Two glances at once

by NIrajana Chakraborty (India)

Making a local connection India

Only a month ago when me and a friend decided to visit the small hilltop village, Lava and trek through the less known Neora Valley up to Rishap we weren't confident about the local geographies to be such masterful storytellers. Lava and Rishyap, two small vibrant dots on the foothills on Indian lower-Himalayan belt are bridged with the valley of Red Pandas and a family Woodpeckers, but all we cut through the tight smoke of Neora none would arrive at view other than a riot of Stick-insects, Magpies and Tibetian Mastiffs scurrying for bread crumbs from visitors. The rains were due on the 27th of February, compelling us to pace through the track ignoring the obvious tire from a 13 km uphill terrain that with its rocky build played at the weight of our loads, yet we reached at evening just as the last red flare from the sun sank in silence." Rishap wasn't a disaster like the other Indian hillstations", remarked the withering man at the tea stall where we anchored our bodies, having woken up to the chill of the clouds swishing through roads, moistening our faces. "The mountains are cut in considerate spirals for the buildings and that keeps the steady hill on its foot, the soil tightly bound" he said when we pressed him to remember how his 85 year-old self has seen an alien village grow into a town, changing shape with each decade of invading- isms, now plagued to eco-anthroposophical threats by the global clutches that prey upon marketing their cultural memories. Thiswas a happy place, like Maugham’s Lotus-eaters, where the days spilled on to afternoon with the hill-folk contemplating hours-long game of cards at every turn of lanes as pot after pot of tea quietly turned to the local rum, Honey-bee, all drop by drop as the evening fell. We in that cold fog of the night could resist that bitterness either that smelt of lavender and mustard flowers swimming in a mix. But in Lava the darkness was punctuated by the psithurism of the pines and the hum of chants from Monasteries at both ends of the town, only last night. The memory of the sound of a place becomes inextricably linked to the stories we hear from it, I now think. My friend had befriended a 15 year old monk back at the Lava Monastery who with the half-eyed wonder of having learnt the exciting story of tantric Buddhists traditions of the village only a week ago, shared it with us while drinking his wine and munching on some Phalay and dragon fruit. About 50 years ago instead of a coin-sunken, water-brimmed silver bowl, Buddha would have pieces of flesh put in vessels filled with blood and wine for prayers all served in 10 spots before him. Now the religious traditions were sanctified to a less hedonistic strain of ritual practice, peace before the mystic- meditation before the muses. But only 15 kms away, Rishap was a town who history recounts a pantheistic cult of praying to forest gods with amber powder and tree sap, a culture now lost to a growing investment in fruiting economic from catering to tourists and trekkers. Well the local indigenous connections to cults, cultures and native practices are scarely documented, a repository of oral narratives seemed like our only access to a remote past where breed a syncretic practices at every step of the Himalayan beds. Our last night's dinner, a local rooster was cooked with its blood one of the main ingredient, with our modest permission- reminding us of that 85 year old man who said they waste no part of a life they take in the hills for its all so scare and precious. Even bones of slaughtered cattle go into making a paste which cement ceramics and paint their wood-walledd, match-box houses for insulation. Life in small villages of these hills follow the belief in finding use and purpose for and in all resource and put it to work. Helping the earth for them seems like a habit, a diurnal labour of sorts, as they believe is the earth’s, even in these immensely trying times.