Once he’d broken the nasty habit of splurging on Marriotts in Amritsar, he’d husbanded his money carefully. But now that a clear end to his journey was in sight he spent some on warm clothing and a few other items that might come in handy at the Roof of the World.
The time of his departure could hardly be kept secret from the community of the gurdwara, since he had accepted the offer of a ride to Shimla from Jasmit, a truck driver who happened to be headed that way, and Jasmit was nothing if not talkative. They were supposed to get underway at six o’clock in the morning. Inevitable delays and friction pushed that back to eight. The point of departure was an alleyway that ran behind the gurdwara and served, among other uses, as an informal loading dock for the kitchen. A surprising number of now familiar faces were there to see him off. Laks trudged up the alley bent under a fully loaded backpack and carrying a long bundle of rattan sticks. Or at least that was the case until the weight was lifted from his hand by one who had fallen in step beside him. He looked up in surprise to see Gopinder, his sparring partner, shouldering a duffel bag. He was dressed in what passed for warm clothing in Chandigarh but was probably a one-way ticket to hypothermic shock where Laks was going. “I can carry part of that load, brother,” he said, taking the stick bundle in his free hand.
This should not have been such a total surprise. Gopinder had put himself through a lot of physical discomfort training in that breathing rig and was at least as altitude-adapted as Laks. But it caused Laks to start crying with astonishing suddenness. Blurry then was his view of the Uighur family, awaiting him by the kitchen’s back door. He hadn’t seen them in a couple of weeks. They’d been adopted by a local mosque that had evidently been looking after them well. They looked healthier. Ilham seemed to have grown three inches and put on fifty pounds. He was wearing a Kullu cap—a cylindrical hat of heavy wool, common where Laks was going. Laks assumed it was just a symbolic gesture until Ilham hauled a bag—smaller by far than that of Laks or Gopinder—out of the car that had brought them here and commenced a long series of farewells to his mother, granny, and siblings.
Laks was just pulling himself together when Ravi came striding up the alley. His rolling suitcase, designed for polished airport floors, kept trying to jerk his shoulder out of its socket as its cheap skateboard wheels snagged on breaks in the pavement. He had shoulder-holstered his cricket bat so that its handle projected up behind his head, making him look (as he was no doubt well aware) like a character in a movie. “I have never seen the mountains,” he explained, “except from a great distance. I thought, what could be the harm in accompanying you at least part of the way?”
The truck of Jasmit was relatively small, consisting of a cab over the engine and a flatbed extending out over the rear wheels. Usually this was walled in by a steel frame to make it a sort of well-ventilated restraint system for cargo. Panels and tarps could be instated over that to protect from the elements, but they were entering the spell of clear weather after the monsoon and so none of that was necessary today. On big highways in more densely populated parts of India this would have been one of the smaller vehicles on the road. A large one, though, would have been hard pressed to negotiate the road up to Shimla. For as soon as they got out of Chandigarh’s eastern suburbs, Jasmit was obliged to downshift as the engine began to labor uphill. The formerly straight road became an interminable series of zigzags, with little zigzags superimposed on big ones. They were ascending into the foothills of the Himalayas. They stayed as far to the left as they could to allow impatient cars to veer past them with tooting horns. But before long this ceased to be an issue as the whole road became packed solid with a traffic jam of mysterious origin. Roadside dhabas clung with increasing tenacity to the lips of increasingly high and sheer retaining walls. In traditional usage “dhaba” would mean a teahouse, and if you looked around in sufficiently remote places you could still find ones as rustic as this implied. Most of them, though, had evolved into convenience stores, as visually riotous as might be expected. On an open road the passengers would have been blown to tatters, shouting at each other the whole way, but here the wind of passage, when they were moving at all, was little more than a light mountain breeze.
Ilham hadn’t bothered to explain himself yet, but now he did. “You have no idea what you’re getting into,” he said. “I am not much of a fighter. But if I learned one thing from watching the Chinese, it’s that you need several people to think about logistics for every man who is carrying a weapon.” His eyes strayed to Laks’s leather-covered stick. “So I thought it might help you to have at least one such person in your group—what is the word you use? San-something?”
“Oh, the word you are probably thinking of is sangat,” Laks said. “It usually means a fellowship of sants. Not really the right—”
“Sangat. Yes, that’s the word.”
“It is really more of a religious connotation,” Laks protested. “Sometimes, it’s true, in old war stories they use that word to mean a column of saint-soldiers on the move, but it’s a little inappropriate . . .”
“Like the Fellowship of the Ring,” Ilham said, nodding solemnly. It wasn’t his first foray into weird pop culture references. The hostels and dhabas of the high mountain trekking corridors tended to sport communal TV-watching parlors stocked with a diverse but absurdly random selection of DVDs left behind by previous guests.
“Fair enough,” Laks said. “And by joining my sangat you are like my bhai, my brother, now, and the same goes for you, Gopinder, and you, Ravi.”
Ilham signaled his approval by running his hand up the back of his neck and cocking his Kullu hat forward at a rakish and stylish angle. Then he squinted into the hazy sun rising above the white Himalayas.
The Chihuahuan Desert
This was the most forbidding landscape Saskia had ever seen. The Sahara might be even bigger and more arid, but it looked soft—a world of dunes. This was a world of rocks. Rocks that had never been rounded and smoothed by water. What little rain fell on it seemed to have been sucked up by plants with no purpose other than to produce spines and serrations. She gazed out the train’s window for hours without seeing a trace of surface water. Even before global warming, this landscape would kill anyone who tried to walk out of it.
“Welcome to the Flying S Ranch!” T.R. proclaimed, raising a stein, as the Beer Car crossed the property line. Here the railroad track ran side by side with a gravel road, and both passed between a pair of stone gateposts blazoned with a letter S bracketed between wings. Adjacent to that was a reinforced-concrete guardhouse topped with solar panels and antennas. A man in a brown cowboy hat stood in front of it, armed (disappointingly) not with a pair of six-guns but with a Glock. He unhooked a thumb from his belt and waved at people who were apparently waving at him from other windows on the train. No stranger to modern security measures, Saskia observed that the road had not just a gate, but also retractable bollards sturdy enough to stop any vehicle that might attempt to blast through.