Brokeback Mountain

Four blokes in a honeymoon suite? Yup, that’s how our trip began. The manager of the hotel had cut me a sweet deal for a suite at five thousand a night.

Does it have two rooms?

Yes sir.

Does it have a living room?

Yes sir.

Bathroom?

Just one sir.

I should have figured something was amiss right then. Two rooms, a living room and only one bathroom for five grand a night didn’t seem to add up.

When we reached, I discovered that the second room was in fact the living room. So in all fairness he didn’t lie…he just sidestepped the specifics and made a friggin monkey out of me.

We added two more mattresses, but somehow sharing a circular bed with a circular mirror above and frilly curtains around it wasn’t the same kind of bonding trip I had in mind. It was that depressing phase of the evening. The sun had just set and the day fought with the night for just a little more time. I knew it was freezing outside and in case it slipped my mind, the four-foot long icicles suspended ominously outside my window were a reminder enough. Fortunately we had a contraption in the room that could be used for various ends from making toast to heating the place, often both at the same time.

Gulmarg in the winter is a visually exquisite. Being in Gulmarg during winter is quite another story. The banks of snow along the road rise to a height of six feet. At night, the temperature drops to minus 13 degrees and after a tipple or three no matter what you wear, a penguin’s balls would probably be warmer. But then there’s the skiing and snowboarding. Now skiing is relatively easier especially if you have done it before and have never snowboarded. Somehow we didn’t think it would be much of a challenge. After all, four guys in a honeymoon suite with gear that made us look like pros seemed an indestructible team.

Our ‘instructor’ was well, not an instructor. He was one of the four of us and had given us a thorough lowdown on the sport while we were at Bombay airport, on the plane to Kashmir and during the drive up to Gulmarg. Only later did I discover that he had amassed this knowledge snowboarding on the internet. Once we hit the beginner's slope, his first and only instruction to me was “just go down!”

Having grasped the theory of inertia, it didn’t seem like a good idea. By the end of the first session I had a bruised head, a very sore rear and a gashed elbow, which happened when my ‘instructor’ friend ran over my arm with his board. Two things that were an impediment in our learning process were turning and stopping. I think that we should have paid more attention to this before moving to the advanced slope. The thought stayed with me when we decided to graduate to the top of Apharwat Mountain at 13,500 feet. Looking down at a sheer drop of a thousand feet was a bit daunting to say the least. We had improved over the past four days. Stopping and turning were options now, though every run often entailed some bad wipeouts. Standing on top of the mountain, I felt a bit like a bungy jumper without a cord. Now I’ve done several jumps off various cliffs, cranes and bridges in my life, but somehow this seemed a bit more intimidating. It needed to be a little more pre-meditated than just tying one’s legs to something, screaming your lungs out, and yo-yoing a couple of hundred feet.

We meticulously planned which path to take, where we would turn into the lower bowl of the mountain and after the balance few thousand feet, the precise part where we'd get back on the designated track of the lower quarter section. Once we were off, every single detail of the plan was instantly forgotten. The only part we had to adhere to was the going down part. The board and the mountain were hand-in-glove in a scheme to knock some sense into our vacant heads. After wiping out a few times and fracturing my rib, we finally made it to the bottom.

Triumphant and more or less intact, we strapped the ol’ rib, popped some painkillers and did four runs from the very top that day. By the end of it we were flipping turns, controlling the board and actually stopping at will. Finally, we were boarding and boarding not like, but at least with, the pros.

Sitting back at the café, exchanging stories in our pro gear, we all looked like snowboarding vets. Fortunately, no one really sees anyone else when you’re actually running down the mountain or in our case tumbling down large parts of it. Exhausted, we limped back to our hotel, switched on the toaster contraption and I fell back on the round bed of our suite. As I lay on the bed looking at the reflection through the ceiling mirror, I saw four groaning blokes in a warm, toasty honeymoon suite and for some inexplicable reason, nothing seemed to be amiss…everything was absolutely perfect.

Gypsy Kings & Paper Tigers

“God gave man a cat so he could think that he was caressing a tiger!” – (I think Victor Hugo said something like this.)

It was so dark that the thick mist made no difference to the visibility on the road. As Ramayan’s mo-ped sputtered down the muddy path leading to Mahua Kothi, he wasn’t too concerned about whether he would reach work in time for his early morning shift. Even his fading headlight didn’t bother him as he had done these sixty-five kilometers so many times before that he could literally do it in his sleep (and ever so often he probably had). In fact he wasn’t really concerned with anything apart from wondering whether his nose would fall off with the biting cold. And then something happened that made Ramayan forget his duty, the cold, and his nose. As his headlight misbehaved and cut weakly through the fog, Ramayan caught flashes of the largest tiger he had ever seen. By the time he had confirmed that it wasn’t his imagination, he was halfway up the tiger's... Well you get the picture.

Considering, that Ramayan was serving me some fine wine in the courtyard of my lavish kothi -(village hut….of sorts, if spectacular décor, central heating, a luxuriant open bathroom, and a fragranced, steaming tub could count for one) – I assumed that the tiger was not too concerned with the mo-ped, the nose, or quite frankly him at all.

I wondered if the man’s story was fashioned to make my stay more interesting. After all, when you stay in Mahua Kothi on the brink of the Bandhavgarh jungle, the tariff makes one wonder if they’ll have a tiger tuck you into bed. And as I amused myself with the consideration, Keshavji, lurked around my kothi door, in a way that made me uncomfortable. He wasn’t peering at me in any way. He was just there – like an afternoon shadow that turns out to be wet tar on a road. When I insisted on walking myself to the dining room, he smiled hesitantly and told me about the resident tigress with two cubs that was discovered outside my room a month ago. After that, lurking tar became my best friend.

The last time I had been to Bandhavgarh was fifteen years ago. We were one of the few jeeps driving through pristine jungle and I saw four tigers in the first few hours of entering the forest. This time around, it all seemed the same, until the first tiger was forget sighted, just heard. Gypsys (of the jeep variety) from every path in the jungle converged with maddening enthusiasm and then some seemed to descend from the sky for good measure. It was absurd. Yet, only recently Bandavgarh’s other jungle corridors have been opened to outsiders. With a guide, one can traverse the one-thousand square kilometers of jungle that was closed up until now. This means that you probably will have a very hard time seeing wildlife that would shy away from the sound of a motored vehicle, but at least you will rarely see another vehicle on the path. More so, you get the fulfilling experience of such pristine forest that just being there makes everything worth it.

It takes a while to understand that you are actually in Tiger country. That there is a possibility of a tiger crossing your path even outside the sanctuary. I wouldn’t have said this if we didn’t hear them outside Mahua Kothi. But what makes the experience even more special is when you talk to the Ramayans and Keshavjis who live around Bandhavgarh. Out here, everyone has a ‘tiger story’. And it’s not to impress outsiders, it’s actually casual banter on their everyday lives. Up Bandhavgarh hill, we spent our last few hours soaking in the jungle sounds. Around a rather sizeable lying Vishnu statue hewn out of a single rock, our 60-yr old forest guide Ramavatar (whose stories made him at least 106!) told us of the colourful times he has experienced in this magical place. Times when Bandhavgarh was the Maharaja of Rewa’s personal hunting ground; when he saw a sadhu who lived here turn six vessels of water into ghee after standing on one toe for several days (why?); and when he would sleep out in the open wilderness for nights on end.

But there’s one thing Ramavatar mentioned that really made me smile.

“When the Maharaja hunted the animals, he was the king of the jungle, I could sleep out at night because the animals feared men… Now I wouldn’t dare sleep in the jungle at night” he said, adding with wry grin, “Now the tiger is the king of the jungle again.”

As we drove back to our luxurious camp in Mahua Kothi, I couldn’t help but wonder how much the Maharaja would have enjoyed forty jeeps barging into his palace every time he sat down for dinner?