In Search of a Narrative
My girlhood had
been spent in Naini Tal, in a world typical of a north Indian colonial hill
station. This world consisted of elite Anglicized boarding schools, modern
hotels, horse-riding, yachting, polo tournaments and picnics. It
belonged to a culture that was a fluffy pancake tossed out of a western kitchen
and patted down on one that was rooted in age-old pahari traditions and the folklore
of a mountainous terrain that for centuries had allowed for subsistence culture alone.
Though I had schooled here, I had not really known the Kumaon hills at all.
Yet, growing in me was a need to understand something apart from the pristine
beauty of these hills or my own youthful memories in a boarding school. Oddly
enough, it was an illness fifteen years ago, and subsequent convalescence that spurred me to seek out an excuse to be up in the hills again. To smell the sweet crisp mountain
air again and to discover them anew. But i needed a reason to be there, an excuse to spend time in the hills. I was a researcher in search of a story, a writer seeking narrative--but what could it be--I did not know enough about the hills really. In my
formative years, local Kumaoni history and folklore weren’t part of school
curricula as that of far-off Europe such as the Crusades, Renaissance and the
British Industrial Revolution were.So what did I really know about Kumaon?
I quickly realized I would have to look beyond the worlds that I had inhabited
thus far and bypass all that I had been previously familiar with. I would have
to also ignore the colonial traditions that had been slow to wear off in the
first few decades after India’s independence and look for what had long lain
beneath. This involved observing the underpinnings in the life of the
ubiquitous pahari seen at every other bend of the hill road. Wearing a
black topi and a black jacket, a black umbrella tucked under his arm,
and a saffron and rice tilak encrusted on his forehead, he could be
spotted sitting on his haunches smoking a bidi, or on a bench at a chai
shop. All I knew was that he was
part of the industrious workforce of the U.P. plains, meeting his family’s
needs by sending money orders back home. Almost till the 1980’s, every
government office in Uttar Pradesh had a Kumaoni clerk, every dhabha, a
Kumaoni chotu and every hostel, guest house, institution or office, a
guard called Bahadur as the Nepalis who came to the plains via the routes of
Kali Kumaon were called. Little more was then known.
Catching the Ranikhet Express
from Old Delhi Station, as I had once caught the Kathgodam Express from
Lucknow, with a steam engine decorated with painted ‘Homeward Bounds’ made by
school boarders, I plummeted straight to the last railhead of Kathgodam. The
train has always been an overnighter, broad gauge or narrow gauge, since the
early years of colonial rule when it stopped at Lal Kuan. You fell asleep in
the summer heat and dust of the plains only to wake up to spy that compelling
sight of the mountains in the distance in the morning. In a short story I had
once written called ‘Coming Home’, I had described just such a train journey:
It was early
morning by the time the train drew in. Before dawn broke he would be at the
window. He would gaze out of the heavy iron bars of the old first-class
compartment, ready to catch the first rays of light as they pushed back the
charcoal of the night sky. The smell of soot hit his nostrils and flecks got
into his eyes, but he fluttered his eyelids and thrust his face as far out as
he could to feel the fine fresh wind blowing against him. He would look closely
at the landscape to see if he could spot distant hills, afraid the train might
have been cheating on him and all the while pulling in the opposite
direction……….
At Kathgodam, a choice awaited me; buses
and taxis plying to Naini Tal, Bhim Tal, Almora, Kausani, Pithoragarh….where
was I headed? And who could my travelling companion be? Someone I could spar
with or unburden my fledgling thoughts upon?
