Four a.m saw the first beams of twilight finding its way down through the pine forest overhead. I lay in bed a little while longer and an hour later, it was light enough for me to unzip the tent and venture outside into the morning chill.
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| Overhit - And you're off the Cliff Underhit - And you're in the Water |
After walking around for a while, taking in the greenness and freshness of the surroundings, which I could not the previous evening, I began repacking my things. Naresh, the caddy joined me and together we dismembered and repacked the tent. Once done, off we went to the golf house, ready to take on the new course.
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| Over the Trees - Hitting into the Unknown |
With breathtaking splendor, each hole overshadowed the last in beauty. I guess the exquisite surrounding had its effect on me as I downed two birdies and three pars on my way to losing ten bucks to Naresh. Eighteen holes, a bath and change later, Naresh and I walked down to the main road and ordered a couple of ‘give the Punjabi Mom a run for her money’ Aloo Parathas from a little tea stall.
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| Naresh - Caddy Compadre |
Gossiping with the group there, pulling the young owner’s leg and joking about each other would have left one doubting the fact that they were meeting me, an outsider, for the first time. With a full tummy I set out by bus back to Shimla. The friendly people and beautiful countryside I was leaving behind had me looking back, promising myself to return.
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| Scandal Point - Start of the Heritage Walk |
A drowsy journey followed and once we reached Shimla, I began the arduous climb back up from the bus stand to the Mall Road. Starting the Heritage walk at Scandal Point, I booked my evening ticket to Manali and chatted with various people along the way. Finally I arrived at the Himachal Pradesh Museum, also at the top of a murderously steep climb. I sat outside on the park benches for a while, catching my breath and penning down the events of the day so far.
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| Preservng Culture - The State Museum |
In a little while, I decided to walk around the museum. Ancient excavated sculptures, weapons, paintings, cultural relics, stamps, coins from across the ages, pre-historic tools from around the country and photographs from our nation’s past from pre-independence days adorned the corridors of the two storey museum building.
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| Artifacts Across the Ages |
As the clock approached 5 p.m, the Museum closing time, threatening rain clouds began to roll in. I picked up my rucksack and continued on my walk through Shimla. Now began a seemingly endless walk down a sheer, nearly vertical mountain face. Tacking from left to right, down an extremely narrow but well trodden path, I finally reached the Lower Main Road. The hour long sheer descent with the rucksack on my back had my knees moaning, groaning and creaking in submission.
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| Emus in India - From Across the Oceans |
During the walk down, I met a couple more sweet and friendly people, a shy and furry little pup who ran into his cage when I approached him, and most unusual of all – four emus in a cage that squawked me into retreat. The new bus stand was a nicely constructed affair with multiple levels and organized buses from bays on each of them. The complex also had a small shopping mall and fast food centres to spend time at. With my luggage loaded into the back, I boarded the bus and took my seat right at the front. Sitting next to me was a smartly dressed youngster wearing a Metallica t-shirt, Billabong Bermudas and Nike shoes, earphones in his ears and a baseball cap on backwards. Introducing myself, I was fascinated to learn that his name was Tenzing (like Tenzing Norgay). His family was from a little town in eastern Himachal but he had chosen to renounce all worldly wants and pleasures to become a monk.
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| Dude, That's my Car |
Now rapt with attention, I asked if he could explain to me some of the concepts of Buddhism. He told me about the four sects of Buddhism prevalent in India and how the Dalai Lama, though undoubtedly the most popular and renowned, was the head of only one of them. The heads of the other three sects lived in Dharamsala, Dehra Dun and a village near Bangalore while the Dalai Lama spent most of his time in McLeod Ganj.
He explained how the choice to choose the path of enlightenment was purely one’s own and how nobody else in his immediate family was a monk. He was from a good middle-class family. His brother had done his schooling from Lawrence School Sanawar, Bishop Cotton’s in Shimla, St. Stephen’s College in Chandigarh, and finally Loyola College in Madras. However, due to the tragic demise of his father in a car crash four years earlier, he chose to carry on the family occupation of farming.
As Tenzing elaborated on aspects of Buddhism, he explained how what one became was purely a result of his deeds, both in this birth as well as the last – how the child who did well in class without very much hard work was reaping the benefits of the hard work put in by him in his previous birth. The path to enlightenment lay in doing good deeds and improving one’s understanding and control over worldly needs, possessions and feelings. The way to tackle one’s trouble was to first identify it, and then nip it at the bud, not go on fighting it at its final stage or manifestation. He explained how Yogis were tested by seating them naked in the snow and wrapping a wet blanket around them. The test was to generate so much heat from the body so as to dry the blanket in five minutes.
Similarly, as one achieved advanced stages of yogic meditation and self realization, it was possible to levitate two feet above the ground. The most advanced stage, which he said only one or two Yogis had ever achieved, was the ability to fly through the air. They had reached such an extent of non-ownership and renunciation of worldly possessions that they did not consider anything, not even their own bodies, to belong to themselves. I was reminded of the saying, “From ashes to ashes and dust to dust” – How could we consider anything that we came across or attained in between these, during the tiny span of the seven or eight decades that we live, to be truly ours. Nothing is permanent; anything that is there today need not be there tomorrow – for example, a house or a tree. How then, can we say that it belongs to us?
Another amazing coincidence that I noticed was between Naresh the caddy from that morning in Naldehra and Tenzing the monk from that night on the bus. They both were twenty six years old, the youngest in the family, unmarried, had an educated older brother who had chosen to look after the family occupation of farming and two elder sisters, both of whom were married.
He also explained how monk gurus, who had attained a certain degree of enlightenment, had the privilege of choosing their own successor. Just before they died, they would jot down directions to find a boy (peculiarity of a village, house etc) on a slip of paper, seal it and hand it over to one of his pupils, asking him not to open it for three years after his death. Sometime during these three years, the pupil would have a vision as to where to find the boy. Now the slip would be opened, and if the vision matched the instructions on the slip, the recruiting process would be initiated.
Tenzing had settled at the monastery at Bhuntar, and had chosen to renounce marriage of his own accord. Each monk could voluntarily decide to what extent he wanted to renounce worldly deeds such as smoking, drinking, marriage or sex. He recommended that I read a book called The Tibetan Great Yogi – Mela Repa, who was the only monk in the history of Buddhism to have achieved enlightenment in one birth alone.
The fascinating part was that Tenzing looked like the coolest monk ever, in a t-shirt, bermudas, baseball cap and Nike shoes. When I asked him, he said that his robes had gotten wet in the rain that morning and he had packed them into his bag.
Finally, as weariness set in, I dozed off into an interrupted slumber, banging my head awake every little while on the rattling window pane.
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