Travel Travails on Indian Trails: Chapter 02

I developed this habit of wasting holidays on extra curricular activities while working as a schoolmaster at Mayo College Ajmer.
For twelve years I worked at Mayo College, boys persuaded me to take them on treks to the Himalayas during holidays. As a result, I trudged almost every summer or autumn along over-beaten paths in ‘company’ with a dozen or so schoolboys who, for reasons best known to them, actually kept distance from me on the trail.

Since I am from Himachal, I have this typical Himachali habit – boasting. When I joined Mayo College in 1978, the first thing I did to impress the boys was to tell them tall tales about my trekking talents. Thanks to the NCC, I had done a free adventure course from the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute Darjeeling way back in 1965 which had inflated me so much I considered myself a better mountaineer than the late Sherpa Tenzing of the Everest fame.

Unfortunately, boys took my bragging seriously and talked me into taking them on a trek from Dalhousie to Chamba in the autumn break of 1978.
Mr. Dick Everhard (not his real name) of the Geography department barged his way into our plans uninvited. He was dying to become a Principal and needed a trek or two to make his resume for the job a bit more glamorous.

Dick volunteered to make travel arrangements by train; his father was a senior officer in the railways at that time. As for me, I booked accommodation in the Youth Hostel at Dalhousie and tourist bungalows at Khajjiar and Chamba.
Those were the days when Mr. Sabir Bhatia – the inventor of the email – was still in the prep school, so I got the bookings confirmed through ‘snail’ mail that took a couple of months.

~

On October 9, we checked into the Youth Hostel at Dalhousie in the afternoon. Dick and I celebrated the occasion by drinking beer in a bar; the boys did so by drinking it in the forest. Next morning, with heavy rucksacks on our backs, we were on our way to Khajjiar.

Now the trek to Khajjiar from Dalhousie begins on a rather disheartening note – a steep climb of about three kilometers from the GPO on the Garam Sadak – the Mall Road of Dalhousie. The climb is unavoidable unless you choose the switch-backs, which are so long and numerous it takes two days to finish them.
What discourages most people from doing so is the fact that after two days of hard trekking, they are still in Dalhousie!

So we took the shortcut. Boys were full of pep in the beginning. However, after walking 500 meters in about an hour, they started wilting like lilies on a hot summer day. Dick and I shepherded them along, using motivational techniques learnt in our teacher training courses.

Presently we come across a party of girl trekkers from Punjab on their way to Khajjiar like us. Pale-faced and faint with fatigue, they, along with a couple of lady teachers rest, or rather sprawl, all over the path like fallen angels.

Now Dick is a Good Samaritan in addition to being a good Christian, particularly when people needing his help happen to be a bevy of pretty girls and that too from the state of Punjab. I am a bit retarded in that respect and a little bit too vain; I don’t help people unless they beg for it on their knees. It is another trait unique to the people of Himachal Pradesh.

The moment Dick realises his philanthropic (or is it philander-thropic?) spirit might derive more satisfaction elsewhere, he switches loyalties like a politician from Uttar Pradesh. He promptly abandons the Rajasthan party and joins the one from Punjab by sprawling on the path between the two lady teachers.
Dick has another gift -- his knack for engaging strangers in conversation. By the time we bid him farewell, he is fully at ease with his new companions -- chatting with the lady teachers so intimately it looks like the reunion of bosom buddies after long years of separation.

~

Nobody is much surprised when the trekking or rather ‘resting’ party from Punjab eventually appears at the gates of the tourist bungalow Khajjiar at about 8 in the evening with Dick bringing up the rear.

He is bent double under the load of three rucksacks – one belonging to him and the other two belonging to the lady teachers. He, however, seems to be on top of the world. Who wouldn’t be after doing “philan(der)thropic” work on 14 females walking 14 kilometers in 14 hours?

I watch the faces of my boys turning various shades of green as they watch Dick receive 14 farewell hugs at the gates of the tourist bungalow.
The girls then move on to the Circuit House opposite the tourist bungalow where they are booked free of cost for two nights.
One of the girls -- we gather later – is the niece of a Minister in the Government of Punjab.

For the first time, I forgive my boys for forgetting their manners when they greet Dick with a cold stare instead of the usual ‘Good evening, Sir’, as he returns to the old fold.

~

All normal Indian males, not necessarily married, have healthy sex drives they give unbridled expression to mostly in the privacy of their bedrooms. All abnormal Indian males, even if married, have unhealthy sex drives they give unbridled expression to everywhere -- be it a local bus, a cinema hall or any other public place.

Now it so happened that on that night in Khajjiar, a honeymoon couple was staying in the suite next to the one in which Dick and I were sleeping. By virtue of our status as teachers, we had granted ourselves the luxury of a well-furnished suite whereas the boys had to rough it out in a dormitory on the ground floor normally patronized by taxi drivers and ponywallahs.

As if 14 hours in the company of 14 females were not enough, Dick had set his sights on the couple from the moment they had taken a table in the far corner of the dining room in order to avoid proximity with a bunch of noisy schoolboys. As a result, all my efforts to engage Dick in small talk had come to naught. Throughout dinner, his eyes had remained focused on the female component of the couple. To be fair to Dick, the young lady in question was so unusually comely even the boys had behaved well during dinner.


~


It is all quiet at midnight in the serene environs of Khajjiar.

Even Punjabis roaming the moonlit meadow with beer bottles in hand and singing Heer have passed out for the night. Only Dick is up and awake.
I admire Dick for his staying power. Fourteen hours of hard work carrying three rucksacks and he is still fresh like a daisy on a Dalhousie hillside! And look at me – a man from the mountains and that too trained from HMI Darjeeling -- knocked out flat by fifteen kilometers between Dalhousie and Khajjiar and sleeping like the proverbial dead!

Why Dick is still awake I don’t know until he shakes me awake. Groggy with sleep, my fuzzy mind can think of nothing but calamity. Dick as geography teacher had told us the hills of Dalhousie sit on a major seismic fault, so my first thoughts go to an earthquake touching 8 or thereabouts on the Richter Scale but not strong enough to awaken me from the kind of slumber Khumbhakarna of the Ramayana fame must have enjoyed before his untimely demise in the hands of Lord Rama.

‘Listen!’ Dick whispers urgently in my ear.
Reality dawns on me. It must be the ghosts and not an earthquake to rattle Dick.

Now I’m a sucker for the occult and the supernatural. Sleep abandons me like a sexually frustrated partner and I sit up. The spooky ambience is just perfect. The room is dark and the branches of trees swaying gently in the breeze outside cast eerie shadows on a wall. Even Alfred Hitchcock would have found no fault with the settings.

‘Listen!’ Dick whispers again, losing patience with me for gawking at the wall like an idiot.
‘Listen to what?’ I whisper back – the goose pimples on my arms like scales on an over-excited dragon.
In answer, he grabs me by the neck and pushes my face against the thin wooden partition separating us from the honeymoon couple.
I hear nothing of the supernatural kind and shake my head.
‘They are at it, you deaf oaf!’ Dick hisses at me like a frustrated cobra.
Another reality dawns on me.
‘Oh that!’ I immediately lose interest and flop back on the bed. Listening is not my kind of voyeurism.
Dick lets me be, totally convinced I’m hearing impaired.

However, as I mentioned earlier, he is a Good Samaritan in addition to being a good Christian.
So he allows me the benefit of a ‘whispered’ commentary on the events shaping up in the adjacent room. Like Sanjay of the Mahabharata fame and Sardar Jasdev Singh of the All India Radio, he regales me with graphic descriptions of the ‘developments’ – stage by stage -- until sleep claims me again and I hear no more.

~

The hill station of Chail, like Dalhousie, is yet another poor cousin of Shimla.
The Maharaja of Patiala founded it in the 19th century.
Historians make us believe the Viceroy of India found Maharaja of Patiala’s amorous escapades at Shimla more embarrassing than those of his own countrymen so well depicted by Rudyard Kipling in his numerous books. So he banished Maharaja of Patiala from Shimla.

My guess is Maharaja of Patiala found Shimla even in the 19th century a bit too cramped for his romantic proclivities, so he found himself another hill station.

Look at the Shimla of today. It is so over-crowded even the monkeys of Jakhu Hill migrate to Chail during their mating season.
So do couples (not necessarily married) from places like Ambala, Daurala, Samrala or Patiala.

Recent statistics suggest all hill stations in Himachal Pradesh are heading the Shimla way – thanks to the economic boom and conversion of Hinduism into Hedonism.

A quarter century ago, the hill station of Chail was even worse than Dalhousie in terms of basic amenities. I say that on the basis of my first-hand experience in the autumn on 1979 when another bunch of Mayo College boys talked me into taking them on a trek from Chail to Shimla.

Dick, however, did not jump on our bandwagon that time. He had already completed the minimum quota of two treks for his resume for the headmaster’s job by inviting himself to another trek organised by another schoolmaster at another time.

Now our headmaster, late Mr. Charra Ram Gupta (not his real name), was a perfect example of genetic traits evinced by sage Manu – the founder of caste system in India.
Mr. Gupta was so averse to spending money he reluctantly paid us our salaries and granted shoestring budgets for treks.
So we trekkers had no way but to pinch every penny on our way the way Italians have to pinch every female bottom coming their way.
The pinching began with my effort to curry favours from Military School Chail – a boarding school run by the Ministry of Defence.

There were two reasons for doing that. Firstly, there were no youth hostels or tourist bungalows in Chail at that time to be booked in advance. Secondly, if we succeeded in getting ourselves invited to Military School Chail as school guests, we could pinch a lot of pennies in a single go and use them elsewhere – preferably in the Davico’s bar at Shimla.

Now a schoolmaster cannot contact the headmaster of another school directly. According to protocol system we have inherited from the British, only a headmaster can contact another headmaster.
However, it did not take much effort on my part to persuade Mr. Gupta to write to the headmaster of Military School Chail. Money was like a pretty daughter to him – to be kept chaste and untouched at any ‘cost’.

So I was thrilled when three months later, he gave me the letter of confirmation from the headmaster of Military School Chail.
Officially, we were now bound to Military School Chail to play a cricket match with their First Eleven.

~

On our way to Chail, we were forced to pinch our first pennies at the Old Delhi railway station on the morning of October 10, 1979.
We had reached there by a train from Ajmer and were scheduled to catch a bus to Chandigarh from the Inter State Bus Terminus.
Actually the ISBT turned out to be six kilometers away from the railway station and not three as mentioned in the tourist maps of Delhi.
So instead of giving the boys some trekking practice in Delhi, I had to hire some transport to take them to the ISBT.

Now no other mode of transport in Delhi is cheaper than a tanga.
I spell this word the way it should be spelt to draw attention to the callous distortion of Hindi by the British during their illegal occupation of our country.
How such acts of linguistic vandalism by the British affected the lives of the natives is illustrated in the following plain tale from the Raj:

There is this young chap named Ganpat Rai from Dilli (Delhi) who wants to join the Imperial army as a soldier.
He passes the physical tests with flying colours, after which he appears for the viva voce.
Colonel Harris scans the resume in front of him and then conducts the interview in Hindi.
‘Gandphatrahahai?’ (Intended question: Are you Ganpat Rai?)
The recruit goes red in the face; how does the sahib know I’m nervous?
‘No, sahib,’ Ganpat Rai tries to put up a brave front.
‘Tumdailymarata?’ (Intended question: Do you live in Delhi?)
The recruit goes redder in the face.
‘No, sahib. It happened only once, and that too by mistake.’
Ganpat Rai is rejected on the grounds of poor communication skills.

First of all, Tonga (British distortion of the word “tanga”) is the name of a respectable island kingdom in the Pacific (so what if it is a little smaller than England?) not to be confused with an Indian mode of transport, which is as seriously threatened with extinction as are the tigers in various wild life sanctuaries of India.
Secondly, even though it took us nearly fifty years to realise we need not put up with distortion of names by the British, it really feels good now to call Bombay Mumbai, Madras Chennai, Calcutta Kolkata and Bangalore Bangaluru. So why call a tanga “Tonga”?

It is high time we stopped using the distorted name of our national capital too. First of all, the name is ‘Dilli’ and not ‘New Delhi’. Secondly, it is one of the oldest cities in India. The British called it ‘new’ when Lutyen designed and added a little bit to it in 1935 to make it look like England -- unaware the sun would set on the British Empire sooner than he thought.
Calling it ‘new’ only strengthens the general belief India is a nation inhabited by more than a billion morons and still multiplying like the proverbial rabbits!

Coming back to the issue as to why tanga is the cheapest mode of transport in Delhi. First of all, it is unaffected by fuel prices that keep changing as frequently as the Finance Ministers in India. Secondly, the meters of auto rickshaws in Delhi are so badly tampered they keep running even at red light stops.

So we decided to hire a tanga to pinch some pennies. For doing so, we decided to invite as many tangawallas as possible for a ‘summit’.

There were two reasons for doing that. Firstly, we had been deeply inspired by the phenomenon of summits taking place everywhere around the world at that time, especially the one that had taken place between India and Pakistan at Shimla in the summer of 1972.
Secondly, we were under instructions from our headmaster not to make payments without procuring lowest rates in writing. Since tangawallas are generally illiterate, they can’t quote their rates in writing. If they could, they wouldn’t be driving tangas in Delhi.
Summits are very convenient in reaching agreements between people with limited grey cells.

At the end of the summit held amid piles of horseshit on the tanga stand, we agreed to pay ten rupees for a tanga that would take us from the Old Delhi railway station to the ISBT.
How we piled ourselves -- baggage and all -- on a single tanga is a feat that deserves some attention.
However, what deserves most attention is the fact that a miserable little pony carried twelve of us – baggage and all -- six kilometers and still survived!

~

I offer sincere thanks to Lord Krishna when a Haryana Roadways bus delivers us intact at Chandigarh bus stand in about four hours.
A car normally takes five, provided there is no traffic jam on the GT Road.

The only experience of that bus journey that still sticks to memory is the refreshment stop we took at a place called Pipli in Haryana.

Now Pipli in those days used to be a small little place by the roadside. Today it is a thriving tourist complex Haryana government has showcased as the gateway to Kurukshetra where the epic battle between the Kauravas and the Pandavas was fought.
The battle took place only after Lord Krishna healed Arjuna – the Indian version of Hamlet – of deep psychosis.
The entire case history of Arjuna’s psychic treatment is recorded in the Bhagvada Gita – a much better treatise on motivational psychology than the books of Deepak Chopra.

Many Indians knew nothing about Kurukshetra until the film-maker Mr. B.R. Chopra made the TV serial Mahabharata in the late eighties and laughed all the way to his bank.
That serial will go down the annals of world history as the only media event that turned all Hindi-speaking Hindus into couch potatoes for an hour every Sunday for several years.

Going back to the Pipli of 1979, it consisted of a couple of dhabas that catered exclusively to the passengers travelling by Haryana Roadways buses. The arrangement was based on the simplest of all axioms: You scratch my back and I scratch yours.
By depositing 50 passengers in front of a dhaba for a refreshment break, the bus driver certainly deserves a free meal!

The arrangement has been so widespread in India it has contributed significantly to the national economy. If statistics were available, it could be the only enterprise in the private sector capable of giving Mr. Mukesh Ambani a complex or two.
It is a pity our ever-changing Finance Ministers fail to make a mention of it in their annual budgets.

The refreshment stop at Pipli sticks to memory a quarter century later for one reason alone.
The breakfast we ate there was so expensive it ate up all the pennies we had pinched at Delhi.

~

In 1979, only one bus used to ply between Chandigarh and Chail. According to the timetable painted on a wall of the bus stand, it left Chandigarh at 3.30 p.m.

Thanks to Haryana Roadways, we have two hours at our disposal at Chandigarh bus stand before catching the bus to Chail. Settling the boys at one spot on the crowded bus stand, I then embark on the mission to find out where the tickets for that bus could be had.

Now there are numerous booking booths at Chandigarh bus stand but none of them displays information to tell you which destination you could buy a ticket for from it.
Fortunately, the bus conductors solve that problem for you. Standing in front of the booths, they shout the names of cities and towns their buses are going to.

I pass the conductors chanting ‘Dilli, Dilli, Dilli’, ‘Shimla, Shimla, Shimla’, ‘Jammu, Jammu, Jammu’ and so on like parrots gone berserk. I make two passes across the line of kiosks like a general inspecting a parade but hear no ‘Chail, Chail, Chail’.

Then I realise my mistake. The conductors shouting the names of cities and towns are not doing me a favour. They are doing it to compete with other buses running on the same route. Since Chail bus has no rivals to compete with, I hear no ‘Chail, Chail, Chail’’.

Realising passengers may have to compete with each other to find out how to get on to Chail bus, I now embark on another mission.

Which roadways? Which booth? Which platform? I run from pillar to post seeking answers to those questions. Everyone I approach including the bus stand manager appears to me either like a pillar or a post -- deaf and dumb to my queries. A reluctant shrug or a snappy ‘menu nee pata’ (‘I don’t know’) I gratefully acknowledge as pearls of meaningful human communication.

~

We eventually succeeded in catching our bus to Chail.
It came from Patiala fully loaded with couples (Remember Patiala-Chail historical connection?), stopped outside Chandigarh bus stand for a minute or two and then moved on. The conductor of that bus felt no need to take it inside the bus stand and ruin his vocal cords by shouting ‘Chail, Chail, Chail’’.
I gathered intelligence about that elusive bus from a beggar owning a ‘regular’ spot on the pavement outside Chandigarh bus stand.

Now ‘regular’ and ‘temporary’ are two legs on which the entire Indian economy stands. How significant those legs are can best be understood in the light of the fact that even at the time of retirement, most human resource in India is still ‘temporary’!
It is, therefore, quite reasonable that the beggar owning a ‘regular’ spot on the pavement outside Chandigarh bus stand parts with any information on Chandigarh only after making it clear to his clients that owning that spot costs him more than 20% of his annual turnover.

The bargain with the beggar left us a few pennies poorer but saved our mission to the mountains from going kaput midway.
Chandigarh was so expensive even in 1979 the thought of spending a night there with a bunch of eleven hungry schoolboys had sent a chill down my spine.

~

October is a cruel month in Chail, particularly when you reach there at midnight and that too from a warm place like Ajmer.
At five minutes short of midnight, the driver stops the bus somewhere, switches off the headlights and kills the engine. It is so cold almost all the couples inside the bus seem to have welded together into single units.

‘Get off the bus; Chail has come,’ (literal translation of ‘Ootrow, Chail ah gaya’) a voice tells the frozen passengers. It is so dark it could be the conductor, it could be the driver; it could even be a ghost.
My legs creak in protest as I get up from my seat. What else can you expect from them after eight hours inside a Patiala Roadways bus?

The Chail bus stand, as far as I can make out, looks like a narrow clearance in the middle of a dense forest. It is so dark it is difficult to tell when, where and how the Patiala couples disappeared after getting off the bus.
So far as my boys are concerned, I believe they are still inside the bus, though I’m not quite sure.

Suddenly a whiff of whisky breath on my face indicates the presence of some life, terrestrial or otherwise. By straining my eyes, I identify an apparition standing close by.
‘Any party from Ajmer in this bus?’ enquires the apparition in an inebriated voice, furnishing tangible evidence of its terrestrial nature.

Joy has never come in my life in a sweeter form than those seven words in Haryanavi. I pinch myself vigorously to make sure I’m not in the middle of a dream.
‘Yes, yes, we are from Ajmer,’ I almost hug the apparition in gratitude. ‘Sandeep, Rishi, Amit, Gaurav…’ I shout the names of my boys in a voice choked with emotion. ‘Come out, boys. We’re home!’

Another apparition appears on the scene carrying a flashlight. Boys jump out of the bus in its assuring light -- strengthening my conviction they wouldn’t have given a damn if a leopard had mistaken me for its dinner before the appearance of those two angels – one with the whisky breath and the other with a flashlight.

Thanks to the flashlight, I now notice the angels are actually two soldiers well fortified with woollens from outside and pegs of whisky from inside. I wouldn’t have given a damn (By the way, ‘I don’t give a damn’’ is the unofficial motto of our school) even if they had been a pair of wolves so long as they were there to take us to Military School Chail.

Which they do after we get our rucksacks off the bus and then carry them to the 3-ton army truck parked a little deeper into the jungle.
In a jiffy, we are all aboard – I in the front cabin with the First Angel (in the order of their appearance) and boys at the back with the Second Angel.

~

Then begins the last leg of our journey to Military School Chail.
The First Angel engages 4x4 to get the truck going up an incline of thirty degrees. To my dismay, the incline goes on increasing with every yard the groaning truck gains.
The narrow road through the dense forest is like a dark tunnel winding its way up and up. Once again, I am assailed by doubts. Is this real or some kind of a nightmare? Could it be I am actually on my way to the Heaven in a 3-ton army truck, escorted by two Angels – one with the whisky breath and the other with a flashlight?
I am soothed by one thought, though. If the way to the Heaven is that steep, the Angels have chosen the right vehicle for it – a 3-ton army truck. No wonder they are dressed and drunk like Indian soldiers to make it look realistic.

For nearly an hour, the truck grinds uphill in the first gear and then comes to a sudden halt.
My doubts are almost confirmed -- I have reached Heaven. Ahead of me is a vast level surface surround by billions of twinkling stars.

For a moment, my mind goes back to my wife and children in Ajmer. They will be all right, I assure myself. Mr. Gupta will give my wife a job in the school, most probably of a peon, even though she is an MA in English. With that assuring thought, I am sort of ready to embrace nirvana, albeit a little too early. For God’s sake, I’m just thirty-three!!

‘Sir! Sir!’ a boy’s voice pulls me back into the temporal world I thought I had left behind me.
I open the truck’s cabin door and jump out onto the terra firma -- a bit regretfully though. Will have to pay back that loan I had taken from the Bank of Rajsthan to buy a scooter, after all.

‘Sir, Sir, You are standing on the highest cricket ground in the world!’ Sandeep’s excited voice confirms I’m still on the bad old earth.

Sandeep is the only cricketer in our group -- a crafty leg spinner who bowls for our First Eleven. Other boys except Rishi and Wahid actually shun games and toss a football reluctantly around during compulsory evening games.
Rishi is a tennis fanatic. He doesn’t mind playing tennis anywhere anytime and has been punished several times for playing it inside the classroom when the teacher is late.
Wahid Yavari is an Iranian whose family took asylum in India after Ayatollah Khomeini took over power in Iran. Football is in his blood. He is eloquent with his feet when playing football; he’s equally eloquent with them in the middle of a brawl.

Received and escorted by the reception committee of two schoolmasters and two school prefects, we walk across the highest cricket ground in the world to a low building at its edge.
It is nearly one in the morning.
It is cold like Hell (Hindu Hell, not the Christian) but beautiful like Heaven.

The low building at the edge of the field is a Guest House and a Cricket Pavilion rolled into one.
Dinner is ready.
In fact it has been ready so long it seems to have lost its warmth mainly out of sheer boredom.
However, we are so famished we devour it like hungry wolves while the members of the reception committee stand politely around, suppressing yawns with great difficulty.

After dinner, boys settle down for the night in the Guest House and I am escorted to the MES Rest House lower down the hill.

The caretaker of the Rest House looks like a character out of a spooky Hindi movie. The sense of déjà vu gets stronger as I climb up a long wooden staircase leading to the first floor.
The scenario is complete with the life-size portrait of an enigmatic looking lady staring down at me from a wall above the landing.
However, I’m so tired I don’t give a damn if she steps out of the portrait and floats around singing ‘Gumnaam hai koi…’ like the heroine of a ghost Bollywood movie.
I just pass out as I hit the sack.

This is what Chail looked like in 1997: