinning for most of the way.
Location - Nepal
Written - May 2008
[One of my current goals is to get one of my more upbeat pieces out there. So far it’s only been the more depressing ones, and I like to think I can capture other moods than just the shitty ones. I’m particularly fond of this particular piece, partly because I’m writing about one of the most beautiful times in my life.]
Amy doesn’t even like to walk. She’d rather catch a cycle-rickshaw than walk to the bazaar. But for whatever reasons she has, she says she wants to walk with me into the Himalayas. I don’t ask her reasons. I don’t question my own reasons, either.
We busy ourselves with the eager minutiae of preparation. We think we’re ready. We catch the wrong bus and end up at some windy village in the Himalayan foothills. The driver shrugs his shoulders at us. From his broken English and sweeping gestures we establish that we’ll have to walk down the valley, to a main road in the distance. There we can catch a bus to Nayapul – our starting point. The driver follows us for a few minutes, and points the way one last time before vanishing back up the path in long, swift steps. So we walk.
We’re headed to the Annapurna Base Camp, about 60 kilometres’ walk north of Nayapul, in Nepal. No-one knows the exact distance, because no-one has ever measured it. Our route will be longer than most. At the main road we’re told the bus union has called a strike against the new Maoist government, so we hitch a ride on the back of a tractor to Phedi. My map tells me we can start from there instead.
Amy struggles. The path climbs steeply through terraced rice paddies and fields of corn. The farmers have dug wedges out of the hillsides to create flat ridges, and on each ridge is a crop of glowing vegetables, in humble little patches that complement the countryside, rather than detract from it. Amy wipes at the hot sweat that drips into her eyes. At a juncture I start up the stone steps – the tractor driver told me it’s a shortcut. Amy wants to take the jeep track, which isn’t as steep. She’s being difficult. There’s a tyrant in me without an empire, but Amy represents my balance of power. We take the jeep track. Amy plods along slowly, stopping frequently to rest or take a photograph. She begins turning red from the sun despite lathering on sunscreen. I’m worried about how she’ll survive the next eight days of this. By the late afternoon we’ve only made it as far as Dhampus – no more than four kilometres. We find a room for the night at a guesthouse. We discuss it calmly. I say that I doubt she’ll be able to make it all the way. I’m happy to go on alone. I say we can wait to find a group heading back down, and she can join them and bow out now, if she likes. We resolve to see how she goes tomorrow. It doesn’t occur to me at the time that doubting her ability is the surest way to spur her on.
In the morning the sunlight comes out to dance. It plays upon the rocks. The rocks used to make the steps of the path are infused with flecks of mica, and the path glitters before us. The path rises up and over a ridge. When the sunlight strikes it the steps glint, as if sprinkled with celestial dust. This glint becomes entrancing, hypnotic. It reassures me for no good reason, like heavenly breadcrumbs along our way.
The light is different up here. It’s brighter, somehow. Clearer. I’ve spent the last few months under the smog-haze of India, without realizing it until now. Every now and then we come up over a small rise to be greeted by a stone cottage, with smoke rising from a small cooking-fire. I pace an empty cobbled street. A gust of wind is blowing through. I saunter into the small village feeling like I’m in the Wild West - only my slow saunter is borne less of a gunslinger’s sense of supreme self-confidence than it is of the rising fatigue in my legs. The mountains are whispering to me. They first invite, and then demand that I move to their rhythm, to the rhythm of the mountains. Not to any other pace that our minds might prefer.
I look up to see a Nepalese man. He walks hunched over like an ancient one. He has two full backpacks on his back, their shoulder straps are wrapped around his forehead in the Nepalese style. He must be a porter. He’s overloaded, he’s been made into a beast of burden. He doesn’t respond to my ‘namaste!’ as he trudges up the steps with fifty kilograms or so on his back. His chest heaves with every breath. The image stays with me. Ten minutes later, we meet the couple who’ve overloaded him. They’re Americans, maybe fifty years old. They’re on a package tour, they tell us, and they seem entirely oblivious to their porter who trudges up ahead of them. I will them to see. I don’t want them to come to a particular conclusion, or feel bad, I just want them to feel the earth at the end of their spiked walking poles.
I turn to wait for Amy. We pass through another village. A large flock of mountain goats trots around the corner like a living avalanche of fur and feet and horns. As they flow past Amy picks up a baby goat and cradles it a moment. The mother bleats – she’d halted when Amy picked up the infant – and only proceeds when the infant is safely beneath her once again. We stop in a small valley to rest. The old Nepalese bloke who lives there beams, and says, ‘today is a very lucky day for me.’ He says his goat just gave birth to two baby goats. An hour ago. We ask if we can see them, and he leads us down some steep stone steps to a wooden stable. There we find the mother and its two newborn infants. They stand unsteadily, and the old Nepalese man props them up on their feet, helping them to suckle. He grins at us and says again, ‘today is a very lucky day for me.’ His face ripples with lines when he smiles, like contours, the sort of lines that some would cover up, or operate upon, yet which others wear joyously, and with unblemished radiance. ‘Yes,’ I smile back in agreement, ‘a very lucky day.’
These moments are the breadcrumbs of food for Amy’s spirit, as the mica is for me. She’s always been a people-person, more so than myself. She’s looking strong and determined now, she’s found her own steady pace. There aren’t many tourists on the path, but when we come across a group of professional-looking trekkers Amy strikes up conversation. They have walking poles made from the same material they use to construct the Space Shuttle, and that sort of thing. Amy and I approach them with towels and shirts wrapped around our heads to keep the sun out. We’ve been getting very badly burned, very quickly. We’d picked up some SPF-50 sunscreen in Pokhara, but it isn’t working. One of the professional-looking trekkers - the sort of tall German you can imagine marching into Poland - tells us that this particular brand of sunscreen is a common Indian scam. It’s nothing more than cheap moisturiser, he says. We bond over this piece of Indian trickery, it kindles an animated exchange of subcontinental experiences that we recall with the weighty solemnity of soldiers, recollecting some terrible battle. I offer the story of a Nepalese man I met, who was fond of acronyms. He told me that N.E.P.A.L. is an acronym for ‘Never Ending Peace And Love.’ I.N.D.I.A, he said, is an acronym for ‘I’ll Never Do It Again.’
We awake to the sunrise. The last remnants of cloud waft away to reveal the Himalayan peaks, away in the distance. I’ve been observing the weather closely for several days now, watching the patterns. The air is at its clearest in the early morning - all but free of clouds. Then the mid-morning haze begins to settle, culminating in mid-afternoon rains that last until early evening. The monsoon is coming. It’s best to do the bulk of your walking before midday. And with each new day our legs get a little stronger.
We meet a pair who walk at a similar pace to us. A Swiss Jew, and his Nepalese guide. The man from Switzerland is twenty years old, not long out of high school, and he’s going home in a week to study Literature and Philosophy. My ears prick up – we might have something worth talking about in the silence of the mountains. Adrian was born in the mountains, and has been walking and climbing in the Swiss Alps since he was a kid. He has a watch that tells you the altitude. He takes a no-nonsense attitude towards it all. His sensibility is only tweaked by the impish influence of Ram.
Adrian met Ram on a dope-deal in Pokhara. And, travelling alone, Adrian was on the lookout for a guide to take him to Annapurna Base Camp. Ram is a thirty year old Nepali from Kathmandu, who has five years’ trekking experience. He tells us this with a tiny smile, and the slightest glimmer of pride in his eyes. He’s doing exactly what he wants to be doing with his life. I listen carefully to his tales of trekking in Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, and Ladakh. At the memory of these treks he puts two clasped fingertips to his lips, kissing them, as if recalling the taste of a rare delicacy. ‘Beautiful, my friend,’ he says. Ram’s other great love is for heroically strong hashish. At every other stop he silently rolls up a number, smokes, and has passed it to you before you even realize what’s going on. ‘No problem,’ he says, with somnolent eyes, ‘hashish is meant to be smoked in the Himalayas, my friend.’
Amy never touches the stuff. But she says that when I smoke it helps us to harmonize our walking pace. I keep my eyes on the path and take things just a little slower. Since yesterday the path has taken us north through a long, steep valley. For some time we have followed the western face of this valley. There’s a strong-flowing river at the bottom, full of fresh melt-water from the mountains, and its constant hush wills us to be silent, and listen. I assume the path follows the western face of the valley because it’s slightly less steep than the alternative. The path follows the smoothest, flattest contours of the mountains. And this means that the path cannot, for mere human convenience, rise in a slow and steady incline to base camp. It must follow the places where the mountains will permit us to go. Up and down – in a brutal rollercoaster of steps.
The slightest glance to the right, over the low-side of the path, is greeted with a drop. Sometimes this drop is twenty metres. Sometimes it is several hundred - sickening - metres down. At other times the drop is obscured by dense vegetation, until a break in the undergrowth reveals the abyss once again. It isn’t just the size of these mountains which is staggering. It’s also their style. Back home I’m used to rolling hills that rise upon each other, gently. But these mountains are sheer bolts of electricity that flash upwards from the ground. And, sometimes, a mountain will not let us wind around it, it blocks our path and demands that we must go up, and over it. This is no ordinary walk.
As we approach Chomrong, the last village along the path, we’re already tired. We’ve walked for seven hours today. The map tells me we must ascend 500 metres into Chomrong. That’s five hundred metres, up. One eminently careful footstep after another. I’m not sure of how I can describe something like this. The Rialto tower, in Melbourne, is 250 metres high. We have to climb twice the height of the Rialto Tower, on zig-zagging steps about the same steepness and width as the staircases in a high-rise building. Only our steps are large, loose stones, and grey earth. Now picture this climb up the Rialto staircase is done without walls surrounding you, and with the occasional gust of wind ruffling your hair. At times I foolishly glance down, and become dizzy for a step. For just an instant my mind goes completely limp. Back to the path. We have to haul ourselves up each step. Slowly, slowly. On a small plateau Amy begins dry-retching. We stop and drink some water. When she recovers I make her laugh by saying, ‘now, I’m not a genius, but couldn’t they have thought of a better spot to build their fucking village?’ On the opposite ridge are vast landslides, open gashes of grey rock against the green of surrounding trees. I begin to wonder just what we’re getting ourselves into.
We stop in Chomrong for the night. A few times during the evening I step outside and spend a few moments alone, gazing up at what lays ahead. The valley just keeps...rising... into the unknown. These mountains are unimaginable - and I use the word deliberately. In the last year, and in all my imaginings, I didn’t come close to picturing their true scale. I understand now that this is because their scale is so vastly beyond anything in my experience. The first time I saw the Himalayan range from a distance, I said to Amy that it looks like the exaggerated, painted-on background scenery of old Hollywood movies. As we get closer, slowly, they begin to seem more real. And for the first time, I feel the icy touch of fear. Just how insane is this path going to get? Are we acutely stupid to be attempting this walk without a guide?
The other night I asked Russ – the Aryan Superman who’s knowledgeable about mountaineering - whether it’s possible that a Nepali might have climbed Mount Everest, hundreds of years ago, seeing as people have since done it without oxygen bottles. He said it’s unlikely, as before the onset of ambitious Westerners, traditional Nepalese culture held the peaks as sacred, as places of the Gods, and they stayed away from them. Looking above that inhospitable ice-line, I know exactly where they were coming from.
The ascent to Chomrong has drained us of energy. But I have an idea. I watch carefully, and I order the same thing that the guides and the porters eat. ‘Dhal bhat’: an all-you-can-eat Nepalese feast of rice, dhal, pickles, and curried vegetables. I eat several rounds. Every mouthful brings new energy to my body. I’m getting fitter. My body is no longer the water on which my mind floats - it is the rock on which my mind rests. A miraculous machine, so poorly neglected, which my mind can now rely on, and so devote its awareness solely to that next step. To that next rock.
We wake at dawn. I eat muesli with hot yak’s milk. It has become clear to me what the greatest danger is. It isn’t landslides, that distant crack of falling rock you hear sometimes. It sounds like long thunder, mixed with the sound of rock splitting apart. Ram has been close to one, once. It killed a Frenchman in his group only ten steps behind him. He doesn’t lead tourist groups in the monsoon season any more. The landslides are caused by rain loosening the earth, but you can’t waste your time being paranoid about the unlikely event of being caught under one. You’d have to be unlucky. And the greatest danger isn’t altitude sickness, either. If you begin feeling the symptoms – headaches, dizziness, nausea – then you go back down in altitude a few hundred metres and rest, if you’re sensible. The greatest danger, so far as I’m concerned, is simpler and less grandiose. It is a misplaced footstep. A lapse in concentration that leads to a slip and a broken leg. Or, a slide and a long fall that ends up breaking your everything. We’ve been walking for four days now. Help is not so easily available out here, at this time of year you have the path to yourself for long stretches of time. And so you watch every footstep. You test rocks to see if they’re loose. You step carefully over the suspension bridges. And, most of all, you stop before gazing up at the hypnotically epic view. Sometimes the path turns sharply.
On day five we prepare to make our final ascent to Annapurna Base Camp. I've started calling it ‘A.B.C.’ by now, just like the in-crowd of trekkers and guides. At first I disliked what sounded like a gimmicky acronym, preferring the sweetly rounded sound of ‘Annapurna.’ Now I call it A.B.C. It saves breath.
We’re at an altitude of 3,270 metres, according to my map, about a kilometre higher than the tallest mountain in Australia. And certainly higher than I’ve ever been. But we’re headed up, baby, we’re headed up. I let Amy set the pace, walking a step behind her. We set a good pace to the outpost at Deurali, through rhododendrons and jungle foliage. The jungle gives way to barren rocky landscapes. When I pause for breath I simply gape at the walls of rock on either side of us. I’ve learned that photography is almost entirely inadequate for capturing this landscape. The tiny frame of a photograph cannot do justice to the epic panorama before us. I crane my neck to see wispy waterfalls that etch their way down the sheer cliff-faces. We cannot see the peaks, for the peaks are above the clouds. Every now and then a break in the clouds will reveal tantalising glimpses of their jewelled-white grandeur. It’s almost impossible to over-estimate how high they are – you crane your neck to some ridiculous angle, some impossible height, and it is only the still, jagged permanence of the things that reminds you that they are of the earth, and not of the heavens.
We reach the ice. At the base of a waterfall a tiny glacier has formed, no more than ten metres across. It’s flat, no problem. Further along, we come to a big one. The glacier is sloped at a 45 degree angle at our height, steepening to a drop further down. It’s about a hundred metres across. I’m genuinely scared. Ice is not my element. Even at heights there’s something reassuring about the firm crunch of my hiking boots into dirt, or rock. But ice is, of course, the very epitome of slipperiness. It’d be easier to climb the sloped glacier, but skirting across it feels unnatural. I take a diagonal route up and across it, kicking my boots into the ice for decent foot-holds. It becomes too steep and I walk on all fours, the biting cold of the ice reminding me of exactly where we are. As frightened as I am, I am infinitely more terrified to glance back at Amy. There’s little I can do to help her, other than kick in some decent footholds for her to use, and this feeling of powerlessness makes my legs shake. I say ‘slowly! slowly!,’ feigning control. But she seems less fazed than I. She has her walking stick, and digging it in helps her to retain her balance. I admire her, wordlessly, her raw gutsiness helps put me at ease. We make it across and pause, panting. We pass on in silence. My boots and hands are streaked with a slushy mix of mud and ice, and, when it dries, the tiny flecks of mica glint in the sun. My boots and my hands are like jewels.
There’s no stone steps now, just a narrow path. We reach a sharp incline before Machhapuchhre Base Camp. We’re up around 3,500 metres and climbing. I keep my eyes on the path. The path is dotted with round, red insects. Ladybugs, I think distantly. Or are they called Ladybirds? Or is it Ladybeetles? My mind is going just a little…strange. The question obsesses me, crazily. Ladybugs, ladybirds, or ladybeetles? My mind can't find purchase on the question, as if scrabbling on ice. I avoid stepping on the insects. They’re the only source of colour in this place, and to see other life up here is reassuring. Ladybugs, ladybirds, or ladybeetles…?
I look back to see that Amy is still behind me. She is. It looks like she’s walking in slow motion. It reminds me of footage I’ve seen of astronauts, walking on the moon. One step, one breath. We walk at our own pace now. We’re over 3,800 metres and everything becomes blurred. I’m shaken from my robotic stumble. A mist descends all around us, cutting visibility to twenty metres. The rocky landscape is completely silent. Only scattered patches of bright purple flowers enliven my senses. We cannot see the mountains, we can only see the path in front of us. And I realize, like a glint of mica in the greyness, that this isn’t mist. I’ve been gazing up at these peaks for the last five days, and I've seen what happens at this time of day. They’re clouds. We’re walking in the clouds.
I smile at Amy as if we’ve walked into each other’s dream. We’re here. Amy doesn't even like to walk. Ordinarily.
We walk together into Annapurna Base Camp, at 4,130 metres. The clouds obscure everything. There’s a couple of permanent buildings and scattered tents. It isn’t just a destination for trekkers like ourselves, it’s a functioning base camp for mountaineers - particularly mountaineers with their eyes on the south-face of Annapurna One. All 8,093 metres of it. As I’m smoking a foolish cigarette, a hulking figure emerges from the clouds and asks to bum a smoke. I guess from his frost-bitten hands and cracked voice that he’s a climber. I sense it best not to ask too many questions, the man looks as if he’s just seen his own ghost. I’ve read that forty percent of people who attempt to climb Annapurna One die. I’m later told that his party made it up to 7,000 metres before coming down, due to the bad weather.
There isn’t much to see outside. It’s too cloudy. It’d be anti-climactic if I had the energy to be disappointed. I have my faith that tomorrow morning the sky should be clear at dawn. I go to our dorm room to rest. I read some Krishnamurti. There’s a knock at the cabin door. It’s Adrian who beckons me outside, and I can tell by the look on his face that he’s serious. The floor is icy cold in bare feet. I put on my boots once again.
The clouds are clearing. We can see where we are, and we are among the Mountain Gods.
There’s no paths up here. I half rush, half-stumble around in our vast, natural amphitheatre, surrounded on all sides by the peaks of the Himalaya. As high as we are, the peaks tower four kilometres above us. I laugh out aloud, a crazed, wild laugh. Unashamed tears of joy come to my eyes. I wipe them away out of a distant concern that the icy temperatures will fuse my eyelids shut, and I’ll miss out on the living, breathing canvas that unfolds around me. The clouds are clearing, and I see the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life. And I can’t bring myself to say it’s ‘like’ anything, there’s nothing I can compare it to. It’s like the Himalayas, baby, it’s like the Himalayas.
I come to a grave, covered in Tibetan prayer flags. It’s a monument for the Russian mountaineer, Anatoli Nikoliavich Boukreev, who died on the south face of Annapurna One. On it are etched his words:
‘Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve,
they are cathedrals, where I practice my religion.’
We have fifteen minutes among the cathedrals, these cathedrals in the sky. Then the clouds descend once again, and in the whiteness I am transfixed by the sight of Amy. Amy, with a doona wrapped around her and her head tilted up, savouring the air of this place. Amy, floating upon the clouds that waft past us with steady, inexorable speed. Amy, who has a fundamentally different style of walking to myself - she likes to walk slowly, soaking in the scenery as she walks, I walk fast, only to stop and sit and imbibe a particular scene - but it doesn’t really matter too much because we always meet up again, just a little way down the path. Forever alone, and yet forever together, at the same time.
The mountains stand silent. Outside of the thin web of meaning which we call our lives, outside of ourselves, our being here is of no significance.
It only takes us three days to walk back. I’m grinning for most of the way.
An Odyssey Of Complaint
Non-Fiction
Location - India
Written - March 2008
[This is an unpolished piece – one of a series of emails I sent home while traveling in India. I don’t plan to submit any of this to publishers, though I might polish one or two up at some stage. I don’t always write with publishers in mind, and it’s usually more fun when you don’t. I like writing for other audiences too, particularly for people I care about.]
When we were in northern India, the people would warn us against heading south. ‘Too hot,’ they’d say. ‘Thirty-five degrees.’ I can imagine our pasty, northern-European cousins recoiling at the news. ‘Thirty-five?’ They’d moan. ‘Shiva… Maybe we’ll do that course in Ayurvedic medicine instead, honey.’ But not us. I felt like saying to the Indians, ‘look mate, we’re bloody Australians, all-right? We spent the last five months in the damned outback. Now give me my smokes.’
So south we go.
In some ways, India is an odyssey of complaint. Sometimes ours, mostly from other tourists. But rarely do you hear them from the Indians. On the way to Mamallapuram we arrived at the train station late, and ended up with the dreaded Unreserved Tickets – like the leprosy of long-distance transport. As far as train classes go, there’s 1AC (1st class air-con), 2AC, 3AC, Sleeper, 2nd Class, and then, at the absolute fecal depths: ‘Unreserved.’ The bottom rung for those who cannot, or could not, procure a reserved seat. We’re taking a calculated risk – if you find a ticket officer, they can usually upgrade you on board.
The train pulls into the station. We rush to find the lone Unreserved Carriage, which is right up the back, out of the way, like the naughty child in the classroom corner. We see through the windows that it’s as full as it’s possible for a carriage (full of live people) to be. People are hanging out the doors. There’s no time for fear, we saddle up our backpacks and cram our way inside, Indian style - that is, with utter contempt for your fellow humanity.
When I say that the carriage is ‘full,’ I’m not talking “a morning peak-hour train headed to Flinders Street” full. I’m saying the carriage is full in three dimensions, baby. People crouch, kneel, or huddle in the wire luggage-racks above, their heads scraping the ceiling. Worried faces peek from every crevice. Families pile on each other’s laps. Those with a seat have only the luxury of parking their ass while they endure the writhing, crashing mass of sweaty bodies. We don’t even make it into the carriage proper, we’re stuck by the toilets in the 2-by-1 metre space at the door to the carriage, standing with fifteen or so Indians in the tiny space. At my feet, a man is bravely curled up asleep on the floor next to the fetid toilet, as the train jumps about on the tracks his head thumps against the old briefcase he’s using as a pillow. I will him awake. He’s taking up valuable real-estate. With my ungainly hiking boots there’s barely enough room for my feet, I cannot shift without stepping on other sandal-clad feet. There’s certainly no room for my backpack on the floor, so I stand with the fully-loaded pack on my shoulders. My girlfriend, Amy, manages to squeeze her pack to the ground so she can sit on it. Every now and then a punter literally climbs over his fellow passengers to get to the toilet. The carriage is a human soup, stirred by the movement of the train.
We keep our spirits up by laughing at it all, ‘this isn’t like the brochure,’ and that sort of thing. We don’t complain, they’re the buggers that get pushed out and have to walk the rest of the way. Wedged in such close confinement we banter with the people around us. They try to help us, they advise that at the next station we should get off and rush to a sleeper carriage, where we might find a ticket officer who can upgrade us. If that fails, we’ll simply have to cut our losses and stay in whatever town we end up in. The next station is two hours away. We bundle out at the station and jog to find a sleeper carriage; we know the train only stops for a couple of minutes. The sleeper carriages are locked. One is open. We collapse on board and by the grace of Ganesha there’s a ticket officer, who finds us a sleeper bed each. We’re the lucky ones, I know this. Most of the other poor bastards we’ve left behind on the Unreserved carriage, from whom we heard not a word of complaint, don’t have this option.
When we arrive, Amy persuades me to take a boat-ride with some Tamil fishermen off the coast of Mamallapuram. I’m not really in the mood – my favourite pair of Thai sunglasses having just been carried off by a local dog. I reluctantly agree to get on the boat. I can feel the sun burning me. There’s six or seven of the boatmen, just young blokes. They drag the fibreglass longboat into the surf. It’s powered by a noisy motor up back, with the propeller out on a pole, another long pole points forward and is moved from side-to-side to steer. The choppy surf splashes into the boat. We head out about two kilometres from the coast, and the motor is switched off. The noise gives way to silence, and the rich sensation of the boat lolling about in the ocean. The blokes begin unravelling the fishing net and casting it out. It trails behind us, floating on buoys. We bob like the buoys with the arrhythmic movements of the swell beneath us.
I become aware that I’m not feeling so good. I feel the birth of nausea, as if I’ve just had that one beer too many at the end of the night. It occurs to me that in the past I’ve described that feeling of booze-sickness as ‘the ground listing beneath me as if I’m at sea,’ without ever truly knowing what I was talking about. Now I’m like Nikki Webster – sober, for the time being – and experiencing the reality behind that metaphor. Amy makes small-talk with the boatmen. At another time I might be interested in the finer points of fishing, for now I wipe the sweat from my face and hold my head in my hands, yawning, as if in the twilight of consciousness.
Time passes. Lots of time. I see the boatmen begin hauling in the nets. I know when they’re finished we’ll return to shore. But the nets are endless. On and on they haul them in, forming a pile on the boat that grows imperceptibly larger with each length of fine mesh. The boat is an old drunk standing at the bar like a jellyfish, swaying and quibbling on his feet. Occasionally, a live fish is plucked from the netting and thrown into a Hessian bag by my side. I can’t see into the bag, I can only hear the flapping about. My belly is full of fish-oil. I move to the edge of the boat and lean over toward the restless, emerald ocean, an instant before a guttural lurch sends preternaturally long streams of vomit splashing into the sea. A neuron spark brings the image of chum to mind – the mix of blood and guts that fishermen trail into the ocean to attract sharks. I’m sending out my own trail of chum, as the motor starts I can see the nutrients from my body bobbing away into the distance. I lurch again. The thing is, the way I’m feeling, hanging over the edge of the boat with my face almost in the chum, I figure that a Tiger Shark surfacing to wrench away my head and shoulders would at least cease the endless…damned…bobbing.
I had no idea that sea-sickness was such a real thing. I look up at Amy with my face covered in drool and miscellaneous slime to say, ‘I’ve never vomited into the Indian Ocean before….,’ before collapsing into the fetal position and falling asleep on the nets. I get off the boat thoroughly shamed. Later that evening we bump into the group of fishermen again, they ask if I’m feeling better. They seem to sense my embarrassment at the whole messy episode. One of them says, ‘everyone like that, first time. Him. Him. Me too.’ The others nod solemnly. I appreciate them saying that, and I laugh again. In India, and particularly in Bangladesh, I’ve encountered the full spectrum of violent bodily expulsions. The sort where you glance at the result, both horrified and vaguely impressed as you think: ‘my God, that came from me?’
India brings an infinite amount of tiny hardships to your spoiled Westerner. So yes, there is plenty to complain about. But it’s strange that the people who should complain most, or at least should complain from a Western mind-set, don’t seem to.
Take the women. I’m very aware that I haven’t written a single word about the women of India. And it’s not because I’m not interested in them. I’m as curious as the next punter about what goes on under those glittering saris, if not quite as interested as the Indians are in what goes on under Amy’s. But I’m more interested in what goes on in their minds. Early on in the piece I asked several men why it is that Indian women will never talk to us. I thought it might be because they’re married and it’s culturally inappropriate for them to talk with other men. But I’ve been told several times that it’s simply because the majority of Indian women don’t speak English. They’re often less educated than the men. It’s usually the upper-caste women who speak English, and we don’t have much contact with the upper castes. Men in the tourist industry have learned English through contact with tourists, and the overwhelming majority of Indian women don’t do paid-work at all. For me, women are the ghosts of India. The voiceless entities that drift past like images on a Bollywood screen. Hugely conservative in real-life, and sexual Goddesses in the two dimensions of celluloid.
For a long time the only contact we had with women was when we’d been invited into Indian homes. In Mamallapuram I was brought to a home down an alleyway. The mother of the household works in the kitchen, cooking fish for dinner. She beckons us to sit in the lounge room. English soccer is on the television. Like the other Indian homes I’ve been to, the walls and floors are hard concrete, and the rooms are sparsely decorated: a few cushions to sit on, a newspaper, a picture of Shiva on the wall. I wait for her husband, and old nutter I enjoy talking with. The woman comes in every now and then to check on me, she doesn’t speak much English and I only know her through her gestures. She sees my shoes on the lounge room floor and picks them up demonstratively, taking them outside the kitchen door, and all without the slightest air of rapprochement – rather in a serene and supremely confident manner that speaks without words: ‘in my house, this is what will come to pass.’
I like her style. And I don’t know if the Indian women are ‘oppressed,’ or any of those words that make so much sense when you’re safe at home, or in a university tutorial, I only know what I see. And what I see are proud, dignified women. They certainly don’t appear aware of the burdens that Westerners might ascribe to them. And, as I was to learn, there will forever remain those hardy souls who do not complain, or suffer, but rather find a way to slip through the cracks in the invisible walls that are Culture.
My ignorance of Indian women changed one morning in Alleppey. I was woken at 7.30am by knock at the door from a Nun standing on my doorstep, dressed in the habit, saying, ‘Tom, it is time to see the Priest.’
It’s Sister Sophia, who I’d met on the bus to Alleppey. When I’d taken the last spare seat on the bus, next to her, she’d engaged me in warm conversation. She tells me she’s spent the last thirteen years in Italy, working with impoverished children. She’s never married, and devoted her life to travelling and helping people. She’s on her way home to Alleppey after hearing news that her parents are ill. ‘After they die,’ she tells me, ‘I will return to Italy.’
We make each other laugh. At one point I ask her, ‘so do many people in Kerala get Malaria?’ She replies ‘yes, of course. Everyone in Kerala is malaria.’ ‘Everyone??’ I ask, incredulous. ‘Yes, everyone. Me too.’ She must see the horror on my face and sense that something is amiss – upon clarifying it turns out she thought I was asking if many people in Kerala speak Malayalam, the state language.
I tell her that Amy and I are interested in doing some more volunteer work. I say we get tired of doing the lazy tourist thing, and we want something worthwhile to do. So, when she returns in the morning she takes us to the local Head Priest, and we arrange with him to begin teaching English at the parish school.
The school is set on the banks of the lush Keralan ‘backwaters’ as they’re called - mazes of rivers, canals, paddy fields, and the lush green of tropical vegetation. I am told that where we are is eight metres below sea-level. Technically the ground we’re standing on shouldn’t exist. The waters are only held back by mud banks. ‘What happens when there’s big rain?’ I ask the Priest. ‘The people build the banks up higher,’ he says. ‘They work together. If they do not, all will be lost.’
The Priest and I nurture a mutual respect. I’ve told him from the start that I am a-religious, and that we only want to teach English. Sister Sophia prompts me, encouraging me to call him ‘Father’ and saying ‘just speak to him as you would to your Father.’ I reply, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that.’ I say ‘I may not have a religion, but some words are sacred to me, too.’ I don’t think the Priest is accustomed to people telling him what they think - he’s used to people asking him questions. We do both. I have my own opinions and biases about the Catholic church, but I am always respectful, and in no way do these preconceptions cause me to doubt what we are doing here. The Indian children are on their two-month school holidays at this time, so our two classes are filled by village children who have been invited to participate in a holiday program. Some have been invited because they are lagging behind in their studies. Others have been invited because they show great potential, and are considered in the running for scholarships. For the village children, getting a scholarship means they can continue their schooling.
The school is in an open shed, with a concrete floor, long wooden benches, plastic chairs, and a view to the river and paddy fields beyond. Amy and I work as a team, as I grow more confident my share of the workload increases. We have a relaxed style of teaching, and each day one or two extra kids join our class. Word spreads quickly. The Priest has told me that we are the first foreigners to teach at the school. This makes me happy, in my egotism I’d like to think that we could be the pioneers of something, however small, and that if we make a good impression the school might look into taking on more native English-speaking teachers in the future. We focus on ironing out a few common mistakes the kids are making, and, most of all, on boosting their confidence to speak English. The kids are respectful and well behaved. English is an important subject in India, everywhere you go you see signs advertising English speaking courses. This ability opens up all sorts of opportunities to make a living.
As my real Father said to me once, you can’t fully immerse yourself in a culture unless you’re living and working in a place, just like everybody else. One evening in Alleppey, as I’m walking to the supermarket, calmly strolling down the road through the speeding motorbikes and auto-rickshaws, it strikes me. Krishna, I’m beginning to feel at home here. And I’ve learned in my time on this earth that, in the doorway to any home, you find people.
People, that’s all. I once mused on how to ‘crack the nut’ that is India. I humbly believe that I know the secret now. To make a single friend here is to suddenly, and dramatically, peel back the outer shell only scraped at when we are seen as Tourists. From a chance encounter with Sister Sophia on the bus our whole experience of Alleppey blossoms. It becomes well known that we’re doing volunteer work in the town, and we’re often seen with Sister Sophia, her cousin Sibi, and the Priest. The Priest takes us on his daily ‘House-Visits,’ where he walks to nearby villages to bless the houses, and we are showered with love by the villagers. Through friends, we are no longer one of ‘Them,’ to the Indians, we become a part of their beloved fold of ‘Us.’
Complaints waft away on the cool breeze of understanding. The first day I arrived in Alleppey a worker at our guesthouse struck up conversation with Amy. He had the tight jeans, the Jimi Hendrix haircut, and the broadly seductive smile that drops the instant he’s distracted from the ladies to respond to anything I have to say. I took an instant dislike to him. There’s a certain strain of Indian men who seem to make it their sole mission in life to seduce Western women. I’m a naturally jealous person, and with the amount of Indian men who have hit on Amy, (how would a hippie say it?...) murderous rage is very ‘present’ for me. The next day I see him with a Danish woman, and their romance forms over the coming days. I avoid them both.
On the day we’re about to leave the Jimi Hendrix bloke says he is very sad. Amy asks why, he says the Danish girl is leaving. I’m silently contemptuous. What did he think would happen? In front of us, Jimi Hendrix breaks into sobbing tears. Like an infant. He says to us, ‘every day since I was boy, I eat breakfast with mother. When my girl is here with me, I not eat breakfast with mother any more. When she is leaves me, I must go back to eat breakfast with mother.’ It’s disarming to see a grown man sob in front of you. And I’d be an inferior human being if my heart did not break, just a little bit, too. I don’t know what to say. His eyes are red with tears. I say to him, ‘I’ll show you something.’ I produce my hand-written journals. I flick through the obsessive mounds of words. I say to him, ‘when I am happy, or when I am sad, I write. This helps me understand things. This helps me…be at peace.’ In the morning I see him at the group-table, he holds up a pen to show me he’s writing, with a smile. He’s writing the Danish girl a letter.
He gives me a hug. Before we leave Alleppey we eat a final lunch with Sister Sophia, and her dying parents. We bring grapes, and mangoes. We can’t bring ourselves to fill our plates. The lunch has been prepared by Sophia’s sister, whose husband has polio and cannot work. They don’t have any money. They encourage us to eat more but we politely decline, saying we just ate breakfast. In India, once you are one of ‘Us,’ the people have such big hearts that it makes me sad, somehow.
So I can no longer complain.
Tomorrow I fly north, to Delhi. From there I’ll proceed overland into Nepal, and the Himalayas.
I think of a book I read about a Tantric sadhu, unmemorable except for one idea that has lodged in my mind. The sadhu says that learning not to grasp onto things we are drawn to is only a part of the journey. The harder part, he says, is learning not to avoid the experiences that we are adverse to. To accept the things we would otherwise shy away from. I think of our decision to go South, despite the advice. I think of the Unreserved train ride. I think of my sickness out at sea. I think of taking a chance on teaching for the Catholic church - an idea which might otherwise appear ludicrous. And I think of the cold showers I take every morning, which, with just that little tweak of the mind, become the cascading droplets of a waterfall, brisk and refreshing at the heat rises outside. I think of the long walks ahead of me in the Himalayas, which I will do alone and open-mouthed with wonderment, and gratitude that I have the chance to do these things. When I really think about it, I think about my whole half-baked idea to come to India in the first place. I am not a brave or hardy man, by disposition, but in India I am learning. And now, I only want to embrace it all - the beauty and the bullshit - without fear, without aversion, and most certainly without complaint.
But first, I’ll need a warm pair of socks. I have some mountains to meet.
Location - India
Written - March 2008
[This is an unpolished piece – one of a series of emails I sent home while traveling in India. I don’t plan to submit any of this to publishers, though I might polish one or two up at some stage. I don’t always write with publishers in mind, and it’s usually more fun when you don’t. I like writing for other audiences too, particularly for people I care about.]
When we were in northern India, the people would warn us against heading south. ‘Too hot,’ they’d say. ‘Thirty-five degrees.’ I can imagine our pasty, northern-European cousins recoiling at the news. ‘Thirty-five?’ They’d moan. ‘Shiva… Maybe we’ll do that course in Ayurvedic medicine instead, honey.’ But not us. I felt like saying to the Indians, ‘look mate, we’re bloody Australians, all-right? We spent the last five months in the damned outback. Now give me my smokes.’
So south we go.
In some ways, India is an odyssey of complaint. Sometimes ours, mostly from other tourists. But rarely do you hear them from the Indians. On the way to Mamallapuram we arrived at the train station late, and ended up with the dreaded Unreserved Tickets – like the leprosy of long-distance transport. As far as train classes go, there’s 1AC (1st class air-con), 2AC, 3AC, Sleeper, 2nd Class, and then, at the absolute fecal depths: ‘Unreserved.’ The bottom rung for those who cannot, or could not, procure a reserved seat. We’re taking a calculated risk – if you find a ticket officer, they can usually upgrade you on board.
The train pulls into the station. We rush to find the lone Unreserved Carriage, which is right up the back, out of the way, like the naughty child in the classroom corner. We see through the windows that it’s as full as it’s possible for a carriage (full of live people) to be. People are hanging out the doors. There’s no time for fear, we saddle up our backpacks and cram our way inside, Indian style - that is, with utter contempt for your fellow humanity.
When I say that the carriage is ‘full,’ I’m not talking “a morning peak-hour train headed to Flinders Street” full. I’m saying the carriage is full in three dimensions, baby. People crouch, kneel, or huddle in the wire luggage-racks above, their heads scraping the ceiling. Worried faces peek from every crevice. Families pile on each other’s laps. Those with a seat have only the luxury of parking their ass while they endure the writhing, crashing mass of sweaty bodies. We don’t even make it into the carriage proper, we’re stuck by the toilets in the 2-by-1 metre space at the door to the carriage, standing with fifteen or so Indians in the tiny space. At my feet, a man is bravely curled up asleep on the floor next to the fetid toilet, as the train jumps about on the tracks his head thumps against the old briefcase he’s using as a pillow. I will him awake. He’s taking up valuable real-estate. With my ungainly hiking boots there’s barely enough room for my feet, I cannot shift without stepping on other sandal-clad feet. There’s certainly no room for my backpack on the floor, so I stand with the fully-loaded pack on my shoulders. My girlfriend, Amy, manages to squeeze her pack to the ground so she can sit on it. Every now and then a punter literally climbs over his fellow passengers to get to the toilet. The carriage is a human soup, stirred by the movement of the train.
We keep our spirits up by laughing at it all, ‘this isn’t like the brochure,’ and that sort of thing. We don’t complain, they’re the buggers that get pushed out and have to walk the rest of the way. Wedged in such close confinement we banter with the people around us. They try to help us, they advise that at the next station we should get off and rush to a sleeper carriage, where we might find a ticket officer who can upgrade us. If that fails, we’ll simply have to cut our losses and stay in whatever town we end up in. The next station is two hours away. We bundle out at the station and jog to find a sleeper carriage; we know the train only stops for a couple of minutes. The sleeper carriages are locked. One is open. We collapse on board and by the grace of Ganesha there’s a ticket officer, who finds us a sleeper bed each. We’re the lucky ones, I know this. Most of the other poor bastards we’ve left behind on the Unreserved carriage, from whom we heard not a word of complaint, don’t have this option.
When we arrive, Amy persuades me to take a boat-ride with some Tamil fishermen off the coast of Mamallapuram. I’m not really in the mood – my favourite pair of Thai sunglasses having just been carried off by a local dog. I reluctantly agree to get on the boat. I can feel the sun burning me. There’s six or seven of the boatmen, just young blokes. They drag the fibreglass longboat into the surf. It’s powered by a noisy motor up back, with the propeller out on a pole, another long pole points forward and is moved from side-to-side to steer. The choppy surf splashes into the boat. We head out about two kilometres from the coast, and the motor is switched off. The noise gives way to silence, and the rich sensation of the boat lolling about in the ocean. The blokes begin unravelling the fishing net and casting it out. It trails behind us, floating on buoys. We bob like the buoys with the arrhythmic movements of the swell beneath us.
I become aware that I’m not feeling so good. I feel the birth of nausea, as if I’ve just had that one beer too many at the end of the night. It occurs to me that in the past I’ve described that feeling of booze-sickness as ‘the ground listing beneath me as if I’m at sea,’ without ever truly knowing what I was talking about. Now I’m like Nikki Webster – sober, for the time being – and experiencing the reality behind that metaphor. Amy makes small-talk with the boatmen. At another time I might be interested in the finer points of fishing, for now I wipe the sweat from my face and hold my head in my hands, yawning, as if in the twilight of consciousness.
Time passes. Lots of time. I see the boatmen begin hauling in the nets. I know when they’re finished we’ll return to shore. But the nets are endless. On and on they haul them in, forming a pile on the boat that grows imperceptibly larger with each length of fine mesh. The boat is an old drunk standing at the bar like a jellyfish, swaying and quibbling on his feet. Occasionally, a live fish is plucked from the netting and thrown into a Hessian bag by my side. I can’t see into the bag, I can only hear the flapping about. My belly is full of fish-oil. I move to the edge of the boat and lean over toward the restless, emerald ocean, an instant before a guttural lurch sends preternaturally long streams of vomit splashing into the sea. A neuron spark brings the image of chum to mind – the mix of blood and guts that fishermen trail into the ocean to attract sharks. I’m sending out my own trail of chum, as the motor starts I can see the nutrients from my body bobbing away into the distance. I lurch again. The thing is, the way I’m feeling, hanging over the edge of the boat with my face almost in the chum, I figure that a Tiger Shark surfacing to wrench away my head and shoulders would at least cease the endless…damned…bobbing.
I had no idea that sea-sickness was such a real thing. I look up at Amy with my face covered in drool and miscellaneous slime to say, ‘I’ve never vomited into the Indian Ocean before….,’ before collapsing into the fetal position and falling asleep on the nets. I get off the boat thoroughly shamed. Later that evening we bump into the group of fishermen again, they ask if I’m feeling better. They seem to sense my embarrassment at the whole messy episode. One of them says, ‘everyone like that, first time. Him. Him. Me too.’ The others nod solemnly. I appreciate them saying that, and I laugh again. In India, and particularly in Bangladesh, I’ve encountered the full spectrum of violent bodily expulsions. The sort where you glance at the result, both horrified and vaguely impressed as you think: ‘my God, that came from me?’
India brings an infinite amount of tiny hardships to your spoiled Westerner. So yes, there is plenty to complain about. But it’s strange that the people who should complain most, or at least should complain from a Western mind-set, don’t seem to.
Take the women. I’m very aware that I haven’t written a single word about the women of India. And it’s not because I’m not interested in them. I’m as curious as the next punter about what goes on under those glittering saris, if not quite as interested as the Indians are in what goes on under Amy’s. But I’m more interested in what goes on in their minds. Early on in the piece I asked several men why it is that Indian women will never talk to us. I thought it might be because they’re married and it’s culturally inappropriate for them to talk with other men. But I’ve been told several times that it’s simply because the majority of Indian women don’t speak English. They’re often less educated than the men. It’s usually the upper-caste women who speak English, and we don’t have much contact with the upper castes. Men in the tourist industry have learned English through contact with tourists, and the overwhelming majority of Indian women don’t do paid-work at all. For me, women are the ghosts of India. The voiceless entities that drift past like images on a Bollywood screen. Hugely conservative in real-life, and sexual Goddesses in the two dimensions of celluloid.
For a long time the only contact we had with women was when we’d been invited into Indian homes. In Mamallapuram I was brought to a home down an alleyway. The mother of the household works in the kitchen, cooking fish for dinner. She beckons us to sit in the lounge room. English soccer is on the television. Like the other Indian homes I’ve been to, the walls and floors are hard concrete, and the rooms are sparsely decorated: a few cushions to sit on, a newspaper, a picture of Shiva on the wall. I wait for her husband, and old nutter I enjoy talking with. The woman comes in every now and then to check on me, she doesn’t speak much English and I only know her through her gestures. She sees my shoes on the lounge room floor and picks them up demonstratively, taking them outside the kitchen door, and all without the slightest air of rapprochement – rather in a serene and supremely confident manner that speaks without words: ‘in my house, this is what will come to pass.’
I like her style. And I don’t know if the Indian women are ‘oppressed,’ or any of those words that make so much sense when you’re safe at home, or in a university tutorial, I only know what I see. And what I see are proud, dignified women. They certainly don’t appear aware of the burdens that Westerners might ascribe to them. And, as I was to learn, there will forever remain those hardy souls who do not complain, or suffer, but rather find a way to slip through the cracks in the invisible walls that are Culture.
My ignorance of Indian women changed one morning in Alleppey. I was woken at 7.30am by knock at the door from a Nun standing on my doorstep, dressed in the habit, saying, ‘Tom, it is time to see the Priest.’
It’s Sister Sophia, who I’d met on the bus to Alleppey. When I’d taken the last spare seat on the bus, next to her, she’d engaged me in warm conversation. She tells me she’s spent the last thirteen years in Italy, working with impoverished children. She’s never married, and devoted her life to travelling and helping people. She’s on her way home to Alleppey after hearing news that her parents are ill. ‘After they die,’ she tells me, ‘I will return to Italy.’
We make each other laugh. At one point I ask her, ‘so do many people in Kerala get Malaria?’ She replies ‘yes, of course. Everyone in Kerala is malaria.’ ‘Everyone??’ I ask, incredulous. ‘Yes, everyone. Me too.’ She must see the horror on my face and sense that something is amiss – upon clarifying it turns out she thought I was asking if many people in Kerala speak Malayalam, the state language.
I tell her that Amy and I are interested in doing some more volunteer work. I say we get tired of doing the lazy tourist thing, and we want something worthwhile to do. So, when she returns in the morning she takes us to the local Head Priest, and we arrange with him to begin teaching English at the parish school.
The school is set on the banks of the lush Keralan ‘backwaters’ as they’re called - mazes of rivers, canals, paddy fields, and the lush green of tropical vegetation. I am told that where we are is eight metres below sea-level. Technically the ground we’re standing on shouldn’t exist. The waters are only held back by mud banks. ‘What happens when there’s big rain?’ I ask the Priest. ‘The people build the banks up higher,’ he says. ‘They work together. If they do not, all will be lost.’
The Priest and I nurture a mutual respect. I’ve told him from the start that I am a-religious, and that we only want to teach English. Sister Sophia prompts me, encouraging me to call him ‘Father’ and saying ‘just speak to him as you would to your Father.’ I reply, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that.’ I say ‘I may not have a religion, but some words are sacred to me, too.’ I don’t think the Priest is accustomed to people telling him what they think - he’s used to people asking him questions. We do both. I have my own opinions and biases about the Catholic church, but I am always respectful, and in no way do these preconceptions cause me to doubt what we are doing here. The Indian children are on their two-month school holidays at this time, so our two classes are filled by village children who have been invited to participate in a holiday program. Some have been invited because they are lagging behind in their studies. Others have been invited because they show great potential, and are considered in the running for scholarships. For the village children, getting a scholarship means they can continue their schooling.
The school is in an open shed, with a concrete floor, long wooden benches, plastic chairs, and a view to the river and paddy fields beyond. Amy and I work as a team, as I grow more confident my share of the workload increases. We have a relaxed style of teaching, and each day one or two extra kids join our class. Word spreads quickly. The Priest has told me that we are the first foreigners to teach at the school. This makes me happy, in my egotism I’d like to think that we could be the pioneers of something, however small, and that if we make a good impression the school might look into taking on more native English-speaking teachers in the future. We focus on ironing out a few common mistakes the kids are making, and, most of all, on boosting their confidence to speak English. The kids are respectful and well behaved. English is an important subject in India, everywhere you go you see signs advertising English speaking courses. This ability opens up all sorts of opportunities to make a living.
As my real Father said to me once, you can’t fully immerse yourself in a culture unless you’re living and working in a place, just like everybody else. One evening in Alleppey, as I’m walking to the supermarket, calmly strolling down the road through the speeding motorbikes and auto-rickshaws, it strikes me. Krishna, I’m beginning to feel at home here. And I’ve learned in my time on this earth that, in the doorway to any home, you find people.
People, that’s all. I once mused on how to ‘crack the nut’ that is India. I humbly believe that I know the secret now. To make a single friend here is to suddenly, and dramatically, peel back the outer shell only scraped at when we are seen as Tourists. From a chance encounter with Sister Sophia on the bus our whole experience of Alleppey blossoms. It becomes well known that we’re doing volunteer work in the town, and we’re often seen with Sister Sophia, her cousin Sibi, and the Priest. The Priest takes us on his daily ‘House-Visits,’ where he walks to nearby villages to bless the houses, and we are showered with love by the villagers. Through friends, we are no longer one of ‘Them,’ to the Indians, we become a part of their beloved fold of ‘Us.’
Complaints waft away on the cool breeze of understanding. The first day I arrived in Alleppey a worker at our guesthouse struck up conversation with Amy. He had the tight jeans, the Jimi Hendrix haircut, and the broadly seductive smile that drops the instant he’s distracted from the ladies to respond to anything I have to say. I took an instant dislike to him. There’s a certain strain of Indian men who seem to make it their sole mission in life to seduce Western women. I’m a naturally jealous person, and with the amount of Indian men who have hit on Amy, (how would a hippie say it?...) murderous rage is very ‘present’ for me. The next day I see him with a Danish woman, and their romance forms over the coming days. I avoid them both.
On the day we’re about to leave the Jimi Hendrix bloke says he is very sad. Amy asks why, he says the Danish girl is leaving. I’m silently contemptuous. What did he think would happen? In front of us, Jimi Hendrix breaks into sobbing tears. Like an infant. He says to us, ‘every day since I was boy, I eat breakfast with mother. When my girl is here with me, I not eat breakfast with mother any more. When she is leaves me, I must go back to eat breakfast with mother.’ It’s disarming to see a grown man sob in front of you. And I’d be an inferior human being if my heart did not break, just a little bit, too. I don’t know what to say. His eyes are red with tears. I say to him, ‘I’ll show you something.’ I produce my hand-written journals. I flick through the obsessive mounds of words. I say to him, ‘when I am happy, or when I am sad, I write. This helps me understand things. This helps me…be at peace.’ In the morning I see him at the group-table, he holds up a pen to show me he’s writing, with a smile. He’s writing the Danish girl a letter.
He gives me a hug. Before we leave Alleppey we eat a final lunch with Sister Sophia, and her dying parents. We bring grapes, and mangoes. We can’t bring ourselves to fill our plates. The lunch has been prepared by Sophia’s sister, whose husband has polio and cannot work. They don’t have any money. They encourage us to eat more but we politely decline, saying we just ate breakfast. In India, once you are one of ‘Us,’ the people have such big hearts that it makes me sad, somehow.
So I can no longer complain.
Tomorrow I fly north, to Delhi. From there I’ll proceed overland into Nepal, and the Himalayas.
I think of a book I read about a Tantric sadhu, unmemorable except for one idea that has lodged in my mind. The sadhu says that learning not to grasp onto things we are drawn to is only a part of the journey. The harder part, he says, is learning not to avoid the experiences that we are adverse to. To accept the things we would otherwise shy away from. I think of our decision to go South, despite the advice. I think of the Unreserved train ride. I think of my sickness out at sea. I think of taking a chance on teaching for the Catholic church - an idea which might otherwise appear ludicrous. And I think of the cold showers I take every morning, which, with just that little tweak of the mind, become the cascading droplets of a waterfall, brisk and refreshing at the heat rises outside. I think of the long walks ahead of me in the Himalayas, which I will do alone and open-mouthed with wonderment, and gratitude that I have the chance to do these things. When I really think about it, I think about my whole half-baked idea to come to India in the first place. I am not a brave or hardy man, by disposition, but in India I am learning. And now, I only want to embrace it all - the beauty and the bullshit - without fear, without aversion, and most certainly without complaint.
But first, I’ll need a warm pair of socks. I have some mountains to meet.
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