Deodar Trees of Kalatop

Despite being at the heart of the beautiful Kalatop forest, a loud psychological chatter perplexed me. I would get visions of the fast-operating city life and of the people I see everyday in office. There was an unrest within both body and mind which even a fourteen-hour bus ride did not shake off. From day dreaming about the final solutions to life’s serious problems to planning how to make the most out of the next four days inside an isolated forest reserve, I was possessed by an anxiety similar to times my life took its usual course.

The first opportunity I got to write the chaos down upon the plainness and simplicity innate to a piece of paper I could only recreate the essence of the Kalatop forest in fragments out of memory. My eyes wandered about me with fear of having lost the sharpness of my words, my thoughts and therefore above all my actions. I assumed I would spend a few dull days staring at the vast scenic view of the barren snow-capped mountains, only to eventually get bored of the landscape and find nothing interesting in it.

Some singing small birds were seated at the thin needle like branches of the immensely tall and vast Deodar trees of the Kalatop forest, breaking my concentration, as if to be singing songs only of invitation. Long winged big birds cut through the icy winds over the dry mountains of the Chamba valley calling out to me. I wished to answer to their calls from the ruins of the voids of urban life underneath which my lust for life remained buried.

Only after staring back blankly at the black shadows of the distant Deodar trees moving over the naked brown folds of the mountains as the sun changed its places for hours did I realize that Omaid, my dear friend and fellow traveller, had fallen into the dark lap of sleep. I didn’t wish to wake him up. So, I left the pen inside my blank notebook and stepped inside the bathroom of our room at the Smart Hill Hotel. The water was cold. It cleansed my tiredness in an instant. Although I hadn’t checked what the weather was like in Dalhousie, my estimates about the cold were pretty accurate and I had brought with me ample warm clothes. It was the first month of winter in the Chamba District of Himachal Pradesh.

With a set intention I sat in the sun to observe the serene nest of the natural wonders before me. I knew I wanted my burnt-out mind refreshed. The soothing air of the forest was like a balm working its magic on my soul. Brooding on thoughts I sat there staring out of the balcony at the big blue sky expanding over the many layers of rock and earth.

I was stuck in a labyrinth and my intention was to escape. I was fidgeting. I was extremely anxious out of habit. To my rescue, Omaid woke up singing his favourite songs in many different funny voices.

He told me he wanted to explore the trail. Before walking to the mouth of the twelve-kilometre-long trail from Kalatop to Khajjiar Omaid and I had tea and pakoras at the nearby family run stall. The track began behind the souvenir shop at the main gate of the reserve. I was surprised to see that the trail was barely a meter and a half wide. In some spots it wasn’t even thirty centimetres. To the right of the narrow road were unkempt, wild trees and plants full of thorns and to the left was a steep fall of over a hundred, perhaps two hundred meters. A straight fall into the dark pits of the mountains with only the bare backs of the massive Deodar trees to break the fall if one were to slip and fall. The wet black soil of the mountain forest made the possibility of a fall imaginable. That’s how the place gets its name, Kala meaning black and top meaning the top most layer of the earth.

We went approximately two kilometres deep inside the dense forest on the first day. I was utterly consumed thinking what the remainder of the trail had to offer, but, for Omaid the forest was ‘Instagram worthy’ and remained to be an object to be captured inside the lens of a camera and shared online. The difference our views were not alien to any of us. We spoke sitting on a rock the size of a big black bear native to the Kalatop forest and decided that it would be best to go back for now to the safety and warmth of our hotel room. At the time for sunset, we sat on the roof of the food stall and stared once again at the vast blank scenery of the clouds and the mountains. A bluish grey hue had laid its thick blanket over the ranges.    

After dark, I sat down to drink beer before a pen and paper and tried describing the silence which possessed the lives of the people who lived there. Despite all my efforts I could not depict the way these naked mountains extended northwards into a cold dry desert.  To add to my embarrassment, I could only piece together some fragments of thoughts with utterly weak descriptions of the wild elements of the forest. My attempt at capturing the landscape in words didn’t do justice to its vast expanse, it’s bright blue skies and the elegant folds in its naked mountains. My skill seemed inefficient and incorrect.

I slept contemplating a possible run on the motorable pass between the nearest local settlement called Lakkadmandi and the hotel. The sleep was full of nightmares.

When I woke up, Omaid’s singing washed over my anxiety and I felt like I could do with a little relaxing myself, so I spent the morning sunbathing myself and read The Afghan, an English novel by the famous British writer-journalist Fredrick Forthsyth. The twelve-kilometre trail with all its dense darkness and its eerie silence kept flashing in my mind. Around 11:00 that morning I felt the chaos within me collide with the wild of the open field and I started for a walk in the woods alone.

There stood a small stone gate shrouded with dead grass and moss. It looked like it led to a Christian cemetery. Through here I found a steep climb of about a hundred meters, maybe two. After walking for fifteen minutes, I had to take off my jacket and my cap. The was warm. At one point, near a colourful bench beneath a big umbrella, where the soft to sit on, I found intense tranquillity. I had no real intentions of going any further but I was curious. Deodar trees surrounded me. Wishing to explore the wilderness hidden behind the veil I walked into their shade and found a tiny red temple in the dark. On the temple were the many trishools and scarves that pilgrims had left there. Further down a trail caught my eye. Unknowingly I went in that direction. The trail was drawn inside the shadows of the tall trees. Not a ray of sunshine reached the ground on which I walked. Not a bird was awake here to sing their sweet songs of invitations. Not even ravens to give the decadent soul company. Not one human sound. Only darkness and silence.

The walk on the steep slope was almost like an effortless run. I gave a quick look to my wrist watch. It was past noon. I realized I just couldn’t go any deeper into the forest without the help of a native who knew their way around here.

I traced my steps back to the tiny red temple and then back to the hotel room. Omaid was taking his morning tea at the snack stall. We were both ready to start for yet another scenic peak eight kilometres away. The day was ahead of us. The sun was not going to set till about six. We had enough time to go and just sit on the hills till the silent darkness of night chewed them up.

Omaid and I left for the Dainkund Peaks by van. The ride was awful at first, but once the wheels hit the gravel outside the forest reserve the body stopped beating around inside the vehicle and the clean air could make way into the lungs. It was this freshness which pushed onto me the realization that I simply couldn’t go back to my regular life without experiencing the adventure of the entire twelve kilometres from Kalatop to Khajjiar.

I had only ever gone on two trails before this. My first was an overnight trek from Kasol valley to village Rasol and back. The second was from Dharamshala to Triund and back. Both had been pretty easy and took roughly six hours each in total.

I had become extremely determined now. The trails at Dainkund were a good opportunity to acclimatize myself. There is another temple decorated with trishools and scarves at Dainkund. I saw a site next to the temple overflowing with grease and oil suggesting that perhaps it was one ground for ritual sacrifice of man or animal. Tourists visit Dainkund to catch a glimplse of the sacred Kailash parbat. We were lucky that the sky was clear. The picturesque Kailash could be easily identified from a series of mountain ranges. The snow-capped peaks of the bare back mountains stood tall, arms in arms against the clear blue sky. I felt my grand ambitions were being mocked by these immortal beings of nature.   

Omaid has had a history with nausea. The year I met him in college he would get sick often and suffered with awful pains. At Dainkund he told me that wouldn’t be able to walk that much that fast, and I should go ahead without him. I had really wanted to have this opportunity to bond with him once again. It’s been over three years now that college has ended and we don’t see each other that often. He is a huge part of the reason why I think differently about nature now from before. I tried telling him this along with the fact that my view of nature has been heavily influenced by his ability to connect with it even in surrounding city life. But he felt that I was bullying him into walking with me, so I left him a kilometre away from the stalls near the temple and went to the backside of the mountains. That act of mine and to see my figure slowly diminish in size as I disappeared into the path that cut the two hills must have left a deep imprint in his mind. As I paced away from him he found ‘the problem’ disappear and the silence of the landscape take over him.

Dainkund peaks are situated adjacent to an Indian air force base. After walking about two kilometres came a bunker and some houses so alien in their appearance that I wished to turn around immediately. I was feeling a little tired and didn’t wish to tire myself any further. I was then sure that I was ready to walk to whole of twelve kilometres from Kalatop to Khajjiar without Omaid.

Back inside the hotel I spoke to a guide who agreed to go with me. As night fell, I tried once again to write down what the dried grass looked like, what the naked mountains looked like and the rounded stones of the earth upon which we stood as mountains cast their own shadows over the homes and the lives of the natives at a distance.

This time I felt that language failed me or perhaps I just wasn’t good enough with a pen, or as a human being.

To my surprise I slept well, but when I woke up, I was nervous. The bathe didn’t feel as cold and everything else wasn’t as lively either. I felt as if nothing affected me anymore. I ordered two parathas and back coffee. I saved half of a paratha for that day’s lunch, though I wasn’t sure where I’ll be having it. That was part of the adventure and the mystery innate to life, but we forget to remind ourselves of the simpler things. In my bag I put chana dal namkeen, water, a jacket and the novel I was reading.

To my surprise, early in the morning I learnt that the guide I had spoken to the previous night will not be able to come with me due to some permit issues and that I would have to go with someone much younger than him. My guide, Rohit, was my age and was coming on bike from Banikhet, eighteen kilometres away. He took up much of the early hours of daylight and when arrived expressed his wishes to have breakfast first. Omaid and I took our morning tea together and he told me that he had spoken to the van driver and would join me at Khajjiar.

Rohit and I went five hundred metres down the slope towards Lakkadmandi on his bike. From there a trail began and the first few kilometres were wide and easy to walk on. The trail crossed the tiny red temple near the colourful bench. From this point on, the forest was dark, dense and magical.

Rohit offered me a stick to hold and kept swinging his own as we marched forward cutting through the wild plants. To his surprise the trail hadn’t been looked after by the forest department at all. He confessed that it might even get sealed off in the coming days due to snow. He was afraid that once the snow melted the trail might become totally inaccessible.

We went fast and I began sweating heavily. We had to make up for the lost time. Till about half way the wild seemed conquerable by man, but beyond that came a stretch of the forest where thorns, weeds, uprooted Deodar trees hanging upside down from hundreds of metres above made the steep rise and fall of the mountains appear unconquerable. In places, the feet would sink deep inside the wet black soil of Kalatop.

Around the six-kilometre mark, we stopped in front of the roots of a fallen Deodar tree. By the feet of this fallen giant we took our lunch while sitting at a corner stone. All around us for several kilometres the tall Deodar trees stretched skywards leaving merely a square of the sky to see. The sun was bright.

We ventured deeper down towards the foot of the mountain where a small waterfall flows. The locals had built a metal bridge connecting the two sides and we went over it. From here, there is a one-and-a-half-kilometre steep climb. I had to stop twice while climbing through here. Rohit offered to carry my bag for me and I happily accepted. At our first stop the Deodar trees on the mountains in front of us, though immensely tall in reality, appeared no taller than a match stick’s length. Between us and them was a big empty space where if humans fell, they would certainly die, if sound dropped it would echo and if light fell it disappeared.

Where we stopped the second time the ground was level. There I had stopped to tie my laces but then felt that it might be better if I rested and stretched out a while. The sun managed to reach us through the greenery covering us and, in the shade, cast upon us by the green light the flat earth appeared to stretch outwards forever.

Up till here I had slipped once but regained my balance without any injuries and had found myself totally horizontal on the wet bark of a dead Deodar tree with nowhere to keep my step. My guide was helping me through these obstacles as best as he could and I didn’t have the time anymore to be doubting his abilities as a guide. He told me stories of a woman who once fell down on this trail and had to be carried away by some villagers living nearby and of two men from Gujarat who he was meant to guide through some Himalayan ranges who died due to shortage of oxygen. I couldn’t be unnerved and if anything fastened my pace. Closer to the end, I felt a bit burnt out, and my mind weary. The call of langoors playing on the trees brought me back to myself. To my surprise once again, my cell phone began to ring. Omaid was calling to say that he was leaving the hotel with the driver and will reach Khajjiar in about forty minutes. When I told my guide this, he phoned the driver to find out if this were true.

The last two kilometres seemed impenetrable but in my mind, I had practically run through the path and couldn’t have possibly let the thought of defeat come to me now. I needed to be patient and maybe get some more rest but I insisted we keep going. Rohit went ahead at the same pace and I had slowed down a fair bit. My hopes for seeing the end to this path in the forest soared sky high when I heard the sound of traffic on the highway.

Rohit was too far ahead, I think. It must have been the last one kilometre, I remember. My senses were swinging between heightened and dulled and I acted purely out of adrenaline. It must have been around four thirty in the evening. I’d left a lot behind me deep in the dense wild of the Kalatop forest with the Deodar trees and the black soil from which life grew.

Pushing my stick into the soil I was crossing all the wet patched carefully, when suddenly on my right, on the side of the rising mountain my stick kept going deeper and deeper as if the mountain was opening its mouth to swallow me whole. At one moment it was a feeling of fear which threw me off balance and the very next moment I went three four metres down into the valley on my left side.

I grabbed onto some roots in the earth to save my life. The ground was falling steeply but not enough to take me all the way down instantly. I wished to scream for help but not a sound left my throat. Rohit must have heard the fall and came back to get me. As he extended his arm towards me, I could feel the hand of life itself extending as if I had been granted a second chance. He pulled me back onto the trail and asked me if I was alright. I looked and found my shin was bleeding. It was nothing serious. Another five hundred metres and the road would have greeted us.

After dusting the dead leaves and twigs off of our clothes and waiting less than five minutes I saw Omaid’s van on the road. I’d never been more relieved to see the sight of a van on a road before. The shock from the fall was still fresh in memory and I told Rohit as I caught my breath that I’d never again think of walking on this particular trail again. But I had walked through it. It was all behind me now. I wouldn’t be able to erase it even if I tried.

There’s a certain comfort in the company of human beings, certain convenience in living the modern urban life. Nature which appears tranquil from a distance, in its vast spectrum of wild forces, kills the definition we give to the word ‘human’.