The Anatomy of Journey

by Rohit Nalluri

  The air in Manali is rare and pure, as if spewed and churned by the mountains of ice and fog that surround the town. There is an industry here of mist. Beas hugs the mountain feet fleetingly in her journey towards and beyond the hotel we were staying at. From the second floor window, we could see her dance her way to an unknown destination. We slept late and woke up late. I, for one, experienced a dreamless and easy sleep. A sure sign of the fact that you are actually living your dreams is that when you fall asleep, you fall into a dreamless state of being.

  The plan for the day was to ride as hard as we could to reach Pang. The four hundred and eighty kilometers from Manali to Leh is a tough journey, as the increasing altitude and decreasing oxygen level affect the mind, the body and the motorcycle. On this route, we were about to encounter four of the world’s highest motor-able mountain passes – Baralacha La (4894 meters above sea level), Naki La (4740), Lachulung La (5065) and Tang Lang La (5360). As you have probably figured out, ‘La’ is a Ladakhi word for ‘way’ or ‘pass’.

  In retrospect, our plan to reach Pang on the first day and spend the night there was overly optimistic, if not ill-advised. You can’t jump from an altitude of 2050m (elevation at Manali) to Pang’s altitude of 4630m in a single day and not expect some mountain sickness. In retrospect, the things that happened to derail our plans happened for the best. In hindsight do all disturbed plans reveal their perfection.

  Before you reach the mighty mountain passes in the Ladakhi country, you must cross the first of them near Manali – Rohtang. Fifty-two kilometers from Manali, Rohtang Pass is almost four thousand meters above sea level. With a self-confidence that lead to ignorance, or rather with an ignorance that lead to self-confidence, we decided we would be able to cross Rohtang pass in a few minutes and reach Pang by the end of the day’s ride. Boy, were we wrong!

  Rohtang was also to be the first real test for our motorcycles. As we climbed the steep road to Gulaba, we noticed them choking in the oxygen-depleted environment and the sheer cold. A little apprehensive about the bikes and the various climbs ahead, we decided to stop to check them, and for a cup of tea.

  Gulaba was a town that we could not see. Perhaps it was tucked away in the folds of the mountains and the fog. Markers on the road to Rohtang seemed to indicate at a certain place that we had reached Gulaba. But all we could see was a long dirt road curving into the mist. On both sides of the road, short, bell-shaped trees closely stood waiting - the snows will come soon and will soon blanket them in white. To the left, the mountain ascended and lost itself in the thick fog. Large, woolly Yaks meandered about gently chewing the grass. Wispy, white tendrils of mist rose from the ground, escaping from the clutches of grass and gravity. They formed fingers everywhere, rising slowly and reaching for the sky. To the right, the valley appeared in bits and pieces as clouds hung about suspended mid-air, moving with lethargy, as if they too were on a vacation. The melting snow descended and turned gullies and channels into instant waterfalls that shone white against the mossy, green skin of the mountain. The sounds of our engines and our excited shouts echoed and died throughout them, permeating everything like the mist itself. Here we heard the mountains speak in our voice.

  I remember trying to recall the name of the bell-shaped tree. I couldn't remember the names of many of the trees we passed by. I seem to recall a time in the past when we knew the names of trees. We knew the names of birds and flowers. In the exponential rush of easily accessible information, we seem to have moved to an age where trees and their names don’t matter, and we seem to have lost touch with a simpler way of life that allowed us to learn their names. As a child in Bidkin, a small village outside the city of Aurangabad, I watched my parents grow sugarcane and livestock on fourteen acres of lush and fertile land. Those memories come back to me now, because I remember being able to call by name the trees and birds and the animals that ran amok on our farm. I remember waking up and brushing my teeth with twigs of ‘neem’, and then running into the fields to pluck ripe tomatoes and carrots for breakfast, and chasing barefoot through the wet mud, white Rabbits to their homes under the earth.

  Farther down the road, we came across a tiny hut and a young boy boiling milk. We stopped for a small break there, and parked the bikes. Stretching our legs, we asked for cups of hot tea, omelet and toast and instant noodles. This was delivered ten minutes later to our small plastic table where we had huddled together in the cold. Tea at a rarefied height, with the green theater of the Manali valley polka-dotted by slowly moving balls of cotton. The clouds were taking their time, and so did we. The hut looked faded against the rich green-ness of the grass and the trees that looked faded against the white glow of the clouds, and so our eyes jumped from contrast to contrast.

  Inside the hut, the boy kept himself busy. He looked to be about fourteen years old and perfectly capable of looking after himself. I peeped inside and found in a corner a very cozy and warm looking makeshift bed, filled with thick rugs and quilts. I asked the boy if he slept here at night, and he said yes, because he couldn't pack everything up every day and take it back home; that the hut couldn't be locked and his house was too far and the effort simply too much. So this was his summer abode, during the tourist season, year after year, amidst the mountains.

  'Are you happy with this arrangement?' I asked.

  'How can I not be, sir?' he said, with a small smile, nodding at the view. It is nice to see a person fully content with his surroundings.

  As I write this, I am looking at the notes written in my cell phone from that time. One note says –

  Smoke from the tea mixes with the cold breath coming from mouth and nose. Tea at 10000 feet!

  Place – Gulaba.

  Finally, I notice.

  After taking a few pictures, we rode on. But when we reached the bottom of the pass, people stopped us and told us not to go on. We picked up words like ‘traffic jam’ and ‘landslide’ and ‘rain’ and ‘mud’, but didn’t give them too much attention. It was only when we cleared a small hairpin-turn and were stopped immediately by the tail of a long traffic jam that we realized how much trouble we were in.

  The roads of Rohtang-La that day were not roads. They were a careful mix of mud and sludge and water. Then they were grinded, churned and pulped by the giant military trucks in convoy that took up more than half of the road, almost pushing the rest of us off the mountain. And when you felt the mud had reached the consistency of quicksand and found yourself knee deep in it with a bike between your legs, you had to contend with the traffic - hundreds of bikes, cars, trucks and cyclists jostling with each other to cross the eight kilometers of slippery, squelching roads.

  In this mêlée of adventurers, we found ourselves momentarily speechless. The climb was steep, the road looked more and more like a river-bed, and the traffic was stagnant. In that moment all of us mentally decided that either we counted this as fun, as part of the experience we were wanting, or go through the eight kilometers painfully. This is important and this changed us immediately, instantaneously - that we learnt to ask ourselves what we’d like to take away from an experience. To this day, in our day-to-day lives, this act of self-analysis, of responding to an event instead of reacting to it, saves us a lot of bitterness that really does not exist. And there really is no place for bitterness and disappointment in a journey, especially considering the show the clouds and mists of Rohtang were putting on for us. Standing at the edge of the road, staring into deep, cloud-flooded valleys, watching them float beneath us while tourists walked and cyclists squeezed through whatever gaps in the traffic they could find, are memories we will never forget.

  And this attitude of optimism is driven home by the locals there - the people who witness these conditions every day and live amidst them with a smile. One enterprising old man walked to the shoulder of a hairpin turn, cleared a little space at the layby for his small table, placed a large, clay pot filled with tea on top of it and started selling. He placed four chairs behind him and we immediately par
ked the bikes to drink a cup of tea, relaxing in the chairs as the traffic struggled to move slowly. I guess one has to de-attach oneself from the situation one is in from time to time, to gain a fresh perspective of his condition. If this is done often enough, he realizes that it’s really not that bad. The good and the bad are gently extricated from each other.

  As we waited for the traffic to clear, we were joined by a group of French women in their late thirties and forties, dressed in white and looking angelic all. We shared our chairs with them and sat on our parked bikes and we managed to communicate in a mix of English and French. I had learnt a little of that language a couple of years back and I tried my horrible French on the kindly ladies, who valiantly tried to understand and respond. It was all in good faith and that spirit kept the conversation going.

  Right before they left, I was speaking to this really tall woman from the group, taller than I am, and we stopped speaking suddenly - both of us - our dialect of murdered English and French for ten complete seconds, when the clouds and the fogs of Rohtang lifted and emptied the suddenly expanded valley in a burst of green, velvet richness. The mountains rose dramatically in smooth folds of green and white around us. And we paused.

  Later, we were joined by a couple of Bangaloreans and an Italian fellow who called himself Raaz. He had a helmet on with a camera attached to it, to record every moment of his trip. He regaled us with stories from his travels, told us about a Rastafarian he had dated for a while, and went on for some time about the advantages of freezing one’s sperm and storing it for posterity. It was here we first noticed that all the bikers became part of an uninitiated family, from Rohtang pass onwards.

  Strangers, when on bikes, become friends, we realized. We shared a common zeal, the same yearnings, the same spirit and the same destination. I am sure that we are not at all the same in any other respect, in any other moment of our lives, but only in this moment, sharing the same time-space, were we united. We all recognized this instantly, without speaking of it. There is no explanation of why and what creates this bond – we are just suddenly part of it. And this was reflected in the way every biker smiled or waved at another biker as they’d pass each other. In the slippery mud someone would fall along with his bike, and we’d all rush to help him up. And every time an exhausted biker would stop his bike near the small tea shop on the shoulder of Rohtang, we’d all congratulate him for making it this far, encourage him and order a cup of chai. This is another kind of camaraderie, one without introduction or continuation, but still memorable. It makes you realize how many layers of technologies you've built up over yourself to resist interacting with anything directly human.

  In such journeys you suddenly discover that you have it in you to be patient, to be mindful, to apply yourself, to be tolerant, to make tools, to make do. To smile at strangers, to talk to them, to turn them into friends. You discover that there are no strangers - only a lack of context and simple conversation. You discover that language is not a barrier. You don't need language to stand at the shoulder of a mountain twelve thousand feet high with a woman from France and stare at the passing fog in shared awe. You don't need language to share awe; to share nature.

  What you finally take away from each journey is a little more knowledge of yourself. At the end of a lifetime of journeying, you lie down on your deathbed and piece yourself together by smiling at old pictures of you off on one of your adventures. Each journey becomes an uncovering; a journey of discovery of a part of you that you did not know was alive within you. And the slow discovery of your deepest self is the most important thing you can do with your life. True journeys are monologues and soliloquys; conversations that you have with yourself. And you must never stop conversing with yourself.

  There is a reason we are born alone and die alone. It is an indication that there is a limit to how much we must try to explore the depth of another person. You live with a person your whole life - your parents, your friends, your wife, your husband, your soulmate - and you discover them - their richness, their laughter, their depth, their pain, their texture, their moods, their anger, their love, their kindness, their cruelty - you sink deep into them and you discover them. You begin reading the grooves on their soul with the soft pads of your fingers. But, in the very fact - in the very fact - that you are two separate souls, you reach an abyss in the process of discovery through which you are not allowed, through which you must not attempt to go. This abyss is the surface of the soul, and each soul has its own journey to make.

  When you reach this abyss in another person, leave them be. You've discovered enough - the fact that you've come this far is itself commendable, and I can easily imagine that your relationship with that person must be incredibly rich and fulfilling. But you owe it to yourself to reach that abyss within you, too. And once you reach it, you must begin to dig deeper, until you enter the realms of the soul.

  There is a simple test to know if you've breached that abyss - to know if you are in contact with your soul. You are in contact with your soul - if you are comfortable being alone with yourself, if you sing to yourself, if you smile at the little things, like the shapes of clouds, or the way the breeze plays with your hair, if you notice the many ironies and paradoxes of life and laugh at them, if you are thankful, if you are filled with gratitude, if you find yourself awed by everyday things and rare things, if you find yourself awed by how easy it is to give thanks.

  This realization will change you. Don't ask me how - you'll know how. You will look up at the sky more often. You will speak with passing dogs or cows or goats. You will smile without reason. You will sing. You will stare at birds taking flight and wonder fervently if it would ever be possible for you to do the same. You will leave a room full of people happier than you found them, and a room full of things exactly as they were. You will attach yourself to attributes and attributes will attach themselves to you. Habits will change; you will change. You will fall silent.

  You will fall silent.

  It is important, therefore, to work on yourself - to allow yourself the freedom and space to fall in love with yourself; to become your own best friend.

  But in the city this is not allowed. People seem to acknowledge the existence of nature only on the weekends. They do not even seem to acknowledge the existence of air and sky and breeze. Every day, on my way to work in Bangalore, I pass by this large, tall apartment building, the kind of tall building that has become commonplace these days in any IT-city of India. It has a number of circular balconies on every floor. Every day I pass by that building and those balconies and every day I crane my neck and scan them, my heart bursting with the hope of finding at least one person out on at least one of those balconies, enjoying the view. And every day my heart breaks a little when I see them empty. In the city, I don’t see people out on balconies any more. I don’t see them on terraces. I don’t see any one flying kites these days. Whatever happened to kites?

  What we do not do any more is accept nature as a way of life, and so we have lost a sense of respect towards it. We have forgotten how it feels to be transformed by geographies. We must pursue the migration of birds, the curve of hills, the crest of waves, the stretch of trees and the assault of mountains. We must breathe knowing we breathe the exhaled efforts of billions of trees. We must drink knowing we drink the cosmic interaction of Sun and Earth and Sky. Only by travel is the commonplace of nature broken down into its awe-inspiring constituents. But we fail to see this, because we are so trapped, by the mindless jungles of concrete every day. We are strangled by the artless air of cities. Our instincts that cause expression are stifled by the heavy solidity of routine. We need this, more than anything else we need this – We need to escape and cut the cords that bind us and float effortlessly in the cool, cool air of freedom that travel allows, that nature allows. We must explore the scenes that the mountains provide us, that the forests and the sand dunes and the oceans provide us. We must listen to the song of nature and allow it to flow through us and by this find expre
ssion to our own songs. By this trial we will learn that all songs that have ever been written or will be written exist already in the heart of humanity, and all we ever need to do is be moved enough to sing.