Ride...

Himalayas have always held some kind of a sway over me since my childhood. The summer vacations saw us all over Himachal, Kashmir, Garhwal and Kumaon. The idea of holidays in those days was whole extended family moving together in a number of cars and jeeps (Ambassadors, Fiats and Willys if you remember). Siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles and parents made a large group with a bevy of attendants and drivers. Was not it fun? Those weeks of scorching summer, spent in the salubrious climate playing and making merry while elders played cards, drank their gins or whiskeys and partied in the evenings. We kids clambered over the rocks and trees, fished in the streams or waded in the shallows. The idea was to make mischief but not drown in the rivers or break our necks by falling off a cliff! The windy narrow roads, steep climbs and all those streams and rivers with magical backdrop of verdant green or snow clad mountains. From the very beginning I wanted to be all over them. As I grew up, the fascination grew and I took to trekking.
My father once read me a Sufi tale which went like this:
“The Fakir who knows why men are born lives behind the mountains. We need to reach there to know the answers. The road to his abode is long and torturous. Some of us who want the answers undertake the journey and its perils, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying.”
Every time I go to the mountains, I feel cured, healed and rejuvenated. I have walked and biked all over the mountains of Ladakh, Himachal and Uttaranchal. Over last 20 years I have seen the roads appear on the flanks of mountains where we had skidded and scrambled through scree or waded through thigh deep streams as the tracks went sans bridges. I have slept in the shepherds huts and camped in the open. Yet, I have never had the feeling of travelling through the Himalayas. I always feel I am on a pilgrimage and the mountains pass through me as I travel in them, enriching me, curing me and making me whole! I grow with them as they grow on me!
My parents are gone to where ever all the wonderful people go once their term on Earth is over but their legacies grow in me and in my children through me. We wander in the Himalayas in a car or a bike not in search of anything, but simply admiring the works of God. I keep thanking my parents for showing me these. I traverse the mountains genuflecting, my head bowed in eternal gratitude. What makes me different from a tourist or a traveler? This is a question people often ask me.
I first tried to work out a definition of a tourist. A tourist is described as “one who makes a trip for pleasure or culture” by the Webster’s dictionary. A tourist may pass through a holy place but the motives for his departure, what he seeks and ultimate destination are never the same as of a pilgrim. They tend to carry their own cultural burdens, along with a list of places to visit which they must as a part of the tour. In the process of ticking the items they may perhaps miss out on the place all together!
Then I worked on explaining a pilgrim. The dictionary meaning of pilgrim is – “a person who travels to a holy place for religious reasons”. A pilgrimage is a spiritual exercise along with being a physical journey to a place imbued with a divine character. A pilgrim abandons familiar surroundings and submits himself to considerable hardships and dangers to pay homage at a holy site, all the time knowing that he will return from this odyssey renewed in some way or inwardly changed. Nicholas Shrady, in Sacred Roads says it all:
When I knocked gently at the door, he woke up in mid-sentence ‘…Advent is a time of joy, brothers and sisters… Who in God’s name are you?’ he shouted.
‘A pilgrim.’
‘What do you want here?’
‘A stamp for my document.’
He stared at me silently through bloodshot eyes. ‘How are your feet?’ he finally asked.
‘Dead.’
‘That is the honour of the pilgrim.’
Now that comes much closer to my reason for travelling as I come back enriched, rejuvenated, cured and always inwardly changed. And of course the honour of a biking pilgrim is the numb bum instead of dead feet! Along with it comes a large amount of pictures of the mountains in their glory and hues at different times. These are icons brought by the pilgrim to revere in the sanctuary of home and add to his shrine.