Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Musings from the road: Kafni Trip: Day 2


Crinnnnnngggggggggggggg!

"Someone switch off the alarm, please!"

"Oi, it's already half past five. We were supposed to wake up at 5 and leave by 6. So get your lazy arses out of the bed."

"Yawn! Com'on. Lemme sleep for another 10 min. Please!"

Well, when was it ever easy to get a bunch of college guys on a holiday to get out of bed in time! And the malfunctioning water-geyser is not helping either. I never had a liking for tea or coffee. But when Jai Singh, our guide, knocks on the door with a few cups of tea, I jump up to grab one. In spite of being  devoid of the bovine-juice, the warmth on the lips feels like bliss. Dugs comes in crunching a piece of Britannia Marigold, "Bubu, they are sleeping like babies in my room too. :("

"More like pigs I would say. ;) Anyway, what's the plan?"

"Not much. We just take a Jeep up, which must be pretty eventless (how naive it is to assume anything). Then we walk for 4 kilometres and camp for today. All the good stuff is being saved for tomorrow."

"Well, in that case I guess we can let these guys have another 10 minutes. What's up with the monkeys by the way? Why is that one making faces at us?"

"He's fallen in love with you Bubu, go get him a banana." Dugs and his momentary lapses into mischief! Sutta seems jealous. He grabs a steel rod and goes after the poor soul - can't complain; he's the self proclaimed Don of Gorakhpur after all.

An hour later, we are seated in two Mahindra Maxxs, on our way to Loharkhet and Dhakuri. It's a slow ride. Most of us are still feeling sleepy. I see children in uniform, treading along in groups, with school bags on their shoulders. I am reminded of the evergreen 'School Chalein Hum' commercial. Seems like the publicity has done it's job, especially given the impressive number of girls in the groups. We cross a bridge across River Saryu. Corn fields come into view. We get our first glimpses of terrace farming. Forget the description in the books -- they are not the 'stairs' we are accustomed to -- only when you get closer to them do you notice how long and high each step is. From the car, it looks like each one would extend from my toe to chest. Still the women of the hill, wrapped in sarees, are negotiating the height, sometimes getting over 50 odd such steps to reach their own patch of field. Nature always gives us something to take away, some lesson that we otherwise tend to overlook in our hectic mundane affairs. These people fight with nature every single moment of their life -- just to get their hands on necessary sustenance. Imagine them getting their cattle and ploughs up there. They give their time, sweat and what not, all the while realising that may be the very next moment, an avalanche would wash away their year long toil. It makes you sit back and think. Gives you the strength to face the challenges in your life. It implores you to quit whining sitting in your cosy air conditioned rooms -- at least you don't have to struggle to get your very basic needs fulfilled. That, in itself, is a start. Go on and face your problems head on.

"Hey look down!" My philosophical musings are mercilessly trodden upon. But what's that! Is that a squashed car down there? It's unrecognisable. The roof and the base of the car seem to be wrapped in each others arms; if not for the horror they had for company, one would easily have mistaken them for a romantic pair enjoying their personal time in the greenery amidst rocks by the riverside beside a cliff, far from dissecting public eyes. I wonder how the cadavers would have looked like -- or if there would have even been a corpse at all, just appendages and your innards. "You see, it's a steep 90 degree (of course he said something else, but we being engineers, this's what we heard anyway) fall. The car crashed head down." No slopes to break the fall. No toppling, or tumbling. No romantic camera angle or the shaky camera motion. You just go into free fall, enjoying the weightlessness, savouring the adrenaline rush until you hit the ground 100 feet below, and leave behind a sore sight for the posterity. "Driver bhai, you aren't drunk, are you?" "Well, if I was, you won't live to find out," he quips.

"Things used to be worse. After the Prime Minister's Village Road Scheme, we have got these pebble and mud roads -- they are not much, but it's definitely an improvement over what we had before. You couldn't take a car through these parts. We used to trek the whole way up. But new blood doesn't understand the dangers these roads present. The key is to keep your vehicle in first or second gear only. You will be slow, but in case you get a slippery patch, your car won't veer out of control. And you won't end up at the bottom of the valley like them."

Yaswant, our driver (I would have loved to write 'name changed to help preserve anonymity', but hey, it's not like the guy murdered anybody -- so it's unfair to annotate him thus when quite frankly, the real problem lies with your failing sub-standard memory), gradually gets into a loquacious mode. He passes remarks at a few mountain girls treading along. "This is our life. The road is not even wide enough for two cars to pass. If you see one coming, you communicate from a long distance. These curves that you see; they are the only points where you get enough room to pass each other. We keep on beeping horns from time to time, so that we might know of each other's presence from a long enough distance to find a curve. We never know when we might end up at the bottom of a gorge. So the best you can do is be careful and get as many of those sweet girls as you can", he finishes with a mischievous wink.

And the downpour of previous night doesn't make matters any easier. Mud and water makes a deadly combination. Tyres skid like hell. At one point our car does a complete 90 degree turn and stands in the middle of the road, with it's face towards the cliff and the rear hanging onto the valley. But Yaswant is dexterous enough. A mile onwards, and we have two other Maxxs facing the same ordeal. The drivers and passengers, we included, join hands in getting the vehicles out of that muddy patch, and are left completely soiled.

In a short while, we reach Dhakuri. "Just follow this road for 4 kilometres and you will reach the camping site. I'll follow a different road, with the mules and our cooking stuff, to reach there before you do and get some food cooked for you tired souls. See you then.", Jai Singh takes leave. "Is your cell working?" "Nopes. Whose is working?" "Mine", "And mine", Ankur and Dugs are smiling. "Bloody BSNL, Bhai Sahab Nahi Lagega -- seems like bhai sahab has a special liking for these hilly terrains. So I guess the rest of us are officially cut-off from the rest of humanity. Well, that's what we wanted, did we not? Now let's hurry lest the rain god shows his colors again. Where's PP?"
"I'm here."
"Dude, where were you? You were lost for close to half an hour!"
"Just needed to go get some stuff."
"What 'stuff'?"
"You'll see."

We get elated at our first contact with the wild. The streams, the rocky roads, the roadside ferns, and chirping birds -- while they gather most of our attention, the journey remains uneventful. Though a few of us begin panting heavily and going crazy when they have to continuously move up a slope, foreboding the events of the next two days. Someone suggests we take a few walking sticks, and as it turned out, he could not have been more prudent. It takes a detour from the trekking path to reach the campsite. It's a barren patch of land, with a small stream along the border to meet our water-needs, and rocky terrain to serve as a public toilet the next morning. Our tents are already set up when we reach the site, with Jai Singh and his friends busy in cooking dinner. We have some time to explore the area, before we are called in. A bunch of dogs give us company; and Pulkit, the scare of his life. We quickly notice Archie, Veronica and Betty, playing with each other (Poor Betty seems oblivious to the misfortune that's to befall her -- but PP and me, the learned souls that we are, take pity and let her have a morsel each from our plates). Wolverine, a proud fellow that he's, keeps his distance, and gives away an occasional growl.


"Heyyyyy! Commme. We just saw the mooost wonderful scenery in the worrrrrrld. Heeeee Heeeee", comes in a blabbering Ankit, his eyes red and large, his stance askance, the cap on his head askew. "Oi Hawshi, are you high? Oh god, you inhaled some of PP's 'stuff', didn't you?"
"Does that mattttttter? Lemmmmme show you some wonderrrrrrrrful sceneryyyyy."
"You are so high that even if we beat you up right now and leave you in that bush, you will begin appreciating the dance of the leafs to the rhythm of the wind." "Heeeeeeeee", he blinks his demon-red eyes and shows his yellowish teeth.



Gddrrrr! The distant rumbling of clouds disrupts a fine game of 29. "Is our camp site gonna survive a downpour? Won't water get into the tents? What if the ground becomes muddy? Never thought of that beforehand, did we?", blabbers an apprehensive me, with cards in one hand, one eye at the hand being played, one at the sky, and half a brain devising a devious plan to rope in all the 29 points and the other half being what it does best - get crazy and complaining.  "Well, we have our ways to deal with that", Jai Singh barges in. "You see, we make these drains around the camps. The ground here goes up towards the south. And rain water streams might also come from those rocks over there. So we will make these small drains along those directions around the camp. The water will be redirected, and you will feel cozy inside your warm tents."
"Are you sure the drains are gonna hold even if it rains cats and dogs?"
"We'll find out, won't we?", he leaves with a taunting smile.

Needless to say, the rain god has his fare share of false alarms. Our spirits are up once we have ruled out the rain. We go a step further to annoy the rain god with a camp fire. Most of the wood is wet from last night's drizzle. But with a little kerosene, our collective zeal and a dexterous Jai Singh's wizardry, we get the camp fire going. PP is in a mood to get the whole party high. So he throws in some of his stuff into the fire. People begin recollecting sweet memories. We insist on Jai Singh telling us a ghost story particular to that region. But whatever it's -- superstition or pure damn fear -- he refrains from doing so even after our umpteenth attempt. Some chilling recollections and one or two occasional dog-bark-induced scares later, we are deep in slumber in our over-crowded tents, with me praying that none of them (or me for that matter) suddenly has an epiphany that he might be of a different orientation ;).

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