The teashop at Dhur (Photo: Shyam G Menon)

Thakur Singh worried if he would make it back to Ranikhet in time.

He was restless.                                                 

Hoshiar Singh on the other hand, cracked jokes. Pratap Singh laughed. Nearby, the chain smoking-teashop owner from Kharkia lit a beedie and responded frugally to his talkative host, the owner of the teashop near Dhur.

We were seven or eight people; maybe ten. Some enjoyed the sun. Others idled within the teashop. All were stuck at that bend on an empty, winding road. The stillness of afternoon overcame December morning-energies. We grew quiet, progressively drifting to the wisps of smoke leaving the Kharkia-teashop owner’s lips as sole sign of life in us.

Just behind the teashop at the bottom of a cliff was the Pindar River. Up the valley, the chiselled summit of Nanda Kot, soared to over 6800m. The high ridge of Dhakuri, cloaked in winter’s first snow, wasn’t far off. But it was farther than before. That morning, we had traded the straightforward trail from Kharkia to Dhakuri and Song for the comfort of a jeep to Song. It was despite news at Kharkhia of a vehicle stuck in a landslide on the Kharkia-Song road. Mountain roads are unstable during rains and winter. Stranded in a gooey landslide, the driver had repeatedly tried freeing his vehicle only to see it sink deep. Night froze the mud cementing the jeep to position like a statue; a study in firmness for this otherwise infirm road. We drove up expecting to free the vehicle, clear the road and proceed to Bageshwar. We had along two jeeps to pull, ropes, steel cables, shovels, hired labour.  The labourers got tired of shovelling, the ropes and cables broke and the drivers got fed up. Maybe there was winter’s sloth at play. Add to that, a dash of hangover from the previous night. At least some of us, sleepy eyed and looking to get back to distant towns, had seen each other earlier at the marriage of a common friend in Khati. That village was an hour’s walk away from Kharkia, in the direction of the Pindari Glacier.

The jeeps from Kharkia returned home.

We walked past the landslide hoping that somebody would drive up from Song, discover the road block and ferry us back the forty odd kilometres of winding mountain road to the beginning of the descent to the foothills. But some of the vehicles plying daily were stranded on the Kharkia side of the landslide. That meant fewer jeeps to service the road. We flopped down at Dhur’s teashop to take stock of the situation. Past Dhur was a less used, longer trail to the Dhakuri ridge. Song seemed possible, provided we outpaced winter’s early sunset. Thakur Singh and I pushed off. Five minutes later, we heard a whistle. Our departure had shattered the group’s ennui. All except the Kharkia-teashop owner, who was Bageshwar-bound to treat an injured leg, had decided to hike. They were following us. We walked for a long time. Then as often happened, a lovely patch of grass emerged by the roadside and people plonked down to rest. It was officially called rest; unofficially, it was that couldn’t-care-less attitude which seeps into people in such situations. Time and life ran slowly in the mountains. I wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere, certainly not when my backpack contained snacks and tent. I had a stove but no fuel; I had gifted the remaining petrol to a villager who owned a motorcycle. But finding food shouldn’t be a problem. I was at ease. Among us, only Thakur Singh was edgy. He was on leave and had to get back. He tried sleeping to keep the worry at bay. Hoshiar Singh had weathered slit eyes. Like Clint Eastwood’s. Where Eastwood’s `Blondie’ aka The Man with No Name smoked a cigar, Singh idly chewed a blade of grass, his eyes looking into the distance towards Sorag on the other side of the Pindar. Then some conversation came up and the dreamer in me started nudging talk towards how mountains were formed, how long day and night could be in the polar regions, what lay ahead for the sun, how the universe was formed – so on and so forth. All listened intently, except for a youngster studying in a college in town who had traded larger curiosity, for world by relevance and irrelevance. Of what use are the sun’s life cycle and Big Bang Theory when it comes to career? Time went by.  

Stuck in the landslide (Photo: Shyam G Menon)

The road from Song to Kharkia was a treacherous one. Roads in unimportant corners of India were like that. What’s special about this road? You may ask. I don’t know what its current state is but until the time of writing this article, in the years (probably three) that I had been on it, this road’s condition never changed although it was part of a national scheme for village roads and an adjunct to the much walked tourist trails to Pindari Glacier and Sundardhunga. For villages in the area – Kilbara, Badiyakot, Pattag, Sorag, Wacham, Jatoli, Khati – it was sole road link to the outside world sparking hopes ranging from higher education to timely healthcare. Completed some years ago, the rickety road’s only permanent fixtures were a big concrete gateway erected midway to deify the builders and the utter absence of bitumen. On a lucky day, the road may be fully functional. On others, it may be blocked or damaged. For much of its length, it hugged the mountain’s edge. It was largely wide enough for two vehicles to pass, but only just so. It was also narrow, muddy and riddled with cavernous ditches. Seeing your vehicle’s trajectory and poise, you wouldn’t know whether you were driving, sailing or skiing.

Jeep drivers from Kumaon’s towns rarely brought their vehicles here fearing damage. A few times up and down this road and your vehicle aged prematurely. Local drivers worked this road using cheap vehicles, pushed daily to the limits. Taxis were filled with people and stuff. During the ride you stared down the vehicle’s bonnet into an approaching ditch; you shook violently climbing out from it, the chassis would hit the road and occasionally you skidded along in mud inches from the void. It was regular village life – forty plus kilometres of bone-rattling ride. When a jeep came from the opposite direction, the driver sometimes startled you by requesting for brake fluid or something as critical, which you thought was already there in the machinery. The request and the supportive camaraderie were routine given the punishment inflicted on vehicles. Once, on a day of no taxis, I travelled the whole stretch in the cargo bay of a pick-up truck. I understood what life as a chassis was. As yet, my most unforgettable sight on this road has been a heavily laden small truck that stalled while struggling uphill. On re-start it reversed and then charged up the terrible road, including its hairpin bends as not to lose momentum. The truck shook and twisted; its tyres hit and flew over stone, it roared straight towards my parked taxi and veered off with fine timing. One error and we would have been history. That was 2012 summer. Now, it was December. The road, as ever, was unchanged. Probably the truck too is; lying in some workshop, almost dead from exertion.

Illustration: Shyam G Menon

An hour or more after we left Dhur’s teashop, a pick-up truck brought us news that taxis were heading up. By 4PM, we had a jeep for Song, hopefully beyond. We crammed in. “ Naren’’ (likely short for Narender) who couldn’t fit within had to take the vehicle’s roof. His friends kept up a conversation to distract Naren from the December cold blasting him up there. Once in a while, to the amusement of his friends, Naren howled or yelled to stay awake in the freeze. Sometimes, he sang loudly from up there. Thanks to the delay caused by the blocked road, we didn’t reach Bageshwar. We stopped at Bharadi. Naren jumped down from the vehicle’s roof, playfully shouted a few expletives at the driver as everyone laughed, and ran off. I took leave of Hoshiar Singh who had been a nice person to talk to. Bharadi was a proto-town ahead of the real town, Bageshwar. Its facilities weren’t fully evolved. Four rooms at a hotel; seventeen beds, fifty rupees per bed, one toilet and the usual inebriated men. Pratap Singh was in the room adjacent to mine. He was en route to Almora for surgery. Had it not been for our road Singh would have had to walk to Bharadi.

Few days earlier, we were in a jeep from Bharadi to Pathyasar beyond Song, the end of the road for the Saryu valley. Our co-passengers included half a dozen or so village elders. From Song to Pathyasar runs another rickety road, belonging yet again to that national scheme and about as bumpy as the road to Kharkia, albeit shorter. The conversation in the vehicle had been on how all political parties are similar in their indifference to the public’s travails and how the rule of different parties in Uttarakhand had yielded the same result for this region – the continued neglect of roads. Maybe they are right. “ If you see a JCB tell them of the stuck vehicle,’’ one of the Kharkia-drivers had told me while parting ways at the landslide. Albeit manufacturer’s name, JCB had become near generic for bulldozer in these parts.

I never saw a JCB.

(The author, Shyam G Menon, is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai. An abridged version of this article was published in The Hindu newspaper.)

There goes lunch on a matchstick! (Illustration: Shyam G Menon)

I don’t know how this catamaran business got into my head.

I was quite terrestrial, mediocre swimmer; yet prone to trying things beyond me. That often meant embarrassment for oneself; entertainment for others. It didn’t take long to realize that the ultimate getaway was the sea. Its blue expanse is much bigger in size than land. And what better way to be at sea than in that tiniest of crafts – two or three logs stashed together; a catamaran.

Derived from the Tamil word, `kattumaram,’ the British fashioned it into catamaran and took the description overseas. The word was used to describe the multi-hull boats of South East Asia and Polynesia as well. No better than a big float and deeply enmeshed into man’s history of seafaring, the ancient craft was ubiquitous on the Kerala coast, where it was called kattamaram. Every time you saw a fisherman or two in the distance bobbing up and down in the waves as though they were sitting on the very ocean itself, you knew it was a catamaran below. The minimalist design, almost the lack of it, held a raw appeal. At the onset of monsoon local newspapers loved to publish the photograph of fishermen throwing themselves and their catamarans from a cliff top, into the sea.

I did not have to explain all this fascination to Jason, who had suddenly surfaced just outside the low boundary wall of the resort at Poovar near Thiruvananthapuram. I tracked his movement, shoulders and head visible above the wall and gauged from the smooth, mildly bobbing drift that he was standing on a canoe or something similar. He was hawking his day’s catch of a few small fish and oysters to the resorts bordering the estuary. I looked down from the wall and saw a frail catamaran under his feet. “ Can I sit on it?’’ I asked. He studied me for a second and simply said, “ take it. Go out into the estuary.’’ Then realizing he had dropped a bomb in my brain, he offered, “ don’t worry, I will swim alongside.’’ That presented a dilemma. For the journalist, no matter how badly he writes thinks himself as descended from the first revolutionary. The sahib-servant relation was abhorrent, unthinkable. This was just that – me on a catamaran, Jason in the water. Slavery!

“ No, no, that can’t be,’’ I said, sweating as a pantheon of ghosts, from Abraham Lincoln to Mahatma Gandhi, admonished me for even hearing the suggestion made. “ How could you?’’ they thundered. I cringed fearing their wrath.

But Jason’s problem was real – his catamaran of three thin logs could take only one person. Add a second and it would become a large overturned log; the sort ship wrecked sailors of yore clung to as they drifted to a remote Pacific island. Eventually, we decided – I would venture out into the estuary, Jason would instruct from land.

There were two possible postures on the frail craft. Jason preferred what I call the geisha pose, on your knees with legs tucked painfully under your butt. Given a painful middle aged knee, I couldn’t do that. So, I opted for the normal kayaking position. With one powerful push, Jason launched craft and me into the estuary. We shot out like an arrow into the silence of the deep. As the distance between me and land rose, my mind became a multiplex and playing on screen was the shark’s view from below – there goes lunch on a match stick. And as though to serve my imagined predators well, Jason’s energy transferred to the craft petered out and lunch-on-match stick slowed to a solemn halt. I looked into the water waiting for a shadow that would grow bigger and bigger till it erupts out of the water, the world goes black and Spielberg says, “ cut!’’ Jason must have sensed my nervousness. “ Take the oar and paddle,’’ he shouted from ashore. I took the oar – oar? Here I was, seated in the best kayaking position copied from TV and I had a five feet long wooden plank for oar. It was uniformly broad, thick and heavy. How the hell was Jason using this? He has to be a superman – I thought.  Several strokes later, I was a panting mess beginning to question what I had got myself into.

This was my predicament somewhere in the middle of the estuary when the sound of outboard engines came from my right. Two boats were bearing down on me. Panic is not plain fright; it is the fright over what can be. In other words, the less you know the braver you seem, the more you know, the more panicky you get. And I knew what could happen (journalists always do).  Those boats would generate waves high enough to upset me. Throw me into the water. Now technically speaking, the catamaran is deemed more stable at sea than the popular mono-hull boat. In fact when the multi-hull design emerged from Asia, western boat builders were both taken aback and too prejudiced to acknowledge its capabilities. It took many years for the catamaran to find acceptance, that too after several western interpretations that were no more than reinventing the Asian wheel. Today it is the stuff of power boat races. However, this debate was likely truer for the multi-hull. When you have two logs stashed together like the home made contraption I was balanced on, science was a luxury. Greater certainty seemed an unwanted exploration of marine life in the estuary. My paddling went askew. The tips of my `oar’ splashed frantically on the water’s surface hardly moving the craft, then from being wood, the oar metamorphosed to cast iron and my aching hands stopped paddling altogether. Resigned, I did the next best thing – kept the oar on my lap and sat there like a Buddha contemplating the mysteries of life. Both shores were far off, the bottom was far below, the sky was high above – so sat the hermit impervious to the outcome as two ferocious boats ploughed through the water at him. In reality the journalist was outthinking everybody else; TV crew interviews the eyewitness and he says, “ man, wasn’t that guy calm?’’

I sat there like a Buddha (Illustration: Shyam G Menon)

The first boat with its load of tourists whizzed by in front; the second followed on the other side. One swell, then the next – surrender worked, I rode both pretty well. My little matchstick was a toughie. It was to remind me later of a yacht I had boarded in Kochi. The Australian couple who owned it was sailing around the world. It was a beautiful, well appointed boat with a sense of security to it. I looked at the other yachts in the harbor, particularly a small one. “ That man should feel scared crossing a vast ocean,’’ I said. The husband narrowed his eyes. “ Look carefully. You see those hammer marks, like dents on the hull? That’s a home-made boat. He probably built it in his garage. Looks unsafe but when in trouble he would know it like the back of his palm. And he won’t be troubled often either for his boat is small. Unlike a big ship that has several stress points, this one will ride the waves like a matchbox; too small for the ocean to break.’’ At that moment in the estuary though, two swells tackled and the remaining ones dissipating into gentler bobs, I was just relief incarnate.

“ Keep going,’’ Jason shouted. But I had had enough even though I was slowly getting used to that oar. Direction now set toward Jason, I set off. Strangely even as I moved toward him, he drifted off to my left. The current was carrying me in a straight-right direction; like a general at a military parade with everything going past. The guard of honor – by now a couple of idle watchmen from the nearby resorts had also joined Jason – stared open mouthed at this demonstration of paddling skills. The battle now was to stop the drift, which I did by somehow heading for a resort’s wharf. Except that the current carried me under it; I was now safely lodged among a dozen wooden pillars that supported the structure. “ Hello…Sir?’’ If it was the Buddha garb in deep waters, I now responded to Jason with the air of an accomplished engineer, “ doesn’t anyone maintain these things? They look rather worn out underneath.’’ It struck me then that I had said the obvious and the best thing to do, was get out. But before that vanity struck. I glanced out to see if my antics were causing general alarm. My cousin Rajeev appeared settled into a hammock, reading a book. His mother, sister and family were chatting. Only Jason, watchmen and journalist seemed involved. Good. I nudged the craft inelegantly out from its refuge. And so, the greatest catamaran journey of all time ended with an emergence from under the wharf and on to Jason’s side.

He reluctantly accepted fifty rupees; lingered to finish a smoke with the watchmen and then neatly paddled off to his fishing village nearby. On the estuary, Jason looked like a monk with divine powers, seated on water and using mere will power to navigate. The whole thing worked like a well oiled piece of machinery – his effortless paddling, comfortable position and the catamaran, skimming along on the surface of the estuary. It could have made for a movie: Flying Jason; Hidden Catamaran – Ang Lee’s missed opportunity. Jason didn’t look back. I stood there watching him; the watchmen stood there looking at me. The British adventurer and buccaneer, William Dampier, is considered the first westerner to report on the `kattumaram’ of the Coramandel coast in the 1690s. “ They call them catamarans. These are but one log or two, sometimes of a sort of light wood….so small, that they carry but one man, whose legs and breaches are always in the water,’’ he had written. Dampier circumnavigated the globe thrice.

Pretty big connections for one really small craft, I say.

(The author, Shyam G Menon, is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai)