Life and times in a little hilly corner

 

The hills unfold in all sublimity as nature goes for unpaved walks. All around there is an illustrious and august affluence of her smiles, shoots, saplings, flowers, fruits, plants and trees. Foggy and pleasantly confusing trails beckon the wanderlust souls. Fleeting streamlets coolly rushing on with an assured music on their lips and spontaneous foresight in head. We try to catch up with our roads and boundaries and strive to own our share from one air, one earth, one sky, one water, one fire.

The serpentine road from Tiuni to a little hamlet near Arakot 30 km away represents this administrative and ownership tussle between Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. It’s a narrow road along Pabbar river flowing with the spirit of a young lass to merge with Tons near Tiuni. The road serving almost as the border between Himachal Pradesh (left) and Uttarakhand (right).

Pandranu they tell me is in Himachal. But if you cross the iron bridge over the rapidly rushing Pabbar river and reach the other bank you are in Uttarakhand. I am staying at a lone house overlooking the Pabbar river. The owner family has gone to the higher hills because it’s apple harvest season. They have an ancient house at the native village surrounded by their apple orchards. During the day as I cross the bridge and go to the small market having a few shops by the road, I’m actually crossing boundaries many times in a day.

The common peacock butterfly (Paplio biamor), all bright and shiny, is a beautiful flier full of colors: bluish green, blue, green; a solitary fast flier in lovely fluorescent peacock colors. It’s bigger in size in comparison to the butterflies at my native place. It can even afford to flutter its colors in the windy swirls over the spating Pabbar river. So when it flutters here near the place where I’m staying, it’s the state butterfly of Uttarakhand. But when it flutters to the other side of the road, it turns an ordinary butterfly and loses its status of a state butterfly.

Near the market, down the road is a small auction mandi for the apple farmers. It’s a busy place in the morning. The pick-up trucks arriving laden with apple crates and card boxes. The main commission agent is a wily, smart middlemen between the farmers and the traders from the plains. Nearby, in the same open compound, is a tiny tin-shed snack point run by two glamorous ladies. They have tattooed limbs, wear very tight leggings and T-shirts, flaunt bleached brown hair and display flashy lipsticks. A phone number is prominently displayed on the signboard in front of the establishment. So you have many people taking extra tea or maggi even while they aren’t hungry. The porters naughtily wink that there is some side business as well.

Rajesh, the owner of the house where I’m staying, is a small man with slightly bandy legs that gives him an elderly grace as he walks. He is busy in his orchards high up in the hills. The crow flight might not be that much but to reach there one has to travel about 22 km, first on the main narrow tarred road, then cross the bridge over the river and then move up the barely motorable mud track up the hill to his native village and orchards. He and his Nepalese workers work very hard. They have even fixed rudimentary spans (wire trolleys). It’s a basic contrivance made of massive logs, planks and wires to convey apples from the higher reaches. From there the produce is laden on pick-up jeeps. These travel about 40 km on the narrow, winding hill roads. The apple boxes are then loaded on cargo trucks plying on broader, better roads to be ferried to the plains.

Rajesh has a dominating wife and maybe to keep her happy he has a framed photo of his in-laws with his little brother-in-law standing between them. I mistook it to be his parents photo because people usually keep their own photos. He was embarrassed when I pointed this out. But then if it works as a coolant in the running engine of his matrimony then there shouldn’t be any issue. His wife is hospitable like most of the pahari people are. She will give you the best of bedding and the best of food cooked soulfully. But she will turn disdainful and impetuous if you commit the mistake of picking a raw corn not yet ready for consumption. She will show you supreme scorn if you steal her raw corn. She loves her trees, plants and little rows of vegetables.

I got the opportunity to witness the rainbow colors of a nice hostess at their old, traditional wooden hill house high on the mountain. The logs were ancient but the house carried a dignity of the purity and solitude of past years. A hill house that stands against snows, rains and winds for one and a half centuries becomes almost a temple on account of its survival, for its having seen many generations under its log roofs. The ground floor is for the cattle. The wooden steps lead one to a wooden balcony. The trapdoor on the landing in the balcony is shut at night. The men-folk in the hills drink with relish. So the gathering of drinkers in the floor-bedded hall would go to the side in the balcony and urinate over the wooden railing into the bushes below. I wasn’t part of the drinking gang who did it profusely but still you need toilet at least once after the sundown. So I also did it with a guilty feeling. A dog barked from below, probably grumbling over such uncouth manners.

While the drinkers are snoring heavily, leaving the house almost thunderstruck, I have a dream. A rat snake is sneaking into the house. I spot it but feel ok because my knowledge about its non-poisonous nature avoids me from feeling the typical snake-born shock. Then another snake crawls in. This time it’s a pinkish brown cobra. A man catches its hood from behind and squeezes it to let out many big squirts of poison. Another person is holding a syringe full of water to inject plain water in place of the poison in the empty poison sacks. How I wish I could inject love in some hateful people! I was just a silent, inactive witness to all this happening in the dream.

Down by the river, while staying at their empty new house, I have a lazy time observing and learning about the place. A tea-maker told me about a scandal. Kasab was trying to fleece away two sisters of Nepalese origin on the pretext of getting them filmi jobs in Mumbai. But they were caught at the Tiuni bus stand by the Rudra Sena activists. So the hills have their own little share of upheavals among these small hamlets.

This small hilly pocket on the remote Himachal-Uttarakhand border has its little page in regional history as well. Askot Arakot Abhiyan is almost a local historical milestone. On May 25, 1974 four students of Garhwal university, on encouragement by social activist Hemwati Bahuguna, started on a 1110 km journey, from the village of Askot on Nepal border to Arakot. Shekhar Pathak, Shamsher Singh Bisht, Kunwar Prasun, Pratap Shikhar undertook this 45-day journey to study the conditions of people in the hills. They stayed with the locals on the way to know more about their life. Since then Shekhar Pathak begins this foot journey once every decade on May 25. The participants can join and leave any time. You cannot keep any money on your person so that you have the only option to stay with the villagers on the way. The tea-maker, my local history guide, was part of the fifth abhiyan in 2014 from Pangu to Arakot, passing through villages, alpine pastures, kharaks (high altitude grazing fields), earthquake and landslide prone zones, chattees (ancient pilgrimage camping sites).

He tells me about keeda jadi (Yarsa gumba) smuggling in the region of Kosha glacier in Joshimath area where Dhauli Ganga river originates. It’s used as a steroid. Forest fires are illegally started to melt the glaciers and catch the caterpillar fungus from the stones which emerge after the snow melts. The smugglers use even uric acid to start exothermic reaction to melt the glaciers. It’s a very costly steroid, he informs me. The smugglers entice the local villagers to collect keeda jadi. People have set up entire camps with porters and ponies to extract it. They unleash forest fires in the lower reaches so that the rising smoke melts the snow.

If you love wandering in the surrounding forests, you may come across a little group of Van Gujjars, the buffalo-rearing Muslim pastoral migrants, the hill nomads. But tough forest laws make it difficult for them to migrate across the hills these days. They don’t hold official papers for Indian citizenship and the police mistreats them very often. There have been some attempts to settle them at a place but they couldn’t manage their livestock within closed limits. Many get jailed for transgressing forests laws. Some have turned laborers, but most of them just somehow roam the restricted areas, evading law, trying to protect their traditional way of life and living. It’s the same old story like all the nomadic communities facing jeopardy in the plains.

‘My first love and first time had been with a Gujjar girl, right there in those forests,’ he raises his head towards the bare hillside high on the slope. I can’t see any forests. ‘The forests vanished. Like they vanished the very next day after our first kiss,’ he says with a memory-laden sweet sigh. ‘Maybe someone saw you,’ I give a reason. ‘Maybe someone saw, maybe it was just coincidence, but I got married and I’m a grandfather now. She too must be a grandmother by this time,’ he again looked into the forest that was no longer there. One would always remember the first bud that opened into love even if one stays among an orchard of love for a century. ‘Do you still miss her?’ I ask. ‘I just remember. Some things you never forget,’ he says wistfully.