J is for Julie of Maunda #AtoZChallenge

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the third week of the #Blogging from A to Z  April Challenge 2021. My theme this year is based on the Japanese concept of Ichigo Ichie which means--"What we are experiencing right now will never happen again. And therefore, we must value each moment like a beautiful treasure."

I've put together a collage of such moments which can be seen as chance occurrences, coincidences, pre-destined or random (depending on who you ask) for this month's challenge.

For the 'J' post of this challenge, I'm sharing a snippet from my travel memoir of Maunda, a remote village in Uttarakhand, northern India. The motorable road that goes to Maunda ends there. It goes no further. 

I hope you'll enjoy reading it.

Thank you.

Arti.

Her hazel eyes were the first thing I noticed about her. Her headscarf or ghaatu was the second. The green in her scarf played off the flecks of green in her eyes.

She offered us water. We, our names.

‘Julie.’ She said. My name is Julie.’

‘How come?’ I wanted to ask but didn’t.

Such an unusual, such an English name for a lady who lives in a remote village in the Himalayas, I thought while admiring her gold nose-pin.

My gaze made her touch her nose pin.

“It’s beautiful.” I said.

Her face broke into a smile and she looked towards me, sideways with her golden green eyes, “I used to be very beautiful once. I’m not even that old but my body couldn’t bear children easily, so I look older than I am.” Julie explained her wrinkles to us before we’d had our first cup of tea with the directness and honesty of the mountains.

Julie’s house is built in a typical Garhwali style. Windows wrap around the entire house like a scarf. With views as beautiful as the ones surrounding these villages, it’s good to see men, women and children often sitting by these windows on window sills or wooden benches that are kept right by the windows, watching clouds, goats, raindrops, villagers and the occasional trekker go by. Instead of their heads bent in reverence to phone screens, the humans of Maunda look up, look high, look left and right and their eyes see far beyond the obvious, their smiles stretch to welcome passers-by and a casual ‘Raam, Raam’ or ‘How’s it going?’ echoes from their lips.

By the time we made our way to the bedrooms on the second floor, the welcome party of men from the village had left and evening had arrived, like it does in the mountains, almost too quickly. One minute the sky is blue with day and the next, even before it has had time to blush and kiss the sun goodbye, it dissolves and turns inky. The moon and the stars are always in a rush to peep out of Himalayan skies.

It was getting cold. 

Apu and I grabbed our extra layers and made our way back to the landing, back where Julie had offered us water.

“Aren’t you cold?” Julie called out from her kitchen door.

“Come in. It’s warm in here. Andar aao…come in.” she insisted as she maneuvered to get inside the kitchen while holding a pressure cooker with both hands. She didn't let us help her.  She’d done this a million times and her assured ways turned us into her audience. We watched while she performed. We were in Julie’s kingdom. We were watching her in her seat of power: her kitchen.

“I don’t like to cook, you know.” She confessed almost as soon as the three of us settled down on the kitchen floor. “I keep telling Guruji (her husband) to get me some help. I’m getting old now. When my daughters come to visit, they don’t let me do a thing in the kitchen.”

A few pangs of guilt mixed with the ones from hunger inside me as I looked across to Julie, sitting next to her stove. The brick red wool of her socks ran in cables across her feet, glowing with warmth in her immaculate kitchen lit up by a white tube light.

Julie wrestled the lid of the pressure cooker open and poured out steaming, boiled potatoes into a paraat and started peeling.

Apu and I offered to help. She let us.

*****

Simple, straightforward, ordinary, every day chores such as preparing food can be turned into treasures if we look at them as once in a lifetime moment. When I decided to share the above extract for today's post, that's what struck me. 

Covid-19's fog has somehow made the concept of Ichigo Ichie clearer to me.

Have you been fascinated by someone's eyes, jewellery, clothes while on holiday or otherwise? 

I'd love to hear, if you'd like to share.

This year, I'm participating in #BlogchatterA2Z  powered by theblogchatter.com