A Night In A Garhwal Village

RUSKIN BOND captures the sights and sounds of life in the village of Manjari, some 25 miles from LansdowneIwake to what sounds like the din of a factory buzzer, but is in fact the music of a single vociferous cicada in the lime tree near my window.Through the open window,I focus on a pattern of small, glossy lime leaves; then through them,I see the mountains,the Himalayas, striding away into an immensity of sky. ‘In a thousand ages of the gods, I could not tell thee of the glories of Himachal.’ So confessed a Sanskrit poet at the dawn of Indian history and he came closer than anyone else to capturing the spell of the Himalayas. The sea has had Conrad and Stevenson and Masefield,but the mountains continue to defy the written word. We have climbed their highest peaks and crossed their most difficult passes, but still they keep their secrets and their reserve;they remain remote,mysterious, spirit-haunted. No wonder, then, that the people who live on the mountain slopes in the mist-filled valleys of Garhwal have long since learned humility, patience and a quiet resignation.Deep in the crouching mist lie their villages,while climbing the mountain slopes are forests of rhododendron, spruce and deodar, soughing in the wind from the icebound passes.Pale women plough,they laugh at the thunder as their men go down to the plains for work; for little grows on the beautiful mountains in the north wind. When I think of Manjari village in Garhwal, I see a small river, a tributary of the Ganga, rushing along the bottom of a steep, rocky valley. On the banks of the river and on the terraced hills above, there are small fields of corn, barley,mustard, potatoes and onions. A few fruit trees grow near the village. Some hillsides are rugged and bare, just masses of quartz or granite. On hills exposed to wind, only grass and small shrubs are able to obtain a foothold. This landscape is typical of Garhwal, one of India’s most northerly regions with its massive snow ranges bordering on Tibet.Although thinly populated, it does not provide much of a living for its people. Most Garhwali cultivators are poor, some are very poor. ‘You have beautiful scenery,’I observed after crossing the first range of hills. ‘Yes,’ said my friend, ‘but we cannot eat the scenery.’ And yet these are cheerful people, sturdy and with wonderful powers of endurance.Somehow they manage to wrest a precarious living from the unhelpful, calcinated soil.I am their guest for a few days. My friend Gajadhar had brought me to his home, to his village above the little Nayar River.We took a train into the foothills and then we took a bus and finally,made dizzy by the hairpin bends devised in the last century by a brilliantly diabolical road-engineer, we alighted at the small hill station of Lansdowne, chief recruiting centre for the Garhwal Regiment. Lansdowne is just over 6,000 feet high. From there we walked, covering twenty-five miles between sunrise and sunset, until we came to Manjari village, clinging to the terraced slopes of a very proud, very permanent mountain. And this is my fourth morning in the village.Other mornings I was woken by the throaty chuckles of the red-billed blue magpies, as they glided between oak trees and medlars; but today the cicada has drowned all birdsong. It is a little out of season for cicadas but perhaps this sudden warm spell in late September has deceived him into thinking it is mating season again. Early though it is, I am the last to get up. Gajadhar is exercising in the courtyard, going through an odd combination of Swedish exercises and yoga.He has s fine physique with sturdy legs that most Garhwalis possess. I am sure he will realize his ambition of joining the Indian army as a cadet.His younger brother Chakradhar, who is slim and fair with high cheekbones,is milking the family’s buffalo. Normally,he would be on his long walk to school, five miles distant; but this is a holiday, so he can stay at home and help with the household chores. His mother is lighting a fire. She is a handsome woman, even though her ears,weighed down by heavy silver earrings, have lost their natural shape. Garhwali women usually invest their savings in silver ornaments.And at the time of marriage, it is the boy’s parents who make a gift of land to the parents of an attractive girl;a dowry system in reverse.There are fewer women than men in the hills and their good looks and sturdy physique give them considerable status among menfolk. Chakradhar’s father is a corporal in the Indian Army and is away for most of the year. When Gajadhar marries, his wife will stay in the village to help his mother and younger brother look after the fields, house, goats and buffalo. Gajadhar will see her only when he comes home on leave. He prefers it that way; he does not think a simple hill girl should be exposed to the sophisticated temptations of the plains. The village is far above the river and most of the fields depend on rainfall. But water must be fetched for cooking,washing and drinking.And so, after a breakfast of hot sweet milk and thick chapattis stuffed with minced radish,the brothers and I set off down the rough track to the river.The sun has climbed the mountains but it has yet to reach the narrow valley. We bathe in the river.Gajadhar and Chakradhar dive off a massive rock; but I wade in circumspectly, unfamiliar with the river’s depths and currents.The water, a milky blue, has come from the melting snows; it is very cold.I bathe quickly and then dash for a strip of sand where a little sunshine has split down the mountainside in warm, golden pools of light.At the same time, the song of the whistling thrush emerges like a dark secret from the wooded shadows. A little later,buckets filled,we toiled up the steep mountain.We must go by a better path this time if we are not to come tumbling down with our buckets of water.As we climb,we are mocked by a barbet which sits high up in a spruce calling feverishly in its monotonous mournful way. ‘We call it the mewli bird,’ says Gajadhar.‘There is a story about it.People say that the souls of men who have suffered injuries in the law courts of the plains and who have died of their dissappointments transmigrate into mewli birds.That is why the birds are always crying unnee- ow, un-neeow, which means ‘injustice,injustice!’ Him a l a y a , S p e a k i n g Tiger ■