With the impatience of a kid back from school the scenery kept knocking at the door of my conscious. My eyes were wide open but I saw nothing. I heard every word spoken inside the vehicle but understood nothing. I was there but not. The badgering got so incessant and I came out of the reverie with a start. We had stopped. Sahil was setting up the tripod, Henri as usual had gone somewhere to reappear atop the next knoll or bend. And Mortu had lit up. I looked around. It was a continuous canvas – the cerulean clouds had merged with the ebony-blue mountains in the distance which flowed into the argent blue waters. The atmosphere generally lacked oxygen but I gasped at the beauty that was laid out for me. Just like that. There was nothing demanded from me. All I had to do was just take. Savour it. No need even memorise it for posterity. Relish in the moment, the now. Be happy that you are alive, here. It seemed like nothing in the world mattered anymore. There was no happy or sad, I swarmed weightless in a space with no emotions or thoughts. The lightness was all around me and I edged towards the other realm, again. But it was too early for yet another trip. I told myself that I had to wait. Several times the previous night I woke up with sweat trickling at the back of my neck. I saw images from my past – the breakups, fights, excesses, the overdoses, lazy excuses, the dishonesties.

Barely was my divorce formalised before I got in with an intern from my office. It was easy – I was a rockstar. Or so I believed.
“Oh, I can change you,” she said. “I will make you a nice guy.” The problem was that I didn’t want to be one.
“That’s what you think,” she was fiddling with the cigarette I was going to light up. I knew what she was going to do. “You really are a nice guy, only misunderstood by everyone.” Who wasn’t, I didn’t ask.
She had by now shredded my cigarette into pieces, gotten out of bed dragging the cover around her. After slapping her hands clean into the toilet, she sat on it, turned back at me and smiled. What was intended to be an angelic gesture with genuine intentions had a strange effect on me. I felt claustrophobic; the four walls of the bedroom seemed to be closing in around me. I couldn’t breathe and I pulled on my shorts and a crumpled tee shirt and ran out. I fled down the staircase towards the lake that fronted the apartment block. A few minutes later, after the feeling of space had descended calm on me, I headed back. She wasn’t there but had left a note. She had, apparently, waited for an hour. In the scribble, she said that she had realised that some people were born to live hurt and whoever who came close would be inflicted with it. That was probably the only way they could show their love. In short, she had enough. Next day I came to know that she had cut short her internship and had headed back to college.
“Why don’t you take a look at this shot instead of standing there like a…a…dummy.” Sahil asked me from where he was filming.
“Mummy.” I corrected him.
“No, you look like a dummy. You have a stupid smile on your face.” I didn’t tell him that the ‘stupid’ smile was the closest I might ever come to nirvana.

Not just images from my past, but the previous night was also broken by an incessant drizzle that had seeped through the soggy ground and dampened our sleeping bags. It had left our camera and laptop bags too a soak. The three of us were cramped into a tent that was pitched on a square-shaped ground dug and levelled out from a green patch closer to the lake than to the other tents. Unfortunately, as the others feared, we weren’t sleeping naked or in our underwear. We had all snuggled into thermals before we crawled into our sleeping bags. Though we had to dry all the thick thermals, we decided to do it on the way and started early. We had to film the Chiu Gompa or the ‘Bird’ Monastery on the way and reach Darchen, the base camp of Mount Kailas, before night fall. The camp was slowly stirring to life as our LandCruiser, treadless tyres struggling for a grip on the slushy grass, drifted its way out. On the way we were also to pass by the Rakshas Tal, the lake of the demons. But before that we had to slide and slip our way along the banks of the Manasarovar Lake where we had now stopped, an hour of four-wheeled struggle from the camp.
There were chortens of different sizes scattered all over. I placed a stone atop three of them as I walked towards Sahil. The camera was placed at knee-level with a medium sized chorten in the foreground and the spotless blue expanse of the Manasarovar Lake in the background. As I peered through the lens, Sahil alternated the focus between the chorten and the lake. It was heart-stopping magic. One of the bigger stones had ‘Om Mani Padme Hum’ chiselled on it and every time the focus was on the chorten, the prayers seemed to spring out with an umber life of its own. A birdsong shrills over us from somewhere. Beneath our feet are strange flowers, dangling delicately brushing against our booted feet. Closer to the bank are taller shrubs from where pink and yellow blooms are looking longingly at the inviting lake. There were groups of picnicking locals who sat on pockmarked boulders, feet swinging in the water. Another one had removed his shirt and was thrashing about in the water trying to persuade a girl, who was collecting water into a bottle and drinking it, to join him. Seeing that his entreaties were ignored, he splashed to her and dragged her by force into the water. This created much mirth among the others while the girl struggled up sputtering for breath, water pouring out of her nostrils. This only made two other guys who were sitting on the boulder bodily lift her and plonk her into the water again. The Tibetans surely had their own brand of fun. Before things got out of hand, Mortu tapped his watch at us. It was time to go. Henri would appear from around one of the banking curves that zigzagged ahead.

On the way we passed by a Tibetan pilgrim who was doing the parikrama of the lake, covering the distance with prostrations on the stony path. I asked Mortu to slow down so that we didn’t kick up much dust. The woman had padded her knees with some old clothes and she held a piece of wood with a bulbous knob which was the grip, not unlike the sandals used to be worn by ancient sadhus. As we passed by, she turned to look at us and in return to my sombre nod she gave me a cheerful smile. It was superhuman, to be able to smile under the circumstances. I asked Mortu what would she have done to do such a penance. Would she be forgiven for whatever when she completes it?
“Bad…hmmm… bad…hmmm… bad lady.” He managed an answer.
“Would it mean that she was a hooker?” Henri asked.

Mortu had stepped on the pedal and was, as he does when speeding, hunched around the wheel. He didn’t understand the question and ignored it. Henri repeated the question, this time with more illustrative gestures.
“No, no,” he replied. “Maybe…” He held up his right hand like a knife and made a slashing movement across his neck and stuck out his tongue.
Henri was quiet. I turned around to look at the bad lady / murderess. Through the haze of the dust left by us I could see that she was taking a sip from a bottle that was strapped to her side. The Manasarovar lay by her side applauding her on with a thousand shimmers. We turned around a corner and both the pilgrim and the lake disappeared out of sight.
We passed by a tourist bus whose rear tyres had submerged deep in the muck formed by the night rain and passing traffic. These were local pilgrims who were headed to the holy mountain from Kathmandu. The passengers had abandoned the driver whose attempts to extricate the vehicle from the quagmire was only sinking it deeper. They had assembled in groups of five and six and were chanting. I told Mortu we should stop to help. Adept in sign language by now, I understood without much difficulty when he said that the driver should wait till the day gets warmer. He also added that the other driver was crazy.
“Look who is talking,” Henri muttered.

There is a certain rhythm with which the Tibetans handle their machines; right from the way they get in to the driver seat, buckling up, engaging the gear, one can almost feel a whispered conversation going on between the machine and the man. A trait probably got over centuries of taming wild horses – they were all exceptional on horseback as well. The only time I saw some real joy and pride in Mortu’s eyes was when I told him that he was a good driver; he almost blushed and walked away inadvertently assuming his driving posture – hunched and pulling up the falling sleeves of his cheap sweater. He never pushed his vehicle, but it did what it could, almost with the air of Hidalgo. So it came as no surprise when Mortu took the vehicle up a near-vertical slope, hunched over and hugging the wheel, and the almost-bald tyres held! I had half expected all of us to come sliding down like an avalanche and turning turtle when we hit the bottom. Just as we began to enjoy the adrenaline surge we reached the top of the tricky knoll. What we saw from there mesmerised us: the Rakshas Tal, like a sultry vixen sure of her seductive prowess, challenging us to make up our minds on where to place our loyalties – the pacific expanse of her unadulterated blue or the sullied but holy Manasarovar.

Rakshas Tal, meaning the lake of demons, was once the house evil Hindu spirits who ate human flesh. Together with the Manasarovar Lake, the Rakshas Tal symbolises the sun and the moon which is among the supreme symbols in Tantric Buddhism. Before the Cultural Revolution, there used to be one monastery which was studiously avoided by the pilgrims – Buddhists, especially, as Hindu pilgrims mostly head straight to the Mount Kailas. “They say the detour is a waste of time,” confided Narendra to me that morning. “But the truth is that they are a bit wary of the place for its mythology.” The water in the lake was supposed to be poisonous, not allowing any life form to survive in it. Some believe that the lake is over sunken mountains. There is a small channel which the locals call the Ganga Chu which connects the Rakshas Tal to the Manasarovar. This channel, the Tibetans believe, was carved out by a golden fish. Water flowed from the holy lake to the lake of the demons and it was redeemed. Flowers sprouted around it and life blossomed in it. Taking the esoteric one step ahead is another local belief that for 30 years since the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the channel remained dry. Today, water has started to flow again through the Ganga Chu and thus the Rakshas Tal is not demonic anymore. In fact, it is quite friendly. As if to make up for centuries of alienation, there are hot springs around the lake which are popular pilgrim bathhouses. Any opportunity to bathe, that too in mineral-rich natural springs, was not to be missed. We asked Mortu to take us to the hot spring but he tapped his watch and frowned.
A slight drizzle had started and we hastily packed up after canning our shots of the lake. Just as we were about to leave, mercifully not through the rollercoaster route we took on our way up, a couple in transparent raincoats appeared as sudden like apparitions in front of us. They were staying with a local family at the nearby Chiu village where the famous Chiu Gompa or the Bird Monastery was; could we give them a lift as it had started to rain and they didn’t want to wet their camera. David and Alex were from the United Kingdom; David was a photographer and Alex was a journalism student. They met each other through a ‘free Tibet’ site and got together for the Kailas parikrama.
“How is your journey so far?” I asked David.
“We are both activists for the Free Tibet movement and we have participated in many campaigns for the cause,” he replied. “So we thought for once go and see the land we are trying to liberate.”
“And what do you expect from the road ahead?” This time I pointed my question at Alex. Alex was the firebrand among the two, when she spoke her orange mane – tied up in an out-of-hand bundle – bobbed, making it look like a forest fire welling up.
“The more we see of Tibet the firmer we stand by our cause,” she said, the fiery mane now quivering furiously like an oil rig on fire. “Look around, what an exhilarating piece of earth. How can anybody commit such atrocities here?” She said calling it a ‘cultural revolution’ was degrading the whole idea of a revolution; what happened in the country was organised vandalism. What was unforgivable was that the biggest crime against humanity was committed right next door to the biggest democracy in the world – which just stood back and watched. Sahil signalled me whether I wanted it on camera. No, I didn’t. There was nothing new here. It was always there – a part of our bleeding conscience.

A stony path leads up to the monastery of Chiu or ‘the bird’ and the first thing you notice are the prayer flags that have been tied in impossibly positioned boulders – a definite testimony to the agility of the monks. Many of them were also placed there by visitors who tied them as a mark of reverence for the holy place. The carnival of colours painted a radiant contrast against the sandstone red of the crags. There were some brightly painted constructions that replaced some of the casualties of the Cultural Revolution. These are on both sides of the original gompa which consisted mostly of stone stairways and caves along the side of the hill. We parked our vehicle a good kilometre away from the monastery and carried our equipments till an iron gate – which didn’t seem at all to go with the place, otherwise guarded by a mud wall hardly four feet tall and a flea-covered dog which barely batted an eyelid when we pushed open the squeaky gate and walked in. A novice who was watching television in one of the modern buildings came out. He spoke to us in a furious tone but the face remained indiscernibly calm. We were in a dilemma – we didn’t know whether we were welcome or being shooed away. We told him we would like to pay respects to the lama; Henri introduced himself in his Buddhist name which brought a smile across the novice’s face. He led us into the darker recess of the shrine – in one of the caves – and opened the door to the golden statue of Padmasambhava, Tibet’s greatest saint. It was here that the saint spent the last seven days of his life meditating. We placed a 100 Yuan note on the statue which already had a used Reebok cap and a pack of glucose biscuits. The novice was visibly pleased. He gave each of us a white silk scarf, a sign of benediction in Tibet.

Meandering stone stairways, locked wooden doors, bolted caves, carved woodwork over window frames, the monastery looks spooky even on a bright sunny afternoon. The view of the Manasarovar Lake from here is one of those sights you will carry with you to your grave. I admit, my loyalties were shaken when I laid my eyes on the vamp, the vixen, the Rakshas Tal. One look at the Manasarovar Lake from the Chiu Gompa and I understood it took more than callous devotion to besmirch a timeless wonder.