Outside Looking In

I’m a bad traveller - something I only recently realised. Maybe it’s my dislike for change, maybe I’m too lazy to bother with all the minutiae of travel. At any rate, every little aggravation adds up during a journey, robbing me of any motivation to stop and smell the flowers, universally considered one of the greatest pleasures of travel.

The night before, I had become so tired during the hike that Waqas had actually had to come back looking for me after I had lost the path that others had taken. I got to the camp, ego badly bruised, head pounding and burning (and not just from shame). Took some aspirin, rolled out the sleeping bag and went to sleep cursing myself for being such a grouse.

This morning, it is around 6 am. On my first hiking trip, I have been reluctant so far to take a dump. ‘So far’ means almost four days (hmm… would *that* have anything to do with yesterday?) The first thing to do is to get some paper, soap and something to dig with. I don’t remember anymore if I dug the small hole with my hands or some little thing I brought along. Not that it matters: a discreet hole is dug almost out of sight – but not quite, since the total absence of humanity is also spooky, this being the wild north and all, somewhere in the vicinity of 35°N by 75°E – downstream from the camp, by the right bank of the swift, icy, little stream, just where it bends away towards to the east and the direction we came from.

The needful is duly done, said icy water and soap used, incriminating steam rising from said hole hushed up with the earth dug out earlier and then I brush my teeth and wash my face with the minimum water possible. I must have noticed the sun then or soon after, orange with tints of yellow somewhat misted, rising by the shoulder of the range south of us (still remember the sharp pang of regret at having missed, while otherwise occupied, the actual moment of daybreak). But somehow I find the country east of me troubling, no more than memories of the slight panic of the previous evening in all probability. So I turn around to see what else one could see by the rapidly increasing light.

To my left now, the southern range marches down more or less to the horizon, and from my right, starting from Nanga Parbat and traversing at a southerly angle towards the first range, another range of majestic mountains. But lured to this impossibility by unending talk of mountains that mere superlatives could never hope to describe, capture, contain, comprehend, I find myself shocked by the immensity of the plain in front of me. This is ‘country’ in the old sense of the word – the sense that inspires all pioneers and explorers.

At this height, in this perfect stillness, a chilly morning breeze, what on earth is this plain, vast, uninhabited, patchily forested, partly grassy doing encroaching on mountain territory? What calm temerity. Different thoughts rush in: if this could be used productively (yes, it’s true, I’m rather prosaic), followed by of course not, do you know what height you’re at? Remember your headache yesterday? Followed by but surely there are people here, it’s too perfect to have escaped followed by what if what if there aren’t any? Does that make this ‘virgin territory’? and even if it isn’t, I suppose this is what it feels like to find it, suddenly, without ever dreaming it possible. And Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth - I still don’t find that incongruous, maybe that’s just my fascination with maps, or maybe that map is linked so strongly with the excitement of discovering a new world.

It will be five years this May. I still haven’t looked up the exact location on a detailed map. Suits my vanity better.

Full moon, road to Tank

This is earlier, around 1989 I think, or maybe 1988.

The ‘tour’ is D.I. Khan I think or D.G. Khan (yes, I do realise that they are quite distinct, but call it a learning disability). We have to go from D.I. Khan to Tank. Strictly speaking, we don’t have to – the response from the health people there has been ambivalent, but my mother, the Team Leader, is conscientious about her work. She asks about the way – robbers, road conditions, ETA. The drivers and local staff inform her that there have been robberies on the way and the town itself has a ‘dangerous reputation’, but that if we leave now, we should get there before it gets really dangerous – again that word, implying all manner of calamity: kidnapping, armed robbery, worse.

Hence this narrow two-lane highway to Tank, flat plain on both sides, clear silver moonlight, the picture of the moon and its halo still clear. I have no idea where Tank is located, find this whole passage a little unreal (but then 10 pm is normally past bedtime for me), the name as transliterated in English quite silly, and am also aware of the solemnity in the Toyota Hiace van. I don’t know if it was Zaman (my favourite driver) or Ashraf (my second favourite), or someone else altogether, but I think that I still spent some time at my favourite spot – standing on the ‘horse-seat’, the funny humpy bench immediately behind the front cabin, which got uncomfortably hot after 4 or 5 hours of continuous driving (years later I realised that the engine is just underneath). And listened to the driver alternate between static-sprinkled radio and one of the Indian tapes he had already worn out.

The solemnity meant that this was about the only sound in the van full of seven or eight people – the two doctors, Ayesha, one or two nurses, one or two junior nurses/daïs and maybe the lab technician (apart from the driver and I). Solemnity or was it simply the fag end of a long day, when instead of retiring gratefully to the rest-house, we were being dragged along to this mythical alien town on the edge of the familiar? Hence, exhaustion and, in hindsight, not a little anxiety and resentment. No longer did the prospect of seeing armed robbers seem that spectacular, certainly not welcome. There is that something about not having passed more than two vehicles in either direction for more than two hours, the only other moving object being the other team van, its rectangular rear lights always within the penumbra of our headlights. And the occasional cloud flitting by the moon (or is that obviously invented artsy detail?)

At some point, I fall asleep, shake myself out of it, doze again.

We arrive in Tank. Not much of it can be seen around 1 am. Head to the rest-house where the chowkidar and his people figure out what to do with us. The consensus is to sleep there as no one else (including the LHV [Lady Health Visitor, a Ministry of Health employee in charge of health matters in small towns and villages]) would let us in at this disreputable hour. We sleep on charpais with quilts and mattresses. Quite cosy, once I, disdaining city boy, get used to it.

The next morning, everyone has the same problem: is that really the only bathroom available to us? Yes, of course. Right. The nurse who’s just been laughingly warns me to hold my breath in order not to throw up. The amenities turn out to comprise one large hole in the ground, halfway between an Indian toilet and a bathtub, the walls of which are covered in shit – lurid, unabashed piles of it clinging right there plain to see. I did not tarry much.

Later in the day, I must have gone to the toilet at the LHV’s house (turning out to be a consistent theme, this). The LHV is quite surprised to learn of our presence, invites the doctors and staff nurse to breakfast at her place (hence my opportunity!) and praises us for our foolhardiness. And says she doesn’t think the effort was going to be worth it – she didn’t expect too many people to turn up for the operation.

While I knew Ammi and the other doctor would be pursing their lips internally and damning in equal part the planning people at Temple Road, and the inefficiency of our host and her staff, we all took a surprised, even delighted, interest in the LHV’s guided tour of all the family photos she had framed and hung all over the house. I remember being both amazed at the civilisation of it (yes, disdaining and all that) and increasingly irritated at her efforts to rise above the average Tank native in our eyes.

I don’t remember much more of that trip. Which is a pity – I wonder how we came back, whether we stayed another day, did something really interesting happen, did I see something else? No, all I remember is the strangeness of a frontier town, and whatever else corresponded to my presumed superiority (the WC, the LHV and her photos).