I grew to like the variety of people passing through Dharamshala, the artificial bustle they created in the town’s winding, narrow alleys. The town received a disproportionate number of visitors. Some were Indians, young affluent men in packed Marutis, the ‘yuppies’ Uma Devi disliked, and honeymooners who posed for pictures, gingerly perched on horseback, in heavy ethnic costumes and jewellery. But most of the visitors were Tibetophiles from the West. There were ageing hippies with pony-tails and beer bellies; European and American dowagers in crimson robes and necklaces with big brown beads; German tourists clutching paperback copies of Siddhartha. One dusky evening the Tibetan man at the shop from where I bought my provisions pointed out to me a famous Hollywood actor and his equally famous wife, a fashion model. In more conspicuous numbers, however, were the tourists without spiritual ambitions, the American teenagers and bronzed Israeli young men on leave from compulsory military service, who, late in the evening, crowded into dingy video shacks run by foppish Tibetan youth wearing fluorescent anoraks and earrings.
The liveliness of the bazaar was a welcome contrast to the peace and seclusion of my house, which I appreciated afresh every time I pushed the creaky wicket gate and went in after an unusually long and exhausting day at school. The natural serenity of the surroundings — the lawn in front, the shaded paths through the forest, the oaks and pines, beyond which slumbered the Kangra valley — brought me closer to the inner composure I so keenly sought in those early days. I’d never had a place I could call my own home, and as time went on I came to feel something close to a home-maker’s possessiveness and love for this house, which had given me, I felt, a new chance.
*
At the end of three months, my time at the school came to an end. But I wanted to stay on, and as I expected, the school was only too happy to grant me an extension. I wrote to my father, explaining my decision. He wrote back a short note saying I could do whatever I felt comfortable with at the present moment. He encouraged me to keep the ‘bigger picture’ in sight. He once again talked of Samskara.
The monsoons turned into autumn. More visitors from the plains arrived. Dead leaves carpeted the path to my house. Then one night, fresh snow fell on the Dhauladhar ranges; the wind turned chilly; charcoal braziers and men with fur caps appeared in the alleys and the number of visitors abruptly thinned.
Winter came, and one night, as I slept, it snowed in Dharamshala. The light through the curtains when I woke up the next morning was dazzling; I parted them to find the world startlingly white. Icy breezes blew across the lawn, and on the veranda, under the dripping corrugated-iron roof, a stray cat lay curled up on my cane rocking chair.
The school closed for two months, but I stayed in Dharamshala and walked every morning through alleys slushy with melting snow to give special tuition to a Tibetan child. In the evening, the yearning melodies of Sibelius’s symphonies flowed through the bare rooms while clean rectangles of pale yellow light from the windows stretched across the snow-carpeted lawn outside.
Spring came, the school reopened and I fell back into the old routine.
When school closed again for the summer, I locked up the house and took a bus to the Lahaul valley, where I spent the next two months, trekking through vast landscapes of bleached snow-splattered rock, milky blue lakes and clear shallow streams.
The sun was hot, with scarcely a cloud in the sky. My skin quickly turned very dark; my lips were chapped; tiny spots danced before my unshaded eyes and I had to refresh myself after every hour from the cool streams where trout flicked over smooth pebbles. At the end of each day of walking, I would make for the nearest village, visible by the coils of smoke loitering above it, and find food and shelter for the night at the house of a potato farmer.
In the morning I would start again, with no trace of exhaustion at all. I felt renewed, and reaching a small summit after a day of clambering up steep rocky slopes, I would be suffused by a sense of well-being I had never known before. This was to me the new and exhilarating discovery of that time, during those long walks through the endless valley: the discovery that health lay not only with the whole mind, but with the robust body.
When school started again that monsoon, I put in an application for a long-term extension. I wrote to my father, saying that I wished to continue indefinitely at the school. There was no reply from him for some weeks, and then when the letter came, it was full of reproaches. He said that being a teacher in a primary school in a small town was justified only if you saw it as a step towards something much bigger. He said he had wanted to see me in a more prestigious academic position. He once again spoke of a sense of obligation to ancestors; he spoke of Samskara. His exasperation came through clearly in his concluding remarks: ‘It is your life,’ he said, ‘and you know best.’
I didn’t reply immediately, and when I did, I talked of other things. I wrote about the mythological significance of a nearby temple. I spoke insincerely about my wish to visit Pondicherry at the earliest.
In the meantime, my application was accepted by Mrs Sharma, back from one of her foreign tours. She also gave me an unexpected bonus. She had arranged Gita’s marriage to a Delhi-based businessman, and she now, in her brisk fidgety manner, promoted me to deputy principal. I was to remain a teacher but to have additional administrative duties.
The result was that my days at the school lengthened. The number of Tibetan parents waiting outside the school gate increased. I was greeted in the town’s alleys with new respect, and gifts of sweetboxes in shiny yellow cellophane wrappings appeared outside my door on Diwali morning.
That summer I went to the Spiti valley. I walked through flat grey plains of snow and rock, and into verdant valleys. I stayed in an ochre-coloured monastery to which a shopkeeper in the bazaar had recommended me. It was perched high on a treeless hill, and from my bare room I watched silver-grey twilights in the snow-muffled valley, oaks with scrawny limbs silhouetted silently against the white ground, the first lights cautiously appearing in the distant haze, the still air quivering with the sound of tinkling bells.
The following summer I travelled to Kinnaur, and every summer for the next seven years I went walking in some part or other of the Himalayas.
I made no other travels. The thought of the big world beyond the mountains filled me with apprehension. My father often wrote to renew his invitation to Pondicherry, and I had to find a fresh excuse each time.
2
WHEN YOU ARE in your twenties, seven years can seem like a long time — especially if you live a secluded life, if you know neither ambition nor love nor any of the other preoccupations of that age.
However, my time in Dharamshala passed swiftly, divided between unchanging routine and solitude; there were hardly any periods of restlessness or torpor. I did my work — reciting the alphabet and maintaining petty cash accounts — without feeling greatly committed to the school or the children. I read many books out of an old reflex. I listened to music for long hours. I went for walks. The years passed.
When, in later years, I watched the people in the bazaar — the honeymooning couples, the high-spirited young people, the sober spiritually minded Europeans — I watched them with a sense of strangeness and dread. The gratifications and torments of their personal lives, their desires, fears and insecurities, their interconnected roles in the large world they came from — I didn’t wish to know more about them than what I saw.