By Papri Sri Raman, IANS,
Book: “Limping To The Centre of the World: A Journey to Mount Kailas”; Author: Timeri N. Murari; Publisher: Penguin Books; Price: Rs.350.
Mount Kailash is Timeri N. Murari’s centre of the world. Few Indians, when they talk of Kailash and the Mansarovar Lake, know that these are landmarks on a Chinese landscape. Fewer know what it is to trek to Kailash from the Himalaya’s Indian foothills.
Murari’s latest book is more than a traveller’s tale of this rarefied world where infinity touches mountains and lakes to scale down its size, perhaps.
This diminutive-looking edition is very different from all Murari’s previous writings, a lot of it fiction, and nothing prepares the reader for the sociological perception and the peep into history the book provides.
Looking at the jacket one is inclined to conclude, Ah! A new travelogue’, at a time when almost all corners of planet earth have long been found and written about and clicked from high above several times over.
The story of Murari’s pilgrimage to Kailash and Mansarovar is a revelation – not on ‘faith’ – but about the literary influences that can drive people to take what has been described as the world’s most difficult trek and the politics involved in trekking to the world’s highest plateau. Along one of Asia’s oldest trade routes, up the Lipu Lekh pass at 5,334 meters and across the Dolma La pass, another 200 meters higher, to the flatlands of Tibet.
On the way lies Malpa village, where a rockslide killed 220 people in 1998. Ten years on, nothing has been made safer for the people of the land lining the trek route; the road to salvation is never easy but the road to a descent education and livelihood for communities along the pilgrims’ path seems bleaker in Murari’s story.
He begins by saying: “I suppose I was my father again, the steadfast agnostic. What I seek is certainly not a god man but the physical presence of a power beyond god.”
“Each of us has his or her secret reason, still to be told, for being on this journey,” Murari says. Some are drawn just by childhood reads — James Hilton’s “Lost Horizon”, Heinrich Harrer’s “Seven Years in Tibet” — others less romantic, by Amaury de Riencourt’s “Roof of the World: Tibet”.
Surprisingly, Murari has drawn attention to the strategic interest two Asian giants have in Kailash and Mansarovar without too many words!
There is a map in the book, and a whiff of badly-camouflaged Indian intelligence officials’ shenanigans, as well as the inscrutable Chinese military police, their body language proclaiming this is territory China!
Example after example exposes the disparity and discrimination, both on the India side of the passes and the Chinese side. On the Chinese side, glitzy trading posts, neon-lit pubs, macadamized roads, Takalakot shopping malls stuffed with consumer goods, hot water in the rest houses, special facilities for the Western tourists, coming via rail and land rover from Nepal and China.
On the Indian side, the shabbily dressed Mohan Rams and Kishans, struggling to keep warm even if they are Ministry of External Affairs-sponsored tour support staff. And ‘Hindutva’ that refuses to humble before the magnitude of Mount Kailash and the Mansarovar.
Then there is the shadow of Tibet, looming large over all that is going on in and around it – the rarely seen Tibetan, the empty monasteries, the barley cookies and butter tea that traditional knowledge says, keeps hunger away.
The book provides a peek into how rare herb collection at this height is done by Chinese girls, definitely earning them more than their temporary tour guide jobs. China exports herbal medicine valued at over $1,000 million to 164 countries in the world.
“A cobweb of mist lies on the surrounding hills and across the valley, and a soul-soaking drizzle has been falling since dawn,” writes Murari at the beginning of his story of this pilgrimage, which by the end, makes the cobweb of life in India and China more densely misty, Kailash that much more ephemeral.
A good read.