Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  Our first heli-ski drop would be Bant Rua, a mile-wide meadow draped from a ridge at 13,000 feet, 2,000 feet above timberline. Once out of the valley, the landscape turned pure white, and the mountainsides rose steadily toward the fluted spires and blocky summits of the area’s highest peaks, around 20,000 feet in elevation. A high-pressure haze muted the day’s snowy contrasts, but it also seemed to magnify the already impressive verticality. This was the Himalayas of the picture books.

  The Bant Rau landing site was about as high as the highest heliski landings in Colorado, which are the highest in North America. And still we were just on the fringe of the really big stuff, which loomed ever higher all around. We skied Bant Rau, leaving hundreds of easy, regular turns in the snow. Then it was back into the helicopter for the next run, called Son of E. P., one bowl away from its namesake, Excellent Powder. This time we started from just below 14,000 feet. Rainer, the chain-smoker, went chalky white with the exertion and had to “voluntarily” cut back on his skiing. His condition was not unusual, since ancient Hindu traders had often felt dizzy and weak when crossing nearby Rohtang Pass. Back then they blamed their malaise on evil spirits, and called Rohtang the Pass of Death. For several of our next runs, we looked down on Rohtang’s 13,000-foot saddle from far above.

  Pablo, our guide, took things easy at first, biting off small chunks of each immense, naked slope. He’d ski twenty turns and stop, then thirty turns, then forty. Only once that first day did he lose himself, proving that guides too are susceptible to the sway of heli-skiing bliss. It was on a particularly fine pitch, a true north face running away from the sun and sparkling with big recrystalized surface flakes. The snow was knee-deep and bouncy, like angel food cake, and Pablo just didn’t want to (or couldn’t) stop himself. Down he went, forty turns, fifty turns, seventy. I tried to keep up while a small war raged within. Should I listen to the mantra of accumulating joy that gave me a sense of ascension-through-falling? Or to the lactic acid that was screaming its overweening presence into my thighs? They say nirvana is a blowing out, like the snuffing of a candle. By the time we finally stopped, I could have blown out a village of candles.

  At the end of the day, Jim Bay, a Himachal guide from British Columbia, brought his group in last to the helicopter pickup. He stopped a thousand feet above us, atop a roll so steep that he couldn’t see the middle third of it. Pablo radioed up, saying, “That’s a nice little poke.” In Colorado, I thought, that would be the biggest poke of my life. Jim led Albert and Jean-Eric into the throat of the couloir. He skied it with a liquid ease, surfing the forty-five-degree crux through the rocks without once upsetting his wool topi, which perched on his head like a book in a finishing-school balancing exam.

  Who put the seed in man saying, Let this thread of life be spun?

  —Atharva-Veda (ca. 1000 B.C.)

  That night, waiting for dinner with a golden Punjabi lager in his hand, Albert said, “It is fantastic. Ze best terrain I have ever seen.” Everyone agreed, though the comments were oddly reserved—either because of fatigue or because of an unspoken superstition that it was too good, that it couldn’t last.

  Over the next two days we skied with Roddy—and with Murli when there was an extra seat—and after each run we flew higher, until we were sliding down as much as 6,000 vertical feet per run. One of the longest runs ended in the terraces of Sethen Village, a little Buddhist enclave that had been abandoned for the winter. The place seemed stuck in time. We kicked off our skis and wandered around, whispering for no good reason. Faded prayer flags flapped atop tall poles and wooden hoes and picks rested in the rafters of mud-chinked log houses.

  A few days before our arrival, Boris had flown the Lama up to Deo Tibba and touched down on the summit—just for a second, just to see if he could do it. Boris knew it was a sacred mountain, but he also knew that just about every feature on Himalayan landscape has its deity and its story. From the slopes above Sethen Village, for instance, we’d been able to see Hanuman Tibba, across the valley to the northwest, which was named for the monkey god, Hanuman, who led an army of monkeys to rescue Prince Rama’s wife, Sita, in one of India’s most cherished Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana. Roddy pointed to another peak with a necklace of cliffs near the top. “It seems this god took a shine to a beautiful girl and miraculously impregnated her, and she had sixteen snakes for babies, which she kept in an earthenware jar,” he said. “Someone who wasn’t supposed to opened the jar, it flew apart into the landscape, and the snakes became mountains. That one there still has the jar’s ring around its neck.”

  Over the past few days, we’d noticed that many of our landing sites were marked with stone cairns, some of them taller than a man could reach. They’d been erected by villagers who climb up each October during festival season, scrambling onto one another’s shoulders to add one more rock to the cairn’s top in homage to the god of that particular ridge or meadow. We skied in virgin, silent snow, but everywhere around us the land hummed with spirits.

  After three days of glorious, uninterrupted skiing, it rained—then rained some more. The helicopter couldn’t fly, so we drove to the bazaar. Some of the Tibetans in Manali have become merchants ; a few have become prosperous by selling woven fabrics, silver jewelry, bells, and telescoping horns. They now live in fine houses. Still, the majority of local Buddhists live in mud-floor shacks along the road. River boulders are painted with LONG LIVE H. H. THE DALAI LAMA and CHINA INVATES TIBET 1959 and so on. But local Hindus aren’t particularly sympathetic. One man told me, “If they want to retake Tibet, why don’t they go do it?”

  At the bazaar, examples of the disparity between rich and poor were everywhere. Thanks to the road leading up the valley, Manali has become a kind of Indian Niagara Falls, a honeymoon mecca for the nation’s middle class. They come in the summer to escape the oppressive heat of the plains, and they come in winter, too, especially February, which is the month Indian astrologers favor for weddings. There are more than a hundred hotels in town, with still more in the valley’s evergreen forests. After we’d walked around the bazaar for a while, staring at the wares, I watched from under my umbrella as a taxi pulled to a stop in front of one of the town’s finest hotels. The street was a river of snowmelt, garbage, and excrement, and as the taxi’s door opened, a dainty foot shod in a white linen pump swung out and stepped up to its ankle in muck.

  There was more rain the next day, Thursday, and we tried not to mope. It seemed now that even the memory of that exquisite skiing was slipping away, like Narada’s family, down the swollen Beas River. We ate in glum silence. As usual at the hotel, the food was delicious: lentils, saffron rice, startling red carrots, chapatis, and a chewy goat cheese cooked with garlic and spinach. We played caroms in front of the fire. We watched television. A cricket match yawned along on one channel. “No real power in that shot,” droned the announcer. “It just seemed to stagger its way through for Andrew Jones’s fourth boundary.” On another channel was a repeat of the serialized program Ramayana, first aired in 1988. Indians were so hooked on the original weekly episodes (all seventy-eight of them) that riots broke out in Uttar Pradesh when the show ended. But of course the dialogue was incomprehensible to us.

  We wanted to be coursing down those endless, womanly slopes in the high country. We had been adjusting to the altitude, feeling stronger with each day. We had hoped to fly to 16,000 feet before the week was out. And we had accumulated less than half of the 100,000 feet of helicopter lift that Helicopter Skiing had guaranteed. On Thursday afternoon, some of the Euros began getting antsy about catching their plane out of the valley on Saturday. They had a point; if it kept raining no one would fly out of Kulu. A car trip to Delhi would take two days. Who knew? Friday might be a ski day. Heli-skiers are, out of necessity, gamblers.

  Rainer, however, couldn’t wait. He hired a car and left the valley Thursday afternoon. A few of us went the other direction, back up to Vashisht, this time with the intent to slip into the hot baths. But the water was unusually low
and, perhaps because of the rain, had turned an uninviting brown. We splashed water on a scowling stone god and retreated to the temple courtyard. Rain polished the already slick stone floor. Children collected the shoes of worshipers and bathers at the gate, and bare feet shuffled across the stones, polishing, polishing.

  Friday dawned as wet and dreary as the previous days. Chris and Roddy were empathic but not apologetic; those skiers in our group who’d bought the guaranteed 100,000 feet of vertical would be issued a partial refund. Before we left, Jean-Eric and Albert signed up for another Himachal week the next winter, a Himalayan hunger in their eyes already. They knew they had just scratched the surface.

  For twelve hours, crammed with our baggage in an armada of taxis, we bumped down the road to Punjab. Over that time we stopped for three flat tires. We stopped to buy puffed rice from a roadside ascetic, rice that our driver insisted we touch to our tikas in order to bless our travels. We wondered aloud about India and quizzed one another for confirmation of the skiing, trying to hold on to the immensity and beauty of it all. We wondered if maybe we had dreamed it, or if we might, in fact, be the illusion.

  Peter Shelton began skiing in 1956 at the age of seven and since has skied most of the world’s mountain ranges. He taught skiing for eight years and was director of the ski school at Telluride in Colorado. He’s the author of several books on skiing, including Climb to Conquer: The Untold Story of WWII’s 10th Mountain Division Ski Troops, and he writes regularly for Men’s Journal, Ski, and Outside.

  In nearby Faizabad I played confessor to an embittered rickshaw-wallah. In hopes of a bigger tip, he’d been complaining about how tired his legs became at the end of a day. I surprised him by offering to switch places: I’d do the pedaling and he’d sit in the passenger seat, on condition that he truly played the part of a passenger by telling me all his life troubles.

  “You will find it so difficult,” he laughed.“Rickshaw-man’s job is hard work.” But we traded seats nonetheless.

  It was hard work, hard both to propel the lumbering vehicle forward and to control its unwieldy momentum. I gained a new appreciation for the legions of skinny boys and grizzled grandfathers who pump the pedals fourteen hours a day.

  The rickshaw-wallah had hulking shoulders and brawny legs as thick as logs. The gray hair growing out of his ears was so thick I wondered how he was able to hear. He said that he generally enjoyed his job because it had kept him fit and healthy for nearly fifty years, that he earned enough money to keep his family fed, and that his wife had proved herself by giving him three sons. But still he was not happy, he said, because of his brother.

  “He went off to America,” the beefy man said, “to Boston, USA. So many years ago. Asked me to come and join him, but I have seen American television on videotapes—”Dallas”, you know it? I want to see America, but there every man is sleeping with the other man’s wife. I love my wife, I do not want to be sleeping with the other women, and so I cannot go.”

  Like a good rickshaw-wallah I did not correct him, did not argue, just nodded my head and kept on pedaling.

  “Now, ten years later,” he went on, “my brother is so rich. He has about, oh, a hundred million dollars. And now when he comes to India, my brother will not visit me. He will not even talk to me, because I am a poor man. He thinks I will be asking him for money. But I do not want his money, just my brother.”

  Abandonment of one’s family is, to Indians, an abomination.

  —Jonah Blank, Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana through India

  Greeting the Monsoon

  ALEXANDER FRATER

  The annual monsoon defines India as no other natural event does.

  A LINE OF SPECTATORS HAD FORMED BEHIND THE KOVALAM beach road. They were dressed with surprising formality, many of the men wearing ties and the women fine saris which streamed and snapped in the wind. Their excitement was shared and sharply focused, like that of a committee preparing to greet a celebrated spiritual leader, or a victorious general who would come riding up the beach on an elephant; all they lacked was welcoming garlands of marigolds. As I joined them they greeted me with smiles, a late guest arriving at their function. The sky was black, the sea was white. Foaming like champagne it surged over the road to within a few feet of where we stood. Blown spume stung our faces. It was not hard to imagine why medieval Arabs thought winds came from the ocean floor, surging upwards and making the surface waters boil as they burst into the atmosphere.

  We stood rocking in the blast, clinging to each other amid scenes of great merriment. A tall, pale-skinned man next to me shouted, “Sir, where are you from?”

  “England!” I yelled.

  The information became a small diminishing chord as, snatched and abbreviated by the elements, it was passed on to his neighbors.

  “And what brings you here?”

  “This!”

  “Sir, us also. We are holiday-makers! I myself am from Delhi. This lady beside me is from Bangalore and we too have come to see the show!” He laughed. “I have seen it many times but always I come back for more!”

  The Bangalore woman cried, “Yesterday there were dragonflies in our hotel garden. They are a sign. We knew monsoon was coming soon!” She beamed at me. “It gives me true sense of wonder!”

  More holiday-makers were joining the line. The imbroglio of inky clouds swirling overhead contained nimbostratus, cumulonimbus, and Lord knows what else, all driven by updraughts, downdraughts, and vertical wind shear. Thunder boomed. Lightning went zapping into the sea, the leader stroke of one strike passing the ascending return stroke of the last so that the whole roaring edifice seemed supported on pillars of fire. Then, beyond the cumuliform anvils and soaring castellanus turrets, we saw a broad, ragged ban of luminous indigo heading slowly inshore. Lesser clouds suspended beneath it like flapping curtains reached right down to the sea.

  “The rains!” everyone sang.

  The wind struck us with a force that made our line bend and waver. Everyone shrieked and grabbed at each other. The woman on my right had a plump round face and dark eyes. Her streaming pink sari left her smooth brown tummy bare. We held hands much more tightly than was necessary and, for a fleeting moment, I understood why Indians traditionally regard the monsoon as a period of torrid sexuality.

  The deluge began.

  Alexander Frater was born on a South Pacific island and now lives in London. He has worked as chief travel correspondent for the Observer, has written for The New Yorker and Punch, and is the author of three books. This story was excerpted from Chasing the Monsoon, a book that was also made into a documentary film.

  One aspect of wearing a sari has remained constant through time: the tucked-in pleats. Sanskrit literature from the Vedic period insists that the pleats are absolutely necessary for a woman to be truly a woman. These pleats must be tucked in at the waist, front or back, so that the presiding deity, Vayu, the wind god, can whisk away any evil influence that may strike the woman in two important regions, the stomach and the reproductive organs.

  The brilliant colors of the sari are also partly ruled by custom: colors are held to represent moods. Yellow, green, and red are festive and auspicious colors which stand for fertility. Red, which also evokes passion, is a bridal color in some parts of the country and a part of rituals associated with pregnancy. Pale cream is soothing in the summer and also symbolizes bridal purity.

  A married Hindu woman will not wear a completely white sari, as it is only for widows: life without a husband is life without color. Black alone is thought to bring misfortune and must be mixed with another color. Blue evokes the thirst-quenching, life-giving force of the monsoon and visions of the beautiful boy-God, Krishna.

  —Annapurna Weber, “The Evolution of the Indian Sari,” India Currents

  The Other Raj

  WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

  Centuries before the British arrived in India, the Portuguese were in Goa.

  IN THE NARROW COBBLED LANES OF FONTAINHAS—A
SMALL BIT of Portugal washed up on the shores of the Indian Ocean, where old spinsters in flowery dresses sit on their verandahs reading the evening papers—I finally found Perceval Narona, the Goan historian. He was sitting in a taverna drinking a glass of red Goan wine. He was in an expansive mood.

  “We were ruled from Portugal for 451 years and 23 days!” he said in an accent heavy with southern European vowels. “The result of this is that we are completely different from other Indians—completely different, I say! We Goans have a different mentality, a different language, a different culture. Although we are now under Indian occupation, I feel awkward when I cross the old border into India….Suddenly everything changes: the food, the landscape, the buildings, the people, the way of life….”

  What Narona said was quite true: the minute you arrive in Goa, you become aware that the place feels very different from anywhere else in India. But it takes a little time to work out exactly why. Partly, you realize, it is the relative absence of people. Most Indian scenes—even remote rural landscapes—always seem to be packed with hundreds of men, women, and children, all shoving, pushing, chatting, poking, giggling, begging, laughing, defecating, tripping over each other, and getting in the way. Much of the subcontinent feels like a vast, well-stuffed sardine can.

  But—as the empty lanes of Fontainhas indicate—Goa is different. The red-roofed houses are spaced father apart; crowds are a rarity. From this flows a certain prosperity. There is no hunger in Goa, no beggars, little poverty, and, as a result, virtually no crime. It is a radical contrast to most of the rest of India.