Tapovan, they said, was my gateway to the Himalayas...
I slept badly on the night
train from Delhi, one of those great, swaying, monochromatic monsters that
ceaselessly prowl the sub-continent, and got off in the morning in Haridwar.
The name means "gateway to the gods" in Hindustani, a reference to
the Himalayas, but this was still the baked plain of northern India, the
mountains no more than distant shadows under the haze of the building monsoon.
The Ganges, the color of cafe au lait, brimmed with Hindus
renewing themselves in water that had descended from a glacier almost three
hundred kilometers away, near a place called Tapovan. That was my destination,
and already I was exhausted by the heat, dust and low-grade hysteria that is
daily existence in the most colorful, clamorous of countries.
I had come
to India in search of an extraordinary woman who reportedly lived in a cave at
14,000 feet, a 20th-century Hindu anchoress known as Mata Ji, the only one of
many Himalayan hermits to endure the winters there. I wanted to know how and
why she did this, and to take the measure of her mountains, but I had begun to
regret the whole enterprise.
That
night, in an airless hotel room in nearby Rishikesh, I dreamed of violence on a
mountainside, and of blood welling up from the bottom of a deep blue sea. Six
hours later, in the back seat of a hired jalopy plying relentlessly dangerous
roads, I came upon a battered blue bus that had been side-swiped by a truck.
The driver appeared, wiping blood from his face, a profoundly unsettling
coincidence.
Hindus put more faith in instinct than in
reason. To them dreams are prophetic, with little distinction made between the
conscious and the unconscious. Both aspects of life are as varied as the terraced
rice paddies in the foothills reflecting almost infinite shadings of green and
blue, a vivid mosaic of the external world through which I carried the memories
of the dream and its painful realization.
I stopped
in Uttarkashi, the last town of any size before the road assaulted the
mountains in earnest. I wanted to rent trekking equipment for the walk to
Tapovan from Gangotri, at the end of the road. But Mount Support, the
outfitters, contained only a faded backpack standing in the corner. While negotiating
for it I watched young men try to piece together mis-matched poles and greasy
canvas, until finally the owner told me, "I think you don't need a
tent."
I had read
of fierce winds in the mountains in June, of snow. I had no stove or pots, just
a dozen high-protein "power bars" and a bottle of halazone tablets.
On impulse I held up my flimsy rain shell for assessment.
"No!No!No!No!"
they all chorused.
I held up
my Patagonia sinchilla.
"Yes!Yes!Yes!Yes!"
India may be the only country in the world
where hermitry is a viable career option. A century ago Rudyard Kipling wrote
in his fine, neglected novel, Kim, much of it set here in Uttar Pradesh,
"All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues;
shaken and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers, and
visionaries: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the
end." Not a word, however, about holy women.
India
nurtures more religions and sects than any other country, having incubated two
of the leading contenders, Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as Zoroastrianism and
India's very own Jainism. Hindus comprise about 80 per cent of the populace,
more than half a billion people; their pantheon is appropriately crowded with a
staggering array of gods and demi-gods, their plump, pretty, androgynous and
sometimes bestial faces gazing from beneath the eaves of temples and shrines,
out of shop windows, from rickshaw dashboards, postcards and necklace pendants.
Intimately
bound up in daily life, Hinduism involves the belief that a series of re-births
lead eventually to salvation, known as moksha. The determining element is
karma,
that term so abused in the West; the relationship between people and karma is
strictly causal. Behave badly and you will have corresponding karma and
consequently a lower level of reincarnation - as, say, a cobra, or a dung
beetle. Behave well and your karma improves. Meditating enhances one's
understanding of one's karma, and this and other benevolent actions eventually
liberate one from the cycle of rebirth that is moksha.
Roots of
Hinduism arose in the Indus Valley at least 1000 years before the birth of
Christ. (The southern Dravidians also exerted influence.) The Vedic hymns and
scriptures that gave Hinduism structure were
brought south by the Aryans; today their descendants look more like
inhabitants of northern Europe and North America than most other races of Asia.
I kept seeing old classmates and celebrities along the road, deeply sun-tanned,
inexplicably involved in the steep idyll of the Indian Himal - Larry Byrd
sitting cross-legged on a straw mat, a skinny Al Gore sharpening a scythe on a
grindstone, Jodi Foster in a bright green sari, bent double under a load of
firewood.
These
mountains, as imbued with spirituality as with tectonic drama, are the ultimate
goal for what amounts to a nation of pilgrims. I saw them in battered busses
spewing black smoke, bound for the shrines of Badrinath, one of the four famous
dhamas of India. Bare toes pressed against cracked windshields like
petals in grubby floral arrangements, their impassive faces marked with red or
yellow daubs of sandlewood paste, sign of the devout, they hung calmly out over
frightening thousand-foot drops to the Ganges while their drivers backed up to
accommodate other busses on the narrow corniche or threaded the spaces between
the mountainside and tumbled boulders.
Near Jhala
Chatti the dirt track switch-backed and the valley opened up to reveal the mass
of the Himalayas rising straight out of the earth: strung stone bows younger
than the Rockies, streaked with green where the pines - Ponderosa and the
stately deodars - had taken hold, cut at the base by the straight-arrow
ferocity of rapids wild beyond classifying.
It began
to rain. By the time I reached Gangotri, at more than 10,000 feet, I had
changed from shorts to trousers and a sweater. Mist rose in waves from
cataracts that had eaten deeply into the marly stone of Kedar Gorge. The
Bhagirathi River, the main tributary of the Ganges, flowed northwest, hence the
name of the town, Gangotri, which means "Ganges turned north."
According to myth it was here that King Bhagirath meditated to propitiate the
god Shiva who kept the Ganges suspended in the coils of his hair. Satisfied,
Shiva released it as three streams, one of which touched down here and
immediately resurrected 60,000 people from their ashes.
Gangotri
was also the site of the temple of the goddess Ganga,
built in the previous century by a Gurka commander in the Garhwal. Busses
jammed the one narrow street on the precipitous slope, disgorging pilgrims,
bundles on their heads and backs, the women wrapped in saris, the Punjabi sikhs
wearing creased Nehru hats, collars turned up to the cold. Others had come from
as far away as Madras and Calcutta, and the mountain states beyond India's
borders. White dhotis - pantaloons - marked the progress of old men; the
turbans of the Rajasthanis bobbed in the human current, past stalls of incense,
bead mallas, bottles for taking away some water of the Ganges, flowers for
floating prayers on it, staffs for climbing to the glacier at Gaumukh, brass
castings of the syllable, Om, mystical affirmation intoned during the mantras,
and every staple from matches to mangoes.
Mixed with
the Aryan were Mongoloid features of some locals, animated by the hustle of
mountain commerce: carters piled with suitcases, mule drovers wearing their
ropes, hawkers and bearded sadhus, poor spiritual seekers
and/or beggars under black plastic sheets, and overall the roar of the plunging
Ganges and the intermingled smells of the incense, dung, and the unmistakable
skunkiness of smoldering cannabis.
Most Hindus are followers either of the god
Vishnu, the preserver, or of Shiva, the destroyer and reproducer, whose seat,
and that of his consrt, Parvati, is in the Himalayas. Some Shaivites believe
their god passes the time blowing dope and so base their lives on that, like
the half-naked sadhus, smeared with ash, their hair in serpentine dreadlocks,
their tridents, symbol of Shiva, planted at the edges of their squalid little
camps. There people were expected to drop alms - paise, fractions of a rupee -
as they passed, on their way to the temple.
On impulse
I approached a pilgrim in jogging shoes and a Windbreaker and asked if he spoke
English. He asked, "Where are you going?"
He was a
diamond merchant from Bombay named Sunil, on pilgrimage with his family, and he
took me in hand, found me a room in the Tourist Rest Home across the river -
kerosene lanterns, communal baths and toilet stalls, hot water in buckets extra
- advised me not to get involved with the Shaivite beggars, and said,
"Come with us to arti."
Hindu
practice centers on three activities: worship, known as puja, cremation of
the dead, and the observance of the caste system. Arti is morning and evening
worship of the vastly complicated tripartite godhead. Vishnu, Shiva, and
Brahma. All are associated with animals that provide them with celestial
transport, and with powerful consorts and almost infinite incarnations and
representations reflecting on the harmony of things spiritual and material -
part of the natural laws of dharma.
Sunil and
his wife, a plump, pleasant woman in a white sari, a large diamond in her nose
pierce, led me through town. We bought little leaf boats containing chrysanthemums
and went down to the river's edge. They scooped up water and sprinkled it over
their heads, said prayers, and set their flowers adrift. I was an observer, not
a believer, but felt drawn into the pervasive embrace of Hinduism, touched by
the sight of men and women dousing themselves with tumultuous glacier-melt, the
sounds of children playing and the ceaseless tolling of the brass bell above
the steps struck by ascending pilgrims.
As I
launched my flower boat I thought of my daughter, Jess, a student of Asian
religions and reader of classical Tibetan who had planned to accompany me to
India, before life intervened. I missed and needed her, to explain things and
to absorb some of the daunting intensity of this place, enhanced by altitude
and fatigue, the scent of wood smoke, the sight of saris, cerulean, carnelian,
spread in the twilight, and lamps coming on in the windows of the ashrams
across the river, all under the high, sun-lit hugeness of the Himalayan snow mass.
Already
the faithful were sitting on the stone terrace outside the temple, shoes off,
chanting and squirming, a medley of ages, racial affinities and styles: shawls
and saffron turbans, bright cottons and synthetics, drab woolen jackets and the
orange robes of the sannyasin, the mendicant holy men, Indian tourists and
their porters, the shaven and unshaven, clean and dusty. A cry went up as the
doors were swung open. Sunil joined in the shouted praise of the goddess, a
silver figurine on an altar amidst radiant cloth and tinsel, while a young
priest on the temple porch held up a brass dish in which seven flames guttered
in the cold night breeze. He began to chant, a repetitious call to faith.
Afterward,
we ate at the Tourist Rest Home - curried vegetables, roti, dal and tea - while
the generator gasped in the stairwell, the electrical current lost somewhere
along the line and the darkness barely alleviated by candles and lanterns.
"That is where you are going," said Sunil, of the silvery black peaks
visible far up-valley, under a fingernail moon. "And you don't speak a
word of Hindi," said his wife.
"While
traveling in these hills," lectured my little guidebook, Call of
Uttrakhand, bought at a stall in Gangotri, "please never try to divert
your attention towards any seenery (sic) or howsoever sublime beauty, charm or
attraction, as the practice may prove harmful and you may tumble down or
perhaps loose (sic) your life even..."
I needed a
guide and found one in a room built into the face of a rock, one of the
gentrified caves popular with sadhus in the Himalayas, fitted with a door and
rugs. His name was Ram Sharma and he was given to meditation as well as to
mediating the affairs of some of the many westerners drawn to India. He told
me, in a sing-song voice through which his university education showed like
elbows in a tattered sweater, that he had rejected the purely intellectual
approach to enlightenment. "People talk about soul, and person. What is
that? Book study! I want to get into self-knowledge, life experience - not gurus,
not ashrams, but self."
He escorted me through town, his blue robe -
Shiva's color - draping a diminuative, animated figure that seemed to glide
rather than to walk. Raised in Bombay, a former disciple of the late Rashneesh
who founded the famous ashram at Pura, Ram Sharma was a Brahmin, the priests'
caste that included India's cultural and religious arbiters. He had agreed to
accompany me to Tapovan, but first he wanted to introduce me to Gangotri's
celebrated "baba" - the affectionate term for Indian swamis.
We found
the swami seated under a tree, in the lotus position. I had expected him to be
copiously bearded, burnished by the sun in these high altitudes; I had not
expected the swami to be naked. He and Sharma conversed in Hindi, and then I
was invited to join the conversation. I asked why he had come to the Himalayas, and he laughing out loud when Sharma
translated. It was the "vibrations," he said, that had for millennia
drawn both Buddhists and Hindus. Then he asked, “Why did you come to the Himalayas?”
Next: Tapovan and Beyond
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