Change of Vision

Stunned! After days of trekking along the mountain, forests and valleys, we hit one shop almost hanging on the edge of a road. A small village shop selling every other stuff for daily requirement like soaps, masalas, vegetables, noodles among others. For the past seven days then, we had covered some 85-odd km that included trails where we negotiated 3ft deep snow at an altitude of 14000ft! While coming down, our feet were trembling like palm trees on a windy beach. Our job was getting all the more difficult as we had to keep our pace controlled in the thick mid-altitude pine forests amid drizzling. The shop at Wan was a perfect discovery at a perfect time.

Wait.... more surprises were in store for us there besides cakes and bananas that we gorged on. Noodles, biscuits and dry fruits were our means to survive in the higher camps. Fresh fruits — brought from district headquarters Uttar Kashi, no less than 80km from the shop — were cuisine royale in the sparsely populated village where one can get rice and squash curry at every other kitchen though. Incidentally, we enjoyed a pint of country liquor at the village on our way back to Loharjung, our base camp for Roopkund trek that summer.

As i was fiddling with my camera to look for Himalayan birds — enthused by several rare sightings — in and around the shop when my fellow trekkers were browsing food stuff, suddenly my five-point focus stopped on a face that i have never expected to find in the region. Maybe i forgot that i was in Garhwal, one of the few places in the country famous for beauty — both natural and human. Maybe i forgot the concept of rustic beauty... maybe i forgot to capture beautiful faces... maybe i was waiting for the moment to unfold before the high-zoom camera i was using then. Stupefied, i started taking her pictures but not fully satisfied.

This dissatisfaction led me to buy an SLR for taking better portraits. Later, i realised that i feel more comfortable in framing portraits than taking landscape pictures. A beauty at a Himalayan village shop changed the way i should look at the world with the viewfinder. And it was a new beginning: the search for human faces....

Breakfast at Dunera

Two aloo-parathas for breakfast on a sunny morning when the mercury nearly touched the 0-degree mark the night before refreshed me like nothing. That morning, January 5 this year, i was dropped by Jammu Mail at Chakki Bank when a blanket of dense fog made my task difficult to even look for a chai-wallah — forget to find my way out. Like an angel when a shawl-wrapped chai-wallah appeared from nowhere, i considered myself fortunate enough to warm up a bit when the clock just ticked 6.30. Within minutes, he also mingled in the blinding fog that now deepened like clouds in the upper Himalayan regions. I, who the morning before was in the plains of Kolkata, stood in silence thinking whether to go for GPS tracking or take out a compass as the sailors took recourse to in time of shipwreck or mid-sea cyclones!

Stranger things always happen in strange places. As northerly wind blew past my pullover, i was taken aback by an old rickshaw-wallah asking me where i am headed to. “Banikhet,” i replied short. “Beesh,” shorter was the answer. Only about a week later i realized where i had got down, what was the street the rickshaw-wallah took amid rows of eucalyptus to the bus stand on the national highway. A patient wait for about 30 minutes was intermittently interrupted by asking every other bus whether it would go to Dalhousie or Banikhet and “nahi” was the word blurted out by conductors peeping out of a half-open window when sun was still eluding the north Indian town.

As i was thinking to take an auto-rickshaw to Pathankot’s terminus, some 6km from there, a green-and-white Himachal state bus stopped in front of me, and surprisingly the conductor opened the door and told me to step inside! Wow! “But how can you make out I was going to Banikhet?” i asked the 50-ish gentleman in khaki. “I know, you are going to Youth Hostel,” he politely told me. Is he a mind-reader, or face-reader? “No, for the past 15 days or so, I have seen youths like you are waiting here and you must be going for the trek?” Now, the reply with a smile. Yes, I was the last to join the last group last winter for the Dalhousie trek. He also made an arrangement for an aisle seat on the right three-seat row just diagonally opposite to the front door. My inquisitive eyes made a study of faces — mostly wrapped in either shawl or monkey caps — around the bus till i found two beautiful women sitting just across the aisle on a double seat. They — Aditi and Gaganmeet — later became good friends of mine as they were also joining the same trek.

But, what about food? Hungry as always i am, I asked the conductor while paying the Rs 65 fare will the bus stop anywhere between Chakki and Banikhet? Dunera, he told me. A small lower altitude Himalayan village on the highway, Dunera was a great relief that day. For 14 hours or so, i didn’t have good food after a dosa delicacy at a restaurant in Dwarka with Ujjwal and Ipsita. I grabbed the two unusually big aloo-parathas on a bench off the road with the first sun rays shining like gold that morning. It seemed as if i had been served water after crossing a glacier without a drop as i gulped hot tea down the drain called mouth. For me, Dunera is not just a stopover point but a memory to cherish in times of monotony of life.