A city dweller’s one-year communion with nature in the Indian Himalayas

I am a city dweller. In the unrelenting monotony of the various cityscapes that I have, at various times, called home, the days are indistinct from each other in a way that makes the seasons irrelevant.

Nature appears distant, like an impediment that technology hasn’t managed to control yet. You don’t really experience the seasons — you merely dress for the season, watch the sport of the season and regulate the time you spend in the park according to the season. Holidays come and go with a vague sense of growing older.

It was only really when I spent a year in the Indian Himalayas, in a village called Sansari near the little town of Ukhimath in Uttarakhand state, that the weather began to determine the pattern and perspective of my daily life.

Sanasari is a village that clings to the mountainside at 2,000 metres, commanding a view of the town and valley below, and the snow-clad mountain massif of Chaukhamba in the distance, with its 7,000-metre peaks. Around a bend on the Delhi-Kedarnath road it appeared, long after the shrubbery of the plains had given way to a lush, verdant mountain foliage with a character all its own.

It was late March — spring. The plains were already sweltering under a remorseless sun. But here in the mountains the air was crisp and dry. On some days, cold winds from the eternal snows would scream through the valley like ghouls, and in minutes it would be winter again.

The one constant in this changing weather was the sound of the river at the bottom of the valley. Like every spring, it ran strong with the voices of melting snow, filling the days and nights with its roar until you got so used to it that you hardly noticed. But listen intently and there it was, a thundering woosh of a sound.

The cool spring air chilled the sweat off my back as I climbed the stone paths of the town. Buds formed on the apple trees and by mid-April the apricot trees burst into flower.

By summer the days grew warm enough for it to feel pointless to carry a jacket. But once the sun slipped below the western ridges, you remembered why.

I was there to teach at the village school, but the children loved to play truant. And they had the perfect excuses: the village livestock needed to be taken up to the high alpine pastures where the green shoots that had just sprouted were juicy and sweet. Or the terraced paddy fields sloping down to the river needed to be cleared and ploughed, ready for the monsoon rice planting.

Often, despite myself, I gave in to their demands. We were friends by then, and on really clear days, I’d go with them to a waterfall an hour’s walk away and gaze at the rainbows cast in the spray and remember what a magical world I lived in.

The stars guarded the valley at night like a host of angels and the air was so clean and clear that the distant snow peaks of Chaukhamba glistened under the full moon.

I slept out on the verandah until the sun turned the peaks pink at dawn. Then I’d grab my camera and snap away as the peaks turned light crimson, then orange, then light yellow and burnished gold, before finally settling into a dazzling white as the sun ascended from the eastern horizon.

The monsoons arrived, putting one’s mountain spirit to the test. The rain came down on the tin roofs so hard at times that it was impossible to maintain a conversation above the din and I had to give the kids more holidays.

wknd@khaleejtimes.com