Spirituality of the Himalayas

The Himalayas in the Ladakh region comprising three main ranges - the Zanskar, the Ladakh and the Great Himalayan - is an awe inspiring sight, no matter how many times you fly over them. Some of the peaks towered over us - cold, icy, snow covered, harsh, menacing- these sentinals of the north that has protected this land from marauding invaders and the more inclement weather further to the north. We had dropped below the cloud layer on our final approach into Leh, the capital of the Ladakh region. I was earmarked for an expedition, or at least, that was what I was told - the first Siachen Glacier expedition. I was to keep things under the wraps for some reason and at that time, I did not bother to question things - I was just taken in with the adventure of it all. Leh is a small town nestling at the foot of the Ladakh range. The altitude was 11000 feet, but there was some greenery in the otherwise desolate moonscape. The river Indus flowed past the runway in a wide shallow stream as it was still early spring. A cold gust hit me as I stepped out of the aircraft onto the tarmac and picked up my haversack and looked around for a place to warm myself. An assortment of olive green army vehicles were lined up on one side of a hut that passed as the terminal building. Expecting my ride to be one among the parked vehicles, I saundered across and was quickly bundled into a vehicle which had its heaters running. I couldn't have hope for more!

Two weeks of acclimatization later, I was headed off into the blue on my first assignment. Several hours later we were grinding up the mountain side towards Chang La, enroute to Chushul, the lone outpost overlooking the old airfield and the stretch of Pangong Tso lake that turned and continued beyond the bend into Tibetain Chinese territory. But this is not about the trip up to Chushul or the subsequent 'expedition'. Its about the journey and the people you met along it and the stories that was associated with it.

There is one about a military police chap who appeared on pitch black nights to direct vehicular traffic into a ravine - the Khooni Nullah - on the way up from Udhampur to Ramban. There is one about a friendlier soul who directed people stuck with a breakdown to places where food and shelter was available enroute from Kashmir valley to Gurez in the Kishenganga valley . There is even one about a dedicated spirit that joined each patrol that set out from Tangtse to a particular mountain top each Thursday night.

There was this story about a whole convoy being stuck up on Chang La for a week before the people trapped in it decided to try and make it down to the other side on foot. Walking down the steep mountainside, the group triggered an avalanche that buried 14 people. Nine survivors were dug up that day. A recovery group that came back later to collect the bodies found four of them. Two weeks later, there was still no sign of the fifth body. Someone suggested that they should approach the local baba or holy man to see if he could help and sure enough, he said that on the third day a lone bird would appear and circle the area a few times before alighting on the slow covered slope momentarily before flying away again. They would find the body at the point where the bird landed. Most of the group who heard this, dismissed it straightaway as a lot of gibberish. But some kept the faith. And sure enough, it happened like the baba said. The body had been picked up by the avalanche and smashed up the far side of the stream at the bottom of the reenterant. There was no way any one would have even thought of looking there.

The strangest one I heard was about this great white winged horse that flew across the mountain, with its hoofs catching the ridge lines tens of miles apart. The local even lead me to a spot on a ridge just behind one of our forward localities that had a giant hoof mark imprinted on rock. The story goes that there was a similar hoof mark on each of the three ridge lines visible from there all aligned in a straight line along the line of flight - one on the ride above Haji Pir pass, one were we were standing and one on the ridge line visible in the distance on the other side of the narrow Jhelum valley towards the Kayya Bowl sector.

There are even more gruesome patterns to naming landmarks along the way. The 'one-ton mod' ('mod' for a turning or a hair-pin bend, in Hindi) where a one-tonner had crashed through the concrete siding to the rocky stream bed 150 feet below. The 'Shaktiman mod' where the truck had fallen with the loss of a dozen soldiers, and even an 'Avro mod' where an Avro aircraft had crashed sometime in the 60s. There were no survivors. Some of the twisted wreckage is still visible from that hairpin bend for those who bothered to stop. All these mods were on one route from Leh to the Nubra river valley on the far side of the Ladakh range via the Khardungla pass at 18400 feet, the highest motorable road in the world.

Whatever the truth in the thousands of stories one picks up on the journeys through the mountains, there is no doubt that the harsh terrain does make you more spiritual. There are well established temples on all routes in the mountains. There is the mandatory stop at the top of each climb to offer prayers for a journey half accomplished and to seek blessings for the remainder of the journey. There are memorials all along the way of people whose journeys did not concluded as expected but ended all the same. It reminded me constantly of the fraility of human lives.