Dial and Talk Foreign at Once, page 9
Back on my boat, my uncomplaining old shikara man took me next to the Floating Gardens – drifting silently through a wonderland of winding water-corridors carpeted with meadow-green lichen and pink-red water lilies. Then he located the ‘old market’ – a floating bazaar which moved daily – and gladly guided me to the best places for shopping.
Though shopping was no longer really an option. ‘Kashmir is turning out expensive,’ I thought as the tour came to an end. ‘Somehow, I’ve got through a hundred dollars in just four days.’ On the plus side, this part of India was really growing on me. Escaping off the busy river into my quiet houseboat haven was great. ‘You just can’t do this in India proper,’ I told my Walkman after a nice hot shower. ‘No escape possible, except in luxury hotels. Sometimes, not even then!’
My last full day in Kashmir opened at 3am when I was woken by all the crockery in the small kitchen behind my bedroom clattering away. This turned out to be Gulam’s pet rat ‘Billy’. Billy, I learnt, came and ate any dinner leftovers each night. He was particularly fond of curry.
The rest of the day was high adventure. I boarded the 9.30am day tour bus to Gulmarg with considerable anticipation. Situated 53kms from Srinagar, this beautiful mountain resort was famous for its flowers, for its outstanding natural golf course (at 2650 metres, the highest in the world) and for its winter skiing resort. ‘In high season, it’s packed out,’ Megan had told me. ‘Busloads of rich Indians roll in every few minutes and are greeted by exultant hordes of pony-men, toboggan-men, ski-instructors and assorted guides. The women go skiing in saris and army boots, the men dress up in strange coats made from acrylic fur, with high collars, gold buttons, and huge plastic elasticated belts.’
But this was not high season. It was about as low season as it could get. And about two hours out, as we got to Tangmarg (13kms below Gulmarg), we realised we had a problem. The snow started coming down in sheets. Teaming up with the only other two Westerners on the bus – an Irish obstetrician called Anne and a farmer from Kent called Ian – I hid out in the quaint Mahajan Restaurant (‘HERE MAKE TEA OR HAVE IMMEDIATE’) while a gaggle of touts, pony-men and jeep-men argued the toss over who would see us up to the mountain. In winter, I’d learnt from the tourist centre, the bus rarely went the whole way up – it just dumped folk in Tangmarg and they got a jeep the final leg to Gulmarg. On this occasion, however, the bus did attempt it. And got stuck in a snowdrift halfway there. ‘Extremely foolhardy,’ grumbled Anne as we all got out and walked the final few kilometres up to Gulmarg. ‘Yes, well, you’ve got to see the funny side of it,’ I said with a grin. ‘Here we are, fighting our way through to the “meadow of flowers” – only to find the whole place buried under seven feet of snow.’
Then, of course, having made it to the top and having had the weakest cup of hot chocolate imaginable in Gulmarg’s one and only visible restaurant, we had to think about going down again.
‘I’m not walking down,’ said Ian, his weathered farmer’s face set in a stubborn pout. ‘There must be another way.’ Then his eyes alighted on the three low wooden sleds the porters had dragged up behind the bus. ‘Ah ha,’ he crowed, pointing us to them. ‘There’s our meal ticket!’ Anne and I exchanged a look of puzzlement. ‘What are they?’ we said in unison, and Ian said, ‘they’re toboggans. Have you never seen a toboggan before?’ I considered this and could think of only one. It was called Rosebud and it figured heavily in Orson Welles’s film Citizen Kane. Rosebud had made little Kane very happy as a child, but was ultimately a symbol of his decline and fall. I eyed the toboggans with suspicion. Did they have the same fate in mind for me?
There followed the most exhilarating 15 minutes of my life. ‘What a buzz!’ I cried as my sled made a mad, hair-raising 2000ft descent down winding, twisting toboggan runs at incredible speeds. ‘Sit! Sit!’ screamed my crazed driver whenever we clipped a tree or ‘legs up!’ when that extra bit of speed was called for. ‘Gosh, this looks dangerous!’ I remarked at one point, eyeing up a precipice we had stopped at the brink of. ‘Oh, that is nothing!’ replied the driver airily. ‘We pass really dangerous part just back!’
Whenever it got too steep to toboggan, we slid down the mountainside on our bums. ‘I’m absolutely soaked!’ complained Anne as Tangmarg came into view. ‘I don’t care, I’m having a ball!’ I laughed in reply. Then I collided with a tree and was completely buried by an avalanche of snow that came down from its pregnant branches.
We waited two more hours for the rest of our bus passengers to pick their way down the mountain on foot and rejoin us, and in all of that time I was steaming. I was in fact steaming so much – as the log fire in Tangmarg’s small ‘porter’ restaurant dried off my sopping-wet poncho – that Ian and Anne couldn’t see me. No matter. I got a lot of information from Ian, including where to stay if I ever made it back to Gulmarg again. ‘It’s called the City View Hotel, and it’s just like staying with the Addams family,’ he said as he toasted his damp woolly cap over the fire on the end of a ski. ‘There’s an old cook called Wally who does the best food in Kashmir, an eccentric waiter called Ramone who does his best to be deliberately rude – “What you want, you?” – and a Bruce Lee clone called ‘Dragon’ who appears every night to tell guests how he wandered round the Himalayas for four years, and how he can take off his clothes with just two fingers.’
I found this funny, but Anne didn’t. ‘That’s what gets me about the Kashmiris,’ she said, a further flush coming to her apple-red cheeks. ‘Some of them do talk a lot of rot. I went to a travel agency in Srinagar to book this Gulmarg tour, and the manager wasn’t having it. He wanted me to go to the Kolahoi Glacier instead. “Is good value!” he chirped annoyingly. “You get good food! You get fresh eggs and live chicken! You get chicken in the basket – flying chicken on the mountain! You get caramel custard – yes, with a cherry! You get banana fritter with honey at height of 16,000 feet! Tourists like that kind of thing, you know?”’
Ian and I laughed. ‘What did you tell him?’ we asked.
‘I told him to shut up about that bloomin’ glacier and give me that ticket to Gulmarg. If he didn’t, I added, I’d tell him where to stick that cherry.’
After further delays, including a punctured tyre, our rescued bus got back to Srinagar absurdly late, at 8.30pm. ‘Where Sir go?’ said Gulam, jumping out of his shikara like a frightened rabbit. ‘I think Sir must be dead!’ I gave him a quick pinch to show that I wasn’t and then enticed him to paddle me over to my houseboat. Here, and this was really touching, he fussed over me like a mother hen, lighting a glorious wood fire and serving up a piping-hot vegetable pulao meal. It was his finest hour, the food was so delicious, but I couldn’t eat it all. In a flourish of magnanimity, I told him to leave the remainder for Billy.
A tear trickled down one of Gulam’s leathery cheeks as I prepared to leave the next morning. He was genuinely sad to see me go. ‘Sir have good time?’ he said miserably. ‘Sir will recommend to friends?’ I assured him that I would and gave him a parting hug. ‘You say you will make me part of family, and you did,’ I said by way of cheering him up. ‘I will pray for you, my friend. You are a good man.’
Chapter 12
Jammed up in Jammu
I boarded the 7.45am bus to Jammu with considerable unease. It would be my first marathon road trip this tour of India – no more quick and easy domestic flights for me. But I needn’t have worried. On board was an entertaining Australian called Martin and four hours flew by as he filled me in on places I wouldn’t be visiting, like Ladakh and Leh, while in return I talked to him about Buddhism. Then, around 1pm, the bus suddenly ground to a dead halt. ‘This ain’t good,’ said Martin, leaning out of his window. ‘Looks like the traffic jam to end all traffic jams.’ I stood up and craned over him to look for myself. ‘Blimey, you’re right,’ I said with a whistle. ‘There’s literally hundreds of vehicles stretching out ahead of us for as far as the eye can see!’
The cause of the hold-up was clear as soon as we stepped off the bus. Even from where we were standing, a mile or so away, vast chunks of mountainside were dropping away and crashing to the ground. It was the first landslide I’d seen outside of a disaster movie.
While waiting for the road to be cleared, I had another little word with my Walkman. ‘I would describe the Srinagar/Jammu run as one of the great bus journeys of India. Twelve or more hours of stunning scenery, perilous barrier-free mountain tracks, and the nerve-racking, edge-of-your-seat excitement of never knowing if you’re going to reach the other end in one piece. The sides of the rocky road are strewn with the hulks of vehicles either recently crashed or recently retrieved from gaping chasms. Every bus or truck on this route drives like the very devil and just to make you feel even less safe, there’s a series of astonishing and disconcerting road-signs: “DARLING I WANT YOU, BUT NOT SO FAST”, “MY CURVES ARE DANGEROUS, GO ROUND THEM SLOWLY”, and (my personal favourite) “I LONG FOR MY LOST LOVE – SPEEDING, HE WENT INTO THE RIVER.”’
The first thing that struck me when we finally rolled into Jammu at 10.30pm was that I was back in India proper, with all the heat, dust, sacred cows, and temples. The second thing that struck me was the strong military presence – Jammu was very close to the Pakistan border and tensions were evidently running high. Grabbing just about the only room left in town – a grotty cell in the Hotel Apsara – I moved next door to the Hotel Naz for some late night sustenance. The menu here was a hoot – ESTAMBLE EGG ON TOAST, FRAY EGG and SWEEP CORN SOUP – and so were the waiters. ‘Why does my coffee have hot milk, hot water, but no coffee in it?’ I asked one of them. ‘So sorry, sir,’ came the happy reply. ‘This is the only item we are serving!’
Jammu did not impress me. Not only were the general populace nervous with so many armed police and soldiers on the streets, but when a sparrow flew into my room and squawked me awake at 6am I couldn’t find a restaurant open for breakfast. At the Tourist Home Hotel, a little old man cried, “Wait! Wait! Manager is coming!’ But the manager was not coming. He was urinating against a ‘Stick no bills’ sign on the other side of the road. So I ordered some plain chapatis at the unfriendly dhaba next door. And got served a red-hot chilli paratha instead. That woke me up.
At 9am, Jammu’s tourist office opened its door to me and revealed itself the most useless in all India. It had no hand-out information on the city, it offered no sightseeing tours, and when I asked for a map, I was told: ‘This is withdrawn for security reasons.’ The sensible part of me said, ‘The clock is ticking on my book, I’ve only got a month left in India, I haven’t got time to waste on this dump,’ but the stubborn ‘I’m a travel writer and I better do my job’ part decided that there must be something good about Jammu and I had a duty to stay and find it.
My first gambit was the old Fort, five kilometres above the town. This had lots of monkeys and a gauntlet of incredibly damaged beggars in an orderly queue leading up to the small Kali Temple within. ‘You are so lucky!’ my rickshaw man told me. ‘Today Tuesday. Big puja!’ But I didn’t feel lucky. All I saw was a tiny, black-faced, flower-decked goddess figure and a small pen full of families earnestly praying to goats. ‘Before, we kill goat for sacrifice,’ explained a local priest. ‘Now we rent out by the hour. Goat live to see another day!’
Fortunately, just below the fort, I found something I did like about Jammu. This was the lovely Bagh-I-Bagh gardens, a green and relaxing picnic spot constructed on a series of terraces and giving fine views of the Tawi bridge and the river. Calm and tranquil, it was the only place in Jammu where I felt completely safe and comfortable.
But I wasn’t left long without the jitters. At my final stop, the Dogra Art Gallery, I found the small garden forecourt full of riot shields, helmets and batons, with the disrobed policemen having their lunch. The gallery itself was full of army clerks busily filling out supplies requisition forms for what looked like an impending crisis. ‘Okay, that’s it,’ I thought. ‘Time to get out of Jammu!’
*
Having haggled my rickshaw driver out of his 8 rupee ‘government tax’ – a very crucial saving as it turned out – I jumped on a 2pm bus south to Pathankot. And found that I had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Pathankot was without doubt the noisiest, most unsafe place I had ever been to – even worse than Jammu. Grim, shifty-eyed figures began to circle me as I nervously backed into the nearby railway station. They seemed particularly interested in my bags. Fortuitously, after just two hours holed up in the railway station, a bus to Manali turned up. The cost of a ticket? Sixty-three rupees. How much money did I have left? Sixty-eight rupees. With all the banks closed, I could have been in big trouble had I not challenged the rickshaw driver for that 8 rupees earlier!
So relieved I was to have caught that bus that I launched into a spirited gongyo while waiting for it to leave. The driver and his rowdy mates heckled and made fun of me, then quietened down. In fact, as we set off on our long 12 hour night journey, they really looked after me – kept moving me into progressively better seats, until – at the end – I was in a window seat right behind the driver, with loads of leg room and fresh air and good views. This, they said, was the ‘VIP seat’.
As the night progressed, I reflected that – by the time I reached Manali – I would have sat 27 hours in two days on hard-seated local buses. The downside of this was that my bum was really playing up. On the upside, after the first couple of hours, my mind just sort of ‘switched off’. Time became meaningless and the journey passed incredibly quickly. All sorts of thoughts and memories occurred to me while I was in this weird kind of mental ‘stasis’. I thought, for example, that I had been travelling round India over a month now alone, and that I had found it increasingly easy to push out to other people – most of whom ‘happened’ to be interested in Buddhism. Then I recalled the very vivid dream I’d had back on Gulam’s boat that I had not had since my childhood. It wasn’t the recurring dream I’d had (since about the age of six) of jumping off the Titanic and watching myself being chopped into tiny pieces by its giant propeller. It was the other, even more vivid, dream I’d had of being a gypsy girl in Victorian London. In this dream, which I now felt sure must be a former life-time, I became a Fagin-like teacher who taught her children to go round old people's houses and steal from them. ‘Maybe that’s why I felt so drawn to helping and looking after old people this time round,’ I briefly considered. ‘What a horrible person I must have been!’ The authorities had agreed with me in this dream and the gypsy girl – now a diseased old crone – ended up in London’s infamous Newgate Prison, where another old crone began teaching her about Buddhism. ‘It just makes sense to me,’ I concluded in my mind, ‘that we live and learn, and then we die and have a rest, then we come back to live and learn again – until we have rounded off all our rough edges and are contributing value to the planet each and every moment as Buddhas.’
Chapter 13
Manali Stitch-Up
I was looking forward to Manali. Nearly every travcller I’d spoken to – especially the beach freaks in Goa – had been raving on about it. And they all said the same thing: the weed was plentiful and it grew ten feet tall. But it wasn’t the weed I was looking forward to. It was the other thing travellers had raved on about, namely that Manali was one of the best places in India to chill out. This sounded good to me. After 35 days of bruising travel, and hardly any sleep in 72 hours, I urgently needed to chill out.
Imagine my disappointment, then, when I arrived in this nirvana of all Indian destinations and had just about the least chill experience imaginable. Fighting my way through a barrage of touts at the bus stand, I moved into a very clean room at the Pineview Hotel, 200 yards up the road – and immediately had to move out again. A bearded hippy next door was blasting out Bob Marley on his hi-fi. Migrating to the other side of the building, I next got a room outside which a team of workmen were demolishing an old house and putting up a new hotel. I eyed them dangerously, and they kindly downed tools and let me get some sleep.
I woke up three hours later to a pleasant surprise – it was warm and sunny. In fact, after the excesses of Calcutta (too hot) and Kashmir (too cold), the climate was just about perfect!
I had good connections in Manali. First, there was the exceptionally helpful tourist officer who deluged me with information and lent me fifty rupees until the banks re-opened after lunch. Then a couple of passing Canadians guidcd me up the back of the new town to Old Manali village. This was a lovely walk, particularly round the small iron bridge connecting the old and new towns. The landscape here was a pastoral delight of colourful meadows, brick-house water-wheels, rushing mountain streams, and snow-capped peaks.
Five minutes up the shepherds’ path at the far side of the bridge, I came to the village of Old Manali. Here, life proceeded as it must have done for several centuries. Bales of hay hung out to dry from barnyard rafters, smoke drifted up from stove-chimneys poking from slate roofs, and stacked woodpiles propped up the sides of ornately-carved traditional village houses. Heading up to the top of the village via a damp cobbled path, I came to a ridge overlooking a winding river valley of beautiful flowers and meadows. It was a photographer’s dream.
Appropriate then, that I met a young photographer from London called Robert who lived down in that valley. He was renting a ‘house’ with his girlfriend Pippa for just 20 dollars a month and he invited me to come visit them. Twenty minutes later, I was drinking tea and smoking my first charas with my new pals in their simple bare room (no furniture, just a single wood-stove) and learning all about Manali.
