Transmission 15 – A More Familiar Resting Place

Life in Nainital was a lot more gentle than the mayhem and misery in Varanasi, and I found myself approaching a more familiar land of pines, spruce and oaks, with snow shirted himalayas in the horizon, tiny cliff side settlements and terraced gardens where lithe village people hiked up and down the mountain roads to their private peaceful dominions. There was promise of a new India in this less than tropical climate. I was no longer in short sleeve and sandal weather and it could have easily been Canada with an imported culture implanted into its remote forests. The bulk of Nainital is built around a lake with its typical shops, nescafe coffee houses, a passenger dominant walking path called ‘mall road’ that runs on one side of the lake and a gondola offering carriage up the hill to take views of the snowy peaks, an exotic sight for most Indians who have never seen snow in their lives. The Tibetan influence is strong and filters down into every second restaurant offering steamed vegetarian momos, and thunkpa, while every other clothier peddling Tibetan made wool sweaters, mittens, winter hats and blankets. A monastery sits nested above Nainital lake with its prayer flags blowing in the wind. I visited this temple one pleasant afternoon, to find a few men chatting on the porch drinking green tea, generally doing nothing at all. This was more or less what I had in mind, and I wanted to simply take stock of the journey so far, and prepare myself mentally for the last month of the trip, with four completely different states to cover, each with entirely different modes of life.

The quietude of this new place actually had the leveling effect of unraveling a lot of bound up energy I was not aware I had oppressed. The loneliness that came in fits, typical of the long distance traveler, doubt, anger, craving, and even boredom. Ironically, the aphrodisiacal effect of riding a high powered motorcycle 8500km across the country with a never ending flow of  stimulation and novelty did create a longing for something more permanent, engaging and intimate. There was rarely an outlet for all that libidinal force at the end of the road, and if there was, it came in the form of black market flesh trade, and deep dives into the alcoholic underbelly of india’s roughest cities, places and engagements I wanted nothing to do with. The new silence was a good opportunity to look at all my stuff, and what really was riding through my mind when I was not moving down the interstate. The weather was temperamental, changing on the hour, bringing torrential rain, snow, hail and fog then stripping down to play in a few hours of fair sunshine until dark clouds threatened the outdoorsman once again. Out of nowhere, the sensualist in me started to crave, and it came hard. I found myself subconsciously desiring the luxuries of a more hedonic lifestyle. There was nothing I wanted more than a juicy venison steak, a bottle of whiskey, and a woman in my bed. Was it the onset of the miserable weather, and the abstinence from meat and women for the last quarter of a year? Or was it the familiar surroundings that brought me closer in my imagination to my cabin in the woods lifestyle where I permitted these things in moderation? Suddenly subsumed in the natural simplicity of a more secluded habitation, and drawing on four months of the constant barrage of advertisement, western comfort offerings, and temptations, I think my stronghold of discipline was caving in, and just had to laugh with myself. I knew it would pass organically, and maybe I needed to feed the wolf a meal and appease its appetite a little before it consumed me.

But my first day was not all roses and honey either, and there were no strong spirits, wild meats or fine women in the picture. 11km from my hotel, the machine suffered another puncture. All my pride in making good road time from Uttar Pradesh was suddenly deflated, literally. Impossible odds I thought and just my luck. I hadn’t eaten all day, and it was getting on 4pm. Several of the more decent cafes and restaurants were closed for some reason, so I gave up the hunger pangs of survival, instead opting to fix the bike before dark. This set me back a bit more on my budget but did not eat away too much of the evening. I ended up going on a wild goose chase in search of the Oyo hotel which did not exist in the geo-location marked on the map. There was nothing but scree forest and a thin roadway with nowhere even to park and investigate. I carried on further down the freeway until I reached a small town and asked around for directions. I entered another Oyo hotel with a different name where a man sat on a stool facing the opposite direction of the front desk with excessively loud Hindi music blaring in the foyer. It all sounded the same to me, and in hindsight I appreciated more the folk music of home and its variance in song style and genre. I tried in vain to get his attention, even raising my voice to try to shout over the music, and when he finally did notice me he seemed stunned as if he had just been tazered with a current of electricity and apologized that he could not hear me. It was quite a comical scene, and he offered no insight into where I might find the other hotel. His companion came along from another office next to his and pointed me just 50 meters down the road, and I wondered how it was that the first man was unaware of it. Was it my accent?, or was he stone walling me? Yet these conversational impasse’s seemed to happen more frequently than seemed reasonable. I chalked it up to the individualist ethos sweeping across the world, where people seemed to be unawares of even their closest neighbors and what lie in their proximity, to absorbed in their own little bubbles.

The ‘hotel’ if it could be elevated to that status was less than formal and almost not there. A tiny slanted metal staircase led down from inside a general store selling junk food which seemed deserted and understaffed. A teenage kid showed me the rooms which were musty smelling, but otherwise spacious enough with a king size bed and paintings on the wall. An ironic juxtaposition of luxury in the most unlikely places, but it felt a slight depressing and carried a weird ambience, so I fired up again and told the fellow in the shop that I would look elsewhere. I opened up my navigator and switched it to satellite topography view, and chose the place that was surrounded with the most green and the most interesting name, HOTS hostel, that was it, for 500 rupees cash I could have a pillow and a bed in a six-bunk dorm. I started to second guess my technique at deciding places to sleep when I couldn’t find this one either. I backtracked 14km until the phone and navigator cut off, then I winged it until I ended up in Jeolikote, and went up every road in town looking for the place. I knew from the map there should be a trail or dirt track leading away from the ordinary car routes, and I assumed at least the careful posting of a sign to point the way. I was proved wrong again and this was a stark reminder to drop my expectations even in the most hopeful of circumstances, at least the scenery when I was lost was still epic.

I met a group of youngsters who were able to help me orient myself and called the main line of the hostel, to which a man named Devendra answered and sorted me out with a plan. I was instructed to drive back into town and wait at the Bharat Petroleum petrol pump for five minutes where another man would meet me and take me back to this secret place that started to elude my imagination. Finding the fueling station was no problem, and I filled the tank because I had nothing else to do. After a short wait and feeling rather uninformed of what to look for, a spry old man wearing a trucker hat that reminded me of one of my uncles came trotting down a gravel road and mumbled a bunch of words in Hindi that I did not understand. So debilitating and cut off I felt at that moment to be unable to speak the local language, so I retorted back the only way I could and in simplified English met his remarks with ‘we go to hostel?’ feeling rather ridiculous at my attempt to communicate. He nodded several times and jumped on the pillion seat like a little kid eager to go on vacation, then steered me up a long winding hill with fishlike movements of his old wrinkled hands. After ten minutes on the muddy path he motioned me towards a ramshackle gate made of weather wrought bamboo, where I parked the bike and locked the bars. I unfastened the saddlebags with which the man, who must have been in his late fifties, slung them both over his shoulders and trotted down the trail like a young colt completely belying his age. I picked up my military backpack and blanket roll and paced after the man finding it a challenge to match his fast footwork down a network of trails through cool forest, and over several small streams. This was impossible I thought, I only saw shacks, a makeshift plant nursery, a little square shaped temple built of concrete, but then trees, and more trees. Where was this man taking me, wherever it was I would have to settle for it, because I was not going back, at this point I would have taken a cowshed for my lodging, at least it would be warm. The rooted trail cleared the woodland and opened up to my astonishment to reveal a most serene and attractive hostel dropped into a haven of nature. The main hall had been painted by former travelers, with artistic outdoor decor in the ways that Ikea might furnish an outdoor patio in Sweden, this was on the upper terrace of the land, while small square garden plots cultivated with various kitchen herbs and vegetables were arranged below in neatened rows and a walking path on their western flank which led to the bedroom house. The rooms had carpets, and a kind of coziness like a chalet, with a brick hearth in one corner, and a mantlepiece over top where I placed a photograph of Ram Dass and Maharaji along with a book and the prayer beads my wife gave me. It felt like home already, at least as appropriated as home could feel for the traveler. I watched the stars come out, and the moon rise from the long porch with the jaded colors of the mountain becoming more obscured as darkness grew around me like a black cloth. Only a few lights far away suggested the presence of others.

I did not do much here but whiled away most hours of the day writing, thinking, and making mental roadmaps of where my life would take me when I returned to eastern Canada. Remembering it was coming soon and all the Indian customs I had become sensitized to would in the course of two six hour flights be left behind. Which of those would I try to preserve and import with me back home, and which would I be happy to leave its native place. I imagined that it would come naturally, and the transitions would not be as harsh to me as many others. I already lived in the country, on a modest farmers budget, and actually found the Indian mannerisms not all too foreign to me. The sacrifices of leaving would be made with grace, and I was actually feeling quite content with it all.

Now was the time of Holi in northern India, a festival that turned the streets into nonstop celebrations of spring, and the longer prosperous days, which were interwoven with myths from the Ramayana. By now the myths are diluted in the revelries of downtown partying, and bizarre public rituals in which colored pigments of all hues of the rainbow are thrown about, smeared on each others faces, animals, cars, and sent smoking out of cardboard tubes into the air, to a soundtrack of electronic beats and bollywood style music. This carries on for two days and nights with incessant drumming, cymbals, and dance. I didn’t really feel amped up with the same gusto the locals had, and figured I would find another way to join the celebrations minus the craziness. In the afternoon I left the premises of the hostel, and followed a walking path uphill past a few rustic shelters and stone houses, which formed a sprawled out valley community I was previously unawares of. The most beautiful strains of music were drifting through the forest like incense in a temple, so I followed the sounds until they became more clearly in focus of earshot. The rare sounds of woman’s melodic voices over the tam-tam of drums and other harmonic folk instruments now bathed me in a sense of peace. Through the canopy of a plantation of apricot and plum trees I could see an elegantly built home, here where no roads lead to, in a haven of this mountains cradle. On the terrace of the village homestead I could just see the crouching and sitting forms of several females, some older and other just in their youth, which I could also sense from the range of voices. Something in me held me in place, the men were not present and the thought came that this must be an exclusive woman’s gathering, so rather than intrude my welcome, I stayed on the walking path until after five minutes of this sweet rhapsody, a man did come, but from another fork in the trail whence I had walked. He was the householder, who carried a small boy child and greeted me with affection and open invitation to visit his home. I felt privileged to get closer to the source of this blissful music, and would have given anything in that moment to climb onto the terrace and receive the blessed presence of their gathering. A moustachioed man exited the house with two servings of tea served in metal cups and we found a set overlooking the immaculate garden and fruit oasis that had been nourished betides. Some of the trees looked like cherry blossoms, and the tranquility of the place soothed the savage beast in me. I always felt most at peace in the bosom of natures bounty, the feminine energy here was powerful and felt incredibly supportive. The man explained to me some of the traditional village customs of Holi, and invited me later to join the men’s rituals which would commence at 6pm at another dwelling, “just follow the music, like you did, and you will find us”. We chatted on until a woman came down from the terrace and offered us each a bowl of citrus pulp mixed with herbs and chili spice, the flavors of which I would have never thought would blend but tasted absolutely heavenly and perfect in this bioregion. It really tasted like the true essence of the land. I sauntered off back down the hill with a big smile, and was eager to experience a slice of the real indian village customs on a holiday.

There was only one other staying in the hikers hostel, a police official from Lucknow on vacation from the hustle of the city in retreat to the silence of the Kurgaon mountains. Over the course of one week we grew in mutual awareness of each others sagas and told stories, explored nainital on the motorcycle and sat by the flames of a fire when it got cold at night. He was in his 50’s and also a practitioner of yoga with a penchant for conspiracy theories and had a particular fascination with aliens. We idled like sitting ducks on the balcony of the hostel whiling away the hours in good conversation ranging on subjects from international travel, married life, indian culture, and world issues. Of course with the growing plague of the corona virus infecting the worlds attention, this leaked into our communication as well. On Friday, India closed the borders for any foreigner entry, which barred any chances for one of my Scandinavian friends from joining me on my last months round up through Himalchal Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan.

Since I had made the conscious decision in my teenage years of not following any form of mainstream news like radio, television or paper, what insight into the world did filter through often came in the most inconspicuous of ways, from neighbors or from word of mouth. I enjoyed the reserve from the constant barrage of negativity pushed in the local media, and tended to learn everything I really needed to know through direct communion with the world away from the screen. The situations in which I came to awareness of international worldly matters were often comical. I would steal away to a small hamlet in the Indian hillside and visit a fruit stand to buy a few mangoes and some grapes, whereby the man or woman behind the stall would proceed to wrap them in the latest hindi newspaper. And there on the outside of the paper in plain sight would be a picture of Donald Trump and an article on his latest political shenanigans, or some colored bulletin from China about the spread of corona. Even here I couldn’t escape it, and found it to be a sign of the times we live in. It was another important lesson I learned in India, that modern culture bleeds into every corner of the earth. I shelved it with my other keen observances that human trash is everywhere, and spirituality can be bought and sold like products. I guess the golden teaching through many of the life lessons I have earned over seven years of nomadic travel is that we need to adopt new mythologies for being if we are to thrive in a brave new world. We are not living in our ancestors lives, nor even in our grandparents or parents lives and we must adapt and evolve in this Wolf Age and Kali Yuga.

I’ve been learning that stories are such a profound way to transmit a teaching, to share the calling of wisdom with other human beings. And I’m not under an illusion that I have a corner on the market of wisdom or even any special wisdom. I feel we are all born into wisdom and come together to share what we are hearing, that we already know all this stuff and each person is an avatar of the storyteller archetype. We figure out how to live our lives from the place of wisdom as the culture around us graduates from knowledge and experience, whereas the wisdom has to do with the intuitive heart and the way we receive information. I have enjoyed using stories in my own toolbox, and I think we are just stuck in between stories, and that in order for the good stories to survive, we have to keep creating new ones.

Never minding this digression into the rotten fruit that our society sometimes puts out, I was looking forward to the Holi where overall good feelings were the keepsakes I would have from tonight. From the fireplace I could hear the ram ram on the drums and that was my cue to exit, and get back uphill. The eyes of over twenty weathered men and some boys met mine in the dim electric light of the porch at the gathering house, and my new acquaintance explained away my presence among them. Though every time I breached these encounter swith the non-English community whom most had not seen white people, I was usually met with peculiar gazes as if they had seen some strange new species. I knew I was fascinating but surely not that much. Over the course of the next two hours I followed the train of this darkly dressed male caravan up the hill path to various homesteads, while various voices in our company belted out traditional Holi songs, which were then repeated by younger members. We circled small fires built on stone patios while three or four chants were sung at each family home, in between which colored pastes were smeared on our foreheads by the elders, and sweets were poured into our cupped hands and gulped down eagerly, especially by the kids. I did not actually like these sweets, which were some kind of jaggery with a sour fermented flavor, but the dances were amusing and I felt a little more received now. We continued this march until reaching a small temple where some of the men broke branches and started a massive fire which almost lit the pines up, and sent us all far back in our circle dance. Then some couple women came out with boiled potatoes rubbed in herbs, and good spiced chai, what a treat thanks again to the ladies. I was really like this custom, free food, hot tea and warm fires, and everyone was in a good mood. I said my good nights to my new friends and searched my way back to bed in the dark.

On the second day of Holi, I went on a couple excursions with the motorcycle on the outskirts of Nainital. Some happy twenty-somethings were parked on a metal bridge that spanned a great scree of gravelly mountain resembling part of the Rockies. They danced to upbeat Hindi tunes and were smeared in rainbow colors from head to foot, without a care in the world. The hilarious and bizarre way in which Indians move their bodies to modern electronic music is funny every time, and I found it actually a bit liberating to see some good vibes getting into people in this time of doom and gloom. I went to the Himalayan darshan, a turn on the mountain road where the snowy alps of the great Himalayas could be seen in the horizon. It was almost like a mirage, and I had waited patiently for a decade for this sighting. It put me in a really good and adventurous mindset. For the remainder of the afternoon I climbed up to Cheena peak and into the fog. A small canteen at the top served chai and maggi, and I met a birdwatcher while we exchanged stories in the smoky hut of the walah.

The next day, the bike was sounding very sick. A loud scraping sound like metal teeth grinding together in the sleep of a machine, and it made me very uncomfortable to ride. Me and the cop, Sachin was his name, went to Nainital and dropped my beloved roadrunner into the hands of the same young mechanic that repaired my inner tube. I could tell there was more than just this abrasive metallic noise that was the issue, and gave him free reign to fix anything he came across and if there was time, a deep clean and oil change. I came back in the waning light of the evening after spending the better portion of the day chilling at Naini lake, eating momos, and drinking european style coffee latte. She looked great and I had high hopes for the work that had been done. One of the sparkplugs were replaced that had cracked, two bolts in the forks were fitted which were missing, 3 liters of clean high performance enduro oil were swallowed into the engine, the rear brake plates were adjusted to eliminate the friction noise, the idle pin was evened, the bike glistened with black oily lubricants sprayed liberally on all moving parts, and it was even washed of all the crud that had grew upon it like stalagmites and stalactites. I also found a new mount for the phone in town after looking in every mobile shop since madya pradesh. Then we fired it up for a demo ride on a potholed urban rode to test its mettle. It felt smooth again, and it cost me 2700 rupees but I bargained for 2500, that’s what you do here.

The uniquely Indian sights were beyond the Taj Mahal, the forts, temples and wild animals. They were the little mundane things on the streets that popped up in random places. A man got shaved at an outdoor parlor with nothing more than a mirror tied to a tree, and a molded plastic chair to sit on, another carried a small flock of chickens on the bumper of his motorcyle, a team of sportsters played cricket on a concrete pitch in front of an impressive Muslim mosque, women sold woolen socks on the bank of a steep u-turn going down one of the mountain routes, and a cobbler fixed my riding boots with needle and thread as he crouched on a sewer grate covered over with a mat and his assemblage of tools. This was the real spice of life, and it just took slowing down a little to see it all, and going places where you least expected anything. These visions always made my day seem a little more worthwhile, and I felt like I was seeing more of the raw india.

The next few days were pretty laid back, I met an American named Chelsea who seemed perfectly content to hide out in India, toured the neighboring valleys, and visited the Neem Karoli Baba ashram. Customary in Indian tradition, saints were never burned but given proper burials in holy places and usually marked with shrines or in this case, the ashram where Maharaji spent most of his elder years among a throng of western and Indian devotees. His ultimate samadhi or grave state involved being set into the ground sitting upright in the lotus pose, wrapped in his blanket then covered with the dark soil. On top of which was built a white marble statue of the same features and posture of the mortal man, and garbed in an identical blanket. A man dished out prasad, which were usually sweets but on this day was baked chickpeas. The temple was modest and held many rare photos of him, and it felt grounding to finally visit there.

I forgot my helmet that day, or carefully neglected wearing it, one of the two, and of course this had to be the day that everyone on the road including their pillions wore them fashionably, a law that was rarely adhered to in rural India. I cruised the snakey routes and blind turns with a whole lot of anxiety, and a tinge of rebellion feeling a bit like an outlaw with only my blue checkered Arabian scarf wrapped around my head, and a big horse running between my legs.

The food at the hostel was fairly standard fare and the dinner lacked variation, white rice with pickle and some cold sliced garden veg. I grew a bit tired of it until I realized I could ask for something different, again the language barrier enslaved me. But in the end I was able to get hot soup and steaming pots of herbal rice, and make my own healthy porridges in the kitchen for breakfast, this was comfort food and better for my digestion. One particular chilly evening fell with pellets of hail for nearly half an hour and the pressure dropped, and I couldn’t get warm. I convinced the guys to let me have free reign of the burners and supply me with a pint of milk. I heated it up and blended it with turmeric, black pepper, two spoons of sugar and some malt whisky, the resulting golden concoction was like medicine that warmed my bones and put me right to sleep. I was not ready for the sudden drop in temperature at night, so I pilfered some of other blankets in the hostel and slept under five thick layers of them.

My thoughts went on curious train tracks when there was no one else around to talk to, and sometimes entered dark tunnels of depression, vast terminals of doubt, or lofty bridges of acceptance. It was interesting to largely sit back and watch these emotions pass like clouds in the Asian sky, and try not to get attached to them. I tried to hike off the bleaker states of mind when I felt derailed, or put myself where people were and see if I could not change my mood, but at the end of the day I was still living with predominately easygoing circumstances. My impurities were many, and the dross of my emotions coupled with bouts of loneliness forged a marriage that would birth unproductive states of action in me, or a lack of discipline towards my own ethics, but then again, I was no holy man. These were just facets of my being I was learning along the way, and when I laid my head on the pillow at the end of the day felt pretty contented with how the trip was going. I hadn’t met any dreamy soul mates in serene jungles, or had any near death encounters with cobras and tigers, or ridden on the back of an elephant, or even learned any of the exotic languages, but I guess there was still time for those things. Tomorrow I would make for Rishikesh and return to the Ganges river, the cleaner part this time, and maybe have a bath.