"Before beginning to study the sacred texts and constantly singing the sutras, the student should learn to read the love letters sent by the snow, the wind and the rain."
-IKKYU, Zen Master
Quote borrowed from 'The Book of Ichigo Ichie'
Dear Readers,
For the first 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.
Arti.
The morning sun sparkled across the slices of blue sky wedged between tall deodars and broad cedars as Alex, Apu and I explored the village and its outskirts with Pradhanji, the village chief, along with a couple of other villagers one day in mid-May in 2019.
Every leaf, petal, fruit and tree that grew on the path was explored by us (the visitors) and explained by the villagers. If a shrub or tree wasn't used for food, it had medicinal or cosmetic uses. This was Alex's first time in Maunda. Apu and I had been to the village the previous year. After a couple of hours, Pradhanji invited us to his house for tea.
After the downstairs had been looked at and commented upon, Pradhanji climbed the stairs ahead of us and issued a request for tea for everyone in the general direction of the kitchen while beckoning the three of us to follow him upstairs to sit in his sitting room-with-a-view.
It’s
a small L shaped room on the first floor with huge Garhwali style windows
peering over the valley below. A few plastic chairs and wooden benches are
placed perfectly to enjoy the verdant views.
Apu
chose to snuggle up on a chair by the window. Alex sat by the door we had
entered the room through and I sat opposite Alex, a foot or so away from Apu,
facing the door, the back of my chair resting against the wall with a tiny
hole. The hole in the wall was approximately an
inch and a half in diameter with a broken and blackened circumference.
As
soon as I settled into my chair, a bee, a honey bee, buzzed past me, hovered
over Apu for a little while before deciding to fly out of the room.
Alex’s
eyes watched the bee and widened with surprise.
Before
the first bee reached the edge of the window sill, another bee appeared before
me, buzzed, took a few curious circles around my hand holding my cup of tea and
then followed the first bee’s route out of the window, flying past Apu.
Alex’s eyes were screaming silently by now. His fingers tightened their hold on his teacup.
Apu
looked up at me. I smiled.
The
trickle of bees had swollen into a steady stream by now. They were busy flying
in single file out of the opening in the wall behind me and making a bee-line
for the window.
Alex
couldn’t hold it in any longer, “Bees! Honey bees!” he stated the obvious with
barely hidden disbelief.
“They’re harmless.” Apu mentioned and went back to her day dreaming. She continued to gaze out of the window.
I
was enjoying the look on Alex’s face, so I smiled to show him that all was well:
he could chill. We had the same look on our faces last year when we'd seen the bees in this room for the first time. I'm not sure our assurances convinced him. Being a gentle soul, he continued to sip
his tea but his eyes kept following each bee’s flight keenly.
“Arre
Alex Ji, these bees have lived here for as long as I’ve lived here.” said
Pradhanji. “My father discovered this hive when we first started making a few
changes to this part of the house--almost fifty years ago. He decided to let the
hive be. We’ve all grown used to each other. We don’t bother them and they
don’t trouble us.”
Just
then, Pradhanji’s little grandson crawled into the room from the door next to
Alex. Three bees were buzzing over his head like a noisy halo.
Alex
smiled. I could see his eyes were taking in the miracle of symbiosis.
The
little one gurgled and crawled eagerly to his grandfather who picked him up,
kissed him and set him down again to continue with his crawling.
“What
about the honey? Don’t you harvest it?” Alex asked.
“What
they make is for them. That’s their food. We get our honey from the hives we farm.”
stated Pradhanji.
For
the rest of the afternoon, we sat in Pradhanji’s L-shaped sitting room looking
out of the sky blue windows that framed mighty deodars and oaks standing tall
and proud--all the way into the horizon--as far as the eye could see.
The
little one crawled through the chairs’ legs, our legs, while bees buzzed around
him like wound up toys.
Shangri-La
is alive and well in a village in Uttarakhand where men let bees live in hives
built inside houses because their ancient instincts show them how intricately bees and humans are bound together. That day, I was left wondering if they really need roads to open up
their minds or modern technology to teach them how to live and
let live.
But, who am I? I'm a traveller who appears once a year at their doorstep. It's the youth and the elders of this village who'll have to decide how to balance the modern with the ancient; how to learn to keep up with the times without unlearning the songs of the wind, the snow, the bees and the mountains.
(Pradhanji's house in Maunda)
 |
| The village of Maunda, Uttarakhand |
*****
