Perfect and not so perfect days in the hills and beyond

These are such perfect days. Weather-wise in the hills, that is. Despite the traffic, despite garbage being tossed out of moving vehicles and immobile windows. This by (dare I use the words?) ‘tourists’ and some ‘locals’, who should be encouraged to litter their own bedrooms and homes. One also has a suggestion for them. One that could save them considerable money on their next spree of flinging scraps. They need not buy mattresses any longer. All they need to do is collect all the FMCG wrappers, plastic bottles and other sundries that they throw away and use those for stuffing. Every crinkle and crackling will bring back happy memories of a moment well littered.

That vent having been vented, for assorted reasons, the family, in the past few weeks, has been going back and forth to Delhi. Our bright and sunny capital where the sun shines bright and where the sky is well and truly clear, only all that is above the smog line and we are well below. That misery, or sort of wellbeing, is directly proportional to the efficacy of an air purifier. Those who can, escape at any given chance to cleaner air, cleaner water and cleaner food. So much for our burgeoning economy where even clean air is not available to the common man. Grown Child No. 1 returns with a cough that could shatter windows. Grown Child No. 2 returns with a sneeze so violent that it could slam you against a wall. To express a measure of familial solidarity, I really should get back to smoking endless cigarettes and coughing my lungs out.

Vent No. 2 also having been vented, let me turn this down a little and come to why these are such perfect days. A time when there is much beauty and happiness to be found in one’s own backyard. Time and again, it has been said that if you live in a hill town, and you want to reach a place on time, then walk. At best, traffic remains unpredictable and on a normal day, resembles a series of snails worming their way along the highway.

Walking for me is something like a form of prayer or meditation. Not that I do much of the latter two. To be able to walk at almost any time of the year, and at almost any time of day or night, is one of the biggest reasons that I live in the hills. The walk is not hurried, it is not paced and it has done very little if anything to get rid of my tummy (though the real criminals may be late dinners that trail a couple of drinks). This is not just a form of exercise or therapy or something that one does for the sake of doing; for me, this is a core aspect of my being. I like to stop and stare, almost vacuously, at a valley or a distant hill and analyse if the snow line is higher or lower than what it was a week ago or at the same time a year ago.

The wonderful Wendell Berry wrote what are some of my favourite lines: “And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.”

A friend has just returned from a trip to Ayodhya. As a largely irreligious person, the sacred part of the trip had limited interest for me. That may have something to do with my genes and the largely agnostic, even atheistic, family that I come from. (I don’t recall my father ever, by choice, going to a place of formal worship. My mother said her prayers gently and quietly without letting the world know that one was at prayer and wished to announce the event). But then, this is a personal thing, I don’t wish to plant my template on someone else’s beliefs and I don’t want something unacceptable imposed on me. Be all that as it may, what did interest me was my friend’s statement of the places that she had visited being spotlessly clean. Literally, ‘India Shining’.

That was not to say that the sanctity of the place had transformed the pilgrims to epitomes of civic behaviour. That, I was told, was as bad as ever — littering, messing and the spitting of paan continued unabated and unabashed.

What mattered was that this fact of poor public behaviour had been factored into the management system of the place. Huge teams of cleanliness workers performed their tasks through the day and night removing all traces of rubbish that had been left by the thousands of pilgrims who thronged the site. While there may be a backend story to where the rubbish finally reached, this is something that one has long harped on in the context of the Himalaya. Garbage may well end up creating a new set of hills and mountains, ones that will not be easy to surmount. Belief or no belief.

— The writer is an author based in Shimla