Apple Blossoms and Snow — Discovering Kinnaur
Innocence is the first thing that strikes you about Kinnaur — and a sense of vast age. This land is as old as the Himalayas that guard it. Stories and ways of life that predate Buddhism, and Hinduism even — they thrive here.
Seven hours of driving through some spectacular mountain terrain above Shimla, along roads fragrant with the Himalayan cedar, past the mighty Sutlej river straining against the travesty of a dozen dams, and you reach Kalpa — a town in the remote Kinnaur district of Himachal Pradesh, India.
The village — with its stone houses, intricately adorned wooden temples, and playful children — transports you back in time. The deities in the temple are archetypical, primal. The children are warm and unaffected — a little shy of your camera, but as eager to be behind the lens as you are.
It is election year in India. And, even in this remote corner of Himachal Pradesh, political realities intrude. The waving colors of a leading political party frame your first glimpse of the famed apple orchards of Kinnaur. But you can console yourself — the best is still ahead of you.
For a day’s journey ahead is Chitkul — a little town on the Indo-Tibet border that serves as gateway to the glaciers.
But Kalpa’s charms are insidious. At night, the mountain peaks bathed in moonlight are the stuff of fairy tales.
The Himalayas have a way of purging the trivial from your psyche. You shed the deadweight of anxiety and restlessness as you climb. The air lifts your spirit, and frees you.
It is April in Kinnaur. Apple trees in full bloom line the roads. Each village on the way to Chitkul is an excuse to stop for tea and stories.
The river Baspa meanders along the road — snow-fed and playful.
You will meet the river in Chitkul — on a pebbly shore, with patches of snow that recall the hard winter. You will sit by the river till dusk, till the winds knife through your parka and reduce your wants to a hot cup of chai at the “last dhaba in Hindustan”.
In the morning, while you muster the courage to brave the cold, lessons at the village school will have already begun. It is no punishment to go to school here — with the mountains and the river bank for your classroom.
Chitkul grows on you — with its keen snow-bright days, with its freezing nights and howling winds, with its endless walks in a village forgotten by time, with its bus-loads of day-trippers, with its uncanny resemblance to James Hilton’s Tsaparang.
On the last day, just as you give up concocting more excuses to linger in Chitkul, a man from the village shows up frantic outside your room. He is from the village below Chitkul, he says. He stayed the night to visit his sister. His brothers are policemen in Rekong Peo (the district capital of Kinnaur), he says. But they are of no use to him right now — only you can help him. His neighbor walked a kilometer to telephone him, he says. Because the cows are destroying his apple orchard. He needs a lift down to his village in your car — right now, or his apple harvest is history. So you decide to make yourself useful. You head back down with him.
Many backward glances, and promises to return, and good-byes to friends — and you are on your way back. Down from the mountains, back to the mundane.
But the mountains have one last gift for you — by the grace of the mother goddess, may your journey be auspicious — they say.
You are blessed now — for you have been to Kinnaur, the land of the gods.
