All's not well in the bat-cave

If we as a people so revere nature, why do we go to so much trouble to disfigure it?

The view from Kavala Caves, Dandeli

Is there a legit word ending in “phobia” for the fear of being ripped off? Whatever it is, it was on our minds when we set out early in the morning from Dandeli's Kulgi Nature Camp for a safari. Safaris are always dubious deals – at the outset you are force-fed the disclaimer that every sighting banks on “good luck”, which is thereafter effectively neutralised by the grunting and gnashing diesel vehicle that ferries you around the forest.

Our destination that morning was Kavala Caves, 25 km inside the forest and accessible only by a 2 km walk from a waterhole where the jeep track ends. Part of that walk also descends into a valley from where you can see and hear the roaring rapids of the dark and beautiful Kali river.

The Kali is a gorgeous, gushing torrent of darkness

Birders can be exasperatingly enthusiastic morning persons and our poor “guide” hadn't bargained for that when he fixed our itinerary the night before. Well before the appointed hour we roused his recumbent self with hollers and heavy knocking. To the end that he very evidently forgot to brush, and every time he turned to us to proffer guidance we shrank back, nearly asphyxiated.

When we left, the camp was still in darkness and pale veins of dawn light were draining the ink from the sky. In the murky forest we passed the odd shadowy elephant and several feral buffaloes that played tricks with our eager eyes. As the day brightened we saw spotted deer, jungle fowl, peacocks and a solitary barking deer.  


Our walk to the caves took longer than usual, much to our impatient (and perhaps hungry) guide's chagrin. En route, we stopped to chase butterflies, admire a displaying Black-naped Monarch and an Elliot's Forest Lizard. Our first sighting of Malabar Pied Hornbills occurred on this walk. There were enough sunbirds, ioras and swifts en route to delay us further. Then we argued over a Shaheen Falcon's identity, some of us contending that it might have been a Black Baza. Morning light and its myriad tricks! 

In the mouth of the cave, which has effectively been transformed into a shrine

Winding steps led us down to the cave. As we approached it, a familiar haunting reek of disused attics assailed us -- the rank odour of bat droppings. These were limestone caves and the interiors should have been white or, at least, whitish in appearance. But then again, caves with stalagmites and stalactites have long awakened religiosity in kindred souls and, true enough, the stalagmites here are worshipped as Shivalingams. 

Stalactites darkened with soot

The interiors of a limestone cave are usually white or whitish, unlike these darkened by oil and smoke from offerings

On Mahashivaratri, which falls every year in February or March, thousands of pilgrims are allowed into the national park. And they bring along votive offerings in incense sticks, oil for lamps, cotton wicks, coconuts, bananas, flowers, earthen lamps, milk in sachets and packed refreshments to nourish them on their pilgrimage. And how did I know all of this? Just by looking around. 

The inside of the shrine houses a stalactite that is worshipped as a Shivalingam, and our guide quickly got down to business and was perhaps slighted when we did not join in

Our guide was also possessed of sudden devotion inside the cave and he lit the incense sticks that he had brought along. Later, when I brought up the matter with him, he seemed offended that I should place the welfare of sundry forest creatures over the appeasement of the Almighty. If only our forest staff could be trained to differentiate among simple priorities.

We traversed parts of the cave on bended knee, and sometimes all fours

The task of cleaning up after religious rituals is left to the Lord who, having other things on His agenda, never gets round to it. Over the years, garbage has accumulated in and around the caves. Carrying it all back to Dandeli is an idea that has never occurred to those responsible for the park's maintenance, and the caves' distance from the nearest camp doesn't help its cause.

Pligrims have dumped leftover grain under a tree outside the caves

Once inside the caves, parts of which we traversed crawling on all fours, we were aghast to observe that the interiors were blackened with soot. The smooth limestone structures were discoloured from so many years of touching. It was also hot and humid and we started to feel slightly claustrophobic.

Pilgrims have left behind litter of every description

As we emerged from another part of the cave towards the light, we disturbed several roosting bats, which flitted in and out uttering tiny shrieks -- perhaps the only human-audible sounds in their ultrasonic repertoire. None of us were bat experts, and we couldn't determine the species. The bat had large ears, a longish, slightly upturned snout and a dark brown stripe on the sides of the throat. I managed a decent photograph, which might help us identify it.

Bats inside the cave

We returned from the caves struck by their beauty but appalled at how they had been ritually defiled. This experience was in stark contrast to one I enjoyed at Mercer Cavern, a limestone cave in California, which I had visited in 2001. While those caves had no bats, they were nearly pristine, illuminated thoughtfully in white and beige and pink, with only one calcite structure reserved for visitors to touch and feel. Unfortunately, even if we get round to addressing our problems, we will always have too much of religion to deal with.


Text and photos by Beej
Read other posts from Dandeli

From Madurai to Mount Kailas, a pilgrim's puzzling progress

A chance find in a Pondicherry flea market points to an unknown Tamil Nadu pilgrim party's mysterious journey to the base of Mount Kailas in 1948, only two years after Heinrich Harrer arrived in Lhasa

Last Sunday, as I am prone to do on weekends, I paid a visit to the flea shops on the East Coast Road in Pondicherry. These shops, which usually offer a motley collection of old stuff – terracotta figurines, calendars and posters, furniture, French porcelain, old black-and-white photographs, books and the usual bric-à-brac, sometimes throw up a surprise.

Rummaging through an old tin trunk full of dusty faded black-and-white photos I came across an old, slightly faded picture with a mountain in the background. That was surprising enough – 90 percent of the pictures are usually studio portraits of respectable South Indian families, newlyweds, demure housewives and pious Brahmins – but what hooked me was the familiar outline of the peak. From its aspect, it could have been only one mountain -- a huge mass of rock and snow, magnificent in its setting, awe-inspiring and bequeathed with majestic grandeur. It was Mount Kailas (6714 m).

My heart pounded as I dusted the picture and read the text printed on the mount: “Photo taken on 10-7-48 during the pilgrim visit by Sri K. L. N. Janakiram to Holy Mount Kailas.” Four men stood in front of the mountain, three looking away from the camera with the canvas tent visible behind the fourth person. The four pilgrims appear in good shape, proud but with no visible swagger at this achievement, which even in these times when Toyota Land Cruisers race down to within shouting distance of the holy mountain, is a matter of undue vanity and arrogance for quite a few.

To put this in context, the region was still being explored in the late 1930s. A paper written in 1942 by the eminent geologist Darashaw Nosherwan Wadia (after whom the Institute of Himalayan Geology was renamed in 1976), mentions explorations carried on between 1928 and '38 in the Kailas-Manasarovar region as having "raised some doubts regarding Sven Hedin’s conclusions [the Swedish geographer, explorer and writer was the first European to enter the Kailash-Manasarovar region]. Though not a professional geographer, the Swami [Swami Pranavananda, whose book Exploration in Tibet attempted to surmise the sources of the Himalayan rivers] has made a record of most interesting, accurate and painstaking observations of natural features and phenomena which provide valid data on the intricate question of fixing the sources of these rivers”. 

The rivers spoken of are the Indus, Sutlej, Ganges and Brahmaputra. Heinrich Harrer’s fabled escape to Tibet via the Tsang Chok-la Pass (5,896 m) near Badrinath was made only in 1944 (he reached Lhasa on January 15, 1946).

Partly due to its remoteness, but mainly since Tibet was closed to foreigners through much of its history, the chronology of first explorations of this mysterious Himalayan kingdom is as intriguing as the land itself.

While trade between India and Tibet, conducted during the summer months once the high passes were free of snow, has a long history, the first Europeans on record to visit Tibet were probably the Jesuit monks António de Andrade and Manuel Marques from Portugal who arrived in Tibet via the Mana Pass near Badrinath. This was in 1624 during the reign of the Mughal Emperor Jehangir. They set up a short-lived mission in Tibet and their travel accounts were quite popular in Europe where they were translated into all major regional languages.

Between 1893 and 1908, Hedin led three expeditions into Central Asia and Tibet. During his second expedition (1899-1902) he was unable to reach Lhasa, being turned back by the Tibetan army, he exited via Ladakh continuing to to Calcutta via Delhi, Agra and Benaras. During his third expedition (1905-1908), he became the first European to reach and explore the sacred Kailas and Manasarovar region of Tibet. He was also credited with locating the sources of the two greatest rivers of Asia – the Indus and the Brahmaputra (a discovery that was later questioned – he may have found one of the sources).

The British, who were not allowed entry into Tibet, worried that other European powers would beat them to it (the Russians were persevering hard to enter Tibet). They trained and sent several Indians from Johar Valley in Uttarakhand to carry out surveys in Tibet. Between 1865 and 1882, Nain Singh, Mani Singh, Kishen Singh and later Kinthup (from Sikkim), disguised as Ladakhi merchants, undertook several undercover survey missions to Tibet, explored the land (they were trained to cover a fixed 33-inch pace and click a bead after every 100 paces), measured the altitude (by measuring the boiling temperature of water, mercury was hidden in a cowrie shell and the walking stick a makeshift thermometer) and coordinates of Lhasa , surveyed the Manasarovar region, and successfully determined the course of the Sutlej river and the upper course of the Tsangpo.

One gets an idea of how little was known about Tibet despite all these attempts by the fact that until 1912 it was not known if Tsangpo in Tibet was the same river as the Brahmaputra in India. In 1878, Kinthup was specifically sent to Tibet for this reason but despite his valiant efforts this mission met with a tragic end. He was to float 50 specially marked logs a day for 10 days down the Tsangpo. Surveyors were to lie in wait for these logs on the Indian side in Arunachal Pradesh. However, first he was duped and sold as a slave by his fellow-traveller. Then, 18 months later, when he managed to flee his captors on the pretext of a pilgrimage, his letter to his handlers never reached India. He floated the logs and when he finally returned, his hunch that the Tsangpo was indeed the Brahmaputra (he correctly described the river as it rounded the huge peak of Namche Barwa, 7745 m, entering a deep gorge within a short distance of the Indian hills) was met with scepticism. The gorge described by Kinthup is now known as the Yarlung Zangbo Grand Canyon – the world’s deepest canyon where the Brahmaputra cuts through the Eastern Himalayas to enter India.

The north face of Mount Kailas, also spelled Kailash (Photo: Ondřej Žváček/ Wikimedia Commons)

I could learn very little about the routes taken to Kailas during the days of British rule. Several options existed via the Mana pass (5608 m, near Badrinath), Lipulekh (5334 m, the current route), via Leh over the Changtang plateau, from Sikkim via Nathu La (4010 m) and via Bhutan, or from Nepal. I can only guess the route that this party from Tamil Nadu could have taken. But regardless of that, they would have faced lawless bandits, inclement weather and the perils of uncharted routes. It’s a testimony to both their endurance and faith that this journey to the abode of Shiva was a success.

While I feel sorry that the photograph of these four pioneer pilgrims ended up in a flea shop, as someone who is completely taken in by the mystique of the Himalayas, it is a perfect gift. The photograph has finally come home.

Text by Sahastrarashmi 

Main Photo: Unknown

References: Trekking in the Indian Himalaya (Lonely Planet). For pictures of turn-of-the-century Tibet, visit The Tibet Museum

Madhyamaheshwar - In the temple of the Drunken Lord

Life is so quiet and still in Madhyamaheshwar that it's easy to imagine why local people believe that the deity is drunk

A wayside shrine en route to Madhyamaheshwar

A moss-encrusted tree on the trail

“I found myself moved by the simplicity of this shrine. It was a place where nothing stood between me and the spiritual elements of nature… Nothing was hidden from view -- no lamps, no smoke and mirrors, no priests performing a sleight of hand. I noticed the lichen on the rocks, the irregular colors in the stone lingam, the bruised petals on the primulas. Garlands of mist trailed across the meadows.”

Stephen Alter – Sacred Waters


We emerged from the mossy, rain-soaked forest after almost ten hours of walking (the rain had continuously threatened us along the way but we just couldn't hurry, the trail was difficult and the forest dark, damp and bird-rich – all of those factors had successfully conspired to delay us). It took a while to spot the Madhyamaheshwar shine. It was unassuming, at the end of a small settlement consisting of a few chai shops (and inns), a few shepherds' shelters, a dharmashala. The name Madhyamaheshwar means the “middle-lord” a reference to the emergence of Shiva’s navel at the spot but the locals refer to it as Maddamaheshwar, literally the Drunken Lord.


A peaceful calm pervaded the settlement, interrupted by the occasional slow soft murmur of the cold rain. Dusk was well on its way, the light fading gradually with the occasional fog bank cloaking the settlement and giving the false impression of light in the brief white-out. The stream running down from the ridge from Buddha Madhyamaheshwar and flowing along the temple perimeter gave the only indication of motion where everything else seemed to be at a standstill. It wasn’t difficult to imagine why the Middle Lord might be a tad drunk.

The shrine is situated at 10,400 feet (3,289 meters) from sea level on the slope of a ridge 25 kilometers northeast of Guptkashi. The ridge (in this season full of flowers) runs along the west and north of the temple (the trek to Kanchani Tal is along this ridge). To the east is a valley that falls away quite steeply. A steeply ascending trail emerges at the temple from the south through a patch of forest. Pilgrim traffic is barely a trickle (there are no busloads of pilgrims here since the 2-day trail is only for the hardy) and except for locals the only other travelers are an occasional trekking party.

The temple is a simple structure in the middle of a small, squarish courtyard cut from the ridge. It sits in the middle of a depression. A stream descending from the grassy ridges is diverted to enter the temple from the west, running along the inner perimeter and exiting into the valley through the northeastern corner. Along the entire length of the inner perimeter are embedded moss-speckled lingams of various sizes, and near the stream are copper images of Shiva and Shakti. While the work on the copper plates lack the finesse of a master craftsman they represent a more immediate and accessible form, that of Shiva who resides in the ridges, the forest and the mountains. This is not an imported, transplanted deity. 

Copper images of Shiva and Shakti

Stone lingams line the perimeter of the inner path around the temple

The Brahma Kamal (Saussurea obvallata), which is used to adorn the lingams (and offered to the pilgrims as prasad), is collected from the meadows in the vicinity of Kanchani Tal by a barefoot priest – the flowers have large translucent white petals with a hint of green and a papery texture.
The rain ensures that there are not too many birds, but there are still a few. A flock of Pink-browed Rosefinches (Carpodacus rodochroa) feed in the shrubs beyond the temple’s perimeter and a pair of Red-headed Bullfinches (Pyrrhula erythrocephala) court along the blue walls of a nearby house. Oriental Turtle Doves feed in the temple courtyard and a Besra dismembers its prey on the canopy of a nearby oak. We briefly glimpse a Himalayan Monal (Lophophorus impejanus) dart out of dwarf rhododendron bushes from the ridge above and Mistle Thrushes go about their business in the soaked meadows, exceedingly difficult to spot in the mist...

The Chaukhamba range dazzles

A Chestnut-bellied Nuthatch is at home in the mossy bark

A Pink-browed Rosefinch reveals the rationale behind its name

A Chestnut-tailed Minla in the forest

An offering of freshly picked mountain wildflowers

A Kashmir Rock Agama enjoys a brief spell of sunshine

Buddha Madhyamaheshwar - the old temple

A walk on the ridge offers a view of the Madhyamaheshwar Ganga

Chaukhamba - an awe-inspiring massif in any season

One of the less conspicuous denizens of the Himalayas

The great old temple at Madhyamaheshwar

Something to brighten up rain-dampened spirits

At the temple the rituals are slow and lack commercial gloss. As we join the evening arti, our feet numb against the wind-chilled granite slabs, I realize that despite my discomfort I am not impatiently waiting for its end, and the shiver that runs down the spine is actually due to the nearness to Shiva who, here at Madhyamaheshwar, is just once removed from the raw elements that he is.
 
Text by Sahastrarashmi 
Photographs by Sandeep Somasekharan and Sahastrarashmi 
Photo of Buddha Madhyamaheshwar by Rohit Tewari

Upriver, a monsoon love affair with the Ganga

It's easy to see why Lord Shiva fell in love with the Ganga. Mere mortals can be hopelessly smitten


Bhageeratha watched with terror in his eyes as a miffed Ganga hurtled towards Earth from the heavens. His penance to bring Ganga down to earth to cleanse his ancestors' souls had succeeded; but in the process, did he bring forth the doom of all mankind? For Ganga, it was too much of an insult to be asked to descend from her abode among the gods and flow on earth among the mortals. She would show them her wrath; her immense force would flood the entire earth in the blink of a mortal eye.... But she was bridled, by none other than Mahadev Shiva, who stood in her path and let his matted locks intercept her flow. She entered his locks, and emerged in a placid and smooth flow, tamed. And her soothing touch on his temples even changed Mahadev's life. He fell in love... 


My much-awaited tryst with Ganga started at Haridwar, the gateway to the Himalayas, on our trip to Madmaheshwar. All along our flight from Chennai to Delhi, the skies were choppy, and it was no different in the Himalayas. Under a sky threatening to brim over, I saw her first, flowing with effortless ease, murky and swift under a bridge on the Haridwar-Rishikesh highway. Like a blue-blooded maiden, carrying herself with a dignity that evoked sighs of admiration, but from a respectful distance. The volume of water that flows along the river supports a big percentage of the world’s second largest population, and just a glance was enough to see how… We drove upriver for many kilometers. Past Rishikesh the Shivaliks rose up from the plains. The roads were built as ledges along the mountains, in whose gorges the Ganga flowed, keeping us company all the way. Signs screaming to beware of landslide/rockfall were everywhere along the road. But so captivated were my eyes that the fact that landslides could hold us up, delay us, or even doom our trip didn’t register in my brain. The mists seemed to rise upwards like an inverted curtain from the surface of the river. The skies were overcast and saturated, and a downpour seemed imminent. It seemed as if Mahadev had spread his locks a tad to allow more water to gush towards the Earth, perhaps to cleanse many more souls! The higher we went the river became more turbulent. At Devprayag, the Ganga splits into Bhagirathi and Alaknanda -- rather, the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi merge at Devprayag. From here, we followed the Alaknanda. Landslides littered our way, which was being cleared by bulldozers as we watched. The mud that the mountains shook up was pushed over the ledge, into the hungry river, which looked as if it could swallow entire roads, if not the mountains themselves. A few hours of driving upriver took us to Rudraprayag, where the Mandakini meets the Alaknanda. The waters were still turbid, but looked much more menacing. In the planes the flow was smoother but here the rivers dashed against rocks, around curves, churning and frothing. Here she resembled a young woman, hasty and headstrong, hissing and winding like an angry snake. Part of her vehement aspect, before she entered Mahadev's locks, seemed to have resurfaced.We followed Mandakini, which originates near Kedarnath, towards the Kedarnath/Ukhimath route. However next morning we parted company and met one of it’s most beautiful tributaries – the Madhyamaheshwar Ganga, which originates in the galciers of the massive Chakhamba. Past Ukhimath, Uniana and Ransi villages our drive ended, and we moved upriver of Madhyamaheshwar Ganga, a lovely jade green river, on foot, climbing the steep hills towards Madmaheshwar. Alaknanda never left our side, always flowing with a distinct rushing noise. On days that it didn’t rain, she sounded more like a girlfriend who doesn’t stop chattering, and on the days when it rained cats and dogs, she was a nagging wife. When we would return, the rains would let up in patches, and from the color of the water at the various confluences of streams, we saw where it had rained and where it hadn’t. The water in the streams flowing from areas of higher rainfall (and soil erosion) were a murky brown while others were a rich marble green! And soon we saw where all the water came from. There were numerous waterfalls streaking the landscape, and this in addition to the snowmelt from the extensive glaciers from the Chaukhamba massif. Like a few runaway streams caressing the temples of Mahadev, these streams slid down the ridges of the mountains... We drank from waterfalls far from habitation during our treks to Madmaheshwar and back, crossed rivulets flowing over the road (letting water and an occasional leech into our shoes), and lost count of the waterfalls which joined Madhyamaheshwar ganga. Some gushed, some giggled and some roared as we walked past them. Maybe due to the therapeutic powers of the waters, not once did any of us fall ill or face a bout of indigestion. The sun, when it chose to make an appearance, presented us with amazing spectacles -- causing rainbows in the spray that rose from the rocks, pounded by the the streams that would later join the Madhyamaheshwar ganga and then Mandakini, Alaknanda and finally the Ganga itself. And here, she looked like an innocent girl with rainbows and stars in her eyes. By the end of the trip, I could see why Lord Shiva supposedly made Ganga his wife. It was hard not to fall in love with her.

In the arms of Shiva - a trek to Tungnath

Only the peal of temple bells punctuates the stillness of the mountain air

This travelogue on my trek to Tungnath, the highest Shiva shrine in the world, has appeared as an India Abroad Magazine cover story with the dateline December 4, 2009.

India Abroad, owned by Rediff.com and published chiefly from New York, is the oldest and most widely read community newspaper among Indian-Americans in the United States.

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In the arms of Shiva



Off National Highway 58 at Rudraprayag, about a mile’s drive from the uproarious junction of two mountain rivers in the Garhwal Himalayas, stands an unimposing walled garden planted with crotons and overgrown with invasive weeds. At its center a white concrete plaque unceremoniously marks the spot where an Indian-born hunter of Irish descent shot a leopard in 1926. Beside it, a signboard in the green-and-red flag colors of the Uttarakhand forest department informs us that this was no ordinary animal: the cat had haunted the valley for eight years and claimed 125 human lives.


A man-eating leopard in these unrepentant urban environs? I imagine a shadowy creature, dappled with rosettes, stalking me. It’s pointless: the growl I hear emanates from multi-utility vehicles zipping on the macadam behind me.


In the 1920s, long before the muddy glare of sodium-vapor lighting and the glowering beacons of wireless towers had confounded Mother Nature’s circadian rhythm, the Himalayan night must have offered more grist for the imagination. Under starlight, fancy eloped with fact and spawned many myths around the beast. But this much we know to be true: villagers refused to step out of their homes after sundown for fear of being the leopard’s next quarry. And that was bad news for Rudraprayag, an important halt on the routes to the sacred Hindu temples of Kedarnath and Badrinath.


When the British government in India announced a reward for killing the man-eater, bounty hunters turned in many leopards claiming each one to be the culprit. Meanwhile, the death toll mounted. In desperation the British Parliament turned to Edward James Corbett, a railway contractor and a crack shot who lived in Nainital in the adjoining Kumaon region. Jim Corbett accepted the offer on two conditions: that all rewards for killing the leopard be withdrawn, and that other hunters trailing the cat be ordered to stop. In his gripping memoir The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag, Corbett chronicles his dramatic two-year pursuit of the big cat before he gunned it down at this very spot.


Every year a fair is held to commemorate Corbett’s achievement and some village elders cling to the belief that this specialist hunter of man-eaters and pioneer conservationist (India’s largest national park, the Corbett Tiger Reserve, is named after him) was a holy man sent to rid them of an evil spirit. The younger generation, however, seems to have grown unmindful of this aspect of the town’s history. My friend Sahas had to instruct our driver, a road-raging boor, to slow down lest he missed the memorial.

~~~

A Himalayan Griffon vulture soars above the temple of Tungnath. In his book Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage to the Many Sources of the Ganga, Stephen Alter invokes a legend that deems the vultures as one of the first beings of the primordial world. The vulture's egg represents the world - its upper dome the sky and its lower dome the earth; the watery fluid the oceans and the yolk the land.

Rudraprayag is today the headquarters of an eponymous district in the Tehri-Garhwal region of the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. At 4 pm, it is hot and stuffy in the marketplace and the air is rank with diesel fumes. Flies flirt with my eyelashes and nostrils. At the drugstore where I stop to stock our first-aid kit, the teenage shopkeeper does not lift his eyes up from the playlist he is shuffling on his cell phone. Nearby, overflowing rubbish bins invite dogs and donkeys to rummage for surprises.


My delusion of the Corbettian Himalayan hamlet has evaporated and found a place alongside other disappointments – fetid gutters gurgling beside the highway, deforested landslide-scarred slopes crowned with modern temples the color of unappetizing confectionery, and hummocks of garbage and polythene bags where crows and kites bicker over morsels.


Yet, in other ways, Father Time has not grayed for the last thirty years. Tacked to the pillar of a wayside temple, a Garhwali film poster for Meru Gau [My Village] has artwork redolent of an age bygone when Indian cinema was besotted with nationalism. Vendors hawk vegetables and fruit on wooden carts, shooing away wandering cows that pause to inspect their wares. In a sooty teashop, a hirsute cook in a grimy sleeveless vest rolls parathas while his slick-haired apprentice shapes dough into cones, tucking a dollop of spiced potato into the hollow of each one. Sealing the ends, he drops his finished creations delicately into an enormous wok of sizzling oil that browns them into crisp samosas.


Three ceiling fans spin giddily inside the dormitory of the Rudra Guest House run by the Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam, a government-owned tourism agency that offers reliable budget accommodation. From its courtyard I take in an unbroken view of the gorge about a hundred feet below, where the deep-green Mandakini (which rises near Kedarnath) is consumed by the foamy wake of the silt-laden Alakananda, a major headstream of the Ganga that springs near Badrinath.


Washed by the sacred waters of two streams of faith, Rudraprayag is the fourth of the five sacred prayags, or confluences, of the Gangetic riverine system in the Himalayas. Forty-two miles southwest, at the final confluence in Devprayag, the Alakananda joins the clear waters of the Bhagirathi, the source stream of the Ganga which has flowed 435 miles from Gaumukh at the lip of the Gangotri glacier.


From Rudraprayag, our bus crosses the Mandakini and takes us 25 miles to Ukhimath, a village of terraced rice fields 4,500 feet above sea level. In October, before autumnal snowfall makes the trail to Kedarnath unwalkable, the deity is brought down in a ceremonial palanquin to the Omkareshwar Pith temple at Ukhimath and worshipped here till it is returned to the mountain shrine in mid-May. Another Shiva idol, from the shrine at Madhyamaheshwar, is also housed here in winter. Both Kedarnath and Madhyamaheshwar are among the five sacred Shiva shrines known collectively as the Panch Kedar (the Five Kedars – Kedar being a local name for Shiva). The others are Tungnath, Kalpeshwar and Rudranath.


Legend holds that the Pandavas, protagonists of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, having decimated their cousins the Kauravas in the great war at Kurukshetra, wished to atone for the sin of fratricide. They arrived in the Himalayas to seek Shiva’s blessings but the Lord, disgusted with the horror of war, changed form into a bull to avoid them. His pursuers saw through his disguise and gave chase. In the scuffle, the bull was dismembered. Its body parts reappeared in various regions of the Himalayas – the hump at Kedarnath, the arms at Tungnath, the face at Rudranath, the navel at Madhyamaheshwar and the locks at Kalpeshwar. The head, it is believed, emerged at the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu, Nepal. Pilgrims consider a circuit of these shrines to be auspicious.


Our destination is Tungnath, the third Kedar, and my purpose is religious only in a pagan sense. To walk the wild Himalayas, breathe their bounteous air, encounter their wildlife, their trees and wildflowers, rivers and springs, and to be at the mercy of their elements is pilgrimage enough for us.


The timing of our trip is significant. In late September, the monsoon gathers its weakening winds to drench the Himalayas in a final burst of rain. Last November, I followed the monsoon on its return journey through the southern hills of Tamil Nadu (Chasing the Other Monsoon, India Abroad Magazine, May 1, 2009) and now, I am here to witness the spectacle of its retreat from the Himalayas.