Having a riverside room has its disadvantages. And when electricity is available only for three hours between 7.15pm and 11 pm every day, there is not much one can do at night except sleep or try being one with nature.
And there are fewer things more alluring to me than say, being in Dah at night. First of all, you experience pitch dark. Not the city-bred folks’ “pitch dark”. The darkness in the mountains is quite something unexplainable. Dark and silent... absence of noise made by men and their machines. And the hostile desert that is Ladakh does not have much trees, so no rustling either. Therefore fewer birds or insects. No crickets, no toads, no owls. It’s dead silence therefore.
Second is the sky - its like being in the heavens, feeling one with objects a billion miles away. And thirdly, the river... the sound of life. And if you are with just yourself, in the dark, looking up at the sky, or down at the river, you’ve known unbounded joy... and peace.
The effect of the roar of a fast flowing mountain river is quite unlike the soporific effect of an ocean. The ocean lulls you to sleep just by the rhythmic swish of the waves as they hit shore with monotonous predictability, and with almost mathematical precision. Mountain rivers however never seem to make predictable sounds; the moon does not control their behavior. These rivers seem more like a twenty-something girl - sometimes sensuous, sometimes wild, and always unpredictable.
And that is why a riverside room is not always nice. You don’t end up sleeping much; you stay up late watching the river swing by. Today, as I sit on the broad window sill in the dark of my room, I watch it crash into boulders that happen to be in its path, then rush down to encounter a steep decline, and finally sashay to hug the steep curves of its banks, all within my sphere of vision.
I stay up most part of the night, either mesmerized by the Zanskar, or by the greatest celestial show put up on the night sky exclusively for me. My eyes flit from earth to sky to earth constantly. A million stars light up the night sky, with hundreds of them shooting and darting around (I run out of wishes pretty quickly). I must have nodded off to sleep sometime in the midst of this show because I remember picking myself up from window sill very early next morning, only to crash on to my bed for more sleep.
By 8am, soon after shower and breakfast, we head out to Dah, the Aryan village about four kilometers further, and five hundred meters higher than Baimah. The village is probably 200 meters long, about 100 meters deep, and a good 300 meters tall. About 100 mud homes are squeezed either next to each other, or stacked above and behind. Cattle sheds, chicken coops, barns, homes are all squished together. Curiously, the homes are all empty - most adult men have left for work, and the children are in the school; we also learn that the village is in mourning- a middle-aged villager, who has been working as a daily wage laborer on the BRO road works has been missing for the past forty days. The family painfully decides to end its wait and begin the mourning today. We climb higher and higher, climbing or walking up two-feet-wide steep, and winding village streets, looking for someone to talk to. Tired and a tad crestfallen at our ill luck, we park ourselves under the shade of an apricot tree. We eat our hearts fill of apricots, and top it off with some blackberries from the tree next to it. After a decent amount of rest, we trundle back down. Just as we start wondering what to do next, a frail old lady, whose wrinkles suggests she is a good two hundred years old, takes us to her home... a small dark, low-ceilinged, dingy room, lined with dirty mattresses on two sides of the wall, and with kitchen stuff along the other two walls. A traditional Ladakhi “chula” sits unlit in the centre of the room, a few bottles of rice wine is lying around, a single-burner gas stove is pushed against the wall, while 5-6 large vessels containing food lies strewn on the floor and on a couple of typical ladakhi stools. And right in the centre of this pretty unkempt room sits the man of the house, busily chatting with a much younger man. He waves us in, and asks us to take up seats on those pretty awful mattresses. We introduce ourselves and they reciprocate - the old man is Chambariagyalsan (88), his wife Tasheskidzum (84), and his nephew Sonam (40+) who is visiting them from a neighboring village.
We sit in a circle as Chambariagyalsan holds court. He alternates between Hindi and his native “Aryan” language. I learn that he and members of his tribe are the Drogpas (aka Brokpa) who claim to be pure Aryans, that they are direct descendants of Alexander’s army, are no more than 2,000 people strong in four villages around there, and that they moved to this region from Gilgit several centuries ago, where Alexander’s army had originally settled after A-The-Great reportedly abandoned his plans of conquest.
Cheerful and chatty Gyalsan of course gets down to talking about more pressing issues on hand - that his eight children have pretty much abandoned him and his wife, so he has to fend for himself with the limited resources he has; he shows no sadness as he says this - he has a wide smile, and very accepting of his situation. He then quickly moves to the topic of growing wheat in his handkerchief-sized plot of land behind, and how his frail body can no more do a good job of it. And then about how he is seeing lower and lower snowfall each year, (especially since the time troops moved to take up positions on the ridge since 1999), which means more and more arid days for him and his fellow villagers. And then about how his wife is very sick, and he therefore has to also cook and feed the two of them. And finally he talks about how the Pakistanis back in 1965 got up to Basgoo (that’s just a few miles from Leh) before being pushed back to the other side of the LoC. In the midst of all this lecture, he brews us all cups of tea, and also insists that I try a few cups of rice wine, which I do not of course refuse.
It’s finally time to say goodbye and head back down to our little waterfront home. As I climb those 300-odd steps to where we were parked, I realize that I am truly blessed to get to see, touch, and experience the other India that I might have otherwise never ever seen, or heard about.
Comments