Nature levels with you in ways neither strange nor unpredictable. Strange and unpredictable are the ways Fate tempts you. Living is what is caught in the line of these sparring two. It is an adventure mostly self-determined, seldom thrown your way. You are the master and the slave. Travel helps with the reconciliation. It is a clash between a mind craving for head-on collisions with rare experiences and the body set to an assuring routine. The cruelties you come across will harden you, the wonders will humble you, the hardships will embolden you, nothing will leave you untouched. Now, travelling through Tibet, for me, the relevance worked across time: I, with a complicated past, was traversing a region that basked in glorious mythology, revered for millennia. Tomorrow seemed fuzzy, at best. That was the kick of travel. And that’s why we travel.
The day started overcast. I had woken up with a pounding head and couldn’t remember where I was. Did the curio shop proprietor take me in? Did one of the kids give me shelter in a modest tin-roofed house? Where was Sahil? Pierre? And everybody else? The only thing I remembered was sweating despite the cold. There were some frenzied motions, dousing pangs of convoluted anguish. I remembered many layers of blankets around me. And when I pulled them up over my face, my hands brushed against a body naked and cold, but not sweating like mine, just damp. The realisation that it wasn’t mine swept across me with a shudder but then I must have fallen asleep. In the morning as I sat up in bed, I groped under the clumps of mouldy wool, a bit scared. My hand hit the rounded dead weight of a bottle of balm. The pungent, red-coloured balm reeked all over me. I hid the balm just as Sahil came in, leaving a dripping umbrella by the door and looking worriedly at the lens.
“Bloody rains,” he muttered. “Started yesterday night,” he said and looked at me.
“Of course,” I said as if I remembered.
“How are you?” He asked me, beginning to wipe the lens with the leather cloth.
“Never been better,” I lied. Sahil looked at me not convinced and went back to the cleaning.
“Ok, tell me what happened,” I conceded. “Are we still in Tibet? Where is everybody?”
“After your rain dance yesterday, you got piss drunk with some locals.” Alright, that was not so bad. I waited for him to go on but he seemed hell-bent over an imaginary speck beyond his reach.

The drive to the starting point of the parikrama took us half an hour of bouncing over trackless, slippery knolls.
“I already had breakfast you don’t have to feed me my intestines,” an irascible Pierre told Mortu, who was hunched over his wheel. Darchen hadn’t been too kind to Pierre and things were to worsen for him.
Usually pilgrims started from a point called Tarboche, but nonstop rains had made the road inaccessible. We were to proceed to another place further ahead, a featureless and foreboding valley called Sirchun. Far away from where we stopped, at the foot of a mountain which looked like a gigantic termite hill, stood the Sirchun Gompa. As a symbol of thriving faith were the unending strings of flapping prayer flags and dish antennae busy catching signals. We had stopped near a Buddhist stupa which was gift wrapped in translucent, multi-coloured prayer flags. Pilgrims went around the stupa praying for safe passage through the parikrama. The Mount Kailas was hidden somewhere behind clouds sluggish with rain struggling to keep afloat.
Locals and Buddhists believe that the holy mountain is guarded by a deity called Demchog who stays at the top of the mountain, in a palace carved out of ice. In ancient Tibetan texts Demchog is portrayed as a furious god with many arms, brandishing skulls, trident and a drum. Not only is he strikingly similar to Kala Bhairav – Lord Shiva in his destructive avatar (a local favourite at the Kathmandu Durbar Square in Nepal), he is believed to be a tantric variant of Lord Shiva. Furthering the similarities, Demchog too has his consort Phagmo entwined around him symbolising his shakti or strength. Buddhists offer prayers to Demchog here while Hindus walk around the stupa chanting Om Namah Shiva.
During the time of Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the Himalayan region was believed to be a divine territory and the mythical Mount Meru a separate kingdom. Over the centuries, even before the invasion by Aryans, sadhus made daring forays tracing the origin of rivers and reached Kailas. Eventually the holy mountain was deigned the abode of Lord Shiva and the Mount Meru was merged with it. Shiva, the god of destruction, symbolises both the hope and the despair of change with his dance, the tandava. It seemed like he was on to one now. Reports of hailstorms and blizzards over the Drolma Pass had settled a palpable air of anxiety over the pilgrims. Understandably some pilgrims had tearfully dropped out – mostly the elder lot and those with some history of illness. Not many were able to hire horses for the entire parikrama as it was prohibitively expensive and were in short supply.

Sure-footed yaks, plangent with the tin bells hanging from the shock that was their necks, descended from the surrounding hills. These beasts of burden would soon be loaded up with unimaginable quantities of camp stuff: one I was watching had three domestic gas cylinders and two 50-litre drums filled with grocery and pilgrim luggage hoisted on it. While the yaks cut a straight path, over mountains, across stony streams, we began along a semblance of a trail flanked by canyon walls like brown stilettos pointed towards the sky. The first day would be easy compared to the second and the third days; we would be covering just 14 km till Dera Phuk which stood at an altitude of 4900 metres.
It was 11am and rain clouds were growling over the horizon and a freezing gale tore down bodily pushing some pilgrims off balance. Before the first drizzle began, we managed to film the starting point with its beehive of activities. The pilgrims were embarking on a journey of their lifetime; a gamut of emotions was on display there. There was excitement, extremes of piety – some were rolling on the ground in the direction of the Mount Kailas and breaking down, few barely managed to articulate their thoughts as interviews. As the first drops fell, we managed to put away the camera and mikes. Taking our first tentative steps along the billowy landscape, we were soon surrounded by towering sandstone bulwarks with itchy boulders perched precariously at the top. There is a smattering of snow only at the peak of this red and rust curtain – from everywhere else it was wrung out, washed or blown away. There were some pilgrims, Tibetans, coming the other way.
“Tashi Deley,” I greeted with all the enthusiasm of first day, first hour. I wanted to ask them about the weather conditions as I presumed that they had completed their kora or parikrama. While most of my ‘Tashi Deleys’ have been responded to with equal and more vigour, at least a smile, this time I was stumped; the group of three walked by me without as much as even a glimpse in my direction. It dawned on me that they were followers of the Bon religion who preferred to keep themselves away from the crowd, generally. And they did the parikrama in the anti-clockwise direction.

For the Bonpo, Kailas belonged to them even before Buddha came. The holy mountain was the pivotal pole on which the universe hinged upon, manifesting itself as a crystal palace. The origins of Bon can be traced back to the time of shamanism and other animistic rites and is believed to have been brought from Persia. Their god, Shenrab, killed the demons that had invaded the mountain and made it his throne, thus investing it with holiness. Bon as a religion thrived on sorcery and black magic. Legends abound of yogis who turned themselves into eagles, soaring high, keeping an eye on the abode of their god. Buddha, the Bon claim goes, is an incarnation of Shenrab. The Bon cult is divided into ‘white’ and ‘black’. While the ‘white’ offshoot is accepted by the Tibetan Buddhists, the ‘black’ Bon continues to be ostracised for their heavy dependence on animal rites and shamanistic practices. One could say the dislike or the distance was mutual.
Clutching the hood of the windbreaker against the icy gale which had started to skim away from the glacier above only to shower it on us, we started the arduous part of the climb. Scattered shrubs gave way to ochrous red disarrayed shale. The pilgrims progressed, an epicene mass in the bulky warm gear, pointing out rock formations which eerily took on familiar forms from the religious texts; a particular favourite was the Ganesha – with its flappy ear, eye and tusk carefully etched out. Soon it became a test of imagination and almost every figure from the puranas found a place along the ridge that canyoned us in across the opposite side of the Kailas. They were all lined up paying obeisance to the dancing god. The bonhomie was not to last for long. Patience thinned with the oxygen. We were running out of time and we decided to leave the other behind. Within the next two hours, me and Sahil had gained a half hour lead from the rest. Our intention was to reach the camp before darkness fell; carrying expensive cameras over a terrain that was beginning to well up remained a good idea only as long as there was light. The Kailas was on our right, the west face. On the other side was a shallow stream, sparkling pebbly white and shale-blue, which followed us for a while with a gushing applause. Suddenly without warning, it disappeared down a valley that rose up in an ominous silhouette.
We passed by several mountain dogs, which our porters told us were herding dogs discarded due to advanced age. Left to scrounge an inhospitable terrain for food, they eat anything you give them. Narendra had given us all packed lunches which included, dismally, one packet of biscuit, one samosa and an apple. I gave my soggy samosa to one dog which came and sat next to me when I stopped for lunch. He ate it gratefully and gazed at me through watery-warm eyes. I held out a biscuit to see if he would eat it; as I was hungry myself I didn’t want to waste it either. But the mutt wasted no time in crunching it down and looked at me again through unblinking watery-warm eyes. I dumped my entire biscuit packet in front of him. Who is whose friend, I asked him as I got up to leave.

“Must be the reincarnation of somebody who knew you,” Henri said when I told him about it later that evening. I laughed taking it for a joke but Henri was serious.
We were at the Dera Phuk camp; while Sahil and I reached around 5pm as dusk became dark, Henri came two hours later. He was in a pretty bad shape – was wracking over coughing and bleeding through the nose because of the cold and the altitude. We were all wet to the thermals. The camp building was a no-frills construction, built like a ranch in right angles and facing Mount Kailas. They had taken the ‘no frills’ a bit too far and it included doing away with toilets as well. Pilgrims were cramped into every available corner on both the floors. The rooms smelled of wet concrete and water seeped from not just the roof, but even the walls, redefining infinity pools. Those who left their jackets on the ground to dry – for want of clotheslines or hooks – found it dripping wet the next morning. Mine included. The room held a dozen metal cots quite like a hospital during the Second World War; the only thing missing were the drone of B-12 bombers. Pierre was in the bed next to mine.
“Did the dog follow you after you fed it?” Henri asked me.
“I don’t know, I don’t think so.” I replied. “If it did, does it mean that it is actually somebody who knew me?”
“No, but it’s possible,” Henri replied wiping the blood from his nose. “Remember we are in a country where people don’t even kill a housefly as it could be your own grandmother who came back.”
“In which case tonight I will kill at least a dozen grandmothers, this bed is full of bugs.” It was Sahil from the corner bed he had taken hoping the ceiling wouldn’t leak which did and how. One drop of water would sponge itself out from the centre of a bunch of concentric green circles drawn with mould of varying thickness. Then each circle would contribute its own sizeable drop which all gathered at the epicentre to launch itself down in one big swoosh.

“And tomorrow I will take a proper human life, not any reincarnation. I am going to kill Narendra for putting us in this shit hole.” The poor soul was understandably sore. But the truth was that there were no other options.
“The jerk could have given us the ground floor,” Sahil said as if reading my thoughts. “But he didn’t as it was more expensive than this first floor pigsty.” Ok, no arguing here as he had done his research.
“Go ahead,” I told him. “In Tibet you are not supposed to kill any reincarnations. Everything else is fine.”
By 3am Henri started to groan, tossing and turning in his bed. I shook him awake.
“Bad dreams, Henri?” I asked.
“Bloody hell man, my head is bursting.” He sat up on his bed and began massaging his temples.
I rummaged my rucksack for the balm from the previous night in Darchen and gave it to him.
“Hey, this is what she gave you yesterday night.” Henri said. “I know it from the way it burns the air.”
“Who gave this to me?” I was truly baffled.
“You went out yesterday night saying your head was cracking open. And you came back with Chitra who rubbed it for you.”
“But how do you know it was Chitra? Could have been…you know… Harshita…”
“I thought at first it was Harshita. But it was Chitra, Aravind’s wife.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know Aravind, I know Chitra. And I know Chitra is Aravind’s wife.” I hissed at Henri, the venom took even me by surprise.
He quietly placed the bottle on my bed, and slipped under the blanket.
“Henri,” I called out after a while. “You know in these high altitudes patience wears thin with oxygen and…”
Henri replied with a loud snore. He was sleeping open-mouthed as his nose was clogged up with blood. I tore out a piece of the tissue roll and gently soaked up the blood which had begun to trickle down towards his mouth.