Chapter 8 Religion in Landscape

October 26

I woke in a dark gorge. The rock wall to my left was black, its face frozen solid. The rim of the right wall was catching the first rays of the rising sun. As daylight edged down the cliff it brought to life a series of tiny cascades. Water leaped from where there had been only ice. The two cliffs were polar opposites; movement and stillness, light and dark, fifty metres of crackling space separated them.

In the chill air I packed my rucksack. The sun crawled across my possessions. I walked the five metres to the creek to scoop water for tea and in the soft mud of the bank saw the paw print of a Himalayan wolf, a mark as big as my clenched fist. Water pooled in the base of the tracks, shimmering in the oblique light. Had the animal been there yesterday? Had the wolf prowled around my sleeping body? Had we shared the vision of the night before?

I drank my tea, made tsampa porridge and finished packing.

Garwahl, Uttarakhand, India

Within kilometres the alpine meadows had given way to pristine forest. As in the Sangla Valley, deodar cedars and chir pines rose from thick, green moss, the surface scattered with a layer of rust red needles. Mushroom caps, shaggy and fresh, pushed from the earth. Frost iced the early morning shadows. The air had the musty, fresh yeast scent of decay. Other than the rustle of branches and whisper of the river it was shockingly quiet. It was hard to believe I was in India, the country with the second highest population in the world, but the transition from wilderness to human landscape had taken less than five kilometres.

Jakha, the first village in the Rupin Valley, is a settlement of meticulously constructed, two-storey wooden houses aligned along a single dirt path. The houses were different than those over the pass to the north, less stonework in the construction and roofs shaked with cedar instead of the slate common on Kinnauri houses. The slopes around the village were tiered with rock-walled paddies and through the fields grunted plow-bearing oxen. They were breaking soil in the already harvested fields, mixing in the year’s store of manure and compost. In the fields below the village millet, scarlet and harvest-ready, waved in the breeze. Barking dogs, chained to walls, yanked at their shackles anxious to investigate the stranger.

The villages downstream on the Rupin River were consistently placed at three- to four-kilometre intervals, but between them there was a pleasant mixture of fields and forest. The people didn’t appear rushed and many stopped their work to wave at me.

While walking through an unusually thick section of woods, I was stopped by a high-pitched metallic screech. It grew louder and louder until it filled the air, and then, just as smoothly, it backed away. The sound was repeated again thirty seconds later. It was definitely not a mountain sound.

The clamour passed me three more times before I chanced to look up and there, drifting over my head, was a bundle of a dozen ten-metre-long pine logs suspended from a pair of taut steel cables. The timbers were following a ropeway down to the river. I was in the midst of a forest harvesting operation. I looked down the wires to the dumping ground on the bank of the Rupin Nala and saw a stockpile of hundreds of logs. Without roads in the area I presumed they were going to use the river to transport the trees the next forty kilometres to the trailhead at Naitwar. River running is a mythical activity in North American forestry, but for environmental reasons it’s not used anymore. I had never seen a live operation before so I had lots of questions.

Those questions were answered thirty minutes later when I met S.C. Tiwari, a dapper man in his late forties with a carefully groomed moustache and a diligently combed head of thinning grey hair. He was walking with his hunting dog, a fierce-looking black and brown animal with a muscular head that was more jawbone than cranium. It was obvious from his clothes and his brass-tipped walking stick that Mr. Tiwari was not a farmer and when I asked him in Hindi by way of greeting where he was off to he replied in English, “Going to work.”

He explained he was a “timber floater,” the man in charge of the logging operation. We walked for fifteen minutes, chatting about the mountains. Mr. Tiwari was happy to meet someone who enjoyed walking and had worked in forestry in another country. At the next flattened rock we sat, he lit a bedi, one of the loosely rolled Indian cheroots, and chatted about the business of wood in India.

He told me there is a complete ban on cutting “green wood” in Uttar Pradesh. “Only dead or broken trees can be taken, “ he said.

I thought of the stockpile of timber farther upstream. The majority of that wood was alive when loggers felled it. I asked who was enforcing these regulations.

Mr. Tiwari lowered his head, fiddled with his walking stick and told me the foresters were overworked, rarely got out of their offices to check on the harvesting, and that most logging permits were arranged individually between the timber companies and the official.

I thought it was strange that Mr. Tiwari, someone who was profiting from those idle officials, was willing to talk about a system that sidestepped the law. He told me there was such a demand for wood and the officials were so badly paid that the system perpetuated itself. As he said, “In India, so little of the government’s planning is enforced. I would like to be more of a conservationist but what is the point? If I don’t take the wood, somebody else will. It’s first-come, first-served.”

A few kilometres farther on, in a particularly rough and shallow section of the river, I saw just how difficult it was to get that Himalayan timber to market. In midstream, along the opposite bank, braced against boulders and a ten-metre-tall cliff, the loggers had built a hundred-metre-long, hewn timber chute through which the logs ran single file above the shallow river. On the lip of the spillway nimble men ran, coaxing the timbers along with spiked poles and well-directed kicks. It was a scene from nineteenth-century Canada, woolen-clad lumberjacks dancing on a river of logs. The men bounded along the frame with the confidence of dancers and the swagger of cowboys.

When we arrived, Mr. Tiwari showed me why the supervisor is called the “timber floater.” One of the loggers shouted him a question and the boss yelled back. He quickly shook my hand then jumped boulder to boulder over the river and onto the chute while hollering orders at his crew. He grabbed one of the pikes from where it was stored in the frame and throwing his body weight against it demonstrated, to the man closest to him, how to guide the logs through the manmade rapids. Mr. Tiwari was in control. He turned and waved to me, a huge smile on his face.

Gareth and I had worked together in forestry in Canada for two years. The time marked a change in our relationship, because it was the first time I can remember him as anything other than my little brother. It started when my mother asked, or maybe it was more of an order, for me to get Gareth a summer job with the treeplanting company I worked with. Reluctantly I complied, but I made sure he knew that I wouldn’t be babysitting him when we got to the North.

I tried my best to live up to my own promises, but that changed one cloudy afternoon in the early spring when Al the foreman scrambled over to my area of the clearcut.

“Jono, you better get over and check on Gareth,” he said.

“I’m not the foreman, Al. That’s your job.”

“I’m telling you as a favour, Jono. Go and check him out.”

I shrugged my shoulders, stuffed my treeplanting bags under a log and, swearing under my breath, started over towards where Gareth had been working. Every minute you’re not planting trees you’re not making money and if you’re not making money then you shouldn’t be in the bush, I resented the fact that Gareth was pulling me away from the reason I was on a logging clearcut in the middle of nowhere.

I leaped from stump to log, the steel spikes on the bottom of my boots holding me solid to the slippery trunks. Eventually, I saw the yellow and orange of Gareth’s treeplanting bags. Treeplanters fill the bags with the seedlings they will plant and wear them around their waists, but when I reached Gareth’s bags all I found were the PVC bags – no sign of my little brother.

I clambered onto a stump and shaded my eyes. I was worried. If you can’t see a planter on the planar openness of a clearcut, there’s a good chance something is wrong. Then I saw one of his big orange boots sticking out from behind a downed tree five metres away. They weren’t moving. I ran to the spot, still swearing under my breath and praying he was okay, and there behind the log he lay – fast asleep.

“Gareth, what the hell are you doing?” I kicked his big boots and he shook his head.

“Oh … Jono … How’s it going?” He had such a lacksadasical way about him, the words came out in three slow, separate sentences.

“What do you mean? How’s it going? You know how goddamn shitty it’s going. Al’s just been over in my piece telling me to check on you. So the foreman knows you’re asleep on the job. You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t fire your ass.”

Gareth sat up. There were twigs caught in his dirty blond curls. He pushed his fingers through his hair.

“Oh, come on. I was tired. I haven’t been getting enough sleep. I’m bushed, man,” he said.

Gareth’s voice was wavering. He’d always been a person who needed lots of sleep. He was massively tall; he’d spent most of his teenage years growing at an incredible rate and when you grow that much you’ve got to sleep.

“Seriously, Jono. You can’t let him fire me.” He was talking faster now. I liked the bit of power I had over him.

“Al doesn’t have time for lazy asses like you. There’s a dozen kids back in town that would kill for this job.”

Gareth’s eyes opened up. He blinked. I knew that look. It didn’t happen often but he was about to cry.

“Jono, please.” His shoulders started to shake. “You know I’m trying, but I’m not good at getting up early. I’m trying hard but there’s so much to learn.”

Silent tears were rolling down his cheeks. I knew he hadn’t made any close friends in the camp yet. He was on his own except for his big brother and I was doing my best to ignore him. Guilt rode up on me.

“Okay.” I stepped in close to him. He smelled like moist earth. I put my arms around him. “I know you’re trying. Just hang in there. I’ll make sure that Al doesn’t do anything he’ll regret. Another week and you’ll have the hang of it.”

He hung onto me. I was all he had out there. For all his easygoing ways, I realized that Gareth really needed me and I was responsible for him. We held on tight to each other.

I camped close to the river that night on a narrow flat amidst huge trees. When the sun set, the light seeped slowly from the forest and the valley became so dark it felt heavy. It was a stark contrast to the night before when the moon had lit the snow around my tent and created a residual light that flickered through the night.

October 27

I woke to find evidence that I had definitely crossed into the geography of the monsoon; moisture permeated everything. From my sleeping bag, I unzipped the tent flaps and looked down the river to where fog clung in drifts and wisps to the trees on either bank. I slipped into my humid underwear and damp socks and packed the dripping tent.

Downstream the Rupin River widened and irrigation canals cut to the left and right. The trail was becoming more trafficked and better maintained; government-built steel footbridges spanned its width. The feeling was of a more polished world. Electricity poles sprouted by the side of the trail and more than one polyester-suited walker carrying a cardboard travel case passed me by. Were these the travelling salesman of the foot-bound world?

The day wore on. I stopped in a hayfield for lunch and watched coolies on their way upvalley shouldering one-metre-diameter metal water pipes. They shuffled onwards like overburdened ants, their tiny steps through the meadow’s deep grass slow and methodical. The huge loads bent their backs and shortened their breath. One fellow caught my eye as he passed. I waved and he gave me as much of a smile as he could muster with his head twisted under a hundred kilograms of steel.

In the afternoon I followed a man for two kilometres. At first I could only hear him. Up ahead there was a tinkling sound, not quiet, not loud, something like a distant wind chime. Then I saw him – a short, stocky fellow with a khaki canvas rucksack and a woolen pillbox Kinnauri hat. On a section of rocky trail along the river I caught up to him.

He held a short, medieval-looking brass staff directly in front of him, a three-dimensional cross festooned with bells and topped with the head of a Hindu deity. The man walked with an affected, exaggerated gait that made him bob and caused the carillon to ring. He mumbled mantras as he strode along, the words and bells mixing in a way that reminded me of church choirs.

When I caught up to him, he pulled off the trail and sat on a rock, holding his staff before him with a straight arm. I stopped, although I wasn’t sure if he had sat down to let me pass or if he wanted me to stop and chat. He looked at me, his chin shaded with day-old growth, his eyes bright from my attention and he shouted, “Baloo, Baloo” while rattling his jingle-stick.

Baloo in Hindi means bear. The man was a human bear scare. We talked in Hindi and he told me how he travelled from village to village offering his bear deterrent services. If a community’s fields were being raided by bears, he would use mantras and his magic staff to exorcise the spirits that attracted the beasts. From the top of his canvas pack he pulled out a battered plastic bag and extracted a frayed photo of himself standing almost timidly beside what looked like the carcass of a bear. His name was Chandra Bhaga. He was from Kinnaur but spent most of the summer and autumn on the move, for that was his busy time; the fields were coming to harvest and the bears were down from the mountains.

He pulled a pack of bedis from his bag and offered me one. I don’t smoke but in exchange I offered him a piece of chocolate. He asked me if I had ever come across any bears. Since I’d worked in forestry in northern Canada for eighteen years I had had hundreds of bear encounters. This excited Chandra, and he wanted a complete description of the common American Black Bear.

After I had tried my best with limited Hindi, Chandra offered to teach me a mantra that would scare away any bears that crossed my path. I was now more excited than he was. He went through the chant slowly, emphasizing each syllable. I repeated it, trying my best to imitate his intonation. He went through it three times and on the third repeat he corrected my pronunciation, saying if it wasn’t pronounced perfectly it could do more harm than good. That was a worrying thought – chanting a prayer for protection and instead it encourages the beast to charge. He complimented my accent, but after the fourth repeat he looked at me gravely and said the mantra was strictly for my own personal use. I was a friend, and he had given it as a gift.

We had lunch together. I made soup and tea on the stove while Chandra made chapatis on a battered pan over a little wood fire. We relaxed for half an hour, Chandra smoking bedis and me lying back and looking up at the clouds. At the next village Chandra stopped to inquire if the residents had any bear problems. They did and so he had business to conduct. I continued on, wanting to get a few more kilometres in before sunset.

Bears have been a part of my life for two decades. In the bush you live with them, and at night in a treeplanting camp there is only the nylon of your tent separating you from the wild. But bears are not stupid; they only interact with people if there’s a reason. In a treeplanting camp possibly the most dangerous job is that of the cook as they are left alone all day in base camp. These are the quiet times when bears prowl into the human environment searching for food. I’ve known camp cooks who have opened up the door of their kitchen trailers to find gangs of bears fighting over waste food in the slop pits.

One of those times I regret something I did to Gareth was when I pretended to be a bear in the area he was planting trees. I could hear him working on the far side of a thick clump of alders, the throw and stomp on his shovel, his exhalation as he leaned over to lay the seedling snuggly in the hole and the gentle tap of his boot closing the earth over the little tree. I snuck as silently as possible through the alder copse and when I was a few metres from him took a branch and rustled it noisily in the underbrush. Gareth stopped.

The silence was excruciating, every bit of his being focused on indentifying the sounds. Holding back a chuckle I rustled the undergrowth again and snapped a couple of small branches. Only a bear or moose would have the size and audacity to make such a noise and not care about it. Gareth knew this.

He screamed, “Fuck off!” In defence he threw his metre-long treeplanting shovel through the trees, where it sailed past only centimetres from my head. I heard the pop of the nylex waist buckles on his treeplanting bags open. They fell to the ground, then came the thump, thump, thump of his feet pounding down the hill away from me. I pushed through the patch of trees and shouted after him but he was already gone. I continued on my way, thinking that he would get it was only his brother pulling a trick on him.

An hour or so later when I returned to the crew bus, Gareth was there eating a sandwich. When he saw me he sat up and told me right away about the huge bear that had come at him through an alder patch at the top of his work area and how he was lucky to get out of there without serious injury. I told him to take a good rest, get his head back together and I would retrieve his gear. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the bear was actually me.

October 28

Five kilometres from Naitwar the trail transformed into a rough road. It has a gentle downhill grade. It might have been a lack of sugar or a melancholic funk produced by the long drop from the heights but that afternoon I felt light-headed, not connected with my steps or the landscape. I stumbled along behind an unloaded caravan of pack mules. Ahead I could see the opening in the trees where the Rupin River merged with the Tons River. A low, one-storey wooden Hindu temple marked their convergence. I was in Garwahl, Uttarakhand State, the most sacred area in the Hindu Himalayas.

Naitwar is the trailhead for the Rupin Valley. To the south the road leads to the Gangeatic plain and eventually Delhi, but north there are only trails and mountains. As with so many villages straddling the space between the road-serviced world and that of the foot trail, Naitwar has two faces. By the river the old community survives in elegant rows of wooden houses interspersed with Hindu shrines.

Higher up, lining each side of the main road, is the town’s more recent incarnation: a line of open-fronted, corrugated steel stores, a purpose-built community providing for the needs of the highway’s traffic. New Naitwar is an interface between cultures. Drunken Garwahlis in coarse homespun stagger past overweight cloth merchants in sloppily built shops and oil-splattered Punjabi truckers drinking steaming chai by the side of the road. Naked fluorescent tubes bathe the strip in harsh white light and Hindi pop, crackling from worn-out speakers, competes with generators, cars and diesel trucks.

I took a room in the half-built hotel at the far end of town. There was no glass in the windows and wooden shutters closed over iron rods. Outside my second-storey door the veranda’s floor sprouted rebar like late season wheat. In a café nearby I met P.T. Gose, a merchant from the small city of Rampur just across the border to the west in Himachal Pradesh. He was in Naitwar for a few days to secure stocks of a cork found in the roots of some oak trees, a natural mid-sole material for shoes. His family had been dealing in the substance for decades. Gathered in small amounts by the local people, it provides some side-income for many families.

The material excited me and, after chatting for a while, I suggested to Mr. Gose that such products were the best economic argument to slow the deforestation of the Himalayas. He waved his head in the undulating Indian gesture that accompanies any discussion and told me that the mid-sole cork he dealt with wouldn’t play a role in saving the forest because in a few years demand for it would dry up. The oak cork was only inserted in leather-soled footwear and the market for dress shoes was fading as people switched to cheaper, mass-produced vinyl runners.

“Now everything has to be shiny and colourful,” he chuckled. “Soon India will be a pink and purple nation.”

As he was a major distributor of the new synthetic shoes, he had no regrets about the loss of his old markets. Soon after that Mr. Gose excused himself and I was left alone with the crowds weaving along the roadside bazaar. Night had fallen and the air had contracted around the well-lit line of the road. Outside the fluorescent wash nothing seemed to exist. Beyond the road edge was darkness.

October 29

I started walking early, not because I had planned for a long day but because I wanted to leave Naitwar.

I followed the Tons River downstream. For the first time on the trek I saw women in saris and men in rough, cotton turbans. Chattering monkeys leaped amongst the pines. The population increased rapidly, as villages materialized every kilometre and between them on the valley’s flatter sections lay interlocking grids of grey, stubbly, harvested fields. Maybe because it was morning many of the people in the paddocks looked bedraggled, like they’d had a bad night’s sleep. When I passed they stared, neither friendly nor aggressive. For the first time I felt self-conscious while walking.

At the village of Nanai I cut east from the Tons, following a stream up a minor pass that would lead to the Yamuna River. The road climbed slowly. There was almost no traffic. People roamed the woods with long wicker baskets thrown over their shoulders, collecting branches and cones for their fires. In a few baskets I saw fresh-picked mushrooms and the odd bundled sprig of herbs. In the well-managed forest along the road there was an obvious system to the division of the forest’s produce; every tree had lost its lower branches for firewood to a certain height. Each tree trunk was slashed near its base, a hollow tin rod was inserted in the cut and a small cup was attached to collect resin. The resin is distilled and becomes turpentine, another small side-income for local families. The forest looked used but not damaged.

I crossed the pass and the road joined a stream that led into the Yamuna Valley. I had lunch in a café in the town of Purola. The man who served me my rice and dal smiled but wasn’t in the mood to chat. He left and when I wanted to pay I couldn’t find him. He returned a half hour later wiping sleep from his eyes. It had been siesta time.

By late afternoon I was on the Yamuna River. From there I should have headed north to visit the Hindu pilgrimage site at its source, but at that point in the trek logistics forced me to turn south. It was strange in the course of such a minimalist walk to have to think about money, but there I was in the heart of the Hindu Himalayas with almost none. To the people I passed I was a stranger and many would invite me to their homes for food and tea. They were generous to the extreme and, unless it was vehemently refused, I insisted on leaving a gift. I had no need to be remembered as a burden. Then, of course, I had to buy meals and beds, rice and kerosene.

So money or the lack of it forced me off my track and onto an early morning bus the next day headed to the hill station town of Mussoorie. There I could change the crisp, clean travellers cheques I had stored in a plastic bag deep in my pack for wads of grubby bank notes and, once again, I could meander off with the Western world’s ultimate insurance, a pocket full of cash.

Climbing on board the almost full bus I found a seat on a ripped and sweaty bench near the rear entrance. After so many weeks of walking eight hours a day my body had grown accustomed to dictating its own pace. The vehicle moved faster than my walking-speed mind was accustomed to; scenes drifted by with no time for reflection. Beautiful women stared at me, a buffalo lifted an elegant foreleg, children caught in frenzied play froze then waved at the hurtling bus. To the people outside I was a forty-kilometre-an-hour head without a body. The world floated by in infinite vignettes. I began to understand why so many tribal people have to vomit on bus rides. It isn’t just the vehicle’s interminable motion, but the vision of a world moving too fast.

The man beside me was excited to the point of agitation at having a foreigner next to him. He possessed little English beyond, “I like you, my dear,” but tried energetically every fifteen minutes to draw me into conversation. I tried to speak Hindi with him but either my accent was unintelligible or he was insistent on practising his English. After our first failed attempt at conversation I tried to stay focused on the three-day-old newspaper I’d found jammed between the seats.

The bus dropped me thirty kilometres north and 1,000 metres below Mussoorie at a remote intersection in the midst of a deforested valley. I stepped down from the bus and the men playing cards at the cinder-block café took a momentary pause to stare at me. I nodded, smiled, and went inside in search of rice and dal.

The owner told me there were no more buses for Mussoorie that day, but he gallantly offered to flag me down a shared taxi. Within an hour he’d arranged a ride. I wriggled into a four-door Hindustan Ambassador stuffed to bursting with six adults and four children. The Ambassador is the classic Indian taxi. It has long, arching lines, a look that reminds you of British films from after World War Two. Not surprisingly, the car is a copy of the mid-’50s Morris Oxford and has been produced in India continually since 1957.

The taxi slowly wound its way up through a stark, deforested land. We passed a waterfall that had been given a cement backdrop to insure it kept falling and a spaceship-styled Hindu temple with chrome railings and an antenna that reached for the gods. Both were sightseeing attractions and the queue of tourist buses lined up on either side of them almost pushed us off the narrow route. When we arrived in Mussoorie by the back road, the bustling, Victorian-era shopping strip surprised me with its sudden appearance.

The car came to a stop and everyone stared at me. The driver turned, smiled with his bright red betel juice-stained teeth and said, “Mussoorie, sir. Please leave us.”

Mussoorie’s origins can be traced to 1825 when Captain Young, a British Army officer who was stationed in Dehra Dun forty kilometres to the south, went exploring and found a ridge that stretched east to west and featured panoramic views north to the Himalayas. He had found the perfect spot to build a hunting lodge. This was the settlement’s first building and since then it has grown in fits and starts, depending on the number of people with money enough to climb the ridge and escape the scorching heat of summer.

India is a hot country. The British, who controlled most of it for over a hundred years, enjoy cool weather, so for the Raj administration to function in the sweltering pre-monsoon months of April and May the Anglos migrated to the temperate hills. The entire bureaucracy moved from Calcutta and Delhi to hill towns like Darjeeling, Shimla, Dharamsala and Mussoorie. In a way Mussoorie is a purpose-built community, the progenitor of the late twentieth century’s ski resorts and beach-side getaways. Mussoorie is a place to escape the heat and dogged reality of everyday life “down below.”

Hill stations are still tourist attractions. When the British left in 1947, many of their properties were seized as summer houses by wealthy Delhi and Calcutta families. With the recent economic boom a new wave of middle-class Indian tourists has descended on the town. Mussoorie is busier than ever and yet the hill station still retains an air of exclusivity and peculiarity. In Mussoorie you see stately Raj residences in various stages of decay alongside concrete-box hotels and corrugated steel shanties.

Over dinner that evening I talked to an Anglo-Indian student who was visiting his extended family from his home in the U.K. Sundar Singh described himself as a modern Sikh. He hadn’t grown a beard and he didn’t carry a kirpan, the traditional dagger, but he did wear a kara or iron bracelet. Sikhism is a religion that developed in the Punjab under the direction of its founder, Guru Nanak, during the fifteenth century as a bridge between Hinduism and Islam.

Sundar said that being a Sikh for him was not about external symbols but was instead simply about being an honest, hard-working person. He backed this up by proudly telling me his university scores from the past year. Sundar wasn’t interested in what I was up to; his eyebrows rose just slightly when I told him of my trek. I don’t think he actually believed I was walking the length of the Western Himalayas. He constantly brought the conversation back to whether I thought Canada or the U.K. offered more opportunities for young business graduates.

In the United Kingdom today there are close to three million citizens of Indian descent. It’s a long way from the situation in Raj-era Mussoorie when benches along the Strand featured signs on them saying, “Indians and dogs not allowed.”

I told him I couldn’t tell him which country offered more opportunities as I didn’t know much about business and then he said, “Well, I could always come back home. There’s unlimited jobs here now. The future is with India.”

The next day I changed money, went sightseeing with hordes of Indian tourists, washed my clothes, ate Western food and slept in a bed with clean sheets.

The morning after, I boarded a bus for the long ride back into the mountains. The road traced the rivers back into the Himalayan labyrinth. It was cliff-side motoring. Twice we rounded blind curves and came directly in the path of oncoming transport trucks. The scream of heavy brakes jolted the sixty drowsy passengers from their napping. The driver, a salt-and-pepper-haired man with dark bags under his eyes, would creep the bus past the Tata truck or Ambassador car, so close to the precipice that those of us on the left-hand side could see the tires sending gravel into the abyss. With each of these near misses the driver would touch his forehead with his forefinger and then stroke the head of the small plastic statue of the Hindu god Shiva glued to the dashboard. Six hours of this adrenaline-packed driving and I was back in Barkot on the Yamuna River, the town I had left three days before.

November 2

I walked out of the village before sunrise on a street lined with concrete shops. Behind the shopfronts’ bolted iron shutters, the steam engine rumble of kerosene stoves signalled the first cups of chai were on the boil. A line of loaded pack mules was moving north and the clip-clop of their hooves followed me out of town. Fog lingered in the paddies beyond the village. Farmers emerged from the mist, mattocks on their shoulders. The men and women kept their heads down.

The upper stretch of the Yamuna Valley was a pleasant surprise. It was well forested in pine and cedar. Amongst the trees the odd goat foraged on moss and thin grass. At one point, a blue-fronted redstart flitted through the trees and landed with ease on the cracked bark of a deodar cedar.

An hour into the day I stopped to take a sip of water. I looked down the road and two hundred metres away spotted a swaying black and blue nylon pack moving away from me. Indians generally use khaki green army surplus rucksacks so this was anomalous and interesting. I picked up my pace and gained on the walker. As I closed on him I saw the carrier was wearing jeans and a fine pair of leather hiking boots. Closer still I could see he was a tall man with sandy brown hair. I drew parallel and said hello in English. He turned, his eyes wide. We stopped, instinctively shook hands and started walking together.

I suppose to walk was the natural thing to do. Our steps fell together and for the first time in months I talked with someone from my own culture. Our conversation was slow and easy. We had the road to ourselves; there were no buses, no cars, no bicycles, not even other pedestrians. We sauntered down the middle of the asphalt talking and talking, enjoying the opportunity to speak loud and long.

Steve was nineteen years old, a tall man with a quick smile and a lanky gait. Amazingly he was from Toronto, Canada. We had a nation of similarities to fall back on.

At lunch we made a fire and brewed tea to go with the cold chapatis and lentils I’d bought in Barkot. We lay on either side of the ring of stones sipping sweet chai and trying to reduce our six degrees of separation with a mutual acquaintance. The topic of motivations came up, why were we both there, alone in the far reaches of the Himalayas. I gave him the condensed version of Gareth’s accident, my childhood fascination with the mountains and my subsequent obsession with the Himalayas. Steve offered his condolences. I shrugged it off. But he insisted he had some understanding as his best friend had died when he was sixteen. Steve still thought about him often. I asked if his friend was the reason he was there.

“Maybe,” he said. “It’s a few years ago now. I hadn’t thought too much about that.”

We were two young men far from home in the highest mountains in the world, both in some way nudged there by the death of a loved one. Remarkably, at the time, Steve and I barely touched on the deaths that had so shaped our lives. I regret that now because I see how the walk was a catalyst for my coming to terms with Gareth’s death. In retrospect I know I was too fixated on the walk, too focused on situating people and events in accordance with the book I wanted to write. Everyday I was accosted with once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Everyday I could have followed those experiences far off my charted course, but I didn’t. I had objectives; nothing was going to stop me.

In a way I had approached the trek the same way I had dealt with Gareth’s death, with tunnel vision. When Gareth had died it had consumed me. For months his death was everything; there was no escape. It was going back to work, five months after the event, that freed me from the immediate grief. I threw myself into the job, which is easy when you put in sixteen to eighteen hours a day in the bush. I used work to mask the pain. I created my own tunnel of superficial composure, so much so that even I believed it.

But Gareth was there. I remember once seeing a day pack on the side of a logging road. It was the same brand and colour as Gareth’s. Mud was splattered on it, and a stainless steel thermos of coffee lay on top. I started crying, crying so hard I had to stop the truck I was driving and let the wave move over me.

Another time I passed an area where we had planted trees together a few years before. I felt strong, ready to face such a connected landscape. Walking through the young stand of metre-and-a-half pines I could see that the trees were dying; beetles were eating their tender outer bark. The work we had done together had been for nothing. I sat on the moss-covered ground and wept.

That afternoon, north of Barkot, sitting by a fire eating stale chapatis and talking with a man I’d never met about my dead brother, I’d smiled easily. There had been no tears.

I had been so long without dialogue that it was draining to talk for all those hours. After lunch, a few kilometres up the road Steve left me to follow a trail east to Dodital Lake. We shook hands and promised to stay in touch. It’s a promise I haven’t kept.

At the same time I was excited to be moving towards one of Hinduism’s most sacred sites, Yamunotri, the source of the Yamuna River. The river starts at the head of the valley I was ascending, and flows south then east across the plains until it joins the Ganges at the great confluence of Prayag in the city of Allahabad. For Hindus this is the meeting point, not just for these two great flows, but also for the ethereal Saraswati River, the river of wisdom. Therefore, Prayag has another name: Tridevi, the three goddesses.

It is at Tridevi where, every twelve years, the Khumbu Mela takes place. The Mela is the greatest Hindu festival and the largest human gathering on the planet. At sunrise, on the most astrologically auspicious day of those dozen years, up to twelve million devotees take a ritual bath in the confluence, immersing themselves in the fused bodies of the three goddesses. The purifying waters absolve the faithful of a lifetime of negative karma and multiply the good deeds accumulating towards their future incarnations.