It took me a moment to realize that it was not the world that had
turned upside down because the sky, the clouds, and mountains were all staring
up at me from the ground. It was just water.
The alarm rang and with much
grumbling, we got out of bed. It was 3 AM after all, topped with deathly cold.
It was the month of May and my aunt, uncle, cousin and I were at Lachen in
North Sikkim. In the wee hours of the third day of our vacation, we were to
travel to Gurudongmar Lake which is the second highest lake in India. By 3.30
AM, we were bundled in woolens, yawning and sitting in the car.
When road trips need to be taken
in the wee hours, you would usually hope to sit in the car and catch some sleep
before you arrive at your destination. We were no different. However, we ended
up wobbling like fresh jelly in an unsteady hand, only much more violently, as
the car climbed uphill. It was too dark to see anything outside for the next
two hours, so we could neither sleep nor distract ourselves.
Around 5.30 AM, it was just
beginning to get light and we made our first stop. There was a small space
cleared for parking a car or two towards the side of the road; and there were
three windswept looking tents alongside. Now, I had discovered two things that
were consistent no matter how high up we went and how disconnected from the
mainland the place was – Maggi and Cadbury Dairy Milk. Different varieties of
Maggi – spicy, boiled, buttered, and with vegetables; and different prices of
Cadbury which increased as we went higher up in altitude owing to the
difficulty in getting them there. And of course, there was tea. We went inside
a tent and sure enough, there was tea and watery vegetable Maggi waiting for
us. We ate, thanked them and were on our way again.
It was light now and as we drove
up, we could see how the topography had changed. The vegetation was sparse,
with a few rugged shrubs with thick and knobbly branches here and there which
slowly reduced to none in the three hours that we drove after that. It was as
though we were in an extremely rocky, bumpy and infinite desert with no color
in sight but shades of brown in the ground blending into the blue and white of
the sky at the horizon.
Finally, after a back breaking
five hour journey uphill, the car stopped. At 17,100 feet above sea level, our
driver told us to walk slowly due to the lack of oxygen here. In a peculiar
gesture, he handed us a packet of popcorn each. Looking at our befuddled
expressions at receiving popcorns at 17,000 feet, he explained that we should
keep chewing on them to prevent our ears from popping. We had half an hour to
explore the place after which it is unadvisable to stay there for people not
used to the altitude.
We learnt that the Gurudongmar
Lake never freezes completely. Legend has it that Guru Nanak visited this place
during his third udasi (journey) and
was approached by the locals who told him that they had difficulty in accessing
the water from the lake since it was frozen for most part of the year. The Guru
is said to have touched one part of the lake after which the lake has never
been completely frozen. The lake and the place have since become a place of
much reverence for the Sikhs.
To be honest, at that point I was
thinking that we had made this five hour journey to a place where we could not
even stay for more than twenty minutes, in all practicality. However, I tried
putting that thought out of my head as we made our way ahead.
What lay before us was a
landscape completely barren, save for a small temple called ‘Sarv Dharm Sthal’
(the place for all religions) with triangular flags in all colors tied along
its walls. It was the only splash of colour to the otherwise brown
monochromatic scenery. From inside, it seemed more like a Gurudwara, with the
Guru Granth Sahib (The Sikh holy book) shrined and a box kept for offerings.
We walked ahead of Sarv Dharm
Sthal. There was something about the emptiness in the place, something about
the lack of the greenery and civilization we are so accustomed to seeing. It
was strange that in my mind when someone mentioned the phrase “beautiful
landscape,” I thought of one of those open fields in Switzerland right out of a
Yash Chopra film; either that or a moonlit seaside. And yet, here I was, taking
in this emptiness, this haunting quiet, this lack of colour, lined by mountains
with sparse snow capping their peaks and thinking to myself that I had never
seen something more hauntingly beautiful.
A little way ahead, the landscape
dipped downward to form a large crater. My eyes followed the slope as ground
melted into a window from which the sky and the mountains stared back at me –
clear, still and silent as they could be. It took me a moment to digest this. The
lake reflected its surroundings like it was made mirror, not water. Though it
was still as ice, the water seemed to make everything reflected shimmer and
breathe.
Winds pick up at Gurudongmar
after 10 AM and are considered detrimental for people who are not used to the
extreme conditions. With our half an hour up, we bade goodbye to the armymen
and made our way back to the car at 9 AM.
As I sat back in the car and the
engine revved up to make the rattling journey back downhill, I looked outside
the window to this desolate, remote landscape. I remember thinking to myself,
“These twenty minutes were worth it.”
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