Chapter Ten

     Thursday, April twenty-eighth around ten-thirty. Downtown Yuksom at the Gupta Restaurant, Yuksom Bazaar, West Sikkim, 737113. At the round table for four at the side of the asphalt lane. There are no scheduled departures in a shared jeep or any other vehicle headed for Khecheopalri Lake. All I can do is sit here and sip coffee and wait for some unexpected vehicle to slowly pass by or somehow show up that I can flag down and see how close they can get me to the Lake. A friendly yellow dog rests in the shade at my feet under the table.

          Saturday, April thirtieth, nine in the morning at the Limboo Homestay garden. Going back to Thursday morning at the roadside where I’m asking around for options on how to get to the Lake, a young Indian fellow at the next table speaks up. He also wants to go to the Holy Lake today and suggests we go together and share expenses. Anish is from Mumbai and speaks fluent Hindi and talks with different drivers and we have plenty of time to wait for the best deal to materialize. Anish finally gets his hotel manager from down the road to drive us there, and wait for us, and also enjoy the spirit of the Lake. We’re all out there from something like two to four, saying whatever kinds of prayers we want to say, for that is what kind of place this is, ringed with low lying and deeply forested hills. More prayer flags than a person could count along the trail leading from the car parking lot to the Lake. Not an overly crowded place, but there is a steady stream of visitors. I light some incense sticks for the intentions of my family and dearest friends, and all of my relations, as the Native Americans would say, and slowly pour through my fingers the sand from Mexico given to me by my Toltec brother, Mali, into the waters of the Holy Lake shaped by the footprint of Tara. The lightest sprinkling of drops from the sky fall to the waters. We walk the trail back to the car, and our driver takes us on down the road to Pelling where Anish and I can access an ATM. The rains increase into a steady downpour as we twist along the winding road. Pelling, as it turns out, is like a little Gangtok built into the hillside, with tourist hotels lined up along the streets, and all my thoughts for coming here to visit are evaporated. I vastly prefer my little Yuksom and its kind. The skies are heavy with gray clouds and the rains continue throughout our drive back to where we began, and I am returned to the Limboo in time for a shower and dinner. Anish has been a delightful person to spend this day with. He is an avid photographer and my little sand pouring puja is wonderfully captured by his discerning lens.

     In the Limboo dining room for dinner, are a middle-aged couple from Cornwall and their eighteen year old daughter who has been teaching English in Andhra Pradesh since September. As we wind our way through our get-acquainted conversation, we find vast tracts of common ground, and as Pagans, they take an avid interest in the pictures and words and themes in my book. Ian and Bernie will take a copy back to Cornwall, and Elsa will take her copy to Andhra. Between meeting Anish and enjoying his company on our shared journey to the Holy Lake, and meeting my new friends from Cornwall, Thursday was a journey through sunlight and rainfall towards discovery and fulfillment.

     Then there was Friday, yesterday. After breakfast with Ian, Bernie and Elsa, as well as Michael from Israel, I sit at the sheltered table in the garden transferring and organizing photos from my camera to my laptop. Michael joins me there, and his Android allows me to access the internet and pay a bill. We use my computer to help him transfer some of his photos from one of his devices to another, and he shares some travel info sources with me. Until my computer battery runs out. Public utility electricity shut down last night, so recharging is not now possible. Michael and I walk the late morning road to the three side-by-side roadside restaurants, the Norling, the Yak, and the Gupta. We meet Neomi, a brilliant, smiling and compassionate young Israeli woman, whose voice and English pronunciation are melodically perfect to my ear. She and I and Michael had a late night conversation in the Limboo dining room two nights ago, going on and on till midnight, so we three share a familiar spirit. Neomi is sitting with Eliot, who is new to me, at the Norling. I see Anish sitting over at the Gupta and walk over to greet and sit with him. He and I need to follow up on our experience at the Lake from the day before, share photos, and seal the sense of brotherhood we began from the moment of our chance encounter when we were looking for a driver. He and I walk the road to his hotel, which has some generator electricity, and I recharge my laptop and upload some of his mountain pictures from his visit to North Sikkim. Finally say our goodbyes around four. He is leaving tomorrow.

     I walk back to the Norling. Michael is still there and the table has grown to include a  Spanish girl, Lala, and three other Israelis, Alon, and two women. This group is making inquiries about getting a group trip to the North together. So far, the results are prohibitively expensive. I throw my hat in the ring as a possible additional traveler. Neomi comes back to the table from wherever she has been, and would be part of the group as well. Besides English, Hebrew is the lingua franca of this group, and no satisfactory arrangements for a trip are made. There is a dog curled up in the corner whose leg was broken by a jeep this afternoon. It’s being as well cared for as can be by the company here. Pain killers are sought after and calls being made for a vet to visit. Neomi especially is expressing her feelings of empathy for this unfortunate animal, and our best hope so far is that a vet can come over from Gangtok tomorrow. Neomi has seen Anish’s photos of me pouring sand into the Holy Lake, and asks me what that was about. I tell her the story of how I met Mali in Pondy, that he had given me a small plastic bag of sand from Mexico, with no directive about what to do with it, and how I decided to pour it into Khecheopalri Lake. I bring out a copy of my book to show her, and she really likes it! Turning the pages one by one, looking closely at the pictures, reading some of the verse and speaking words like beautiful, while recognizing the images of Nut, the sky goddess of Egypt, speaking of her own understandings of ancient mythologies, and understanding how I am bringing these images into today’s world with this book. She even asks me if I have any extra copies, little knowing that this copy is already hers. She will carry it with her along with her small collection of things she reads along the way in her travels. She shares her pictures of her visit to the Rumtek monastery, and I share my pictures of my visit to the Tashiding monastery. As evening shadows lengthen, she takes leave to walk back to the Limboo. I order a cup of tea and sit with the restaurant resident kitty in my lap. Walk the asphalt lane back to the Limboo, shower and go down for dinner with Ian, Bernie, and Elsa with whom, amongst other things, we talk of old books and how we treasure them.

     Sunday, May first in the garden around ten. Walked to the bazaar to the Gupta late yesterday morning for a cup of coffee. All of the tables are vacant so I imagine whoever might otherwise be around is out on their daily excursions.

I poke my nose into various shops looking for the kind of small notebook I like and finally find one. Walk up the hillock of a knoll on my guest house side of town to a small gompa, to walk around, admire the flowers, and climb a metal spiral staircase to the rooftop of the porch where I can snap some overview pictures of the town. Nobody else around. Time to sit and watch the prayer flags ripple, wave and flutter through the fluctuating breeze. Not entirely sure I’m up for a long walk this day, but what else to do? And there is the nearby ancient gompa at the summit of a steep climb that every visitor around here takes, so now is my time to see what that is about. That climbs around here are steep is taken for granted.

When is it Said they are steep, you can bet it will be very much so, and it is. The rocky trail is hand crafted, and rest stop concrete platforms every hundred yards provide catching of the breath space. The pinnacle gompa dates from 1701, and there is only one young caretaker monk on the premises to monitor visitors and collect the twenty rupee entrance fee. I arrive a bit after two, and for a while watch other visitors come and go until all have come and gone. I then have the meditation hall all to myself. Not very large as gompas go. I can imagine the space as occupied by about twenty chanting monks arranged along the parallel benches. Up a wooden stairway to the floor above where Dakini’s and Heruka’s dance on the painted walls, from how many years ago? - hundreds? – who knows? A candle burns before the statue at the wall, flanked by other statues that look as ancient as the deities they represent. Empty wooden floor, a wooden box with a rug to sit on. Three hundred fifteen years worth of silent emptiness, and the voice that comes from within.  Downstairs, take a seat at a bench along the wall, to watch the candle burn, and listen to the looped recording of a single male voice in quiet rhythmic chant. Till the young caretaker monk comes in around four to let me know it’s closing time. Outside, first sprinkling raindrops are beginning to fall, the gray clouds are billowing, and I will tarry not during my descent down the winding rocky path. Raindrops accelerate slowly as I carefully pick my way across the mossy stones, and I manage to get to the bottom and over to the porch of the Limboo before the soaking rains come down.

     Dinnertime is with my Cornwall family – Ian, Bernie, and Elsa – as well as Neomi, returned from her day trip to the Tashiding gompa. Neomi has a lovely set of photos to share. The five of us, later to be joined by Michael, have engaging conversation during and after dinner.

     In the dreaming before my afternoon climb to the hilltop chanting hall,

I wandered through some of my university hallways till I came to the registration desk where  I could sign up for a course in the Tibetan language, and the lady at the counter is happy to tell me that as a senior citizen, I can take the course for free! There was a time, a long time ago, when I took one semester of the  Tibetan language. I learned the alphabet and some simple phrases and sentences. All of that is pretty well evaporated by now, but I wonder if I might pursue some sort of elementary review, even if only to learn the alphabet again, which in itself is no simple task. Would help, clearly, with my sense of connection with this cultural world I will be passing through these coming months. And for the evening after my visit to the ancient monastery, my dreaming brings life to some of those images on those painted walls.

     Tuesday, May third around nine-thirty, after two coffees, two bananas and a few cookies for breakfast in the hotel Pandim top floor dining room. We have a shared experience, you and I, and our feeling together is grounded in our hearts, yours and mine.

     Analogous thinking in computer language: The brain is the hard drive; the heart is the software which tells the neural network which program to run. So whatever is put into the heart, writes the software. In thinking over the function of the brain – a rather recursive, oxymoronic concept, when you think about it! – at the top of the list is keeping my people together. Every person I have interacted with to any significant degree – significance of course being a completely relative and subjective notion, you know what I mean! – is with me here now in this room I’ve never been in before. An entirely new window through which to see the world, and to see it with you, each of you one at a time, see it with the memory

I share with you! Green foliage, sweet birdsong, and a city stretching down the hillside towards the invisible bottom where the rock strewn river runs. For all of the lingering issues of misunderstanding, I will weave an interpretation as intricate and ordered as a Navaho-Tibetan rug. And when we meet again,  I‘ll run that software by you, and it is of course in my best interest to keep the hardware virus-free, malware free, and as we all know, the spam-battle is never-ending, and requires discerning filters. Scanning the city below with my lens, there are countless configurations to focus on, and here is where choices are made.

     Six hours yesterday in a jeep along the rocky road from Yuksom through Tashiding, and a series of other mountain villages, to the final stretch of highway leading to the taxi stand in the heart of the city’s crowded pedestrian and vehicle traffic. Night has fallen, the city lights are on, and a taxi driver is right on me as soon as I get my backpack down from the jeep rack. From room number eight to room number nine, next to the view I had before, but attenuated with another focus. Closer to some greenery and dirt this time, without the view towards where the mountain should be. Three rows of seats with four passengers each, including the driver, which doesn’t give him much steering elbow room, and his phone keeps ringing, and he keeps answering it and having short conversations, but of course he’s used to doing things the way he does, and his is driving along rocky cliffside hairpin turning roads. I’ve got windowside, row two, and the skies are moistly clear all the way through the afternoon till we find evening haze as we approach the city.

     Sunday evening dinner with Ian, Bernie, and Elsha was a sumptuous feast of heartfelt conversation and Cornwall is now very high up on my list of places to visit. Between the hotel Pandim in Gangtok, Sonu’s homestay in Tashiding, and Limboo homestay in Yuksom, I’ve got three new places I can return to and call home. I’ve got a nice little map of Gangtok sketched out in my brain, and know the turns I need to take to find my way to certain destinations. For as long as I’m walking this hillside cityscape, further explorations are certainly on the horizon.

     Wednesday, May fourth at the window of Baker’s Café at quarter after five. Having met Lily this morning, from the UK, who is looking for a traveling partner to Lake Tsomgo for tomorrow, and possibly for a two or three day trip to the North for the following days. Exactly the person I’ve been waiting to meet. Intelligent, adventuresome young woman coming off of three months volunteer work in Nepal. Just arrived in Gangtok yesterday. Get the get-acquainted conversation going in the hotel Pandim dining room late morning. Kelsang can arrange tomorrow’s one day Lake Tsomgo excursion, and I’ve got a lead from last night’s Russian party of travelers for a good agent to ask about the trip to the North. Lily and I walk down to the Marg and we visit Norgay of Galaxy Travels and he writes us up a set of options that are as good as anything we are going to find.

     Friday morning, May sixth at nine. As it turned out, a trip to the North with the Russians was not in the cards. Which is very much just as well. Lily and I along with Robert from Poland arrange through Kelsang – our hotel manager and liason with the jeep and taxi network of this city – a drive for Thursday morning heading East into some higher altitudes to the sacred Lake Tsomgo. What specific sacredness this lake embodies we do not know. Suffice it to say there is a one day road trip with exploration and mystery lined up for Thursday morning. Lily with the driver in the jeep front seat. Robert and I in the second row, and our official guide in the rear. Three kilometers out of town is the official police checkpoint station for the restricted area we will be entering. There is a very long line of jeeps and cars and vans inching along, one by one, as the men in brown uniforms check everyone’s permit papers. The twisting, curving, cliffside mountain road climbs from seventeen hundred meters at Gangtok to the entirely different world of thirty-seven hundred meters where the jagged gray rocky terrain closely caresses the ribbons of snow that fill her crevices and line her ridges. Of course this is a Her, whoever She is, who hovers over the reflecting pool, between the silvery dark gray snow lined rocky crags on both sides, in this snowmelt basin from which the first trickles of the long mountain stream emerge.

She is in the water, She is over the Water, She is all around the water, and springtime greenery is not yet here. Thin layer of gray cloud filters the light, save for a twenty minute parting and dissolution that brings blue sky reflection to the waters, and a brightening of the snow ribbons.

     This lake is all about reflections – of rocks and sky and snow and clouds and ridges and crags and jagged skylines on two sides, and the soft, gentle, deeply white skyline of a faraway elevation, from where the waters come. The collecting pool, before the final spillover and descent, and there is an endless supply. Cold mountain air at twelve thousand feet washes our faces and fills our lungs, and we’ve made this two thousand meter leap in about an hour, and the air is lighter, thinner, and fresher than from where we’ve come. A rocky trail goes a few hundred yards along one side, for visitors and photographers like me to wander around and find a personal space for saying something to the Lake. I go pretty far along the way by myself with the guide following by about fifty yards to make sure I don’t go farther than I rightfully should. We are in a restricted area, as far as foreigners are allowed to go, and every step from here to the east is one step closer to the Chinese border.

     There are several military engineering camps alongside the road on the way coming here, and many parts of this cliffhanger of a highway are still in the earliest stages of demarcation and development. Some stretches are very well done, while others have a long way to go. The small groups of civilian workers we pass by on the way have plenty of work to look forward to. There are about a dozen shaggy black Yaks with saddles and colorful knitted stockings for their long horns. For the visitors who want a ride along the lakeside trail, and always cheerful and enthusiastic Lily takes her turn. We hang out at a gazebo-like structure at the end of the rough, rocky trail, before returning on the higher side of the loop. Instead of a flat-on view, more of a slightly elevated view, where ribbons of prayer flags – yellow, green, red, white, blue – criss-cross on long strings tied to high points, and slowly disintegrate into the wind, one wave at a time.

     Are we up there for three hours? There is a magnetism in the rocks and the snow and the water and the air that holds us there, and we drift slowly along the trail back to the jeep parked at the side of the road. Finally, a short ride to the first village down the road, where we stop in and take a table for coffee or tea, and a bowl of Thuk-pa noodle and vegetable soup, and jostle around with the owners, the cooks, and the other visitors to this rest stop canteen. Return to the hotel by four, about six and a half hours since we left. At dinner at seven in the top floor dining room, we share a table with our motorcycle traveling friends, a fellow from Finland who has gone across Russia and Mongolia and China and Japan, then Southeast Asia to here, so far, with intentions to get back to Finland by winter. The woman cyclist is from Holland, started in Australia, has gone through Indonesia, Southeast Asia and China and Japan, and is on her way through India, Pakistan and the other –stans of Central Asia on her way to Holland. These two cyclists met somewhere on the road in China, where they decided to share the road in tandem.

     Now to the table comes Roland from the UK, who got the message from the Galaxy agent that I am looking for a partner to go to North Sikkim. Neither Lily nor Robert can afford that excursion, so I am back to looking for a jeep-mate for that trip. Roland is staying in the hotel right next door, and has found me, and we seem eminently compatible, and he would like to take the three day, two night trip on Monday. So we still have time to find another partner maybe even. Lily is leaving very early tomorrow morning for Yuksom, and it is most unlikely that I will be seeing her again around here. Such a brilliant shooting star she has been. I had no idea about visiting Tsomgo Lake before we met two nights ago, and this Lake trip was the diamond she brought into Light. She is planning to go South, to where I’ve just come from, Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry. She has been audio studying her French. I give her a copy of both the French and English versions of my book. Meeting with Roland in the stairwell on the way to my room, he and I have had enough of a conversation for me to give him a book. My motorcycle friends and Robert each get a card with my website addresses, and I will be seeing more of Robert the next couple of days.

     At our conversation over bowls of chicken and vegetable noodle soup at the windowside table of Taste of Tibet two days ago, as we were weighing our options after our visit to the Galaxy agent, Lily speaks of her interest in pursuing Social Anthropology, and reminds me of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, which I read and loved several years ago, and would love to read again. We visit the Jainco bookstore to look at Sikkim maps and browse the shelves, and Lily finds The God of Small Things for me, so I am now paging through Arundhati’s exquisitely vivid and enchantingly insightful prose.

     Sunday morning, May eighth, after porridge, papaya, banana, and coffee for breakfast as I continue my reading journey through The God of Small Things. Excursions with Robert these last two days, first to the Enchay monastery here on the ridge overlooking Gangtok, and next to the Rumtek monastery on the ridge across the valley, twenty-six kilometers along the winding cliffside roadway, down one hillside, crossing the river, climbing the other hillside. At the Enchay on Friday, as we enter the gateway into the main courtyard, there are a few monks walking about on various missions. On an old, painted dark green wooden park bench, a stout and muscular aged monk welcomes us with his look. Robert and I approach with our Nameste’s, and the old fellow asks through his limited English vocabulary, how old I am. After I tell him my seventy-one, I ask his age. He is eighty-two. A picture of robust, cheerful health. I ask that we may join him on the bench. Robert sits between and most of the conversation is between Robert and the clear-eyed monk, as it should be, for Robert and I are already traveling partners, and the conversation between my elder and I does not require very many words. As a picture of health and soberly cheerful good natured energy, I am inspired to continue my journey through Living.

     Meditation hall is quiet this afternoon, the air is misty with occasional drizzle, and the younger monks are arranging a long row of small piles of fresh evergreen branches and dry kindling sticks for a long row of little fires to burn the next day to commemorate something. The eighty-two year old monk had given each of we visitors on the bench a sprig of evergreen and told to rub it in our palms and inhale the scent. Robert and I have a cup of hot chocolate at the canteen near the gateway before heading down the asphalt lane back to the hotel under gray late afternoon skies, cutting our way through the ridgetop flower garden along the way. On Saturday, the Rumtek monastery is much larger, there are more visitors, and we sit through an early afternoon chanting session, complete with deeply vibrating drums, and sharply resonating trumpets.  

     Notes from the hotel Pandim rooftop morning Monday May ninth. The range of Kachenjunga peaks are clearly bright and snow-capped white across the horizon in Dawn’s first light. Finally! For the first time during the two weeks I’ve spent in this hillside city. Went with Robert on Sunday to the Ganesh Tok, i.e. hillside temple, on the upper reaches of the ridge about seven kilometers from our hotel. Ganesh, the ever popular elephant-headed god who removes obstacles to our endeavors, speaks to us through his Sanskrit chanting priest, who leaves me with an intertwining red and yellow string wrapped and tied around my right wrist to remind me that so long as I speak in my heart with honor for benevolent Ganesh, so he will honor me. The string is worn until it wears away and disappears into nothingness, like the Tibetan prayer flags waving in the wind.

     Robert, my boon companion these last four days, will soon be heading to West Sikkim for an eleven day Kachenjunga trek, after which he’ll be heading towards Nepal. There we might meet again. He has a copy of my book to page through on his journey.

     Monday, May ninth, at quarter to ten evening in the village of Lachen in the hills of North Sikkim. Seven hour jeep ride from Gangtok, from ten-thirty to five-thirty. Bumpy road. Stopped for lunch along the way. Traveling partner is Chanphen Orman from Thailand, (pronounced John-phen), also known as Pookie. First time in India for Pookie and she starts with a three night, two day sprint through the Himalayan foothills of North Sikkim. The road is true to form in its alternating states of form and formlessness. Pookie is on a three week initiation journey and plans to visit Darjeeling, Varanasi, Agra, Jaipur and Delhi, traveling much of the way by train. She’s got the front seat alongside the driver with their windshield point of view, while I’ve got the entire second row. Baggage is in the back. The thirty year old driver knows no English just as we don’t know his Nepali, but he’s driven this road before and knows some good stopover points for pictures, including an off the road stroll to the ancient stone platform where a couple of hundred or so years ago, the chief honcho representatives of the Lepcha and Bhutia peoples met and pledged to each other eternal peace between them in this land of steep mountains, abundant rainfall, countless waterfalls, and lush green carpeting forests.

     Pookie has a fine Nikon with a large lens, and encounters the landscape and villages in search of frames to capture, while I am likewise on a photographic hunt for images to keep and take home. My camera is comparatively compact, but with terrific resolution and zooming capabilities. I’m capturing my fair share of frames in passing, and Pookie and I are creating photo albums of our focal preferences. What do I see through my viewfinder, my lens? What am I looking for as I scan the panoramic, compositional possibilities and push or pull the zoom button? All the while a little voice going on in the back of my head, telling me how I wish to present these images. In slide shows for friends and family, of course. Here are images for my imaginary travel magazine article. Snippets of memory to carry to the other side of the world, to tell little stories about, and share with my friends this place where I’m taking these pictures right now. I’m thinking of those people and what I’m going to tell them about this series, and how they all fit together, and what they mean to me. Here is a series of notes. What kind of music do I hear, that I can share, through these images?

     Tomorrow’s journey begins before dawn, and Pookie and I and our driver will be covering a lot of ground, and it is all going to be completely new to two of us, and whatever we might think about what it’s going to be like, it surely will be sensually stimulating in ways that transcend imagination.

     Thursday evening Notes: The excursion is billed as three days and two nights, each night in a different place. Picture the letter Y. Begin at the base of the stem in Gangtok at ten-thirty Monday morning. Pookie in the front seat alongside our driver, and I’ve got the entire second row, both side windows at my disposal for panoramic views and photographic frames. Take the left fork in the road at Chungtang and proceed halfway up the left branch to Lachen, arriving by about one hour before dark. Measuring distance in kilometers is misleading. Better to measure in hairpin turns and ninety degree turns and turns of every conceivable angle wrapping themselves around the virtually vertically inclined hills. For this entire trip, these hairpin turns are endlessly recurring, and number without doubt in the several hundreds. And most of this highway is seriously underpaved, seriously unpaved, and seriously still a concept in some road builder’s imagination. Pookie and I can stroll through the streets and lanes of Lachen through the last evening’s light and night’s first darkness, looking into the occasional shop to see what there is to consider. Time to shower down and freshen up before the evening rice and curry and veggie meal at eight-thirty.

     Knock on the door at four with our first cup of coffee, and a follow up coffee in the dining hall before our four-thirty departure, continuing north along that left branch of the Y. to Thangu where we are served two egg sandwiches for breakfast along with more coffee in what looks like a shack from the outside but is very neat and pleasant inside, maintained by a Tibetan matron and her daughter. A short drive from there to the Chopta valley where we have the better part of two hours to descend a trail to the lush valley where scattered Yaks graze in peaceful silence, while the views towards the surrounding mountains would invite any trekker’s imagination.

     Sunny blue sky, and just chill enough to warrant a lightweight hooded sweatshirt. Pookie and I spend some time each on our own little photographic excursions, and sometimes we walk together, while our driver makes good use of his time hacking and gathering and packing a gunnysack full of evergreen branches from the surrounding brush amongst the scattered rocks and boulders. Throughout our journey, our driver who speaks no more English than we speak his language, is very good at stopping at spots along the road where fine views are available for our creative photography. From Chopta Valley, we drive back to our Lachen hotel for lunch, then head back down to the fork in the road at Chungtang, and go north along the right branch to Lachung for our second night. Late afternoon light is good for a couple of hours, but here at the edge of town, there is not much to walk to and visit, and truth be told, that mostly full day of bouncing around in the jeep is physically demanding, and information overload with today’s passing scenery has been more than fulfilling. Chopta Valley is around thirteen thousand feet. The change in altitude factor is real, slowing us down a bit, and hanging close to the hotel and waiting for our late dinner is in order.

     Morning light starts around five in this eastern part of the Indian time zone, and we are on the road north around six-thirty towards a drive through the Yungtang Valley, and our ultimate destination of Zero Point, a rock strewn valley at around fifteen thousand feet where the beginnings of the river meander through the stones, where large patches of snow still carpet sections of the surrounding hillsides, where a couple of ambitious vendors have come and set up little wooden tables with refreshments for hungry and thirsty visitors, for Pookie and I are not the only Jeep-trekkers who have meandered our way up the loop-de-loop road to this remote niche of somewhere on the other side of nowhere. Our driver has the wisdom to take Pookie and I to the furthest end of where we’re allowed to go, away from the more collectively minded visitors. Photo-op time here is less than an hour. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us today. All the way back to Gangtok, by way of our hotel in Lachung for lunch. Although we’re not so very hurried that our driver cannot give us the time to snap pictures of dragons and rhododendrons and waterfalls and snow-capped peaks along the way. Our driver knows his timing well. We get back to the hotel in the last light before darkness settles in. And of the hairpin turns, and ninety degree turns, and all the other turns, and the uncountable bumps in the road, our driver handled them all, on the edge of the cliff, like the pro like he is.

     Early Friday morning, the thirteenth. Yesterday was my first full day back to the Gangtok valley after the three day excursion into the Northeast Heights. There was a mid-morning stroll to the Marg to replenish my rupees at an ATM, buy a new ball point pen, inquire at the jeep-taxi stand about schedules and pick-up points for Darjeeling, and check-in for a glance through the shelves of the Jainco bookstore. Take a shared taxi back up to the hotel around one as the sprinkling prelude to a downpour begins. Then it is hanging all day with my quiet time at the Pandim, sorting through my 397 photos from the three day journey, reading from Limitless Sky by David Charles Manners © 2014 about his life-altering visit to the Lepcha Himalayas, taking notes, making notes, writing messages to myself, visiting internet email connections, looking into the Nepal guidebook, all-in-all doing quiet time at my homeroom at the Pandim, sharing quiet moments with Kelsang and the staff at tea time and for a light dinner, counting down the days and the hours left for my visit to Sikkim and my first six months in India.

     Summary time. Aftermath of the climax. Sitting on a bench in the Marg – the shopping center mall – under the blue late morning sky, watching the river of shoppers and miscellaneous pedestrians endlessly flow by. I’ve done all of my Sikkim things, visited all of my Sikkim places, met all of my Sikkim people, taken all of my Sikkim photos, written almost all of my Sikkim notes. All of that is now history, behind me, under my belt, stored in memory, absorbed into memory, in all of its conscious and unconscious depth and complexity, and the meaning lies somewhere in between whatever I want it to be, and whatever it wants to tell me.

     A dance with a tall and slender woman I’ve never met before, dark red hair hanging closely to her shoulders. Our dance is very, very close, in a large wide open ballroom to ourselves. Slow, methodical and graceful, something between or a combination of a tango and a waltz. When the dance draws to a close and we separate, I find that she has been taking notes, writing things down with the small notebook and pen she held in her hands behind my head as we were dancing. She wants to give me some advice, tell me some things about myself I might do well to consider as I continue on my journey to wherever I go. Kind of like a lover, and kind of like a businesswoman, a publishing agent, in her approach. What exactly her advice is I don’t exactly remember, and that seems not to matter so much. Those notes will come back to me later. For now, just want to remember Her, and who and how she was as we danced.

          Then there is a younger woman who comes to dance with me on this same ballroom floor. More playful in gesture and movement, dressed in a free flowing frock. An older Anne Frank, in her twenties, northern European from the nineteen-forties, and our dance is so free-flowing that our feet leave the ground and we fly together through the ballroom, up to the ceiling and all around, until we return to the ballroom floor, and I’m holding an infant, so small it has almost embryonic qualities, and it is wise beyond its apparent age, and speaking quite clearly that it, he or she I don’t know, perhaps both in one, will be needing some kind of help, some kind of careful nurturing, and I am the one who is given to take care of this little person, this life in its earliest stages of development.

     As I awaken in the wake of these two dancing scenarios, in the darkness of some early morning hour, I linger on that surface between water and air where waves between conscious and unconscious thinking ripple with awareness becoming. My little book has been my lifelong project, and bringing it into the world has been my purpose, my mission, my assignment, and all of what I do and have done, and where I go and have gone, of what I talk about and with whom, has been rooted like the stem of the lotus reaching into the mud at the bottom of the holy lake, always reaching upward through the water towards its flowering, its blossoming, and the fullness of its expression. The bringing forth of these words within my heart has been through this vehicle. It is what I leave behind when my ashes are scattered to the wind, then to fall with raindrops to the Earth. 

Chapter Nine

     Tuesday, April twelfth at one in the afternoon in room one-fifteen on the ground floor of Conclave Lodge in Siliguri. Lovely quiet courtyard with a sense of seclusion just a one block walk from one of those continuously busy thoroughfares slicing a way through a transportation hub. Yesterday started early with a seven a.m. ride to the Chennai airport where at the check-in counter, I opted-in for some extra rupees to upgrade my status to include a front row window seat with extra leg room, a meal for both legs of the flight, and priority baggage handling, as well as pre-boarding privileges, thus bypassing the two hundred person queue. From the Bagdogra airport , prepaid taxi through Bagdogra to Siliguri, sixteen kilometers, on that perpetually busy two-lane highway, with about a half lane’s worth of shoulder on each side. Busses, trucks, cars, motorcycles and all of the usual suspects. Following my 2009 Lonely Planet guidebook, I go for the Conclave Lodge. It’s simple and clean and good for two nights, remarkable as an island of silence amidst the surrounding cacophony. Late afternoon exploratory walk along that busy highway to locate tomorrow’s objective, the Sikkim registration office and state bus depot for Wednesday’s ride. Try the outdoor patio of the Khana Kahana restaurant for some Lemon sodas and a small cheese and mushroom pizza. All of this is within walking distance, as far as I want to go in Siliguri. Buy some bottles of mango juice and water to see me through the night, and call it a night, and enter a little story that begins with riding my bicycle from some city towards the edge-of-town convenience store I frequented in Canyon, Texas. Not sure I want to go in there right now, so circle wide around the parking lot, and then up to a small grassy park on a hill where I find a small grove of young trees where I can sit quietly and look at the convenience store below. After a while, I get up, go down the hill and enter the store, and realize that I haven’t played the lottery in a very long time, so as long as I’m remembering this, I’ll play a ticket, the kind of game where you pick five numbers and wait for the evening’s drawing. There is a new game here now in this format, and the ticket is very unusual, three dimensional, and I need to spin dials of numbers like those used on some padlocks. This is all very confusing to me, and I need to consult some brochures, which turn out to be travel brochures for Texas with many maps of natural and geological features of the state. Texas is now sixteen years behind me, and I lived six years of panhandle Texas in depth; that’s an old story, I’m looking for a new story now. Next I’m riding in an open air jeep with some friend, I’m not sure exactly who, some old neighborhood friend, or simply the old neighborhood as a friend, and the driver whom I don’t know but who has a precise familiarity with these streets and alleyways. From the firehouse at the Riverview – Partridge triangle, up Riverview to the top of the rise for a right turn onto Harney, to the first alleyway on the left, which goes down past the rear of the Rio theatre, to the T intersection near the back of my childhood home. I exit the jeep and walk to the gate of our small back yard to the back door which is open, and inside are my parents and brothers and sisters in the last stages of installing a brand new high-quality wooden floor in the kitchen. My sister Rosemary and I are in our later teens, and everyone is as they were at that time and very excited about this new floor. I have to go around to the front door to enter the house, Rosemary lets me in, and I go to the doorway to the kitchen on the inside of the house where my dad is working on the finishing touches for this final section of the project. There is an uneven quality about the way some of the new floorboards are placed, and my dad starts explaining to me how he’s going to make adjustments and make it all even and level. It just so happens the family has a pet horse, dark coloring, which walks in from the living room to where me and my dad are examining the floorboards. The horse sits down much like a dog taking rest. I reach out to pet this horse on his snout, and he reaches out with his long tongue to lick all over my hand and arm. It’s only one o’clock by the time this dream wakes me up, and I’ve got the rest of the night to dream some more, which I do. As for this one, what to say?

     My home is on the road, always between one place and another. Another stopover hotel, this one in Siliguri, West Bengal, coming from Pondicherry, South India, heading for Gangtok, Sikkim. In series they follow, one after another, reaching back through the years, looking forward into however much more time I will travel on this planet. This Siliguri room at the Conclave Lodge is where the new wooden floor is installed. A room on the road, leading to another room. All of these places are part of the same place, the room I live in. It goes where I go. I take it everywhere. I read the brochures with all of their pictures and descriptions and choose some mysterious place, one set of numbers on the lottery ticket, and then take the ride back to where I have always been. It was really very nice sitting with my father looking the problem over, working out the best way to fix the problem. It was nice seeing the entire family happy and working together on a project meant to enhance the beauty of our home. Homelessness is kind of a home for me right now. For all I know, Homelessness really is my home. I have moved away from every place I have ever lived. I find a home where I stay for awhile, then move to another home, and homelessness is the home that is always here. I know where I’m at, wherever I’m at.

     Found a nice breakfast spot this Tuesday morning, up the quiet lane from my lodge to the upscale hotel on the corner where the traffic goes by. Met with Edward and Laura, young travelers from UK, just coming back from several days in Gangtok. They made a hotel recommendation, which I appreciate. They are heading to Nepal for a couple of months, and it’s possible that I could meet up with them again after I enter that country mid-May. As breakfast winds down, I give them a copy of my book and tell them something about it. Something to read on those long train rides. Get my registration document at the Sikkim tourist office on the main road, and learn that busses leave from here every hour in the morning. There are jeeps aplenty around here, parked in clusters along the road, ready to take customers to Gangtok or Darjeeling or any of the other hill stations nestled in the rising northern terrain. This is a hanging-out-in-the-crossroads day, another one of those in-between places.

     Wednesday at nine-forty in the morning at the Sikkim Nationalized Transport (SNT) bus station. Arrived at ten to nine to be first in line for the nine-thirty bus, only to find out that the next bus this morning leaves at eleven. Time for sitting in the canteen sipping masala chai. Afternoon walk yesterday after four, going south along the main road, across the bridge across the river into the heart of the Siliguri shopping district. Crowded with traffic, and pedestrians, and shoppers is the word. Stop into a small shop for two cups of Elachi tea. Walking back across the bridge as a golden sun disc slides down towards the upriver western horizon, there are a few hundred people, mostly women, carrying on some kind of pujas on the banks of the river and in the shallow waters near the shoreline. Blessings of bouquets of flowers, and lots of little candles and oil lamps are burning. Most of the saris are in variations of red, which makes the occasional green or blue sari stand out brilliantly.  Another example for how the soft, cool colors can outshine the bright, warm ones. The low and slow river waters reflect golden sunlight. The drummer boys get out their instruments and keep their rhythm going strong while the ladies go on and on with their blessings and ablutions and children play and splash in the shallow waters. Sun disc disappears into the haze at the horizon. Streetlights twinkle on and headlights begin to sparkle in the dusk.

     Thursday morning, April fourteenth. Bus pulled out of the station at eleven-thirteen and I’ve got my front row window seat opposite the driver, with our front windshield view of what ever is coming on down the road. Through the city, across the plains, and into the hills we go. Alongside the Teesta river much of the way and the farther we go, the deeper the gorge becomes. The hills are heavily forested. The road is mostly narrow, and needs some construction crew attention in many places, and the drop-off from the road, if there should be some mishap, is quite severe. I’m guessing this is the driver’s regular route, from Gangtok to Siliguri in the morning and return in the afternoon. He knows the road well and drives carefully like he knows where all the rough spots are and how to negotiate the hairpin turns and the assortment of trucks, cars, and small busses along the way. I need to step down from the bus and enter a building at the border of this restricted area to get my papers stamped and info entered into the official books, and when I step out, the bus is nowhere in sight! Hmmm! Walk up the road and around the turn a couple of hundred yards and find my bus at its chosen rest stop. Needed a little bit of legwork exercise anyway, at this border crossing town. Bus does a lot of stop and go along the way picking up and dropping off locals and we finally enter the built up citified area, as jammed with traffic and pedestrians as any Indian town, although here it is all layered into the hillsides.

Bus station of course is in the middle of it all, and I find a Tibetan taxi man who knows where the Hotel Pandim is, which was recommended to me by Ed and Laura at Tuesday morning breakfast. Up and away from the maddening crowd, the taxi climbs into forested hills with occasional buildings, and I can see clearly that the Hotel Pandim is an exquisite location.

     No room available until tomorrow night, but I can book one tonight at the neighboring Hotel Pomra, and then transfer to the Pandim tomorrow.  Evening sky is overcast and hazy, and the cool mountain air is like a springtime shower. After all of the burning hot Chennai and Pondicherry days and nights, it’s like I had forgotten what this kind of air could taste like. There are no ceiling fans in the hotel room, just shaded hanging light bulbs with Tibetan and oriental motifs. This is really a different part of the world from where I’ve been the last four and a half months. All of my little Tamil and French phrases and greetings are no longer relevant. The linguistic atmosphere is a whole different kind of music, and I know none of it. My taxi man gives me his number for when I want to call for a ride, and I’ve got a whole new world to explore up here, by foot and however. For one thing, no yellow hornets up here!

     Friday morning, April fifteenth, around eight-twenty in the morning after breakfast of plain omelet, bowl of porridge, one fine pancake, all with a mug of coffee before and after. All at the Pandim hotel, where I have a treasure of a room. First night was in the fine room of the hotel Pomra, where manager Pema Namgyal showed me a pictographic map of Gangtok. We are way up on one of the highest ridges on the east side of the valley. There is a forested area on the other side of the road that rises towards the highest ridge. View is towards the west across the valley, with multistoried buildings built into the hills on both sides. Dense misty clouds cover the sky. Only the outlines of the surrounding higher forested hills in the soft gray light shine through. The snowy peaks I know are beyond are invisible.

    From booking at hotel Pomra in late afternoon through an evening meal, through night’s cool darkness, into an early breakfast, and a full morning room rest, transfer to neighboring hotel Pandim where this treasure of a room is now mine. On the corner with windows facing east and north across the valley, the city below is in a panoramic splendor of colorful rooftops and buildings of varying heights nestled amongst the hillside trees. The misty cloud continues to fill the valley, the faraway peaks still invisible. A private balcony two chairs wide. Pale green tiled bathroom. TV table with hand-painted Tibetan dragon and conch shell, and hanging above the double bed is a Tibetan Thangka painting of a male deity holding a rosary and a Upalla flower in two outstretched hands, while his other two hands are holding before his heart an oval blue semi-spherical object. Rivers flow on both sides of the lotus blossom he sits on. The manager showing me the room cannot tell me who exactly this deity is, so I’ll just have to take him at face value without any preconceived notion about his powers or influences. A thick comforter blanket and a richly soft and densely woven upper blanket to melt into. A solid wooden desk, about four feet by two feet with accompanying upright sit-down chair. I could live in this room for a very long time and call it home. And for hotel price ranges in this part of the world, this is a gift.

     As I’m filling in paperwork with Tibetan manager Kesang Norbu in the top floor restaurant, and I start asking him about places to go and how to get there in both Gangtok and Sikkim, his quiet voice comes forth with rivers of information. How long shall I stay? I have no plan and know nothing about anything anywhere. He checks his pre-booking ledger and says I can keep this room till May first, about two weeks down the road, so I settle into that idea. Two weeks exploring Gangtok and whatever is a day trip’s distance away. Then ten days or two weeks exploring the outlying towns and villages towards the west and north, closer towards tne snow-capped ranges.

     Kelsang lives here with his family, including his mother, so is available twenty-four-seven. His English is perfectly well spoken and he emanates kindness. The top floor restaurant has a table for four, two tables for two, and two corners with cushioned seating around low tables, the entire area in elegant Tibetan décor. There is a small, neatly kept library, and a stereo for playing soft background music from time to time. The afternoon comes through with the most massive downpour of rain I’ve seen since the Chennai monsoon. And for sheer volume of water coming down at one time, it was a waterfall for a while, as the tall vertical prayer flag banners – blue, white, red, green and yellow – flapped vigorously in the relentless wind. Around five o’clock, I go upstairs for a late afternoon tea with a plate of French fries. Meet Niall from Liverpool, a young traveler here for his last night in Gangtok before going to Calcutta on his way back to the bar on Penny Lane where he works. His girl friend Alice and he are in room four, and I visit them after my fries and tea, with booklets in hand to share. Alice is heading to Nepal for a few weeks before returning to Liverpool. The Liverpool English of Niall and Alice is like no kind of English my ears have ever heard up close and personal, and I really have to pay close attention to the words as spoken by Alice especially. Niall had been an English lit major with a special interest in George Orwell. Niall and Alice each get a copy and I go through an explanation-introduction and we have a good conversation. I take my dinner on the rooftop at seven – vegetable curry and vegetable fried rice and masala chai – so very well done! And see Niall and Alice again for our farewell wishes. Evening air is cool and foggy. The comforter and thick soft blanket are for crawling into, where memories from under the comforters of times long gone by flow in their misty rivers once more.

     “The Lepcha language is monosyllabic in character and possesses  an inexhaustible capacity for derivatives and suffixes. Two striking aspects of the language are the wealth of vocabulary devoted to nature making it possible to verbalize complex subtleties of the natural world; and the allusive characteristic of the Idiom, so that the language appears to revolve around innuendo, and a verbal statement is almost always a suggestion rather than on explicit observation. Not surprisingly, this has made the Lepcha language rich in metaphors, similes, and riddles, and consequently, very poetic.”

    Sikkim: A Traveler’s Guide

    Pbotographs and essays by Sujoy Das;  Text by Arundati Ray; © 2000

     Saturday, April sixteenth at two-fifty in the afternoon. Woke up to some continuous raining at two this morning. Then again at dawn for most of the morning, and the valley between the ridges is filled to overflowing with a Himalayan cloud. Now the rain has stopped and the cloud has evaporated into a mist still dense enough to veil the ridge of the city on the other side, and the hills beyond. Five shining silk prayer flag banners ripple in the gentle breeze not thirty feet in front of my window looking across the rooftop of the three story building built into the hill one level below the Hotel Pandim. This feels like the sportscasters box at the stadium. Atmospheric perspective washes with multiple shades of gray the horizons of ridges and hills receding towards the furthest foothill. Took a walk yesterday afternoon, which means going downhill, and then downhill some more, and then more, until I found a leveling out road, which by now is in the thick of the city and which evolves into an outdoor shopping mall. Just like an American shopping mall on a Sunday afternoon, endless streams of pedestrians going in both directions, shoppers, browsers, people like me out for a walk, all the local people, very few western tourists. Buy a couple of Sikkim maps

in a bookstore, and mostly walk around from one street to another, down one set of steps or another, setting as a goal to find the bus stand where I alighted two days before. By the time I get there, it’s been a good walk and I plan to taxi it back to the hotel. As I’m approaching the taxi stand, who should come out but Pan-Kg, the Tibetan with his old blue minivan who knew, when I was asking a cluster of taxi drivers, where hotel Pandim is. He’s the pro and he knows, and the fleet drivers are left standing, asking each other where is this place and none of them knows. I’ve got his number, and I do believe I’ll be sticking with Pan-Kg for my taxi needs during my visit to the Gangtok area.

     Today is for sitting at the window watching the light change through the afternoon as the angle of light from the sun reflects off from and shines through the fluctuating mists wafting through the valley between ridges in their soft and subtle shades of bluish-gray.

     Monday, April eighteenth, at four-twenty. Stranded on the Marg (open air shopping mall) at a window table of Taste of Tibet watching the pedestrians with umbrellas walking through the rain. How long is this going to take, this sitting around watching the clouds roll through the valley from daybreak to nightfall, watching the rain decide when to fall? Five days in this Shangri-La, and not only have I not seen a snow-capped peak, neither the sun nor the blue sky have made more than a teasingly brief suggestion of their existence. Here comes the waterfall out of the sky! Here comes the river flowing down the steep sloping street.

     Wednesday the twentieth around eleven in the morning at the Baker’s Café again overlooking the pedestrian mall. Been doing the walkaround Gangtok city these last three days. Down here this morning to buy my ticket for the jeep ride tomorrow to Tashiding in the west. Starts at seven and will go for four and a half hours. Kesang, manager at the Pandim, has set up a home stay contact for me in Tashiding, as well as at Yuksom. Tonight will be my seventh in the lap of luxury Pandim Hotel, and tomorrow the road trip resumes. Met a seventy-one year old French woman on the rooftop during breakfast this morning. She has been coming to Sikkim for a couple of months at a time for the last sixteen years, and the family run Pandim is her choice for a place to stay. She has set up some sort of a small NGO that helps look after about seventy Buddhist children, and today is taking a group of about thirty to the theatre to see The Jungle Book. She tells me of her journey three years ago to Lake Manasarovar and Mount Kailash in Western Tibet where she did the three day trek around the mountain. Some of us older people got things we need to do before we get too old to do them. That was one of hers, and what I’m doing is one of mine. The seed of an idea is born. Could I go to Lake Manasarovr in Tibet on this go-around? The trek around Mount Kailash is unthinkable for me, but a trip to visit the Lake?! I’ll be asking around in Nepal when I’m there next month. My budget is pretty tight, and I’ll bet it’s not a cheapie, so I’ll see what I can find out. Meanwhile, where I’m going tomorrow should be rather exhilarating in its own right, and meanwhile again, getting to know the streets and ridges and pathways and a couple of sit-down places of Gangtok serves as entertainment, and while the skies around the horizon all around continue in their cloud-covering haziness, there is a peek-a-boo glimmer of sunlight from the noontime sky above. Time to trace another path and see what’s down the road.

     Tuesday the twenty-first at two o’clock in my little room on the side of the hill at Sanu Home Stay, near the village of Tashiding, after the jeep ride along the winding, twisting, curving, turning convoluted ribbon of mostly single laned or

lane-and-a-half asphalt, potholed, rocky, uneven, rough and occasionally smoothly paved road for the hundred kilometers from Gangtok to my drop-off point where a graceful middle-aged woman, Sanu Bhutia, waits to meet me, with her driver who will take me that last kilometer or so into the hills where we will get out and physically climb a rocky path to her set of simple rooms built into the forested hillside.

     Alongside the overland driver are three passengers in the front row. I have a window in the second row of four, alongside three of the local young women. In the third row are another four passengers, and all of our luggage is packed into the rack on the roof. The young driver is by no means shy about going for the pass whenever there is a vehicle before us on the road. This is mostly a cliffhanger road, twisting down into the valley where the river runs swift, twisting up into the haze between the hills. Four hours altogether with one stop for tea along the way. Where a lovely elder teenaged girl with her family in another vehicle is absolutely elated  to learn that I am from the USA, her favorite country she declares enthusiastically that she so very much wants to visit, and is immensely pleased when I agree to pose with her for a selfie.

     I’ve got what you’d call a wide single or a narrow double bed, a solid wooden table about eighteen by thirty-six inches, together with a plastic lawn chair, in my corner room with two sets of windows looking across the valley on one side, and towards the village down the road on the other. The haze on the horizon is as opaque as it was in Gangtok, and I’m told by Sanu that the snow-capped peak is there, but if or when I will see it is still a mystery. There is a long narrow balcony where I can sit and listen to the sounds of silent nature through the treetops.

     Meet with Brenden and Kate this evening in Sanu’s dining room. They have taken a twenty-one kilometer hike today through the forested hills between Yuksom and here. They are interested to hear my story of my several trips to India since I first came here in nineteen sixty-nine. Yes indeed, that two year visit was a watershed event that focused my direction for the rest of my life. It led me to my encounter with Anthropology, which in turn led to my explorations in Art, through my earliest paintings and notebook keeping of the early to mid-seventies, and from there into my excursions and inquiries into the Aztec calendar stone and from there into my linguistic encounters with poetic expression. Until I came up with my book of drawings and poetry that I have been passing out since the early eighties.

     That is four couples in a row since April sixth: from Martin and Alin, the German travelers in Chennai, to Edmund and Laura at the breakfast table in Siliguri, then Niall and Alice from Liverpool at the Pandim, and now Brenden from Maine and Kate from Melbourne who will get their copy tomorrow. Every time I meet someone, I start sizing them up through our conversation as likely candidates for getting a copy of my book. It’s all really very simple. If they are interested in my story, if they ask questions and want to know who I am, our connection is clear. There are those who are more intent on telling me their story, and that is fine. I will listen and perhaps find them interesting, but unless they are interested in my story, they will not know who I am. It’s not exactly for me to say who I think I am. It’s up to the listener of my story to decide who I am to them. For isn’t that really what it comes down to? There is no truly objective, I am, except in my own convoluted imagination. The only, I am, who really exists is interpersonal, and that will always be an aspect or a fragment of my internal sense of self. I have been who my career path says I’ve been, and lived and traveled and interacted through several stages in the theatre of my time, and we paint portraits of each other in our minds. Who on earth does that smiling teenager who took a selfie of her and I together think this fellow with her in this picture is? Her friend, the American traveler at the rest stop on the road. I illuminate her dream simply by telling her where I’m from, and the joy in her expression is a treasure to my heart. We create a meaning together, a shared experience that is uniquely ours, etched in memory forever.

          Dream of teaching, or trying to teach, a group of about twenty of my ITT college students how to read. An impossible task. As I’m listening to one student practice his reading, what are the other nineteen doing? Mostly sitting there with listless minds, neither paying attention nor caring about how I am helping the student I am focusing on. Then I notice another group of about twenty other students on another side of the room, the other half of this class. Since I am concerned with trying to keep everyone involved with the class, I go to another student in the other part of this class to listen to him practice, hopelessly hoping that the entire class can somehow keep focused on what is going on. Are we all learning how to read better while I give my attention to one student? The futility of what I am attempting seems overwhelmingly senseless. Before very long, I notice another entire class of students, another forty or so, are sitting together in another part of what has become an open air, outdoor classroom. And they are also a part of my overall class. Shall I go over and select another student to focus on, while maintaining a sense of cohesion and attention amongst all of these students, many of whom apparently couldn’t care less about what I am trying to do. Caring very little themselves about learning how to read, the inevitable smart-aleky, disruptive ignoramuses in the class start throwing out their smart-aleky remarks, seeking only to annoy in their childish search for ego-boosting snickers from their classmates, challenging my sense of responsibility for keeping order and effecting a collective learning process. There is absolutely no point in my getting into countering this mob of fools who are motivated by no other objective than to disrupt. If only I could single out those individuals who do want to learn, for I know that some of them do, but I don’t know exactly which ones those are. Meanwhile, if what has gone on so far is any indication, the classroom size is on the verge of doubling again, and I am about ready to throw in the towel, leave the whole bunch to their desserts, and walk down the hallway to the Dean’s office and tell him that he can take this English reading class and shove it. Along comes Mr. Ed, the acting teacher I got to know and took some classes with last summer when I was spending time on movie sets working as an extra. A very talented and experienced man with a lot of good advice, he is basically telling me to keep playing my part and to above all ignore the distracting fools, and play my lines with all the heart and soul that I have within, and that is all I really need to do. Fulfill my role, and let everyone around me take responsibility for fulfilling their roles, as they see fit, and emphatically do not let those who couldn’t care less about what I’m doing interfere with my sense for accomplishing my goal, teaching those who want to learn.

     Saturday morning at seven, April twenty-third, on the balcony looking west across the valley into the haze receding towards the horizon. Sunlight filters through from over the hills behind the cabin, and there is birdsong in the air. Took a walk down the quiet asphalt lane yesterday into the village, where I took a few pictures, and stopped into a couple of shops for some crackers and  chocolate bars. If there is an internet connection around here, I don’t know where it is. Getting to know Brenden and Kate through breakfast in the dining room, later on the balcony, and then again through dinner in the evening. Such a cheerful, enthusiastic young couple they are. Kate has a law degree, and has been working in China for the last ten years with domestic violence issues in that country and is well versed in Chinese language and culture. She is from Melbourne, Australia and has an extensive background of travels through and living in India and Sikkim. Brendon has been living in China for the last two years, working as an educator in developing innovative ways to encourage young people to develop the skills and knowledge they will need to pursue their chosen careers. Brendan and Kate met in China and are a charming, intelligent, and adventuresome couple whose company has been a precious gift here on the outskirts of this remote Sikkimese village.  You just never know when or where or how the lovely people in your life will show up. Our paths have crossed as we have been traveling in opposite directions. They are coming from Khecheopalri Lake and Yuksom where I am going, and I am coming from Gangtok where they are going. A magical encounter along the winding trails of exploration and discovery.

     After last night’s dinner prepared by Sanu, another guest at this home stay guest house, a professional Sikkimese guide, gives us an extensive explanation of how his business works and things he must keep in mind as he leads his clients through their travels. Brendan has a deck of cards. First, I show Brendan and Kate how to play casino, my favorite two-handed game, and after a few rounds of this, he and Kate show me and our Sikkimese guide friend how to play a complicated four handed game. Public service electricity is an on-again-off-again feature of this cabin on the side of the hill, and an overhead hanging LED lantern helps keep the table in light when the regular connection flickers into darkness. Considerable rainfall yesterday afternoon. The air is cool and damp this morning, and Sanu’s mother, the quiet matriarch of eight children, of whom Sanu is the youngest, keeps her prayer wheel turning.

     Monday, April twenty-fifth at four-fourteen in the afternoon. Reviewing the last couple of days beginning with Saturday. Brendan and Kate have heard of a hotspring at Tatopani, a couple of kilometers down the road from Legship, which is seventeen kilometers from here. Sonu confirms and gives us instructions for getting a shared taxi, i.e. multi-person jeep from Tashiding to Legship, and then catching a vehicle that will go down the road to Tatopani. Shared jeeps are off-schedule today, so we take a pricier personal driver, and split the five hundred rupee fare three ways. This highway is rockier and more uneven than many a New Mexico mountain forest road. At the Tatopani drop-off point is a shack of a shop selling crackers and cokes and no one is there. A switchback, rocky hiking trail descends sharply into the depths where the river runs swiftly around boulders and whitewater ripples over low-lying stones. A suspension walking bridge has a plate metal footpath that rattles as we walk. The bridge is festooned from one end to the other with bright colored prayer flags. A couple of hundred yards further along another rocky trail to the riverside, where tiny bubbles of sulphuric gas from the volcanic magma far below, infuse a pool of water at the edge of the river with therapeutic properties. Sheltered on two sides by huge boulders fallen one upon the other, or open to sunlight on its other sides, the pool is plenty big enough for half a dozen adults stretching and resting to soak, and half a dozen small children who romp and play and splash around. Being a Saturday, some parents have brought their kids here. The water is from the river flowing swiftly by, somehow siphoned off into this niche of a pool about eighteen or so inches deep with its fine black sand bottom. There is also a pool of quiet water in an open niche at the side of the fast running river. One can dip in the cold river water, and one time of that is all I need. Finding a spot to stretch out and let the medicine waters infuse my every pore is more my cup of tea. Sky is clear and the noontime and early afternoon sun is refreshingly warm. One of the boulders of this enclosure is just high enough out of the water and level enough in a curvy kind of way for me to start standing little pebbles that my fingers find in the black sand atop one another, one upon one upon one, up to five and even six, looking for balance points every time I stack one stone atop another. The children are enchanted with this, and then start fishing through the sand with their fingers for pebbles to give me to keep building these little balancing towers. It doesn’t take long for these kids to start piling up pebbles, and the surface of the boulder becomes a cityscape of balancing towers. Around two o’clock after about three hours in the pool, Kate and Brendan and I decide to move on and hike back across the bridge and up the switchback trail to the side of the rocky road to try and flag down a passing jeep heading to Legship. Most passing jeeps are full, so we agree to have one or two of us go at a time in available seats, and meet up in Legship. I get a single seat first, and Kate and Brendan get a pair of seats in the time it takes me to have two cups of tea at the shop next to the taxi stand. The skies have clouded over, and raindrops are lightly falling. Again, a shared jeep is not available, and we opt to go with a personal vehicle. More rupees, more leg room, and get back to Sonu’s home stay sooner than later. Getting towards five and the clouds on the western horizon are gilded in gold, and beams of light reach through holes in the clouds to filter through the moist valley air, lighting patches of the hillside forest in bright green. Sonu’s marvelously prepared meal of rice and intricately spiced vegetables at six-thirty as darkness settles in puts a finishing touch on this masterpiece of a day.

     Sunday morning is departure time for my friends whose paths met and converged  in China. They have been studying the book on Northeast India, and after their short visit to Gangtok, will be heading to Assam and Megalaya and wherever else in that area suits their fancy. Make it up as you go along. My kind of itinerary! Early morning resting time on the balcony for me until after ten when I begin the upward trail towards the three hundred seventy-five year old monastery at the top of the hill. Up, up and away the climb goes on, through the forest, over a trail nurtured by hand with rocks placed intentionally into a rough washboard-like arrangement. I imagine this rough surface minimizes the slippery factor when these mountains are coated in fresh snowfall. Perhaps a half hour for me to climb the winding trail which leads to the monastery, meditation hall, and courtyard of chortens. The grounds are wide and flat, grassy and green. Nothing goes higher from here than the sounds of chanting in the meditation hall, which I sit with as a guest on a bench alongside one wall. An eight year old monk pours me a generous cup of milk tea. There are about five other visitors today sitting alongside the wall on either side of the rows of altogether about thirty monks. The youngest and younger boys sit in the outer two rows, while the mature and elder monks sit on the inner two rows. The little boy monks can be playful and unruly, as little boys will be, and no one imposes any correction on them, telling them to be still and behave or some such thing. They are obedient to the directions they are given, and aware of the boundaries of the occasion. Respectful and smiling and perhaps a bit curious about today’s visitors, they will be here for the rest of their lives, however in their minds they might think about this idea! In the courtyard of chortens, tall white spires rise from the earth towards the sky, pointing the way to the heavens. There is an immense metal bell, much larger than the cracked American Liberty Bell. This bell is inscribed all around in Tibetan messages, and the huge clapper has hanging from its end a woven cloth rope, and any visitor who comes by can pull the clapper against the bell and send a deeply resonating sound into the monastery grounds and through the valleys surrounding the hill. Like from any bell made by Tibetan metallurgists, the sound carries on forever. I take one moment in time to pull the woven rope and send the sound through the valley, for as long and as far as it will go. Altogether a little over three hours I spend on the top of the hill, then follow the path down back to Sonu’s home stay to rest before dinner, and watch again the sun descend behind the clouds hovering over the hilltops on the western horizon.

     Tuesday, April twenty-sixth at nine-forty-seven in the morning after a seven o’clock breakfast of porridge and two brown, dense apple pancakes, along with a cup of milk chai, at the Limboo Home Stay in the end-of-the-road village of Yuksom, which has a continuous enough trickle of backpackers and trekkers who keep the several small hotels and homestays, and a couple of larger hotels as well, in business. Met Eric from London, now living in Wales, at the Gupta Café, next to the Yak Café, on the side of the road in the middle of town yesterday afternoon. He’s worked a lot with autistic people in institutional settings, is very dissatisfied with the way autistic people are being treated, and wants to set up a residency out in the wilderness of Wales, where autistics could live in an environment that encouraged them to live their creative lives. Eric is thirty-three now, with an excellent background in experience and professional associations, he has a well-developed idea and I can see support for his vision coming his way.

     Not long thereafter comes along five hikers who have just come in from the  several kilometer walk from Lake Khecheopalri. Two British couples around in their twenties, and an Indian fellow of similar age from Rajasthan, who is studying at an art school in West Bengal three hours from Calcutta. They all sit around the table next to where Nick and I are, and soon the seven of us are sitting around in a circle mostly around the hikers’ table, trading stories and making inquiries. Ankur, the Rajanstani art student and I fall into a beautiful conversation about the kinds of art we do and why, and who amongst artists from the art history books have been sources of inspiration. Is there a line or is there only a shifting haze between ideas of subjective and objective beauty? It is extremely much fun to pull images into the conversation from out of those art history books, images that illustrate a concept or an appreciation, images that we both recognize, for we are brothers who have chosen to spend time with and page through those art history books, just as we have chosen to search through our brush for that elusive mystery that expresses the beauty we feel within. After the hikers have ordered and eaten their meals, Nick parts way to return to his hotel, and I walk the mid-town road with these two young couples and my brother in art. At the Limboo Home Stay where I am, the hiking group deems the three hundred rupee dorm room too costly, and heads off to look for one of the economy hotels along the road. I truly admire the adventuresome spirit and the sense of cohesion these British hikers embody, on a shoestring budget that puts eight hundred rupee rooms like my single at the Limboo out of the question.

     White walls in clean paint, one set of windows looking out across a couple of home gardens below to the green slopes of a steep incline. Sit-down toilet in a bathroom of tiled floors and walls, clean porcelain sink, and hot water on demand. Wide single bed with covering blanket soft and warm, woven blue carpet, and long red oriental throw rug with curving and twisting and winding brown and black dragon, with flames and smoke coming from his open saber-toothed jaws. This is the dragon room and there is no image on the walls. Where do I go from here?

     The story is about the book, the one I have already written. The roots reach deeply into the soil of two boxes of college textbooks copyrighted in the nineteen-thirties, science books, biology, chemistry and physics and math, and the book that most enchanted me was the astronomy book, with all of its pictures of the planets, the solar system, the stars, and the galaxies, and the half page article about the recently discovered Pluto and what was known of it which was not very much. These were my father’s books from the years when he was learning the things in these books, and now they are in two crates in the corner of a closet. And I entertained myself with them, wanting to know what was in them, as a way, I suppose of wanting to know what was inside my father who was working in a Chevrolet assembly plant supporting his wife and family of five children, keeping the home above water.

     Reading books became a very large part of my way of knowing. The local library branch was one of my favorite places to visit and hang out, scanning every title on every shelf. Some book or another to read is always on my horizon of things to do in between everything else. Now I have a book of my own to share, and it is kind of fun keeping my ear and my eye open for someone to share my writing with.

     There was also a huge, heavy finely bound book of paintings in color, all North American birds. Semi-gloss paper pages with drawings and paintings by Audubon, and other artist bird watchers. An amazingly beautiful book to page through after I’d had my fill of galaxies and planets.

     Wednesday morning around ten, April twenty-seventh. In the dragon room with white walls. I’ve been looking for a place to be, a place to return to, since before I arrived in Chennai five months ago. Thorough the Chennai guest house, two Pondicherry guest houses, the Hotel Qualithe’, two nights at the lodge in Siliguri, one week at Hotel Pandim in Gangtok, and four nights at Sonam’s Home Stay in Tasahiding, I’ve found a place to be, a place to return to. Limboo home stay, run by graciously smiling, soft spoken Rani and her husband, Head Forest Guad Birkaman, with their three school age children. The backyard garden is a phenomenal space, and Yuksom is a phenomenal place. There are more bird voices out here than a person can count. Just ask the visiting birdwatchers from Bangalore with their telescopic lens cameras and guide books and check-off lists! Skies have been clear or mildly cloudy with no rain. There is no automotive traffic  along the well-worn asphalt main street through town, except for the occasional jeep passing through, dropping off and picking up. Couple of outdoor cafes and a post office, no ATMs or Internet. A short walk leading away from town from here is magical Kathog Lake, “sanctified in the seventeenth century for the purpose of his (Kathog Rigdzin Chhenpo) oracular practices.” This is his Bla-Tsho, i.e Soul Lake and Lamas perform purification rites every year to retain the sanctity of the place. This is the town where the kingdom of Sikkim was born in 1641.

     The Limboo homestay garden is designed around relaxation settings for small groups around tables under shade, and narrow rocky pathways network through the flowers and small bushes. The main building has rooms and the kitchen and dining room for temps like myself, and there is a duplex cabin in the back, which I have yet to ask about, but from the outside, it looks like a home. Itinerant trekkers and hikers and sightseers pass through town every day on their way to somewhere, and it would never take long to find company at either the Yak Café  or the Gupta Café.

     Went out for a walk up the road yesterday mid-afternoon to look for the 1641 stone coronation throne on top of a hill, and as I’m taking pictures around a middle-of-the-road stupa, along comes Ankur, my art student friend from yesterday, so we walk together up the rocky path to see what there is to see. The coronation throne platform is weathered gray stone with seats for the three great lamas who presided over the inaugural ceremonies. Just have to take a minute to imagine how colorful, and crowded and musical the event would have been, and here we are, Ankur and I, in the middle of it all. Be There Now! The towering white chorten of this ceremonial center points towards the sky amidst straight towering trees. Ankur and I sit on the first ledge of this chorten and he shows me his portfolio on his phone camera. Truly a talented young man already and he’s only completing his third year of a four year program before going on to three years of graduate school. His portraits are entirely real in color and tone and linear accuracy. His landscapes are bright and playful, gentle and contemplative. A pleasure it is to meet this talented thoughtful person. Descending the hill as the solar disc approaches the hilltop horizon, we walk to the nearby Kathog Lake, more on the order of a large pond in my vocabulary. The grass around the lakeshore is a naturally luminescent green, and a few large boulders clutter the water and ground in one corner. Two necklace strings of white prayer flags adorn two sides of the smooth as silk and reflective waters. As Ankur and I find some flat stones to sit on and continue our conversation and simply sit and admire the lake, two of the young hikers from yesterday enter the lakeside grounds and walk over to join us. Natasha from Ukraine, the artist friend from Kerala, along with a young artist from Italy, not formally trained in art, but seriously dedicated, with a velvet soft voice, and aesthetically discerning. Visual art is about seeing and showing what you see, and I give them each my address card with my pueblo painting for background and my three website addresses for my book, my poetry and my paintings. Our conversation has been through art. Here is an image from my brush. You can see more and read some on the internet, and this is my avenue for sharing today and they all appreciate it. Eventually, the company of three go their way, and Ankur and I circumambulate the holy lake. We return to the road and walk to our parting way. Ankur is leaving Yuksom tomorrow. We will meet again, or, as Mali would say, we have always met, exactly right here.