Chapter 9 Balance

November 3

After a cold night in an empty pilgrim’s guest house in Sayanachatti village, I spent the morning waiting out some wet weather in the local chai shop. Sayanachatti is the hamlet where the road ends and the foot trail to Yamunotri begins. The shop was ten metres square, roofed with rusty corrugated iron, its sides open to the elements. A low cement wall separated it from the road and over the partition a wind, moist from the river, blew around the dozen tea drinkers huddled around the fire.

The village survives on summer’s pilgrimage business but the season ends in September and the place was all but deserted when I wandered up the empty road. The tea shop was the only sign of life. As with most villages in India it was the social centre of the community, a place where business and politics are continually wrestled with by an ever-present gang of happily idle men.

Garwahl, Uttarakhand, India

Politics may trace its etymology to ancient Greece, but I’m confident that India is its true home and the chai shop is the heart of subcontinental politics. Rice and potatoes, the Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata parties, sheep and bridges, roads and buses – all are discussed. Over and over again in Sayanachatti the words rupee and government intersected and became catalysts for the debaters to stand, shout, and wag their fingers. The young shopowner, Prakash, sat next to me. He was bundled in multiple sweaters topped with a woolen sport jacket. A homespun scarf was wrapped turban-style around his head. Between refilling his customers’ glasses he provided me with a rapid-fire translation of the local Pahari dialect.

A middle-aged man with tired eyes and a bright red acrylic toque was holding forth. Prakash said, “He is saying his brother-in-law has a new contract repairing part of the pilgrim route. The contract price is much less than last year.”

Voices were raised.

Another man with a prodigious belly, his arms spread out on the bench back, shuffled in his seat and replied.

Prakash translated, “The other man is saying that his uncle is an advisor to a big man in the district.” The man sat up straight as he mentioned his relative. “He will try and find out why there has been a reduction in cost.”

The group nodded.

“Oh, now this fellow,” Prakash waved his finger at a bearded man in a purple nylon jacket two sizes too small for him, “is saying that the man’s uncle has lost his influence with the public works department because of some bad dealings with the state ministry of roads.”

The rotund nephew rose to standing, pointed his finger and shouted to the verge of spitting at the accuser. Prakash did not have to translate. The other man stood and with equal fervour returned the gesture. Two groups rose around the men, and friendly arms reached placatingly around the adversaries, bringing them back to sitting.

Prakash whispered, “These two have never gotten along. Their grandfathers argued about property boundaries back in the British time.”

At the Yamunotri trailhead the valley narrows, and a well-maintained path follows it, rising steeply beyond the village of Beef. It was cool and moist, and wispy clouds clung to the hillsides but the climb brought a sweat out on me. The trail was cobbled, the first I’d encountered in the Himalayas, a testament to the importance of the Yamuna pilgrimage. The route winds through a tight, verdant gorge, which was quiet but for the sound of the young river and the whispering tick of dense foliage. Moru oaks and acacias sprouted from the cliffs above and below the trail, their leaves dripping with mist.

From June until September tens of thousands of pilgrims traverse the route, but in late fall it was empty, and from Beef to Yamunotri I saw no one. It was eerie to be the only person on such a meticulously constructed route and I was relieved to round a bend and see, tucked into the cliffs at the river’s source, the temple of the Goddess.

But the joy I had in seeing my day’s goal was quickly extinguished because on second glance the site looks like a disused mining exploration camp. Buildings that in summer would have been shops and restaurants were roofless, empty and unkempt; ripped canvas tarps flapped in the breeze, concrete flaked off the shops’ river-stone walls. As I walked by the skeletal frames, paper and plastic blew by my feet. Woodsmoke marked the interior of each building and the monsoon had stained everything an algae green. These were X-ray buildings, open for all to see but containing nothing worth looking at. It seemed a poor tribute to the Goddess who gives life to such a broad swathe of northern India.

Disheartened, I thought about turning around but decided I could not leave without visiting the hot springs around which the temples are built. Past the line of empty shops I crossed the nascent river on a small steel suspension bridge and climbed to the temple complex that had been built by the Maharani Gularia of Jaipur in the nineteenth century.

On the rusted iron fence circling the steaming, flagstone-lined springs I hung my trekking gear and slipped naked, but for my underwear, into the pool. The faint rotten egg smell of sulphurous spring water mixed with the resinous scent of pines and cedar. I stared at my ghostly pale body under the water. My legs and arms were thin and sinewy from the months of walking. It had been so long since I had taken an extended look at what lay beneath my clothes that it was as if I was looking at a new creation. Muscles I had never seen flexed when I lifted my legs, and new ribs appeared where only fat and muscle had been before. The heat seeped into me. My muscles loosened.

A hundred metres above me new snow glazed the branches of altitude-stunted conifers. The light was turning golden in the magic hour before darkness. I stretched my shoulders and elbows out along the cold stone sill and leaned my head back to appreciate the play of rosy clouds. I looked to the right. Gathered in the ornate stone doorway of a partly completed temple, a crew of ragged construction workers stood and stared. Up until then I had noticed no one in the compound. They smiled between puffs on their cigarettes. Their teeth were the colour of old crispy leaves. The sound of bells and chanting came from one of the shrines. Afternoon prayers had begun and with that the men turned and resumed their work.

In the warmth of the hot springs the landscape around me hummed. Legend has it that Yamuna was the daughter of Surya, the sun god, and the sister of Yama, the god of death. Hindus believe that whoever bathes at the Yamuna’s source will never meet a violent death. I exhaled and watched the steam roll off the pool’s surface, across the stone-lined courtyard and into the emptiness above the source.

Rivers hold significant power for Hindus. On the surface the silt-rich rivers are the lifeblood of the subcontinent. They ensure the supply of food and provide the water that Indians exist on. At a more subtle level, flowing water for Indians is the physicalization of feminine power. The great rivers – Ganga, Yamuna, and Saraswati – are all female entities. Rivers embody the dichotomy of maternal compassion and parental discipline. They give everything they have and in return demand respect.

The water of the Ganges is the purest element in a purity-obsessed religion; even 1,500 densely populated and polluted kilometres downstream in Varanasi, Hinduism’s most auspicious place to die, the water is considered ambrosia, an entity capable of nullifying sins and amplifying good deeds. Devout Hindus consider the water at Varanasi pure enough to drink, an amazing feat considering that by that point the water has passed by and through the 100 million people who call the Gangeatic plains home.

Yamunotri is the first stage on one of India’s most sacred pilgrimages, the Chota Char Dham Yatra, the pilgrimage of the four holy sites. Hindus believe that those who traverse the Ganges’ Himalayan watershed from west to east, stopping and completing the required rituals at the springs of Yamunotri; Gangotri, the origin of the Ganges; Kedarnath, the Himalayan home of Lord Shiva, Hinduism’s embodiment of power and destruction; and Badrinath, the Himalayan sanctuary of Lord Vishnu, the personification of continuity in Hinduism, will achieve moksha, salvation.

The region of the Char Dham is also known as Dev Bhoomi, the land of the gods. For Hindus the Himalayas are a visionary environment, for the peaks that form the range are not just spires of stone and ice but the thrones of the religion’s greatest gods. With the right mindset, one steeped in devotion and good deeds, Hindus can experience the mountains not as an inaccessible labyrinth but as the wellspring of their religion’s greatest myths. The Himalayas become a physical medium through which Hindus can connect with their gods. Thus the mountains have been the object of pilgrimage for a pantheon of Hinduism’s great thinkers, but it is Adi Shankaracharya, the eighth- century philosopher monk, who is credited with infusing the region with the legends it is so deeply associated with.

In the time of Shankaracharya, Hinduism had been in decline for nearly a thousand years. In the second century B.C.E., King Ashoka had militarily brought most of the Indian subcontinent under his rule. In the midst of his empire building he converted to Buddhism and under Ashoka’s patronage India slowly became a Buddhist country.

Shankaracharya was from the south coast of Kerala, an area little touched by Ashoka’s Buddhist dissemination. He came north as a pilgrim and a missionary. He wanted to return India to its original belief and travelled widely to achieve his goal. Eventually, he was able to convert most of the central Himalayan population back to Hinduism.

Shankaracharya used landscape as much as philosophy and storytelling to connect the people with the religion. During his time in the mountains Shankaracharya identified not only the Char Dham, but also the Panch Prayag, the five confluences of the Ganges; the Panch Kedar, the five shrines of Shiva; and the Panch Badri, the five temples of Vishnu. By creating a matrix of holy sites in the local landscape Shankaracharya intertwined communities with the religion. To this day Hinduism is connected to the landscape of India in a way that makes the two almost inseparable.

November 4

I camped that night up one of the Yamuna’s small steep-walled tributaries not far from the temple and the next morning packed in a frigid gorge unaccustomed to sunlight. I returned down the valley from Barkot and walked east towards the Rari Ghatti that leads to the Bhagriath Valley. It was a long climb. The woods were quiet. Their harvests complete, there was little movement in the few villages along the way. I moved quickly, satisfied with the thump of my rubber soles and the easy breathing that months of hard walking had given me. Every once in a while the sound of children or the rap of an axe would reach me in the echoing way that sound comes to you through trees.

At nightfall I found myself close to the pass and far from any settlement. I pitched my tent in darkness, so accustomed to my portable home that I could erect it by touch. A few hundred metres below I saw the flicker of candles, light from inside a single shanty. Dinner was made and eaten under the beam of my headlamp. I rinsed the dishes with water from my canteen, feeling for the caked-on rice with my fingertips.

My chores complete I lay outside, astounded by the silence. The air was so still it rang in my ears. Not for the first time in those many months I was shocked to think I was in the second most populous country in the world. On all sides were monumental deodar cedars, whose branches reached down out of the darkness, touching the ground by my feet. Through the branches I saw the moon rise. Delicate cedar fronds were silhouetted by the ghostly light and their glossy needles shimmered as a slight breeze danced them round and round. The moon’s ascent, the half-time waltz of needles and branches and trunks, the touch of wind on my face – all that movement without sound.

Millenniums of pilgrims had come to the Garwahl Himalayas for exactly that experience, quietude and space. Adi Shankaracharya’s identification of the Himalayas’ myriad of holy sites became the framework for some of Hinduism’s most important pilgrimages.

Pilgrimage, or Yatra in Sanskrit, has traditionally involved a great commitment in time and energy – the slow movement between holy places is a process of spiritual journeying, a time removed from everyday obligations, a period for contemplation. The process of Yatra is as important as its geographic goals. A pilgrimage is a course of inquiry, a long question whose answers evolve in the meditation of walking and the openness that hardship engenders.

I felt the air moving in and out of me, my chest expanding and contracting in motion with the trees. Above me an owl called. Cedar fronds rustled. A rhesus monkey howled at its troupe, a chorus began, and from the valley far below came the answer of barking dogs.

November 5

The morning was chilly and after a quick cup of tea and some biscuits I packed and set off down the road. I walked fast to warm myself. Two kilometres into the day I came across a road crew in torn T-shirts and cotton scarves wrapped tight around their heads. Three of the men stood above a hole, shivering, arms folded over their chests, gazing with sleepy nonchalance at a fourth who shovelled stones into a breach in the road. I stopped. The labourer was sweating. I indicated to the shaking trio that if they joined in they would warm up. They smiled back and raised empty hands, indicating that for them any work was impossible – there was only one shovel.

The sun climbed overhead and the temperature soared. As I moved closer to the Bhagriath River the woods gave way to treeless slopes and haphazard paddies. It was shocking how quickly the transition was made from pristine timber to environmental havoc. On the naked ground the sun worked relentlessly, ossifying hillsides, sealing off the earth to any trace of rain. In a field near the road poor, biscuit-coloured soils were being broken by a crude wooden plow dragged by two gleaming buffalo, their skins rippling in the heat.

To my left diesel-spewing trucks passed on the road, while on my right the paddies were being prepared with 8,000-yearold technology. Behind the plow stalked a withered crone in a cornflower blue, sun-faded sari. The dress was hitched and tied around her leathery thighs. She shouldered a huge mattock, swinging it with precision when the plow missed an unruly chunk of clay. She grunted as she struck, the clods disintegrating in puffs of dust. As I drew level she looked at me but I was not worth a reaction. She returned to her work. It was one of the few times on the walk when my presence produced no emotion at all.

The Bhagriath River is the primary source of the Ganges. Unfortunately, in its lower reaches thoughts of the great Hindu goddess Ganga are drowned by the blare of the road’s traffic. Transport rigs and overcrowded buses, share taxis and private cars all barrel down the road honking their horns and laying on their hissing air brakes.

Soon after I started up the valley I passed a roadside café, a dhaba. Vehicles were parked outside and the drivers sat drinking tea and smoking cigarettes. Truckers the world over have the reputation of being a rough-hewn crowd, and the Indian variety are no different. On the subcontinent drivers are thought of as heavy-drinking, promiscuous men. A friend who worked in HIV education once showed me a map of the disease’s spread across India, and the virus’s path paralleled the country’s interstate road system.

Yet for all their hard living truckers hold tight to their religion. In every vehicle outside the café I saw kitschy plastic Hindu icons glued or screwed onto the dashboard: silver and blue Shivas the size of action dolls, Baby Krishnas crawling across the drivers’ sightlines, adult Krishnas blowing their magical flutes. The less than holy existences the truckers live and their blatant display of religiosity is no contradiction in Hinduism because the religion adapts itself for every congregation.

Across the country Shiva stares at you from calendars and coffee mugs. People donate enormous sums to wild-haired gurus who claim contact with the gods. Truckers say their prayers and wave incense before their mobile shrines at the start of every day. They are individualized forms of devotion and therefore as acceptable as the learned master who pores over the holy Hindu writings, the Vedas and the Upanishads.

The truckers’ approach to Hindu practice is a type of bhakti yoga, one of Hinduism’s four Paths to God. Bhakti in Sanskrit means “the way to God through love.” Yoga can be interpreted as both union and discipline. Yoga’s purpose is to join with God through dedicated practice. The process of this joining and liberation is through bhakti: karma, the way to God through right action; raja, the way to God through meditation and thought; and jnana, the way to God through wisdom.

In the bhakti path by having the image of your chosen god present, not only visually on your dashboard or in your shrine, but constantly on your lips and in your mind, by holding it so close that eventually you are consumed and merge with it, the practitioner uses what the plastic icon represents to move to a higher state of consciousness. The essence of bhakti yoga is held in the three-word Sanskrit mantra, Tvat Tam Asi, Thou Art That.

By mid-afternoon I had reached the town of Uttarkashi, the capital of its namesake district and the staging ground for pilgrims travelling farther up the valley to the Ganges River’s source at Gangotri. Uttarkashi literally means northern city of light, and it is a miniature version of the great pilgrimage centre of Kashi, or Varanasi, well downriver on the Gangeatic plains. The town is a bustling hybrid of the secular and the saintly; wide-eyed holymen amble by advertisements for Hindi soft-core porn movies, and electrical shops blaring Hindi pop flank centuries-old temples. I saw mechanics chanting mantras while dismantling transmissions and curry cooks waving incense in front of postcard gods. In India Hinduism is everywhere and encompasses everything.

I took a room at a surprisingly comfortable hotel close to the middle of town. Because it is a major stopover on the pilgrimage route, Uttarkashi has dozens of guest houses and on every street there are small restaurants and tea stalls. In an open-air café sandwiched between a shop selling Hindu religious paraphernalia and children’s toys, and a travel agency with internet terminals and a side business in water pumps, I had a memorable dinner. There were three different curries – curried okra, palak paneer, and vegetable jhalfrezi – which I ate with fresh tandoori chapatis accompanied by a large bottle of Kingfisher lager.

I was full when I finished but had passed a sweet shop on the way to the restaurant and had promised myself I would return. Good Indian sweet shops understand that presentation is as important as taste. This sweet shop had its products laid out on stainless steel platters in a long, chest-high refrigerated glass display case. The room was brightly lit with halogen lamps and I was suprised to see that when I ordered my gajar halva, carrot semolina pudding, the person who served me wore rubber, surgical-type gloves when he placed the sticky squares in a cardboard box.

I ate my halva as I walked to the Vishwanath Temple, the town’s best known shrine. Vishwanath, ruler of the world in Sanskrit, is one of Lord Shiva’s personas. Shiva is one of the triumvirate of primary gods in Hinduism, the others being Vishnu and Brahman. As a polytheistic religion, Hinduism has literally thousands of gods, but the vast majority are local manifestations of the trio of dominant male gods or incarnations of Shakti, the embodiment of female energy.

The brick courtyard of the temple houses two buildings, the larger, Vishwanath, built of plain-cut granite and the smaller red painted Shakti temple. The Shakti shrine is famous for the six-metre-tall metal trishul or trident that pushes through its roof. The trident is one of the symbols of Shiva. Legend holds that the trishul was driven into the ground at Uttarkashi by an assembly of gods. Its shaft was wrapped in saffron silk threaded with gold and at its base crumpled garlands of bright marigolds were laid. To Shiva’s followers he encompasses the universe. On one level, the trident’s prongs symbolize the three forces held by Shiva – the creation, the sustenance and the destruction. On another level, as Lord Shiva’s weapon, the trident represents his ability to administer fierce justice on the universe’s three planes – spiritual, subtle and physical.

At the opposite end of the compound the Vishwanath temple is focused around a ninety-centimetre-tall lingam, a phallic-shaped stone that stands in the middle of the one-room building. The lingam, Sanskrit for phallus, is an abstract representation of Shiva’s male power, and the simplicity of the shape is a reference to the ethereal, attributeless form of the god, a form so elemental it can be imagined and felt in any time or space. I took off my shoes, went inside and sat quietly in a corner of the pale marble-tiled room. Devotees entered and prostrated to the gleaming stone. The phallus, which resembles an elongated egg, looked to be made of highly polished marble. It was constantly being washed and stroked by an attendant priest. Belief has it that if the stone is not constantly doused with Ganges water, the heat of Lord Shiva would melt the stone and the temple.

Each of the congregation dropped their heads to the floor multiple times, stood with their hands clasped over their chests and whispered prayers to their god. On finishing, a priest offered them a handful of simple white candy, prasad, and a sprinkle of Ganga water, both of which were blessed through their proximity to the stone. The faithful in return offered fragrant oils, flowers, rice, saffron, coins and bank notes.

Beyond the murmur of prayers, the shuffle of sock feet and the splash of sacred water the room was quiet. It was lit by two fluorescent tubes. The cool light, the whiteness of the stone, the muffled sounds, the measured movements of prostration and prayer – all these slowed my senses. After the commotion of the town’s traffic and my rush to find a guest house, I relaxed in the chilly corner. I could have stayed longer but with sunset the temperature dropped, darkness seemed to be sneaking in through the doorway and the cold of the marble seeped into my spine. People kept trickling in, but I saw the priest yawning. It was time to go.

Vishwanath is one of Lord Shiva’s 1,008 names. In his most popular manifestation he is thought to be a mountain ascetic, a being who lived a reclusive life deep in the Himalyas. But according to legend even the untamed god eventually married. His wife was Parvati, the daughter of Lord Himalaya. Together they emerged on earth at Varanasi, the City of Light, and it was there that the first emanation of the Shiva lingam occurred in what is now the Vishwanath temple. While the lingam represents the raw force of masculine energy, that white-hot male energy emerges from the concave, vulvic form of a stone base. Almost every lingam is seated upon such a stone pedestal, the Yoni or feminine energy. Male and female are reliant on each other for balance. Shiva holds the power of both sexes and the merged stones are a representation of polar energies fused within his body.

November 6

From Uttarkashi I headed north, passing small villages and man-made forests. Hindu monasteries, ashrams, were a frequent sight along the river; some were constructed of plain stone but others looked to be turreted palaces in pink and green, saffron and gold. As I passed I would utter a prayer and put my hands together in respect.

Just before the village of Maneri I was dawdling peacefully along when a pearl white minivan screeched to a halt in front of me. A man in a jean jacket and New York Yankees baseball hat jumped out and strode towards me. By his dress and the swagger of his walk I guessed he was a big city tourist about to ask me to share a cup of tea with them. When he reached me, he thrust his hand in mine, shook it hard and introduced himself: “Jackie Deol, ZEE TV. You’re a tourist, right?”

ZEE TV is one of India’s new wave of television stations, a non-stop barrage of Hindi movies and music videos. Jackie’s enthusiasm was based on his desire to interview me for a news clip. I consented, the camera rolled and I voiced my opinions on Himalayan deforestation, the erosion caused by poorly planned roads and the general lack of infrastructure in the mountains. Jackie wanted to know how Garwahl compared to Kashmir as a tourist destination. I told him there wasn’t much comparison because there was a war going on in Kashmir.

It was not what he wanted or expected. He continued along that line of questioning, but by the end of the interview he was making “hurry up” glances at his cameraman. A large crowd of locals had surrounded us: boys in tattered school uniforms, a man with two buffalo in tow, a trio of women shouldering towering loads of hay. Our interview petered out. Jackie gave a weak thank you and offered me a ride farther up the road. I declined but accepted his now limp handshake. The crew jammed back into the tiny van and leaped from the scene in a screech of tires.

North of Maneri I stopped for a cup of tea at a chai stall near the hydroelectric dam across the Bhagriath. The squared-off wave of concrete was painted in geometric blocks of pink, yellow and blue. It was a Piet Mondrian painting holding back the mighty Ganges. From its base shot a stream of foaming whitewater. Behind it the Ganga was stilled. Along its upper edge walked a technician, hard hat on, clipboard in hand. The concrete barrage was surrounded by rusty barbed wire and was shadowed on the roadside by a line of dilapidated chai shops, none of which appeared to have any electricity.

The road climbed out of Bhatwari town and into more scenic country. There were thick deodar forests reaching away from the road and it was heartening to see jagged snow-mountains to the north on the border with Tibet. The traffic had dramatically diminished, and almost all of it now was human: quick-walking men with bulging canvas rucksacks, children for whom the road was a playground and women travelling in gangs of four or five, each of them burdened with a bale of grass three times their own size.

Those women were walking haystacks, their backs bent under loads that would see their cherished livestock through winter. I was impressed and attracted by those women not because of their looks but because of their grace. When they passed they all smiled or giggled and when they were not chatting they were singing. I have seen some translations of those songs by Anjali Capila.

The water is cool in the mountains.

Do not go away to a strange land, my Lord!

The Gods abide in this land.

Do not go away to a strange land!

The fields are lush and green.

The Himalayan peaks high and covered with snow.

The forest is dense with tall deodar trees.

The water is cool and clean.

My Lord, do not go away to a strange land.

A few times old women stopped and asked me questions in the local Pahari dialect, but I would hold my hands up in admission of my lack of understanding and they would shake their heads and laugh. Once a young woman, a beautiful girl with flawless skin, a tiny ruby stud in her nose and stalks of grass scattered across her jet-black ponytailed hair, asked me in surprisingly good English if I had any cigarettes.

I told her I didn’t smoke and she nodded her head to one side. I was surprised she smoked, as in the Indian villages it is a social faux pas for young women to do so. Trying not to sound like an older brother I asked her what her family thought of that. She laughed, flicked her head around and walked away without answering my question. She was alone and away from her family, so social norms did not apply. Those women had focus and energy and wit, and through it all their hips swayed and their eyes twinkled.

November 7

The next day I reached an altitude where the forest of oak, sal, acacias and conifers mixed with rolling alpine meadows. The air was cool, with the clarity that comes with a dry cold. I felt loose, happy to be free of the lower valley’s heat and human density. Harsil was the first village in the area. I saw five coloured prayer flags like those I had seen through Ladakh, Zanskar, Lahaul and Spiti waving from rooftops in the lower part of town. The upper reaches of the Bhagriath Valley are inhabited by Buddhist Bhotiya people. Originally they are from Tibet, merchants who moved back and forth trading wool and salt from the north for rice and fine cloth from the south. This lucrative trade dried up with the formalizing of borders since India’s independence in 1947 and the Bhotiyas have been forced to settle in the villages close to the border.

In that post-harvest season the houses’ flat roofs glowed with colour – peppers drying, their redness almost black; amber squash with dried and twisted vines still attached; old green hemp; scarlet millet waiting to be threshed; and sheaf upon sheaf of dusty, golden barley. A Buddhist monk in burgundy robes and carrying a bright yellow shoulder bag paralleled my path for a few hundred metres on the far side of the river. It was a surprising sight in the Hindu heartland.

Harsil was the home, at the end of the nineteenth century, of Raja Wilson, an alleged British army deserter who stumbled upon this piece of untapped wilderness and drained it of all it was worth. Wilson started out killing and stuffing rare birds and animals and exporting them to London. The trade came to the attention of the local ruler, the Raja of Tehri, and in tribute Wilson went before him and offered four hundred gold coins. The Raja was surprised to see so much gold, as his own fortune was based on the meagre grain tithe he received from his citizens. He asked Wilson about the source of the money and when the Englishman explained, the Raja named Wilson his “golden bird.” To which Wilson replied, “Oh, there’s much more money to be got. Allow me to cut the trees of the Himalayas and the timber can make us a fortune.” Thus began the deforestation of the Hindu Himalayas.

Wilson pioneered riverborne timber transport in India; he was the original “timber floater.” His discovery initiated the beginning of the Himalayas’ commercial exploitation. When he had made his millions, he returned to British society in Mussoorie, no longer a deserter, but an entrepreneur in a new and needed industry.

That night I camped on a cliff above the Bhagriath River in a small, thinly grassed glen out of which a zen-like garden of small stone monoliths emerged. I ate my dinner at the edge of the abyss watching the late sun streak the turbulent water with flashes of gold, then pink and then red. In the trees I heard the pi … you, pi … you of a Great Hill Barbet and then the answering calls of a dozen of its mates. Night came and from the slopes behind came the hollow tock, tock of axes slicing into wood. Somewhere in the darkness illegal, nighttime loggers were continuing Raja Wilson’s legacy.

November 8

I arrived at Gangotri in the early afternoon and the village was a welcome surprise. After Yamunotri I had expected a ramshackle assortment of disused chai shops girdled by a wasteland of gunny-sack outhouses. I was wrong as the place was neat and tidy, like a European seaside resort in winter. The only inhabitants were a core of diehard saddhus, sincere Hindu holymen, and in this was another marvel for me.

Saddhus are Hindu ascetics who have taken vows to follow a strict path towards higher knowledge. They have given up the first three goals of Hindu life – kama, pleasure; artha, wealth and power; and dharma, duty – so as to concentrate wholly on the fourth: moksha, liberation. It is said that in India today there are between four and five million saddhus. Most of these men (and a lesser number of women) are dedicated to their path, but unfortunately there is a scattering of pretenders. Saddhus live on the charity of others. Indians in general are very generous towards their holy men and for the few less than authentic saddhus, donning robes guarantees them an income.

These false holy men have a tendency to congregate in areas frequented by Western tourists, I would guess because it is almost impossible for someone outside of Hindusim to tell the real from the imitation when it comes to holy men. In truth, I don’t know whether in the previous five years in India I’d actually met a committed saddhu. But the holy men I met in Gangotri were a different breed because they were immersed in their religion. Unlike the saddhus I’d met in Delhi and Calcutta they generally ignored me. By just going about their business the saddhus gave me the impression that Gangotri was special, a place charged with religious energy. My expectations were heightened for the Ganga-Mai temple that is the centrepiece of the village.

Ganga-mai means Mother Ganges, and this is how Hindus perceive the goddess. She is all-giving but sometimes stern, an energy that is with you always. Almost every Hindu home will have a vial of Ganga water in their household shrine. Ganga water is the purest substance on earth and anything or anyone that comes in contact with it is cleansed. The goddess herself is portrayed as a beautiful, voluptuous woman who carries an overflowing Grecian-looking urn in her hands; she is the personification of abundance.

The myth of Ganga’s appearance on earth is a great description of the peculiarly human qualities of the Hindu gods. The legend goes something like this.

King Sagara had two wives. One bore him sixty thousand sons while the other bore him only one, whose name was Asamanjas. The king once wanted to perform a religious ritual that involved a special horse, but the jealous god Indra stole the horse. King Sagara sent his sixty thousand sons to search for the animal. After digging up the entire earth’s surface and then the underworld, they eventually found it in a cave close to where the sage Kapila was in retreat. Thinking that the learned man had stolen the horse, the sons hurled abuse at him. This brought the great master out of his meditation. He was angry and with one look instantly burned the sixty thousand sons to ash with his fiery gaze.

The king heard of his sons’ fate through Narada, the heavenly wanderer. He sent his grandson Ansuman, the son of Asamanjas, to undo the harm. The grandson met Kapila, who was pleased with the young man’s tact. The sons could not be brought back to life, but Kapila granted that the souls of the sons could be released for reincarnation if touched by the waters of Ganga. Ganga-Mai at this time resided in the heavens. However, it was many generations before Bhagriatha, who was Sagara’s great-great-grandson, was able to impress the goddess enough with his devotion that she agreed to come to earth.

But Bhagriatha knew that the impact of her fall to the planet’s surface would destroy the world, and the blow could only be borne by Lord Shiva. Therefore, Bhagriatha went into meditation again and obtained Shiva’s agreement that he would cushion the fall. Finally, the river came down, the thundering descent was absorbed by Shiva’s matted dreadlocks (when you look at images of Lord Shiva, you see in his hair a tiny waterfall of Ganga erupting from it) and thence it fell gently to earth. Where Shiva absorbed the flow’s impact is the site of the present-day temple at Gangotri. Bhagriatha then used his plow and dredged a course for the water to the south (the path of the present-day Bhagriath/Ganges River) and led the goddess to where the ashes of the sixty thousand sons lay. The souls of the sons were liberated and an ocean formed there. Today, this is Sagar Island in Bengal where the Ganges flows into the Bay of Bengal.

The Ganga-Mai temple is simply designed, a pale stone square with four corner turrets and a central tower. It fits unassumingly into its surroundings. The current structure was built by the Gurkha general Amar Singh Thapa in the early seventeenth century.

When I was there the lack of people and the white-noise rush of the Bhagriath River emphasized its tranquillity. The temple was locked (it is closed for the season on the Indian holiday of Diwali each year and reopened in May), but I could see the whitewashed walls of the inner shrine were covered with thousands of red dots, women’s bindis or forehead markings. Bindis mark the area between the eyebrows that is said to be the sixth chakra, or energy centre. In Hindusim it is known as the seat of “concealed wisdom.” In a way, each of those scores of women had placed a piece of their being in the guardianship of the goddess. The pattern created by the red marks was endless, like an Australian aboriginal dot painting exposing a community’s relationship with gods and landscape.

Then, in true Indian form, reality shifted a little off to one side. I realized the three young men sitting at the far end of the otherwise deserted courtyard were tied together and the two burly, half-naked, fully bearded saddhus standing by them were guarding them with sticks.

In Hindi I asked what was going on and one of the guards explained the trio had kidnapped the teenage son of a wealthy Uttarkashi family and had been holding the boy for ransom in one of Gangotri’s deserted shacks. The holy men had known nothing of this but had noticed smoke from the chimney of an empty hut. It would be unreasonable to expect that someone would take over an absent saddhu’s hut without informing the others, so they knew something strange was going on. The holy men surrounded the shack and accosted the gang, who made a run for it. The monks went in pursuit and after a wild chase through the deserted village apprehended them. I liked the image: a gang of ochre-robed, barefoot, dreadlocked saddhus pursuing a trio of knife-wielding gangsters. The kidnappers were being held until the police could arrive from Uttarkashi. I had cup of tea with the saddhu guards; the captives stared at the ground.

I stayed that night in a deserted guest house. It wasn’t officially open but after I enquired about rooms, one of the saddhus, a heavy-set man with dreadlocks that snaked down his back, touched me on the shoulder and silently indicated I should follow him. He didn’t speak the entire time – maybe he had taken a vow of silence – but as we were walking he showed me a key and escorted me into the building and to a room. He didn’t indicate that he wanted any money, but I gave him a donation, saying it was for the upkeep of the temple.

The room was musty and damp. I cooked my dinner outside and ate on a stone courtyard, looking across the darkening river at the pale walls of the temple.

November 9

I had breakfast again in the courtyard. I ate my porridge and saw some of the saddhus descending to the river for their morning dips. I decided to join them. It was fantastically cold. I stripped down to my underwear and made a quick dash up to my knees in the surging water. Bathing in the purest substance in the Hindu world seemed a good way to start the day. Most of the saddhus ignored me, but the one who had quietly shown me the room the night before was sitting on the low stone wall by the temple, and through the forest of his beard he smiled and then waved as I left.

Soon after Gangotri the forest ended and the landscape opened out. It was a twenty-kilometre walk up to the river’s glacial source at Gaumukh. The valley had a symetrical concave sweep that started with the river at its centre and rose outwards and upwards like an elongated bell curve until the greenness of the valley gave way to the rock, scree and ice of the mountains that cradled its edges. I had heard that meditators inhabited the caves that dotted those mountains. I could understand why. With Gangotri as its anchor and the sky as its limit, it was an environment of direction where the focus was upwards; everything in the valley was directed higher – to the glacier, to the summits, to the sky. It was terrain epitomizing the focus that the ascetic must have to achieve a higher state of consciousness.

I liked those mountains with their sloughing, disintegrating, re-creating, impermanence. Falling down, getting up. Growing old, being new – they challenged my idea of the unwavering peak. When I had been a climber I had climbed for the challenge, the physical rush. The mountains had always been something too solid, almost untouchable in their steadfastness. Now I stepped back and saw their changeability, their death and rebirth and, in the view from afar, how they were like me.

Gaumukh, the cow’s mouth in Sanskrit, is the origin of the Ganges, and emanates from the base of the thirty-kilometre-long Gangotri glacier. This is her point of physical manifestation. However, legend has it that the divine source is hundreds of kilometres to the northeast at Mount Kailash in Tibet. Kailash is the mythical Himalayan home of Lord Shiva as well as the cosmological centre of the world to Tibetan Buddhists. It is fitting that she should start there, the Kailash area being the calving ground for a multitude of South Asia’s great rivers: the Ganges, the Tsang-po/Brahmaputra, the Sutlej, the Karnali and the Indus. From the mountain’s base those waters spread east, west and south to encircle the subcontinent, the fluvial structure for the motherland. Kailash is the heart of a liquid mandala, but only Ganga originates from the peak, from a fountain spilling from the meditating Lord Shiva himself.

I approached at sunset. From Bhujbasa, still six kilometres from the source, I could see the snout of the Bhagriath glacier. I knew I’d have to hurry to reach it before dark. The mother was playing tricks on me, for the closer I got the more fantastic became the light reflected on the circling snow peaks. Darkness was advancing and I wanted so much to see the river’s beginning in the transitional light between day and night that I dropped my pack and began to run over the jumbled glacial moraine, leaping from boulder to boulder, agile as a deer. I was a man possessed.

After assuming, a dozen times, that the headwaters were just around the next corner, I suddenly found myself there. I arrived as the mountains glowed in coral red. The infant Ganges emerged from her frigid womb, surrounded by a fortress of ice. The glacier was translucent blue. There again, as on the Phokar River in Zanskar, were the protective colours, turquoise and coral. Again I felt completely at peace in the landscape.

I sat down on a freezing beach at 4,000 metres, the stream an arm’s length away. My shirt and fleece vest were soaked with sweat but I was satisfied with where I was. I crossed my legs and stilled my breath until it was soundless. I sat and sat. I felt a warmth rise up my spine. There was a tingle on my eyelids, as tears welled up and stumbled down my cheeks, falling to the sand. The water of me was absorbed by the earth and taken back by Mother Ganga.

My brother had been taken by water and now I was sitting at the source.

The source. Gareth’s death was a source of fear for me, fear of not deriving the most out of life and at the same time a source of fearlessness in my drive to transcend that. But his death was also an inspiration for trust, because to get the most out of my many experiences I had to trust the people and the land I came in contact with.

The Ganges flowed on, part of a cycle of transformation. Cloud and sun to ice and water, all leading to the mother flow of a continent and a religion. Gareth’s death was the basis of my own transformation, from a world defined by more black and white rules to one ruled by the infinite greys of India. Death was my catalyst for understanding that great paradoxes – why, for example, such a good person as Gareth should die so young – are there not to torment us, but to provoke us into asking more questions, and eventually to accept them for what they are – constant. The world is a matrix of paradoxes and how we navigate the labyrinth is the best definition of our lives.

And the Ganges was faith – the faith of the hundreds of millions of Hindus who believe in the goodness and justice of Ganga-Mai. And again Gareth forced me to accept real faith. His passing pushed me out of the tight, secure world that my life had become and in that movement I gained faith in the goodness of those I met, in India, in the Himalayas, in Europe, in Southeast Asia, in Latin America and across North America. I put myself out there; I had to have faith in their compassion and in the process I gained faith in the landscape, the entity I loved and wanted to walk and ride and paddle through. It was the environment itself, through its unpredictability, infinite variety and constant flux that brought me to understand the permanence of change, the idea that everything and everyone will transform. I learned to accept that this life, this moment, this pain and this joy are fleeting. What is important is to navigate life with goodness.

Most importantly, his passing brought me to look in on myself, to qualify who I am and understand what it is to be good, to live with goodness, in the dozens of cultures I travelled through. Goodness, I understand now, is universal.

My tears dried. Darkness was all around. Where to go? I stood, remembering the night I had learned of my brother’s death and had walked alone in the dark rain to Elk Lake, a first small, confused pilgrimage – a walk of dreams, of hope, hoping that maybe it was all unreal, that when I reached the lake Gareth would stride out of the water, intact, dripping like an ocean swimmer. But at the edge of Elk Lake all there was was darkness and wind and the clicking rustle of conifers swaying and rolling, wailing like a line of invisible mourners. At the edge of a stony beach was the water – black, depthless, forbidding. It had my brother and was not about to give him back.

I went to the edge of the infant Ganga. I sat back on my haunches and leaned over. River stones glinted in the moonlight. I scooped a handful of water, so cold my fingers burned, and drank it. The water was in me.

November 10

I woke the next morning tired and shaky. It had been a hard uphill walk the day before. I had camped on a shaly flat just a few metres above the river’s source. I was torn as to whether I should spend more time at the glacier or move on. I decided to walk. I had been given something timeless, and as at Tabo I didn’t want to spoil it by trapping it in comparisons. I packed in the cool, icy air and headed downstream.

The sun was out. Small golden birds flitted around me like blowing sparks. A scarlet monarch butterfly, the same colour as my backpack, landed on my arm, billowing its wings to evaporate the morning’s dew. The day warmed quickly, and soon I had stripped down to my T-shirt.

I stopped in a grove of chir trees past Bhujbasa and was quietly taking some notes when I looked up. There, three metres away, was a naked man, thin as a stick, with hair that looked like a tattered spray of twigs and wide, piercing eyes. I jumped and let out a scream. The man did a jerky two-stepped dance and chortled hilariously. His laughter brought me back to earth. On a second look I saw he was not naked but wore the skimpiest of loincloths, a rag that barely covered his genitals. He stopped his crazy dance and put one leg up on a boulder, completely exposing his organ, drew a flashing, white-toothed smile across his face and said in English,

“I am Vashisht. You like chillom, my friend?”

A chillom is the hashish pipe used by Shaivite saddhus. In this situation, I decided, it was a good idea.

Vashisht retrieved the needed items from an intricately embroidered lunch box-size bag he carried on his shoulder. He packed a dense ball of black hash into the straight, terra cotta pipe. He held the cylinder, which was a little thinner than a hotdog bun, vertically with both hands wrapped around the tube and lit it by sucking hard while holding a lighter to the hash. It smoldered and he raised the pipe to the heavens offering the first hit to Lord Shiva. He drew deeply and exhaled the smoke upwards shouting, “Bom, Shiva.” Then he sucked hard on the chillom himself and passed it with both hands and an air of respect to me. Vashisht demonstrated the proper way to grip the pipe, explaining the significance of the hand gestures, then showed me how to offer the first taste to Shiva, the Lord of the smoke, and eventually how to draw on the chillom myself. I inhaled and coughed most of it back out.

We talked for an hour. He spoke good English in the Indian way, unusual for a saddhu. He was in his late-twenties; five years before, while still at college in the city of Allahabad, he made the conscious decision to become an ascetic. He had become disillusioned with what he called “family life,” the interminable circle of wants, desires and money. What he craved, he said, was an “eternally satisfying experience” and so Vashisht renounced his past, gave himself to the spiritual undercurrent of India, and had been initiated as a saddhu.

He was a gentle man with an acute awareness of the world around him. He was a mine of information on the mythical geography of the Dev Bhoomi; he claimed to have witnessed precious stones self-generating into images of gods and he knew of sacred caves and flying saints. He talked about the animals of the area – bear, tiger, leopard, bharal deer – and of his ability to communicate with them. He talked of the elusive musk deer, whose scent sack is the most expensive commodity in the world. The power of the musk, said Vashisht, is derived from a plant the animal enjoys that grows on glaciers. Its roots hold a poisonous snake, the deer absorbs the poison when it eats the plant and its scent sack takes on that potency. He told me he had mixed the oil of the deer in the hashish we were smoking; as he said, we were “joining with the deer.”

Vashisht was a practitioner of raja yoga, Hinduism’s “royal road to God,” the most complex and esoteric of the yogas. Through a series of physical and mental exercises, raja yoga exposes the layers of the self for what they are – ego – and eventually brings the practitioner into contact with a core, non-dual transcendental body that Hindus believe is one with the primordial god Brahman. When you achieve this state, you achieve moksha or liberation.

Vashisht was a captivating storyteller and I could have talked for days, but in the middle of what I thought was a great conversation he stood up, said goodbye, and ran off down the trail.

I was high from the hashish and didn’t grasp that he had gone until he was far down the trail. Lethargically, I put on my pack and began walking. A few minutes later I glanced left and saw Vashisht on a moraine field two hundred metres away across the valley. He was barefoot and leaping from boulder to boulder, making his way up to the glacier. He was singing a high-pitched devotional song to Shiva. Ten metres behind him were three full-grown bharal deer.

Late in the afternoon I arrived back in Gangotri and went to the head of the gorge west of the village. From near the temple the river has carved a series of pale granite cataracts, and the water pounds through the tight walls. The stone is sculpted into chambers, pools and caves in organic, flowing forms. It looks as if solid rock is conforming to the goddess’s touch. Deep in the gorge three of the chambers are named – Bhrahmkund, Gaurikund, and Vishnukund – and in the winter, with the river’s reduced flow, it is said you can see self-generating Shiva lingams in the grottoes. I sat on the edge of the falls and stared and stared, wishing for a glimpse of the phallic stones, but it was not meant to be.

That night at Gangotri, over supper with some saddhus who had invited me to their rooms, I was told the full story of the kidnappers I had seen under guard in the temple courtyard. They had now been arrested and taken by the police to Uttarkashi. The teenage abductors had an accomplice, none other than the victim himself. The boy they had taken had planned the job. He had suggested to his friends they kidnap him, split the ransom four ways and head for Delhi. The plot became even stranger when they arrived in Gangotri as they thought they could steal money from the saddhus who, they presumed, were defenseless and had mattresses full of cash from the donations they received during pilgrim season. Even more ludicrous was their admitted intention to climb the technical ice route up past the Bhagriath glacier to the Tapovan meadows and steal money from the famous cave-dwelling saint Mata-ji.

Their plans were ridiculously flawed. The Gangotri babas have no money because they give everything to their temple committees. The sad result was some rattled holy men, confused parents and cowering boys. Worse, though, was that those petty criminals had even considered stealing from the saddhus. Like the icon thieves of Zanskar and Baltistan they had no respect for their past and no clear concept of the future.

Vashisht, who was on his way up the glacier to inquire about Mata-ji when I had seen him, had some interesting opinions on the teenagers’ motivation: “Those boys were rats, sewer rats, but even worse, sewer rats who watch too much television!”