It’s been a while! I’ve been travelling since the 3rd of September and have had neither the time nor the energy to do any kind of writing. It’s all I’ve been able to do to manage basic things like work and health.
It was a beautiful trip to the countryside with mountains and clouds and sunshine and rain. Flowers impudently blooming and bobbing about in all their multicoloured glory. A life so ethereal, it takes city girls to actually appreciate it. My cousins there don’t realise the magic of where they live but then that’s how it usually goes.
During this period I also lost touch of things important to me: writing, friends, even my dad (well we were mad at him). I do have these phases of being lost, just flowing along the tide of life, doing only the most necessary to survive and not even and a half more. It comes from time to time, where I don’t feel like talking to friends or reaching out to family (when I was staying alone). It just descends upon me, this state, and usually goes away through a forced reconnection. Like a spark ignited. It takes a loved one’s persistent concern or anger or both to do that. It’s odd. But I try to reduce these periods. Sometimes though they don’t take no for an answer.
I think this happens when I’m overtly sad or stressed about something like I was about my situation with mom and dad. It feels better to swat life away and focus on the present – the present was a lot of distant family members, surfing on their conversations plus a living a physically harder life.
Anyway, let me talk about the trip. The drive to Bhadarwah was so much better than what I remember from my last visit thirteen years ago. There were state-of-the-art tunnels en route now, cutting down on time taken to reach the little picturesque town nestled between the mountains. Chenab however, disappointed me. It was not that piercing emerald green that I’d marvelled at and kept close in my memories. It was a gray-green.
“The government has built a dam,” explained Mom. Why must human beings ruin it all?
What I also missed was a point at which the earlier road would come down to the level of the river. We’d stopped at such a point all those years ago, dipped our feet in the frigid water and taken pictures. Mom would always warn us of how ferocious and deceptive the river was.
“It may look slow moving from here, but it has powerful currents that even the most experienced swimmers cannot fight,” she’d tell us. I never understood why because neither of us soft, coddled children would ever jump into the spine-freezing water of the river even if we weren’t warned about the sinister current.
We stopped at two famous eating joints. One was to have “kaladi” I have no English word to offer for this seeing as I became aware of the existence of such a food item on this trip. It was some form of milk product – rather like cottage cheese but not exactly. They make a sandwich out of it and it was delicious.
The trip was also made enjoyable by a rather naughty beagle pup, Firefly, travelling with us. My aunt and cousin had brought him along. Every stop he’d be put out to do his business and his nose was in overdrive trying to figure out all the new smells the world had exploded into. Closer to our destination, we stopped at a place called Usher, or well pronounced that way anyway. There the rajma-chaval (kidney beans stew with rice) topped off by dollops of clarified butter was amazing. We even had corn on the cob after. My sister remarked that we were eating like we had a twelve hour journey ahead of us when it was just two hours left.
Anyway we reached my Bhadarwah aunt’s house. To my surprise, very few things had changed there. I’d thought there’d be a more functional washroom but frankly my aunt wasn’t as well off so couldn’t afford it. They’d spent a lot of money on their children (my cousins) who were rather in their own worlds. It was a hard life out there. Trips to fill up water from the nearby watering well (?) You needed to heat water separately either through a boiler or on the gas to take a bath as there were no geysers. The old bathroom had no flush and needed to be flushed with buckets of water. The new bathroom was way up on the second floor and was tiny.
But the charming parts were these: everything we ate was from our own gardens or farms. The water was from a running water well where the algae purified the water further. To me algae in water meant some form of terrible water borne disease, but no one fell sick as long as we avoided any of it in the water. Cousins were taking such good care of us, in fact I felt like we were spoilt and made into utter slobs for the trip. We were fed constantly. I think I forgot what hunger even feels like. Every shade, shape, type of flower I’ve made friends with over there. Perhaps that’s exaggeration, the flowers were in a whole league of their own.
We then made our way further up to what is a proper village called Hanga, a place where my mother lived out her earliest years with my grandparents and her siblings. Most of the way we went in a car with my Hanga cousin driving. It’s a dirt road and we thoroughly enjoyed the jostling about, shaded by tall, sleek deciduous trees. At one point we had to get off and begin a steep climb up to the family homes of my three cousins and their families. Hill homes are painted in colours that are screaming loud and do not go well with one another. Bright blue goes with bright purple and bright red goes with a bright yellow. I realised that it was because during the cold months of grey and white winter, these colours would quite literally brighten up life.
Hanga has an even more beautiful view of the snow-capped mountains and forests on hills with clone like trees making for a gorgeous cloak of green. It’s the kind of view influencers gun for and pay for in hotel rooms. I’ll talk more about this in my next post.
insearchofthebeautiful 