Prayaan: A journey to Ladakh and Within (Part 1)

The largest district in the country, in terms of land area. The highest motorable road in the world, Khardung La. Many ancient Buddhist monastries. The Magnetic Hill. All the lakes. Definitely one of the most exotic and slowly off-beat-becoming-happening tourist destinations in the country, if not the world-  Ladakh. Parked right at the top of the country, wrapped on all sides by the Karakoram and Zanskar ranges of mountains, the sky all clear and blue, the snow glistening on the Himalayan peaks, River Indus gracefully meandering through the valleys- it is a dream holiday. An exciting getaway from the hustle-bustle of hot and dry India of the summers. The second two weeks of May, when unbearable heat waves ride across the country, few of us had the chance to ride above it and wander into the cool climes of Ladakh. Not as tourists, as seekers, students and travellers earnest in a query to understand mountain communities and their issues. And what do you know, the ten days from May 6th to 16th showed us how much Ladakh was different and same as the rest of India, sometimes specifically rural India.

"Welcome to Kushok Bakula Rinnpoche airport, Leh. The outside temperature is 6 degrees celsius, we hope you enjoy your stay here." And a motley group of many honeymooners, few monks, large Bengali families and us, the Fellow Designates eagerly rubbed hands and nervously ventured out into the single most modest and spectacularairport in India. The hangar has space just enough for two planes and the hall for the luggage conveyor belt can maximum accommodate 200 standing passengers. So small was the airport. However, the hangar was surrounded by a glorious range of mountains, some of them inscribed with messages from the Border Roads Organisation or the Indian Defence forces. A huge "Don't drink and Drive" screamed in red across the slopes of a barren mountain, just as a billboard signalled that we were in the territory of "The Clue Finders" of the Indian Army. A little beyond, as we got out of the airport, we found "The mountain tamers", walking in files to their barracks. Ladakh, now broken into the two smaller districts of Leh and Kargil, is scarcely populated by its own people and has a denser population of the Indian Army. The Indian Army is one of the pillars of the Ladakhi economy, because it forms the biggest market segment in Ladakh. Most of the Ladakhi farmers, mechanics, merchants, etc have the defense forces as their clients. Throw a stone in Ladakh and you will probably be serving a sentence for hurting a soldier! This is also one of the reasons, why you should not be throwing stones for no good purpose. (Just Kidding) This is also a reason, why almost every household in a Ladakhi village has a member serving in the Army.

A Ladakhi village. I never thought about it really. Ladakh was always a tourist destination, and an ignorant me was quite oblivious to the fact that just like every other district and block in the country Ladakh could be having its own villages. What presumptions! Why it never struck, that there could be rural communities here too, famers, artisans and the whole lot of them going about their daily lives; not only the hotels, lodges, shops and cafes serving the steady stream of tourists who populate the Leh town. Well, I am not completely to be blamed, that was all that the media, advertisements, Government ever portrayed about Leh-Ladakh. All the tourist hot-spots, not once about its farmers or the soldiers or the students! Maybe because the tourism industry, after the army, is the strongest pillar of the economy. Not to say that in the coming days it will only grow stronger, even as the rest of Ladakh's socio-politico-cultural dynamics may take a downward slump, like how Shimla is today. Streets and streets of the Leh town cater to every need of, guess who, ONLY TOURISTS. Handicraft shops (obviously selling their wares at indignant prices!), cafes serving international cuisines, T-Shirt shops, bars, shops renting out Royal Enfields for all the biker-tourists, outlets selling Buddhist trinkets, and ALL the hotels! Throw a stone in Leh and you would probably smash the window of a Hotel. A reason why you shouldn't be throwing stones at buildings. (well, couldn't help this) Anyway, this is just the reason why the youth from almost all the villages that we visited and interacted with, steadily moved to more "favourable" destinations like Leh, Srinagar or even as far as Chandigarh and Delhi.

A Ladakhi village, Umla, tucked in a pocket miles away from the town. All alone in a barren and rocky lowland, amidst towering mountains, the rural communities go about their daily routines.

Again a Ladakhi village. Really do they exist? What do the obscure communities do there? What do the farmers cultivate? What do the artisans produce? How does the government function in these places? Finally, we were getting to the challenges of the mountain rural communities. Our first destination within Prayaan was SECMOL- Students Educaton and Cultural Movement Of Ladakh. It is an institution that now caters to providing residential education for class 10 drop-outs/failures to help them get back to mainstream education. Apart from these fully funded students, there is also a group of college going students who use SECMOL's hostel facilities. SECMOL is a school/gurukul like none another I have seen earlier. Classes are interspersed between "responsibilities" and leisure time. So a bunch of them have the responsibility to milk the cows at 4.30 in the morning, just as another bunch of them look after the solar heating and lighting facilities. So the food that comes from SECMOL's kitchen is chopped, ground, baked or stirred by the students. Why a few of them would have even planted and nurtured the vegetables, in SECMOL's own greenhouse! And then, there is folk music and dance and volleyball and soccer during the leisure hours. In between all of this, the students put in a little of their efforts to learn Math, Science, Urdu or develop their "Conversation" skills. At dinner, with no TV to distract, or no point of gossip, they all listen to the Ladakhi News to understand the current affairs. One student by schedule, stands up and delivers a short two-five minute talk on anything. On one of the nights that we stayed there, Sajad Hussain spoke of archery competitions in his village and about his family in Kargil. He had travelled across the district with the hope of getting into a college sometime in the future. Scarce in number, very poor in content, absent teachers and partly uninterested parents. The less I say about India's deteriorating government schools, the better. There is always private education, one could say. But the cost of it and the number of them in rural areas are inversely proportional. The villages, like in Leh, deserve way better.

'Becky' explaining to us, how SECMOL makes the best of nature's replensihable and free resources- solar cooker, as in this picture.

A student at SECMOL fixing a crack in the roof of the dining hall with mud plaster. Students know it and do-it-all, operating and maintaining SECMOL campus and fields.

SECMOL, the lifestyle, the curriculum, our interactions with the students and the volunteer-teachers there gave us a peek into what might be going on in Ladakh's villages. The building at SECMOL was passively solar heated, meaning that it was constructed with insulating mud, by indigenous methods that could keep the rooms warm even during the severe winters that drove the temperature down to a minus 35 degrees celsius! But, Rebecca Norman, the Chairperson at SECMOL, pointed out that the classrooms would be still warmer than the electrically heated living rooms in Delhi on a December night. These days, however, she said villages and towns are slowly giving up on these local methods and choosing to spend money and precious fuel by adopting "modern" methods of electric heaters and kerosene burners. Just like the toilets, we later noticed. Traditionally, Ladakhi homesteads, like at SECMOL, have dry compost toilets- without the use of water, using sand and dry degradable material to convert human excreta into manure. In the Leh town, where numerous hotels and lodges have mushroomed into being, toilets are the normal water-using types. The water to the toilets and the dirtied drainage water both come and go back into the same ground, hence polluting and depleting the water tables beneath! The cycle of nutrient regeneration is abruptly cut-off with the introduction of modern toilets and water enabled sewers. The students at SECMOL were aware of all of this, much to our surprise and recognised the importance of other traditional techniques like natural farming methods. During the course of our interactions, we got to know, that almost all of them had set their sights on moving to the town. Nobody wanted to continue with agriculture, something many many generations of their elders had been practicing. It was then that the hypocrisy of that judgement dawned upon me.

Kashmir is so geographically poised that winters are cruel and harsh. The only spot of green that we could see in the barren mountain desert of Ladakh were the poplar trees. And it was end-spring and early summer. If at time when everything should be blooming and bursting to life, the only shades of green were from the few poplar trees, maybe an apple tree here and there, what shade was the desert in winters? Absolute white, we were told. For months at an end, from October end to March, the Ladakhis hardly came out of their homes. There would be snow everywhere, the temperature unbearably cold and the soil most uncultivable. All their food rations come through flights, in crates and sacks, in tin and packs. For four months, Ladakh is closed. Roadways don't work, the glacier's all frozen. How do they irrigate their fields, even if they managed to clear the snow and dig the soil up?! Sunshine was the only assured part of the photosynthesis, so few houses have improved greenhouses. These support minimum cultivation of countable crops like potato, peas and lettuce. So all their cropping happens between May to September- a little bit of wheat apart from the earlier mentioned vegetables, apricots and apples. What hope did I see in agriculture? None. What hope did the youth see in agriculture? None.  Nobody in the city strictly follows what their family elders do for a living. Why is it then, that we expect the rural youth to continue farming?! Only an uncomfortable silence follows this question everywhere. Farming is strenuous, city lifestyles seem luxurious and one is not hypocrite less to pay that price.

A typical sight in Ladakh: snowcapped mountains peering down on scarce poplar plantations and villages. The normal clear, blue sky, sometimes, like on this day spotted with cotton-tuft like clouds. 

Well after the 72 hours at SECMOL, talking, working, laughing, eating and playing with all their students, gradually many troubling questions started popping in my head. What about their school was it that really fascinated me? Traditional methods? Shared responsibilities? Community living? A sensitivity towards local problems? Why did not, as is the majority, most urban schools offer such education- educating young minds and not manufacturing products, in the truest sense of the word?! Why did these youth, like rural youth everywhere else want to migrate to the cities? And more importantly, is the State doing something about it? Who should, who must? I was finding it exhilarating just to be in the vast desert of Leh. Such an eye-opener and provocation to think about these mountain communities was only a sign of things to come. A week left, I could still rub my hands, inhale the clear mountain air, look at the majestic snow-capped mountains beyond the poplar trees and think to myself, "Prayaan continues…"

A hearty stomach and a nourished heart

What did you last have for a meal? Did you savour every morsel of it or was it a rushed affair of gobbling down whatever was on the plate, while surfing through TV channels or reading something really interesting on the mobile phone, maybe just dashing off to work/school/college? I have not done that in a long while, and I count myself lucky. Sitting in a village far away from home, I do not have the luxury of entertainment and I do not have any company while having my dinner and breakfast. It does work on my mind, to be sitting in the middle of nowhere and eating all alone. I cannot help but think of the times when at home all my meals were consumed to the background imagery of a TV running and having my whole attention, or of the times when in college invariably every meal was consumed with so many other friends, happily chatting away the day's incidents or something of common interest. In stark contrast, these days I look, feel and taste only my food during breakfast, lunch and dinner. Every morsel is enjoyed to its fullest and with every piece consumed the taste is savoured to its last bit. Sometimes though I carelessly eat my food while scrolling through the messages on my phone or revisiting pages on the internet. The immensely farm-fresh and nutritious meal is left languishing cold.

At the same time, instead of fully grasping how fortunate I am to be eating food from my own backyard- cutting out all those carbon footprint and inorganic demons- I think and dream about all the foods that I have not consumed in a long while. It could be the highly fattening honey-chilli potatoes served in the choc-a-bloc Chinese restaurants in Delhi or the full Tamil spread on a banana leaf. Constantly bereaved of my grandmother's rasam and my mother's variety of vegetables, I woke up one Sunday morning deciding to cook for myself and not make any of those ready-to-eat items like oats or upma. Khichdi it shall be, a dish for the soul, so homely and prepared by me! When I was at home in Chennai, I always kept putting off learning how to cook. Kitchen was the last place I wanted to be, and the first place I derived maximum from. About 2300 kms away from the kitchen at home, I chose to experiment and learn. After a careful half an hour at the local market, I was laden with few tomatoes, a couple of potatoes, onions, a little pouch of turmeric and half a kilo of rice and moong dal. I had to sheepishly ask the shopkeeper for "khichdi wala daal" because I did not even have an idea of what pulse went into it. Feeling enormously satisfied already at making my first grocery purchase with my own money, I happily called home and quickly got my mother's instructions and later, blessings, to make khichdi. A quick process of boiling all my purchases together and finally adding some turmeric and salt, I ended up preparing my own dinner. So pleased I was with myself, that I clicked a few photos of the really amateur dish, glistening with a dollop of ghee on the top, and sent it across to my near and dear ones. It was my first meal, of my own stipend, prepared by me. Enthusiastically, I went and shared a good portion of it with the watchman on the campus. Joking about his digestive capacity, I waited longingly for just one comment of approval. He was shocked already to know that I had turned the stove on for doing a little more than boiling water or making tea. He readily tasted and gave it a "thumbs up". I went back to my room and ate the dish with so much elation, I could have been the Masterchef at any five star hotel. But I wasn't. All that mattered to me that Sunday was my involvement in every stage of preparing and consuming my food. It was nothing grand, but it had my whole attention. It was a hearty meal.

Khichdi soon became a fortnightly affair and I had experimented with different vegetables, techniques- turmeric first, dal next, etc. Visiting Delhi in a weekend between, I satiated my desire to have Chinese food (and South-Indian at a definitely over-priced Hotel Saravana Bhavan). Nonetheless, the deep craving to have these food items, made me relish every bite of the food. Despite the noisy of environment of the extremely busy restaurants and the enjoyable company of my friends, I could shower my meal with enough love and attention to feel gratified by the end of the process. This meal was hearty simply for it being an overwhelming consequence of an "absence-from-urban" experience. But the khichdis and the noodles of the world did not fill my stomach to the extent that Uday Singh's lunch did.

Uday Singh is the cook at SCRIA and over the past months, we have developed a nice bond of friendship. He and the other housekeeping staff at SCRIA live in a village called Gumina, about 6-7 kms off Khori. It had been over two months that he kept calling me to his home for lunch on any Sunday. Seeing that my tenure in Haryana was coming to an end, I accepted his invite and told him to prepare nothing special. His kids and niece and nephew were stationed by the side of the road to receive me. Their shy grins and hesistant, "namaste Madam" were so becoming. I was slightly late and the family had already eaten brunch, so it was going to be just me eating. Jeetendar, Tanuj, Sonia and Himanshu were circling around their granny at the stove, urging her to bake nice, hot, round, rotis. A simple but delicious side-dish of cauliflower and potatoe was served with the just-from-the-stove rotis. I was just about to tear into the piece of wheat, when Uday Singh asked me to wait. As I looked up startled, he cut a block of homemade butter and lathered it on my rotis. Despite my vehement protest, I was served roti after roti lathered with enough butter to make half a dozen club sandwiches! Just not this, a spicy tomato-onion chutney and a big glass of buttermilk to the brim added to it too. I had to knock it down without any complaint, the kids were all watching me eagerly. They were already pleased with the box of sweets I had bought for them. In their very own way of reciprocating, they offered me a big chunk of jaggery after my really heavy lunch. 

Jeetendar, Himanshu, Sonia and Tanuj with their grandmother; all of them happy to host me and ready to give company for the whole day! Their grins did not once fall.

This was just the start of their expression of love. They took me by my hand across the fields of the village, to the houses of the other staff, chatted like senior citizens at a tea-stall and forcibly took me back to their home before I parted for the evening. Himanshu all of 6 years, fascinated by my camera, posed happily and also learnt to operate it! All the other children, just turning 12, kept joking and giving me enjoyable company throughout the day. After the small tour of Gumina and meeting of elders, I was ready to leave. With a choked voice, Uday Singh said, "hum gareeb hain, agar humse koi galti hui toh maaf kar dena." we are poor people, if we have offended you in any manner, kindly forgive us. I was left humbled. I was at the receiving end of all the good food and the affection, yet he was the one who expressed privilege in having me as a guest. I did not have enough words to tell him, how filled my stomach was, how warm my heart was! In a long long time, I had had the august company of loved ones and really simple home-made food to nourish me.

Himanshu and Tanuj leading my way across the fields into the village.
Have you noticed how a kid walks in his territory? Absolutely carefree, like he owns the place. The gait, the demeanour and the happy mannerisms show a deep connectivity between the individual and the environment.

Soon, I was making my way back to Khori, when the kids who came to drop me till the end of the road shouted, "agle Sunday bhi aana, buaji".  Come next Sunday, too, Buaji, they had called me- their father's sister. From Madam in the morning to Bua in the evening, this meal was surely the best one with this memorable a dessert. Within a week, I had to go home. And as circumstance would have it, all my relatives were around and I was being served traditional south-Indian fare three times a day. Everytime, on a plantain leaf. The variety and delicacies that I had so craved for the previous month were all in-form, on-platter. Even with the many conversations, TV running and mobile phone by the side, my eyes, hands and mouth had space only for the food in front of me. After my days away from a city, I have now understood how to savour every meal and be grateful for it. The stomach and heart may be two different things at two different levels, but I have learnt that a little caring and understanding can make anything a harmonious affair. A picture of a malnourished kid and a preying vulture need not remind me to be grateful for my meal, I just have to BE IN THE MOMENT to savour it. Next time you eat, watch your food, touch it, feel it, taste it and be grateful for it! 

PS: For all my meals to come and for all my meals enjoyed, anna data sukhi bhava!

 May the provider of my food be bestowed with happiness.   

Uday Singh (2nd from left) with his father and few other family members and villagers, sharing a light moment before I left for Khori. The smiles on their faces completely satiated my hunger.