XXX
When I told Mother about some men who wanted to climb the peak, she let out a derisive snort. ‘Baah. When I was a child, some white men came to my village to climb the mountain. We warned them no good would come out of disturbing the gods’ sleep, and soon enough, we heard that all but one of them had died. Then one day, the river carried down a frozen corpse while we were all filling water. Soon some government people came with more foreigners, and Ba and other villagers had to convince them to not try climbing the mountain anymore.’
Mother was like that; she didn’t question the whys of how we lived. For her, life in the village was an eternal circle that went round and round, with a set of rules that were unchanged for hundreds of years – the rules continued to exist, she reasoned, because they were correct. She couldn’t be bothered with curiosity. All that mattered was that it was the way it had been. When I asked her whether she missed her village after she married Father at the age of nine, she said, ‘Who has time for missing one’s family? As soon as I entered this house, your grandmother put me to work. The witch that she was, she would always taunt me by saying she did my father a favor by getting a child without a mother to marry her son.’
XXX
My sister was born on a night of a moonless sky. The village instead glowed in the flickering shadows of a candle-lit night – the night we Bahuns and Chhetris said Lakshmi would enter our homes. The candles helped her way inside our mud huts. My father held this grudge against her forever, a primordial rage that stemmed from the inescapability of having to name his daughter after the goddess of wealth, and knowing all the while that he himself could not escape the matrimonial debt she had brought upon his family. He would never be sour about it, but you could hear it in the admonishments and the infinite comparisons he drew with Lakshmi’s friends – Sita could cook by the time she was five, Parvati had already helped her mother collect firewood and bring water when she was seven. My sister would turn out to be like our mother, eternally quiet, and forever alone. Maybe she understood that in silence lay her best defense, afraid to face the uncontrollable fury of a man who believed himself to be scorned by destiny and stymied by his family. Maybe that was also why she sought in me an undesired protector, hoping that our filial bonds would help abide the angry tide that was my father.
I did not choose the role willingly, though, I must admit. A three-year-old child is met with an impossible dilemma when faced with a sibling he has been asked to love, when he knows that he will not be loved as before. My first thought, in hindsight, must have been one of utter selfishness – what is this pink object who threatens to take my mother away from me? – but even then I could not escape the fact that my sister would now be an inalienable part of my life. I realized this much later, when Lakshmi had already turned five, and I beat up Jange for pulling her hair and calling her a dirty cow. Till then, I had found her to be an irritant, especially as she had begun following me around whenever I asked my mother if I could go play with the other boys on the river bank.
XXX
Growing up in the hills, one could not be faulted for living with a limited worldview. The furthest my father had ever seen was the district headquarter, and that too when he was told by the headmaster that everyone in the village had to register themselves for an election. This was much before I was born. The elections were explained as the people choosing their own sarkaar, and it seemed my father took on that responsibility a little too seriously. When the headmaster told my father, he’d immediately rounded up all the men in the village. I don’t think he understood how exactly he would choose his government, and what his government would do even if it were elected. Maybe it just wasn’t in his larger scheme of things.
Still, off he trundled, along with all the other men and their wives – all the children had been left behind with their grandparents or other elders – the headmaster leading them from front. They reached the town, where my father almost met an inglorious end by coming under the wheels of a bus that he could not comprehend was a moving vehicle, but not before they were told they would all be voting for the king. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable affirmation of a fact they knew to be true. After all, we had been a kingdom for years now, even though we hadn’t seen our king yet. In the district headquarter, they were told that the old king had died of a heart attack – a king’s disease, the headmaster called it – and the young king would now take us into a new age, where everyone would be rich and no one would need to work for food. I think my fool of a father held that utopian hope till the day he died.
Our village carried a curious name to it: Sunpokhari – the golden pond. Why a village that did not possess a single pond came to be called that, we didn’t know. It was a name that had stuck, unfazed by the ludicrousness of a label that wasn’t. Yet the elders attempted to explain this misnomer by telling us how fortunate we were that we could collect a mysterious herb that brought us more money than they had seen in their lives.
But yarsagumba isn’t an herb; it’s neither plant, nor animal – it’s both. It’s a tiny sliver of brown that is worth its weight in gold, a thin mud-crusted caterpillar from whose head shot out a root thinner than a matchstick. Summer herb-winter worm, we called it. In the summer months, just when the snow would begin receding to higher grounds, our villages would empty themselves – men, women, children, all of us, even the headmaster and the sahuji. We would walk across the mountains to the sunnier side, where the new meadows would beckon us to pitch our makeshift tents on their pastures. There would be thousands and thousands of us on a single meadow, each family bringing along even the baby, for in these parts you must learn early. We would use blue plastic sheets as roofing, bought in bulk from the sahuji who would begin stocking them once the rains were over and the cold came in. Armed with a small spade and a toothbrush, we would begin our search, crawling on all fours on the cold ground, digging out anything that looked like our yarsagumba, slowly brushing away the mud using the bristles of the toothbrush. Every successful pick would be put in a sack and taken to the sahuji, who would weigh the sack and pay our fathers accordingly; the record currently belonged to Jange’s father, who had collected two sackfuls three years ago, and he had been able to buy his daughter a gold potey as her dowry – that is, until she ran away with the potey and Jange’s father’s hopes.
XXX
It rained that night, and it still hadn’t stopped when we woke up the next morning. The headmaster had to switch into his role as a priest, beseeching the gods at Ganesh’s temple under the chautara for a bounty this year, as he did at births, deaths, weddings, anniversaries, harvests, sowings, floods, droughts, travel and moments of good fortune.
We began walking when the rain became a drizzle, a thin curtain of shimmering light. It was a routine I’d memorized by now; this would be my third time, but Lakshmi’s first. I teased her about how the yarsagumba was sometimes alive when you pulled it out and it could easily go under your skin and settle there, then the yarsagumba would begin growing out of her skin. She seemed genuinely scared, but Mother censured me for filling my sister’s head with nonsense and assured my sister nothing of that sort would happen.
We began climbing the steps carved behind the headmaster’s house towards the mountain. I counted up to hundred thirteen times until we reached the top. Aquifers had burst after last night’s rain, and a few of them ran down the slopes of the hill across us in little waterfalls with the urgency of a cow separated from its calf.
Mother took out the bag of chiura she had kept as rations and gave us fistfuls of the beaten rice. We munched on them languidly until the headmaster called out to us. The path ahead was now downhill. No longer steps, but a beaten path cut out through a jungle for passage and whittled down under hooves and feet. It went on and on until it opened out onto a meadow, which was but the first of the three we had to cross, for years of picking yarsagumba had shorn the meadow of the worm-plant. A rocky stream was negotiated tip-toeing on a bamboo bridge, more jungle – thick, overgrown with moss and fern, then the meadow where we always slept the night, and awaited the people of two villages on the other side of the hill.
A Himalayan meadow isn’t always verdant green; islands of brown sometimes littered the new grass’s golden stalks. The best yarsagumba is to be found on a more even plain, where the grass doesn’t grow too high and the soil isn’t rocky enough for the tender stalk to pierce the ground. The meadow where we stayed the night stood just beside a rocky outcrop that looked out onto the river below, and at night the howling wind battered our clumsy tents stood on bamboo. It was cold that night, a cold I had never known, a primal cold that stripped away all our layers of clothing and exposed the skin to a sharp sting.
As we sat shivering in the tent, we heard the other villages arrive much before they actually did, their chatter carried over by the wind. Slowly orange shapes began to appear, the lamps that the villagers carried to light the way, and our fathers walked out to greet them. Mother shushed Lakshmi as she began to complain of her chest hurting, telling her she should go to sleep. I peeked out of a hole in the tent to see if Dhane and his sister from the village across our hill had also come, but Mother’s searing poke put an end to that.
