Into green mountains: the Kullu Valley, Beas River, Naggar

We arrive minutes after sunrise at the Alliance Guesthouse at the edge of the forest above the village of Naggar. It’s been a long mostly sleepless nine hours on the overnight ‘semi-sleeper’ bus north from Delhi. But then, there on the stone stairway at the Alliance, stands Gilbert, our host for the coming days, lanky, smiling, palms open, extending us such a friendly welcome with French inflections, even after all the years that have passed since he first arrived here “as a ippie” in the ‘70s, fell in love, married, built his first makeshift guesthouse and now, this morning, surrounded by an ever-widening family tribe of daughters, sons-in-laws and grandchildren. 

Far below us, deep in the Kullu Valley, the Beas River rushes from the high Himalayas to the north and east. I read that the area was known in ancient Hindu scripture as Kulanthapitha, End of the Habitable World. It was once a well-travelled part of north-south trade routes between Central Asia and the Gangetic plains, with local rulers creaming off immense profits from passing caravans. A handsomely restored stone and wood beam ‘castle’, a memory of those caravan days, stands broad-shouldered on a hill crest just below us. 

Just below, as well, peeking through the evergreens, are the layered, flared pagoda roofs of Tripuri Sundri temple. Smoke lazily rises from its courtyard this early morning. Slow deep drum beats come somewhere from the smoke’s roots. 

Later we have a closer look. The temple’s heavy wooden beams are carved in coarse flower patterns and linear designs. Carved wood lions look down from the roof points, small gleaming silver spires rise from each pinnacle. Several people sit around a small temple fire. Scattered marigold blossoms and flashes of scarlet fabric have been set around an effigy of the village deity, his meaning rooted in valley and Hindu beliefs.

Further down the slope sits Naggar village proper, its market area strung along the main road up hill, its houses nestled in gardens and apple orchards. This is a major apple growing area, the season just passed, and people are now preparing for winter: bringing in firewood, the last of the vegetables, cleaning and stitching the winter’s blankets. Everywhere the house design follows the traditional practice of building walls in alternate layers of stone and thick wood beams. The idea is to reduce earthquake damage. Far across the valley, the faintest indication of tracks snake up the sheer mountainside. We can see a few scattered dwellings, mere pale patches, as if glued on the slopes. 

That first early morning, just off the ‘semi-sleeper’, we arranged an auto-rickshaw ride from our bus drop-off on the valley floor high up to Alliance. Most of the world had barely awake but our driver is already in his prime: cheerful, laughing, perhaps especially happy at his good fortune at this sunrise fare. The day will surely be good! He roars putputputput up the narrow, steep serpentine switchbacks, gearing up and down at each blind u-turn, bobbing his head out the moto every time we pass a walker, offering a cheery wave and smile and what seems like ‘mornin’. ‘My brothers’ he calls to us laughing, glancing back over his shoulder, ‘All my brothers’.

He especially takes delight in steering directly at any sleeping dog we approach, scaring them off the road, again breaking out in laughter, a wave of his arm, more gearing up, then down, barrelling around yet another hairpin, dodging a pothole, a moment of flat road, gearing up. He makes me think of some imaginary teen Blackfoot tearing joyfully across the plains on a fresh pony. Such eagerness, such enthusiasm in the moment. The last we see of him, he is coasting downhill, engine off, maybe imagining how he will treat his ‘brothers’ to tea, our fare jingling in his pocket. Yes, this will be a fine day. 

Another morning in restful Naggar. On the deck off our balcony, the rising sun glints off the grey scree crests of the western mountains. A woman walks down the road (already, so early!) bent under a great bale of winter silage, a pre-winter task that occupies many villages here as it did in the hills east of Kathmandu. The air is fall crisp. Below us, Gilbert’s daughter Eva, her baby and her mother sit where members of Gilbert’s family are often found: in quiet conversations seated on cushions around the stone ledge of the family patio, wrapped in layers of cotton gowns and wool tunics, vests and sweaters. There’s no smoke or sounds this morning from the pagoda roofs of the temple below; the deity and her attendants are down the valley in Kullu, greeting their many fellow gods and spirits at Dussehra.

We visit the Nicholas Roerich Gallery up the road. The place has been build to display and celebrate the work of the Russian mystic-painter-writer who came to view the Himalayas and traditional cultures here as evidence of theories-about-everything. He is now the subject of a small global cult. 

I enjoy far more the antics at a small Hindu shrine outside the gallery. A caretaker, who is so carefully sweeping around the various animal and shivite devtas – bathing each, renewing the facial features of what looked like a black Kali figure, arranging garlands around each spirit’s neck – struggles with the undoing of his work by a happy toddler, perhaps the son of a nearby gardener, for whom this is a fascinating playground …climbing onto the elephant and pheasant sculptures, trying out new arrangements of the carefully placed garlands, scattering the gardener’s clippings across the freshly-swept slate patio, drinking the god’s bathing water, taking apart marigolds petal by petal and showering them over Ganesh. On and on the caretaker’s tender acts of the sacred and their inquisitive undoing continue, the man lifting the child out of reach, even trying to lock him outside of the temple fence (the lock can’t be fastened), the child finding his way back again and again to the bright orange-gold marigolds, the gods’ bathing water. What pleasures the gods can provide.

One afternoon, following another of Gilbert’s excellent hand-sketched maps, we walk into the mountains, up along the back and forth curves of a track, like a sleeping serpent, passing through apple orchards and mixed gardens (corn, beans, root crops) to the village of Rumsu, a remarkable sight for us. 

A set of the region’s great stone and wood beam houses flow along the mountain crest from a common earthen plaza or meeting place, itself surrounded by ancient deodar trees, some well over two metres in diameter in the trunk. Built into the hollows and beneath several of these tree trunks are small temples or shrines with remnants of candles, incense sticks, scarlet fabric and ribbon, leaves, ashes, rice, corn kernels. You can feel the life of a people who identity their fate with the lives of these very ancient solid spirit trees, these hills, this exact place, home, world. 

Boys are playing something resembling netball. Several men in intense conversation are seated in an open-fronted temple, with another figure which I first think is another deva effigy sitting in deeper shadows, red scarves wrapped around its upper body and head, eye whites peering from an unnaturally blackened face – it was no effigy but rather a shaman, and he didn’t want us around just at that moment. 

Nearby, women stand and talk and watch us, curious, one with an infant swaddled on her back. Other women appear between the houses carrying on their bent backs great bundles of silage. This is being stacked high along and beneath house decks and up to the gables along the exteriors of the stone house walls: winter fodder but insulation as well. 

Among the people we meet, almost no English is spoken. We are stranded from one another, dependent on gestures and smiles, goodwill and exchanged ‘namastes’. 

There are signs everywhere of how these people must today have to somehow traverse the very ancient (perhaps even the very beginning of the world) and the very contemporary. I think of the power of the spirits of those trees, the cell phone tower at the village’s edge, the carved creatures on the temple within which the shaman gives voice to the village gods, the small trucks bringing in dried corn along mountain roads that wind eventually to regional market transit centres and beyond, the seasonal gardening and ancient harvesting cycles, the self-sufficient economy of old and the wage labour economy down every road, the primary school at the edge of the village with its ABCs and talk of ‘careers’ and cities, the satellite dishes attached to several houses, the energies and deep, encompassing meanings attached to ‘our’ woods, ‘our’ place here, and those other, new energies and tales and objects from somewhere afar, distant and immediate, from some placeless place and now in our midst, Bollywood, Hollywood.

Over the day, the open sky has darkened, gusts swirl up the narrow valley as we make our ascent. Standing half-enchanted in Rumsu’s central plaza, the first lightening cracks among the mountains to the west, now completely lost in cloud. Time to get down the mountain, which we do by following the local path that drops precipitously straight down, ignoring the serpent’s twists, until in a few moments we reach the main track and already find ourselves almost home. 

When we venture out for dinner at dusk, the air is chilled and the surrounding mountain peaks are again visible, just as at dawn, except now, to our surprise, they are covered in the fall’s first dusting of snow. I wonder how the village women will be remarking this first high range snowfall as they hoist the day’s last bundle of winter feed onto weary bent backs and make their way to the nearest footpath home.