I love going places, I like watching the mountains, the plains, the vegetation speeding against me, a strange delight circumscribe me as I wish I could stop and feel the place for a bit more. As the distance from the populace increases and as the expanse of the mountain peak or the relieving silence of the secluded takes over the sanity, the aspiration to be of the surroundings, to surrender to the solitude, the fancy to let the winds undo gravity just for a while is absolute.
And as we hit the road this time round it was a drive from Almora to Ranikhet, both small towns in the Kumaon hills, one where I have lived for most of my life, and the other where I was born. Being repeatedly enchanted with places that you start pretending are so much yours is obvious. It has been a disappointing monsoon so far, not much rain has come down and the rivers faked as rivulets, rivulets seen in plenty the others years were all missing. The clouds though persistently decorated the light blue sky, and with the little rain that we had seen the pine, deodar and the oak had feed themselves to blue green beauty.
Driving out of Almora, with Bob Marley and Knoffler singing for us as the wind tries to catch up with the rhythm of music through the open windows of our vehicle we could see the entire mountain on which the town inhabits. It was structures and boundaries and structures and boundaries and a few veins they told me they were roads. It stood up like a creature in itself, fascination brought to the mind the picture of the moving townsmen as the blood and the fluid flowing through the creature’s body.
As we moved further away and went past a research institute working on agricultural innovations in Himalayan Sub Mountains the road narrowed down gracefully, loosing the luster of the well kept roads. The proximity defied human interferences and concrete if any didn’t vie for attention but formed a part of the scenery. We drove past a memorial of Mahatma Gandhi which being Gandhi’s memorial had his characters and it didn’t complain of the telling neglect, Monkeys and goats considered the occasional vehicle passing by as an intruder into what was rightly and ethically there’s. Bulls and cows challenged each others skill on galloping the longest in the shortest time, we could see the darker clouds and one of us predicted that we were approaching rain, amidst all this many lost there patience with the music from the gone days and within no time Enrique and A.R.Rahman were our new companions. The rain did come or we did reach the rain, they were hard, noisy, and lasted for time enough for the bikers to decide it’s heavy we need to take shelter in the vehicle with roof and to get down again and drive on.
Ranikhet is a cantonment town, perennially cool and beautiful, the mountain was again visible, the creature analogy worked again just that the creature had just bathed and was christened another way. Through the veins we went past the town, into the subdued sounds of insects, into the roads that spiraled us down a hundred meters. We could now see the towering temple close by, we could see the blue mountains, the clouds floating on and over those hills, but what we could not see was what otherwise are the imposing Himalayas hidden behind those impressive frothy white clouds.
We were at Hedakhan temple, a temple and a charitable trust, which a has a long legacy, the temple is a remembrance to the Hedakhan Baba who left his body at this place and is believed to be communicating with his pupil even today. The trust has its mobile hospitals, Ayurvedic medicinal centers, educational support institutions and more. The temple was a large hall with the Baba prominently seated as a stone idol, it is said that through this idol he speaks to the world. The fragrance was redolent of the purity and the vastness of the surrounding evoking the largish of human life. The trees, the birds, the temple, the priest and the priestess, we and our cameras as we photographed, our thoughts and our actions all persuading to be one. Very competently yet subtly we avoided the oneness, avoided the most apparent allude to the life in stone and the passive in us.
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