MILAM
ON MY MIND
Ajit
Chaudhuri – November 2018
What’s the difference between the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘sublime’?
They say that beautiful objects are smooth, polished, and comparatively small,
whereas sublime objects are vast, rugged, powerful, magnificent. They are ideas
of a different nature; beauty being founded on pleasure, and sublimity being
founded on pain. I was reminded of this difference during a recent trek,
following the Ghori river to its origins in Milam Glacier. There was nothing
beautiful about it – it was tough, unforgiving, cold, long, and a pure and
unadulterated test of endurance – none of it a pleasant walk through mountains
with a river on one side and forests with snow-clad peaks above them on the
other interspersed with nights around a camp fire and a flute and guitar combination
in the background (as Internet descriptions implied). There was plenty that was
sublime, though, in following a rough and angry Himalayan river through its
gorges and its sudden openings into wide windswept valleys right up to its
beginnings under the ice in the eastern side of the Nanda Devi, where China,
Nepal and Uttarakhand merge.
Let me begin at the very beginning which, as the old song
suggests, is a very good place to begin by taking you back to events in April
and May 1986. I was teaching at a school in Ajmer which had a tradition of
senior boys and teachers spending a part of summer doing some form of adventure
activity (this was before such activities were subcontracted out to specialized
private agencies, as is the case now). I joined a group of class IXs and two
other teachers on a trek to Milam Glacier – the teachers were among my ‘gurus’;
Mr. Ramesh Shah, an ex-Ranji cricketer with a reputation for strictness, much
loved especially by the alumni who had begun to see the value of his approach
to life, and the younger and cooler English teacher Mr. Gene Lee. The trip
began with an overnight journey from Delhi to Almora on a bus during which the
conductor, an MA in English, tried to convince Mr. Lee that he would be better
off as a UP Roadways conductor than as a teacher. The group reached Almora and
caught another bus onward to Munsiyari, the taluka
town that was the road head for the trek.
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| The Boys, Mr. Shah (in forefront) and Self (right, shirtless) back in 1986 |
I still remember that bus journey – all the way down to
Thal, and then up and across the Ratapani Pass that brought with it a stunning
first view of the Panchul, five snow-capped
20,000-foot plus mountains that overlooked Munsiyari town. The next thing that
happened was not so pleasant; the sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) in Munsiyari
who was to sign our inner-line permits refused to do so, citing snow and ice
(it was still early in the year) and the general unsuitability of the trekking
route for children, and we turned around, caught a bus the next day to
Bageshwar, and trekked to Pindari Glacier instead. And I swore that I would,
one day, return to Munsiyari and do this trek!
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| Self, Gene Lee and Chandraveer Rathore near Pindari Glacier in 1986 |
In the 32 years that have passed, I have returned to
Munsiyari many times and done many treks, but Milam Glacier has remained on my
bucket list. And so, when my trek group’s main enthusiast suggested this one
for October/November 2018, I jumped at it.
Milam is not on most trekkers’ must-do list and, now that I
am back in the safe confines of my home in Mumbai, I see why. One, it is eight
days from road head to road head – a long trek with seven consecutive nights in
tents. Two, it is a two-day journey from railhead (Kathgodam) to road head,
meaning that if one is from Mumbai one starts the trek only on day 4 of one’s
travels and returns on day 13 – a long time to be away. Three, it is not a
pretty trek – as mentioned, it is sublime rather than beautiful. The walking itself
is from morning to evening with no pleasant resting spots along the way, and the
route is tough with lots of ups and downs (the pleasanter route with sections
along the river got washed away in the 2013 flash floods). In fact, the only
section that felt like a trek and not a forced march was the 13 km from Milam
village to the glacier and back. And four, it is seriously cold, especially
when one is over 3,000 meters in altitude (which is almost half the trek), more
so in end-October when we were there (we were the last group in). Many was the
time we questioned what the hell we were doing.
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| The man himself! |
And yet, in retrospect, none of us would have changed the
plans. Four of us did it; a retired infantry Colonel who joked that he was a
laughing stock among his peers for paying money to do in his old age what he
had spent his life being paid to do, walking up and down mountains (he had even
commanded a battalion at Siachen), another ex-Army (but not infantry) guy who
was on his first trek, and my wife and I who in our mid-50s were the youngest
in the group. We became close friends in the process, swearing that we would
never do something like this again (all the while knowing that we would, just
as we had done for the past three years), that the next one would be with us
based in a place with a hotel, beds, a toilet and running hot water, with daily
walks to pleasant locations and picnic lunches accompanying us, something we
could bring our wives to.
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| Mrs. and Mr. Chaudhuri on 30th October 2018 |
We were joined until Milam by a group of Bengalis from the Mountaineering
Club of Krishnanagore, untypical in that they were tall, tough, quiet and well
behaved, who stayed on to also trek to the eastern base camp of the Nanda Devi.
We made particular friends with the tallest, toughest and quietest among them,
a primary school teacher called Viking-da (not ‘Biking’, not ‘Hiking’, but ‘Bhiking’,
he said in his Bengali accent, after the spacecraft that was in the news when
he was born). We were as comfortable as we could possibly be under the
circumstances, with a guide (a ‘birder’, and also the owner of the trekking
company we had hired), a cook, two assistants, four mules and two mule-wallahs
to do our bidding. And the weather held out while we were there – we heard that
the snowfall began while on our way down. Yes, we were glad we did it!
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| Col. Mamgain, Mrs. C and Mr. C on a short break during the trek |
And my mind goes back to 1986, to Mr. Shah (now 80 and retired
in Ahmedabad), Mr. Lee (moved to the Gulf) and the boys (now in their late 40s
and probably dealing with their respective male menopauses), and to what my
life would have been like had I stayed on in Ajmer. I also can’t help wondering
whether the SDM of Munsiyari who had refused permission for us to proceed to
Milam was right to do so, and whether we were unjust in our assessment of him
as a typical babu showing power over
hapless subjects.
