Chapter 11 Gratitude

November 22

Prayag in Sanskrit translates as meeting. Nandprayag is one of the five major river confluences on the pilgrim route from Badrinath to Rishikesh where the river exits the mountains and enters the plain. It marks the joining of the Alaknanda and the Nandakini, a small stream that drains the peaks in the Nanda Devi region.

I was up early. I wanted to see the merging of the two watercourses at sunrise. The air was damp and cold, the kind of clammy nip that enters your bones, and I shivered in the mist that hovered on the water. The rivers moved together easily. It was too early for the clamour of trucks from the road twenty metres above, so there was only the sound of water and stone: hissing, grinding, thunking, rushing, swishing. The rounded boulders lining the bank were glazed by the river’s spray, glistening like semi-precious jewels.

An old man, naked but for a cloth around his waist, stood at the water’s edge, exhaling steamy breath and ladling the freezing water over himself. I could hear the mumble of his morning prayers. The words and the water falling from his body were both taken by the current. He was solid, his body rooted against a fluid background.

Garwahl AND Kumaon, Uttarakhand, India

In the sacred geography of Hinduism, river confluences are a common metaphor; in relation to Shankaracharya’s philosophy, they represent the individual merging with the supreme. The tiniest trickle dropping from an icicle on Nanda Devi joins the stream that feeds the Nandakini; the Nandakini meshes with the Alaknanda, which in turn couples with the Bhagriath to form the Ganga. Ganga irrigates and nourishes hundreds of millions on the Gangeatic plain, but eventually even she joins with the ultimate, the Indian Ocean at the outlet in Bangladesh. Thus it is with the devout Hindu; after lifetimes of meetings and understandings, of integrations with knowledge and experience, the spirit finally coalesces with the one and enters a higher state of consciousness.

I moved east twenty kilometres up the Nandakini River to the town of Ghat. It was a one-lane settlement, an ugly town in a beautiful landscape, a single row of disintegrating concrete blocks cradled in a green valley. All around were thickly treed hills and in the distance to the north peeking over the ridgetops were the snow peaks of the Himalayas.

Both the Nandakini and the Pindar rivers are key routes of the Nand Raj Jat. The 280-kilometre pilgrimage takes place over eighteen stages ranging in altitude from 900 metres to 5,337 metres. For the orthodox it is a journey that should be undertaken barefoot. It is the largest religious undertaking in the Hindu Himalayas and must rank amongst the most arduous mass pilgrimages in the world.

The trek has no regular date but occurs on average every dozen years. The event is the ultimate form of devotion to the region’s patron goddess, Nanda Devi. Nandi Devi means Goddess of Bliss. She is a manifestation of Parvati, Lord Shiva’s wife, and resides on the peak of the mountain named in her honour. Nanda Devi is surrounded by a circle of peaks more than 6,000 metres that are integrated into her mythology: Nanda Ghunti, Nanda’s veil; Nanda Kot, Nanda’s fortress; and Nanda Khat, Nanda’s bed.

The Uttarakhandis see the goddess as a lifesaving force. According to Hindu myth, a flood once covered the entire world. The sage Manu had a premonition of the event, built himself a boat and along with his family survived the disaster. Vishnu then transformed himself into a fish and towed the master to the summit of a mountain. When the waters receded Manu and his family descended the slopes and repopulated the earth. Garwahlis believe the mountain in their midst is Nanda Devi and the people of the area see themselves as the first people.

The timing of the Nand Raj Jat is dependent on the Devi herself. She channels herself through oracles in villages around the mountain’s base to reveal the starting date for the pilgrimage. Once the start has been set, a miracle occurs as before each event a rare four-horned ram is born in the southwest of Chamoli District. The ram is ritually invested with the spirit of the goddess and thereafter leads the procession. The trek passes through dozens of villages along its route and in each one the local temple’s image of the goddess is removed from her place of privilege, dressed in fresh silks, placed on a palanquin and shouldered by the men of the village to join the procession. By the climax of the festival, up to three hundred idols have joined the trek followed by thousands of her devotees. The pilgrimage reaches the high altitude, Hemkund Lake, in late August or early September. There the ram is set free to return to Nanda Devi.

However, I am wary of such mass showings of faith. My doubt stems from childhood experiences at the July 12 Protestant marches in Belfast. The massive parades celebrate the Protestant King William of Orange’s victory over the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Willam had deposed James in 1688 and the campaign was a key event in the ousted king’s unsuccessful attempt to regain the British throne. The victory ensured the continuation of the Protestant hierarchy in Ireland and so is commemorated to this day by hardline Protestants, primarily through the orthodox Orange Order movement, who intentionally organize marches through Catholic areas of the country in a show of historical force.

When I think about the marches I can still feel the pounding of the big lambeg bass drums thumping in my chest, a hammering so ferocious it threatened to throw my heartbeat off-kilter. The energy of the parades was something I was uncomfortable with even as a boy. They were and still are a demonstration of communal bullying. They highlight one of the great contradictions of faith, the conviction of the one side’s interpretation of God melding into a hatred of another side’s understanding of the same God. Superficial belief is too easily mutated. I know now that I need a faith based in logic, an analyzed trust. The words of the Buddha have stuck with me. He said, “Be lanterns unto yourselves.”

He was constantly searching and exploring. The philosophy he created is one of intense self-effort, an ideology of analysis. “Question everything,” he told his followers. Even if his own words were proven baseless, they too should be discarded because to cling to them was to hide from the truth.

As I ascended towards the Bimaik Pass, the houses thinned and again I entered coniferous forest where the scent of resinous needles of blue pine, chir, and deodar and the whistle of a breeze came through sharp trees. I stopped in a meadow. It was another clear night. I made tea, rice, dal. I ate my dinner in silence and watched the sun paint the peaks around Nanda Devi to the northeast.

November 23

On the far side of the pass I descended the Pranmati River towards Tharali. Ten kilometres into the day I caught up with a young man wearing a baseball hat, Nike sport shoes and a nylon pack. He was much too modernly dressed to be local. We were surprised by each other’s appearance; he did a double take when I came up behind him. I smiled, he greeted me in English and after an impulsive handshake we sat on a nearby rock and shared some water.

Prem Singh was nineteen years old, with skin the colour of perfectly brewed milk tea and the dark down of a first moustache gracing his top lip. He spoke such excellent American-accented English that initially I presumed he must be a non-resident Indian, someone who had grown up outside the subcontinent, but he was actually from the industrial city of Ludhiana in Punjab state. He was a student taking a year off college and had walked the Curzon Trail, so called after the British viceroy who trekked in the area in 1905, from Joshimath to Ghat, and now he was continuing on to the Pindar River.

We chatted for an hour about Indian interpretations of America. It was the first time in a week that I had had such a chance and was more than willing to listen. I was impressed by his knowledge of Western music and films.

I asked him if there was much of a rock music scene in Ludhiana, wondering where he had acquired such an encyclopedia of knowledge, but he shook his head and said, “Naw, but me and my friends watch a lot of MTV.”

Prem was travelling by himself. Other than saddhus and sunnyasins, he was the first Indian solo trekker I had ever met. India is a densely populated place, but in my years there I rarely saw people travelling alone. Security on the subcontinent lies with family and caste, so for him to be on his own was a radical departure. I had to ask him about this. Again he returned to satellite TV as he said, “Man, I watch a lot of American movies and the ones I love are the ones where the guys go out and do stuff on their own. They don’t wait around, they just do it.”

As we were about to start walking again Prem asked if he could take a picture of us together. I agreed and as we stood, shoulder to shoulder, waiting for the camera’s self-timer to click, he said, half under his breath, that it was for his father. “I told him I wouldn’t walk by myself. If he knew I was trekking on my own he’d kill me.”

We continued down the valley. In the river seething whitewater churned over spray-shot boulders. Across a long chute of broken rapids I saw goats, their wool the same colour as the waves. Rusty red and saffron leaves from oak and sal trees still held to some of the branches and shook in the breeze. For many kilometres we tracked a caravan of mules. The donkeys threw up clouds of dust and by the time we reached the road both of us were powdered in a pale coating of silt.

In Tharali we shared a room at a guest house on the main road. The room was another concrete cave with an internal skin of peeling paint. The next morning Prem was planning to get a bus to the nearest railhead at Haldwani and then back home to Punjab.

Sleep came easily but late in the night I woke suddenly – someone was speaking in the room. I sat up with a jolt and listened intently, but it wasn’t someone else talking. Prem had been whispering song lyrics in his sleep. It was ‘Come as you are’, a Nirvana song I knew well.

The next morning I was up early. I would be walking before Prem caught his bus. We chatted over a cup of tea, but I made no mention of the song from the night before.

November 24

I followed the Pindar River five kilometres east and then climbed south on a road that switchbacked to a ridge where the route eased its ascent and contoured the land. I only wanted to reach the town of Gwaldam on the border between the Garwahl and Kumaon districts. It would be a relaxed twenty-kilometre day.

After Garwahl, Kumaon is the smaller of the two administrative divisions of Uttarakhand state. The area was annexed from Nepal by the British after the 1815 Gurkha war and for seventy years the entire area was administered by British bureaucrats before it was partitioned into Garwahl, Terai and Kumaon. The Kumaonis claim a different origin and dialect than the Garwahlis. Legend has it that the Kassite Assyrians left their homeland of Kummah near the Euphrates River in the fifth century B.C.E. and settled in the area as the Kumaoni Koliyan tribe.

I arrived at Gwaldam in late afternoon. It is a substantial village straddling the ridge between the Pindar and Gomati river watersheds. Thousands of Indian tourists make the trip there every summer as the village has a famously unobstructed panorama of Nandi Devi to the northeast. But it was early winter now, the air was cool and the one main street was empty. Fortunately, there was a good Indian sweet shop still open and after settling into a nearby guest house with a worthy view to the north, I happily sat in the café with my book, a cup of chai, and a plate of sweet milky treats.

I sipped my tea and the sun moved towards the horizon. The shadows on the street lengthened and I looked up to see Nandi Devi’s glacial flanks take on the heated colours of sunset. I hurriedly paid for my food, left the restaurant and clambered up a nearby hill searching for the best view.

In Hinduism what I was doing would be called darshan, the practice of being in the presence of a holy entity. Merely the process of sitting quietly and observing a beatific, religiously charged object, whether a living being, an image, a river or a holy mountain, is enough to be gifted its energy. I was in search of darshan from the Goddess of Bliss, Nanda Devi. What made my audience even more powerful was that in her form as Nanda Devi, the goddess is considered to be at her most beautiful and therefore most beneficial.

I found a vantage point a few hundred metres above the village and sat on a smooth boulder beneath a pine tree. The mountain was transforming from a thick fin of snow and ice to a vaporous mirror of the day’s last light. The amber shadow play moved across the peak’s sheer south face in slow, almost imperceptible waves. Nanda Devi absorbed the sunset’s colours seamlessly, individually. The light was changing so subtly that it appeared to be moving independent of the transition from day to night; colour was displacing time. I lost track; sky and earth worked together for those precious seconds to prove the Goddess of Bliss’s true divinity, her place of supremacy on a horizon studded with remarkable peaks.

I waited and waited for the mountain to be absorbed by darkness and when finally she was only a black outline against an even blacker sky, I slowly made my way down the hill through the dark of the new moon night. I stumbled to my guest house door, fumbled for the room key deep in my pocket and for a minute was unable to find it or the lock. Temporary blindness – maybe that’s a by-product of darshan with the goddess.

I have sometimes wondered if my time in the hospital morgue when I first saw Gareth’s body after the accident was in some way darshan. The room, silent, cool and only half lit, had a sense of the temple around it. Gareth wasn’t a holy spirit, but he was a good, gentle soul, whose path to somewhere better, I have no doubt, was facilitated by having lived a life that caused so little pain to others. The reaction of us all, Mum, Katrina and I, was emotional in the extreme; tears were the only response to seeing Gareth lifeless and yet so peacefully there before us. I think of darshan in that instance because of the effect seeing him had on me. There was relief – he was no longer lost. Just knowing that cleared a path. There were many unseen, unknown obstructions in the way ahead but I could move forward now, stumbling, ever so slowly out of the shadows.

November 25

In the morning, descending from the heights at Gwaldam I came to the Gomati River. The valley widened, the trees disappeared and were replaced by a checkerboard of paddies. It was almost December, but at that lower altitude the temperature soared as the noon sun beat down relentlessly. The villagers wore sweaters and woolly hats. I suffered in a T-shirt.

I climbed again, this time towards Kausani, another ridgetop village, this one between the Gomati and Kosi rivers. Kausani is best known as the home of the Anashakti Ashram, a community set up by Mahatma Gandhi’s disciple Sarala Ben to put into practice the great man’s principles of truth, nonviolence, vegetarianism, brahmacarya (asceticism), faith and simplicity. Nowadays, however, it is a destination like Gwaldam that swells in summer with an influx of tourists hungry to see Nanda Devi at sunset.

Again I entered forest; the shade cooled and brought me back in tune with my steps. I dropped into the thump of my feet and the motion of my pack. I was walking intently, but just below the village I heard mumbling from my left and in my distracted state I looked up to see a severed head on a concrete wall. I stopped and stared. The head summoned me three times before I realized who it was talking to. The face was that of a bank clerk, slightly jowly but well sunned, the bald head meticulously shaven. It was telling me in English of a shortcut to Kausani on the far side of the compound. The head came out from behind the wall and was joined with a body. The man made small talk and offered to show me the path. I followed him through a small, well-organized vegetable garden where spinach, peas, carrots, potatoes and late season tomatoes still bloomed. He pointed to the shortcut trail, then gave a Cheshire cat grin and said, “But come on, there is no rush. You must come in for a cup of coffee.”

From outside it was a fine-looking house. I expected to be escorted to a well-appointed living room, but instead he brought me around the back to a tiny cell; the ceiling was criss-crossed with electrical wires, the floor was uncovered concrete, and a single rope-strung bed stood propped vertically against one wall. He offered me a seat in a patio chair that looked to have been salvaged from a dumpster and recovered with burlap. I sat and was shocked at how comfortable it was.

“Call me Baba,” the man said.

On his bookshelf, which, from the bags of rice and lentils interspersed with the books must have doubled as his larder, I noticed a picture of the Indian saint Ramakrishna. I commented on this and quoted a passage I had recently read: “Mãyã (Sanskrit for illusion), that is the ego, is like a cloud. The sun cannot be seen on account of a thin patch of cloud; when that disappears one sees the sun.”

The Baba erupted into ecstatic laughter and gave me a smothering bear hug. He was a man full of emotion. My Ramakrishna quote was enough to send him into a half-hour talk on the significance of the saint and the importance of the quote.

The Baba was a follower of Swami Vivekanda, a late nineteenth-century Hindu philosopher and the premier disciple of Ramakrishna. The swami believed that Advaita Vedanta was not just a religious way of thinking but a way to approach social and even political issues. Vivekanda invented the concept of “Daridra narayana seva,” the service of God through poor human beings.

Baba-ji was from a wealthy Kolkata family. He had been raised in a cosmopolitan household, his relatives visited from around the world and in his boarding school the students were the children of diplomats and international business people. From the Bible to Buddhism, Sufism to Shiva he had studied all the world’s great religions, but had settled his practice in the roots of his Hindu background.

The Baba summarized his conviction in one word, “Joy.” His instructions for life were simple: “Search for the bliss that is endless.” I asked what he meant by this and he explained the bliss that is endless “is the bliss that knows no self.”

He was boundlessly cheerful and appeared to be more interested in my happiness than his own. He barraged me with questions, tea, biscuits and commentary. I couldn’t help but be caught in his exuberance, for when he talked his whole personality brightened.

He was fascinated by my walk, my encounters with people, my understanding of the landscape and my interest in religions. He harangued me to tell him more and more about the trip, but eventually he grew serious.

“Jono,” he said, “you are walking all over, meeting so many people, discovering so many things, but please remember the most important journey is the pilgrimage to understand the heart. When you are confident enough to undertake that trip, then you will find a joy that is boundless. Confidence is faith and faith is joy.”

Evening was darkening his little garden, and though he offered me a sleeping space on his floor, I declined. There was really nowhere for my long body in his tiny room. I thought we would both be happier if I found a room in the village. He gave me a huge bear hug and I left. Other than Baba-ji, which means uncle in Hindi, I never learned his full name nor did he ask me mine.

November 26

Another morning and the path led downwards again, this time to the Kosi River. As on the upper reaches of the Bhagriath, the Kosi has cut a deep, winding path through a narrow sandstone valley. Its current has formed smooth curls and holes in the malleable silt stone. Every now and then I would stop and gaze, caught in the water’s movement. There was no end to the flow.

In the afternoon, after a lunch of tea and chapatis on the side of the road, I could see far above me the outskirts of Almora. It would be another long ascent to end the day. The climb, however, gave me the chance to see the town from the bottom up. Almora is a community of layers. Lower down I moved through an area of government offices. They looked neglected, their foundations wasting away, walls splattered with urine and betel nut juice, the exteriors raw and bony, as if everything had been pilfered from the shells. With no character in them and no admiration for them, those buildings seemed the woeful by-product of an uncaring bureaucracy.

Above this lay a strata of decaying relics, one-hundred-year-old architectural memories, vestiges of a time gone by: the mansions of the British Raj. They were once regal slate and stone villas. From below they looked to be a matrix of peaked roofs and arched windows, steep-roofed fantasies transported from Surrey and Kent. The remains in Almora are distinguished but sad; hand-worked brick walls fall inwards, chimneys have been toppled by winds, leaded-glass windows are missing jigsaw-puzzle pieces.

On the town’s crest was a last layer, where the old bazaar tops the ridge; it is an avenue of masterfully laid paving stone lined with rabbit hutch shops. Each ground-floor storefront is similar in size and design to the last, yet their interiors teem with a great jumble of different products. Upstairs from the retail space are the merchant’s living quarters and from the intricately carved and endlessly diverse window grills and tiny balconies families look down upon a scene unchanged for hundreds of years.

In Almora I found that people in some strange way reflected the architectural layering of the town. I met Mr. Verma in a local chai shop that surprisingly served brewed coffee and tasty gulab jamun sweets. He was an assistant engineer with the electrical department and a talkative man, interested to know my impressions of all the places I had visited within India, but he had little curiosity about the world outside. He was obsessed with cricket and the army and was somehow able to relate the places I had been to throughout the Himalayas to those two topics; a certain cricketer who was born in Kashmir had these scores in a test match from decades before, or a general made a particular decision in Ladakh that affected the outcome of the 1962 Sino-Indian war. Mr. Verma loved India, and he believed in its superpowerdom, but he was not interested in judging his convictions against anything outside the subcontinent.

In the stratum of neglected mansions Mr. Shah owned the dilapidated one-hundred-year-old hotel I stayed in. The building must have been beautiful in its day, full of nooks and crannies and secret passageways. But now it was a wheezing skeleton of cedar and stone; I would wake at night to the moan of the wooden superstructure and the scuffle of small animals through the room. Taking a shower involved obliging unknown powers of plumbing. It was fitting the hotel was managed by that spritely octogenarian. He had been in the hospitality business since the time of the British and was an effortless schmoozer. Mr. Shah had an amazing talent for sizing up customers and, with his toothless smile, separating you from your money: a bottle of mineral water here, a guided tour of old Almora there, all the while making you feel he was providing an essential service.

Mr. Shah’s antithesis was his servant, Pradeep Dabar, a young Nepali who lived in a room behind a shop near the bazaar. He had left home when he was nine years old after the death of his father and had worked in a succession of cafés and chai stalls, making his way west along the Nepali Terai and Kumaon until he arrived in Almora and had secured work with Mr. Shah. He had started working for food alone but now made a small wage. Pradeep had the contorted body language of a defeated man but the twinkling eyes of a pixie. He really seemed to enjoy helping. Yes, I tipped him well, but unlike Mr. Shah he never reminded me that ten percent was the usual rate on all transactions.

The only other guest in the hotel was a young Finnish man, Juha Pukkola. Like many Finns he spoke perfect English so we talked well into the night. Juha was from Helsinki, but spent most of his time now in India. He was a tall fellow with dark, narrow eyes and the thick, straw-coloured hair you would expect from a Finn. He was a chain-smoker, with a slight tremor in his fingers, and when he smiled his teeth were a jagged mash of yellowing stumps. I presumed, since he spent so much time in the country, that he worked for a non-governmental organization but when I pressed him he admitted he was a drug runner.

Juha transported hashish from the Western Himalayas to Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki. It’s something I could never do – I don’t have the nerve for it, and therefore have a vicarious fascination with the people who do. We talked about the logistics of smuggling, an intricate process of trusting, paying and deceiving a multitude of officials. He acknowledged it was a stressful career. I was shocked when he called it a career, but he insisted that if the “transits” were well-planned there was little to be worried about and he thought he could continue smuggling for many years to come. I probed him more on this and he admitted that he felt trapped by the huge amounts of money he could make on every trip. “It’s a gamble,” he said, “and there’s a rush in that. And when it works I get a shitload of cash and feel like a king.”

November 27

From Almora to Artola the road interconnects and traverses a long series of ridges through southern Kumaon. At Artola I headed north on a branch road to Jageshwar, one of the most sacred Saivaite temples in the region. The path descended through a forest of mixed conifers. Up until then the entire route from Almora had been devoid of timber. The slopes had mostly been entirely cleared and rice paddies were everywhere, but where in Garwahl the fields had been framed by trees, in Kumaon there were only bushes and vegetable gardens. I decided that the integrity of the Jageshwar watershed must be the result of the population’s reverence for the shrine. Beside the road a pristine creek jumped between mossy boulders. At the wood’s edge was a web of the deepest green; barberry and rhododendron, silver weed and ferns waved in the breeze. The trees – chir, deodar and a few miniature oak – were an emerald reflection of the forest floor. The woods were surprisingly dense. By the road, colours were lightened by the sun but the deeper into the trees you looked, the darker it became until it disappeared into earthy blackness.

Seven kilometres on, the forest opened onto a quiet hamlet where woodsmoke hung in the cool air, creating a blue-tinted ceiling. On first impressions there appeared to be an order, a sense of balance about the place; the temple complex straddled the creek and was offset in the fore- and background by an unbroken, curving line of woods. It was late afternoon and the light was mellowing. I headed for the main compound, a group of more than one hundred carved stones and half a dozen temples, the most important of which holds what some devotees believe is a Jyotir Linga – a rare, spontaneously created Shiva phallus in stone.

The temple’s interior was a crisp stone cavern. Roof openings directed shafts of light, silver funnels against the dark stone, into the dim space. Everything glimmered from constant washing. It was crowded with brass and copper religious utensils; lustrous, pregnant shapes glowed in the shadows. In and out wandered the priests, who seemed absorbed in the business of propitiating Shiva. The main lingam was draped in fresh flowers. A bright red silk cloth stiched in gold encircled the yoni base of the moist phallus.

I sat on a stone bench off to one side and stared at the lingam. The place was humid and cool. I had been walking for twelve hours and was tired and hungry, but my mind was focused. The lingam stood in the middle of what felt like a medieval cathedral, and as I concentrated on it, it seemed to pulse, to beat almost as if taking in and exhaling breath. Had the thousands of years of devotion lavished on the stone given it some form of life, transformed it into what the community wanted it to be, a living, breathing emanation of the deity who ruled their lives? The coldness of the bench and the damp floor on my bare feet had no register because I was focused on the organic nature of that inorganic object, but a clatter of metal plates against the slate floor broke my concentration. The stone’s breathing dissipated and I was once again in the moist interior of a Hindu temple.

There were so many times on the walk when I had been struck by what had seemed to be the living spirit of inanimate objects – mountains, rivers, architecture, painting, stones, sculpture. No doubt the months of walking, day after day of being alone with only my thoughts and the manic consistency of my steps, had opened me to those possibilities. I was ready to accept what before I would so easily have dismissed. The weeks of walking meditation and the constant interaction with what I wanted to learn had opened me in ways I couldn’t understand. There was no logic to so much of what I had experienced. I was the freest and happiest I had been since Gareth’s death, but in the back of my mind I worried that the magic of what I had felt would not transfer to my life beyond the Himalayas.

To one side of the temple a group of congregants started chanting, deep, pulsing tones that reverberated and amplified around the chamber. The temple walls echoed the mantras, and they became louder, more imbued with the wild spirit of Shiva. The chanters were rooted in their place, and the building trembled with their devotion for the god.

November 28

When I left Jageshwar at dawn, mist clung to the lower branches of the trees. It was a murky morning. I was walking in an interzone, in a time before daylight in an ancient forest.

Back at Artola I again headed east, following the road along endless ridges. The day wore on, the light grew stark and the details of the land became hazy, obstructed by heat and dust. Then after lunch, the process reversed itself as the light mellowed with afternoon progressing to evening.

Village after village floated by, nameless clusters of huts, their name signs rusted to incoherence. Each one melted into the next. Every hamlet appeared to be just a slight variation on the last. In each village I drew a swarm of youngsters. Like hungry mosquitoes the kids followed me, sometimes for thirty or forty minutes. Although it was incredible to think that a red rucksack and faded yellow sleeping pad could provide so much amusement, I was hardened to my followers now and could ignore the superfluous chatter of a dozen gossiping kids for as long as I needed. I focused on the next footfall. Being stared at and talked about was a reality I had to accept. I was the reluctant ambassador of a far-away world.

But one man didn’t stare. I was between villages on a treeless section of road that ran along a barren ridgetop. He came up out of a paddy field. He was old, had thin grey hair and a patchy beard. He wore a battered woolen vest and an off-kilter Nehru hat. On his shoulders rode a small child of five or six years old, maybe his grandson. I was impressed by the way he moved, one footstep to the next with considered precision. It was continuous motion but stuttered as if he tested every step before committing to his forefoot. There was something meditative about his progress.

I stopped. He moved towards me, his eyes straight ahead. The child was speaking quietly, his head moving this way and that, an inquisitive little boy. The couple came broadside and I could see the old man’s unblinking eyes. His pupils were clouded with cataracts – he was blind. The child’s words were coded directions, and every step they made was carefully planned. The pair moved by and as they passed the little boy turned and smiled.

It’s hard for me not to think of Gareth when I remember that image. There was never that symbiosis between us, but still when he passed away something abandoned me. I was emptier. Part of me was gone and it has never truly returned. At first it manifested as an almost physical pain in my stomach; it honestly felt as if there was hole boring into my guts. Over many months that bodily ache left me, but the psychological damage took years to reconcile.

Last year my older brother was contacted by a friend who directed him to a website that had a video of Gareth on it. Strangely, in this age of ubiquitious recording, this is the only moving image we have of him. Peter sent me the link and nervously I opened the clip. It’s a grainy black and white scene of a few teenagers on a rain-soaked outdoor basketball court talking amongst themselves. The camera pans shakily around the kids and then settles on a tall wet young man with tight dirty blond curls and a shy smile. He laughs and adds a few comments to their personal conversation. My jaw dropped. There he was again after all these years, walking, talking, the same jovial yet timid teenager who left us all those years ago. I immediately burst into tears. I haven’t been able to go back to the clip. The emotion it brought up was shocking, and I could feel the empty void in my belly opening ever so slightly again.

I’ve spent years thinking about what that emptiness is: lost potential, the destruction of expectations, the damning of innocence, the ruin of a carefully created worldview, the undermining of a family, the pressure of knowing that no matter how good you are it can all end in a flash – all these have fed that black hole in my soul. Yet out of that nihilism and pain I have stumbled into being a happier person. Gareth’s death was the bottom of the barrel and to climb out demanded strength that has held me in good stead. I’ve pushed myself to the edge in so many ways that I now understand my own limits – what I can and cannot do, what I’m capable of in this life. Gareth is gone, part of me is gone, and I accept there’s no way to get that back and yet he’s left something with me. His legacy is timeless. It’s simply to get the most out of the time I have in this body. Every day, find the beauty.

My admirers in the Kumaon villages drifted away as evening approached – suppertime was calling them – and as the light faded I searched for a chai shop. It was dark when I found what I was looking for. The white glare of a kerosene lamp called out of the blackness. Inside the bamboo hut was warm. Three men were seated by a crackling fire, but they squeezed down the bench and made room for me.

An expressionless old lady in a threadbare, burgundy salwar khamiz appeared. The man farthest away inquired in Hindi if I wanted potato or spinach curry. I hadn’t asked about food. I replied I’d like both and he and the man sitting beside him laughed. Within ten minutes the food appeared, a small mountain of rice and vegetables. Three sets of eyes were glued to my every move. They were happy when I asked for more of the old lady’s hot lime pickle. I finished the meal and set the plate on the dirt floor beside me. The old lady came silently and took it away. The man who had asked me if I needed food talked to her. She said nothing but nodded. When she came back she placed a bottle of cloudy liquid and a glass near my feet. Each of the men received a glass. The man at the far end leaned forward, held his up, pointed at the bottle indicating I should pour the alcohol and smiled. He had three gold teeth and in the firelight his eyes glinted the same colour as the precious metal.

I poured a finger’s worth of the smoky liquid into my glass, nodded my appreciation and handed it down the line. Each in turn filled his glass and on the prompting of the far-end man, we raised our glasses and called, “Cheers.” It turned out that this was the extent of my new friends’ English.

We were up until very late that night. I’m sure we talked about many things, and I know we must have laughed a lot because my sides hurt, but those are the things you generally do when you get drunk. However, the specifics of the evening elude me because my mind is a blur from not long after we started on the local liquor to when I woke the next morning, horizontal on the bench with three snoring bodies lying at obtuse angles from the smoldering fire. The old woman was nowhere to be seen.

November 29

Starting from the Ramganga River it was a long climb thirty kilometres to the district capital of Pithoragarh. The road clings to a hillside devoid of cover, its surface viciously channelled by hundreds of monsoon rains. I floated, oblivious to the diesel-reeking transport trucks and the buzz of overhead transmission lines. Villages melted in my passing as the road levitated from its stony bed. I saw children playing games, exuberant and full of energy, ignorant of the torn landscape around them. I saw winter vegetables, chard and spinach, bursting through the thin soil. On rooftops I saw sheafs of drying chilies, red peppers and millet laid out across terra cotta tiles, red upon red upon red. Two magpies cackled at me as I passed their roost, telling jokes in a language I didn’t understand. An old lady sat on a flattened stone by the roadside. She smiled, pressed her hands together in prayer and shouted her greeting, “Namaste” – I bow to you.There was a hurry about my movements now. Inside I knew the walk was ending and there was an uneasiness in my steps.

Before I realized it night was falling and I was on the outskirts of Pithoragarh. I found a room in another concrete-box guest house and went in search of dinner.

The dhaba next door was overpopulated with employees and absent of customers. The making of my curry, dal and rice was a labour of a half dozen men, all moving at a snail’s pace. It must have been the gloomy mood I had been in all day but, although it had not bothered me for all the years I had been in India, that night I was frustrated by the great waste of potential in the men I saw standing around the café doing nothing and in that microcosm I saw something of India and Hinduism.

The Vedic concept of Varna or social categories was developed with an understanding of the differences between people. Everyone’s path to realization is individual and this is reflected in the Sva-Dharma, or code of practice. As the Bhagavad Gita says, “Better to do one’s own caste duty, though devoid of merit, than to do that of others, however well performed.”

Unfortunately, the idea of duty, the performance of one’s practice, has become synonymous with specialization, and obligations to caste have become so codified that creativity has been squashed. Caste has been polluted by its bureaucracy and transformed into feudalism.

The making of my cup of tea that evening was an example. One man took my order for chai; another, and not the man who made chapatis or the man who made dal, made the tea. The making of tea is a ritualized ceremony in an environment of repetition, and yet he could not deliver it three metres to my table. That function had to be performed by his underling, a boy of maybe ten years old who was summoned from across the road where he was watching Hindi films in the display window of an electrical shop. He shuffled over, moved the chai, and in the process spilled it on my table. He shrugged in apology and returned to the movies. Neither he nor any of the cooks could clean it; for that, a separate, even younger, member of the crew was summoned from the rear of the restaurant. He appeared lethargically, barefoot, clutching a greasy rag, and proceeded to move the spill around the arborite tabletop, not so much sopping it up as dispersing it over a wider area. He then shuffled back to his corner accompanied by a chorus of unwarranted abuse from the sweaty chai-wallah.

I went back to my room trying not to think about the loss of human promise such a system engendered. As I passed the electrical shop on the other side of the street, I could see the boy who had moved my tea from the kitchen to the table dancing in time with the Bollywood movie he and a friend were watching. He saw my reflection in the mirror, turned and waved excitedly. “God night, Mister,” he shouted, still gyrating his hips like a dance star. Considering the service at the dhaba had been far from good and we were in the land of the ever-present God, it was a fitting farewell.

November 30

The landscape I moved through on the thirty kilometres between Pithoragarh and Julaghat on the Mahakali River forecasts the apocalyptic future of the Indian Himalayas. The rocky slopes were dotted with scattered low-lying brush. The forest had disappeared long ago. There is nothing to hold it back, so the monsoon slides off the hills as fast as it falls and in the process takes with it what little topsoil is left. The land’s thin veneer of fertility is stripped away. Even in December, the sun routed the land; the heat felt like an oppressive weight. That environment, at 1,500 metres, looked less healthy than valleys I had walked through at 4,500 metres.

The road moves due east and the route itself is a travesty of engineering. Washouts emerged every kilometre or so, and great chunks of its surface had slipped away. I saw boulders, gravel and flattened lumps of ashphalt sitting in village gardens. I suppose the road was another example of entropy; everything constructed and left to its own accord will deconstruct.

Julaghat is a typical frontier community, a haphazard, shantytown tenanted by a disproportionate number of little shops all catering to the Nepali population freely crossing the border. Because there are no roads on the Nepali side, traversing the river on a thin, steel cable footbridge is the fastest way for people for thousands of square kilometres inside Nepal to access a road-serviced market. The main bazaar was a bustle of activity. Business is the lifeblood of borders and the lines of stores and open stalls traded everything from cheap tin spoons to computer software. The market was framed at either end of its 400-metre stretch by open sewers.

I left the bazaar and went in search of the river. I followed a trail past a cluster of concrete, monsoon-stained government buildings and down onto a grey beach. I took off my pack, boots and socks and wriggled my toes in the freezing grey sand, feeling the grit rise comfortably around my feet. It was as if the land was conforming to my touch.

Before me was the Mahakali River. It originates on the Tibetan border at the southern edge of Mount Kailash’s watershed, another river like the Indus and the Ganges that reaches south from the mountain that Hindus and Buddhists believe to be the subcontinent’s axis mundi. The Mahakali is the river of Great Kali – the goddess of death. Kali is the ferocious aspect of Parvati, but on that silent inlet I saw nothing predatory. The river was quiet, smooth, unrushed, almost patient. There was no whitewater on that stretch, just constant movement, an interminable current. It was the emerald-blue of glacial streams. The ochre cliffs on the Nepali shore reddened in the evening’s dwindling light. Turquoise and coral – the protective colours. Refuge in landscape.

To my right an old woman washed. A wet cotton white sari clung tight to her thin body. Shampoo foam fell as white clouds from her hair. I could see the frothy drifts like tiny icebergs rounding a further turn in the river. They were moving south to merge with the Ganges and eventually reach the ocean: the mother spirit. Noticing me the woman smiled, which was strange because women in India usually turned away if I looked at them. I smiled back, rolled up my pants and waded in to knee-depth. I spread my arms wide, curled my toes into the riverbed sand and turned to face the heavens. I closed my eyes, breathing deeply. I let the river run and roar through me. I slowed and tried to make my breath as tranquil as the stream. I scooped water – liquid blessings from the mountain’s heart – and doused myself. Now I was surrounded by the river that had been my focus for those four months. I felt enveloped by so much water that my mind itself was becoming fluid – unfettered – clear, moving with grace, without fear, without end.

Gareth was lost in the water, and his remains are still there. I remembered back to the year after his death. My family had gathered at the National Rowing Centre at Elk Lake on the anniversary of his passing. It had been a difficult year, the most gruelling in my life, but for others in my family it had also been a traumatic twelve months. My parents had divorced, although the process had been underway before Gareth’s death, and my sister, who had been trialling for the Olympic field hockey team, had been cut in the very last stages of the selection process. All our lives had been changed forever.

We borrowed a boat from the rowing centre, an inflatable Zodiac – an unsinkable coach boat – some lessons had been learned from the tragedy. The five of us motored out to the far end of the lake where the rowing shell had capsized. It was a cool, cloudy day but the surface was glassy smooth, an opposite extreme to the night of the accident. I trailed my fingers through the water; it was cold and silky smooth, almost inviting. With us, in an urn, were Gareth’s cremated ashes. We were giving him back to the lake. We each took a turn in releasing him to the water. It was the first time I had seen bodily ashes and was shocked to realize how a physical being could be reduced to a few handfuls of dust. There were tears again; his passing was still too close for any understanding. The ashes were taken by the breeze wafting across the surface and spread wide – an entire life reduced to a mottled tinge on a black glass surface.

The motor throbbed behind the boat. We hugged each other; few words were spoken. The western lakeshore was bordered with dense conifer forest, dark and ominous, like the only future I could imagine for myself.

Above the Mahakali River the sun was setting. Violet and saffron streaked the thin cirrostratus clouds skitting just above the horizon. Rocks pulled by the current thunked and banged in an invisible rolling dance along the riverbed. Every cloud was perfectly different. Bright Mars shone in the west, the first star.

I made a silent wish.

I scooped more water.

I thought of Gareth, completely, putting him back together piece by piece, filling out the shattered puzzle that had lain in my psyche for so long. Months of walking, of being alone with him in the mountains had gifted me the chance to view him from every angle, to grasp him again in an innocent embrace. He was gone but that loss, I realized now, could not destroy the love I would always have for him. In the end, all we have is love.

I absorbed myself in the process of gratitude, simply recalling Gareth, family, friends and events while watching the river.

Every good thought is a prayer.

I don’t know how long I stood in that thigh-deep backwater, but when I looked again, the woman in the white sari was gone.