February 13, 2016

On the Road to Shimla

 The toasted cheese sandwich wasn’t very good, but it was late and this was my dinner, after a long day of travel from Dharamsala to Shimla. I sat on the edge of my bed in the hotel, calmly eating one bite after another, like any normal person would, when there was a sudden POP and an explosion and the outlet just a couple of feet from me into which the flat screen television was plugged began smoking. I ran out of the room shouting there was a fire in my room. This added to the general excitement that had been our experience since arriving at this hotel: The bellboys had checked our tour group into our ten rooms, flipped on the individual hot water bathroom boilers at the same time, and set up a few space heaters which overloaded the electrical system. There had been power outages, sparking heaters, and now this exploding outlet. The hotel was unheated, dark and dirty, the worst hotel yet in my experience in India (but there are worse, no doubt). Our guide quickly switched rooms with me. Eventually, I settled into bed in my long underwear, polar fleece pajamas, sleeping bag, and doubled up blankets…only to realize that I couldn’t turn off the last room light from my position in the bed. I’m not moving, I said to myself, and covered up my head, leaving the light on all night, falling asleep vaguely wondering if this light would increase or decrease my chances of surviving any possible fire.

 It was the night of Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, the 40 days of penitential practices and reflections on one’s mortality before the celebratory high holy day of Easter. As we started out from Dharamsala that morning, I had hoped we would arrive into Shimla in time for an Ash Wednesday service and the imposition of ashes on my forehead at Christ Church, a neo-Gothic structure built in 1857 to serve the British Raj at their summer capital. There was a slim chance we would arrive in time, and a slimmer chance there would be such a service, but I still hoped to participate in one of my favorite church services of the liturgical year, to observe similarities and differences in practices of Christianity in India. However, we did not arrive in Shimla until about 10:30 in the evening. Although I wasn’t able to attend a service, I had in fact been worrying about my mortality the entire day, and now there was some smoke and fire, and to me it all seemed to fit together to mark Ash Wednesday, albeit in an unexpected and non-traditional way.

That morning, after visiting the Norbulingka Institute, an organization that aims to preserve Tibetan culture, we boarded our tour bus at about 10:45, anticipating an eight-hour bus ride through the lower Himalayas to Shimla, covering a distance of about 150 miles. The bus was old, with worn-out shocks and rattling windows and uncomfortable, narrow seats. The 16 of us settled in and off we went. It was going to be a long day.

 A couple of days earlier, we had ridden this bus from Amritsar to Dharamsala. I had not done well. As soon as we turned onto the mountain road that would take us up into the Himalayas, I covered my face and head with my pink scarf and dozed, repeating the meditative mantra we had learned from our guide and said every morning to bring calm and bliss before starting out on the day’s adventures: “Om Namaha Shivaya.” I don’t do well with other people driving, and I don’t do well with other people driving massive tour buses on narrow mountain roads with hairpin turns and switchbacks. I am sure I made a comical sight, wrapped up in that pink scarf, but it was an act of emotional self-preservation. When I awoke, I could not believe what I saw: The massive snowy lower Himalayas rising up like satin-clad sentinels in the afternoon sun. The awe I felt, and the fascination with the beauty before me, kept me distracted until we arrived at the Dharamsala hotel at about 4,780 feet elevation.

 Two days later, on this Ash Wednesday, the narrow roads, hairpin turns, and switchbacks were going to be even more dramatic: We were heading southeast but higher into the Himalayas, to 7,234 feet. I was determined this time to enjoy the ride. The driver turned the steering wheel hard this way, then that. The bus bounced and swayed, close to the edge of the road, then close to the mountain on the other side. Vehicles passed us, horns honking; we passed slow-moving trucks and cars, our horn beeping a warning. Oncoming vehicles suddenly appeared from around the curves, swinging toward us, narrowly missing. We charged through little towns, dodging people, cows, goats, bicycles, carts, cars, and goods spilling out of small stalls. I tried to keep my focus on the stunning view. But before long, I was slumped in my seat, eyes closed, praying.

 I awoke from my doze when I felt the bus stop. I looked out of the window to see a barricade and a policeman sitting next to it, preventing traffic from passing beyond that point. The driver’s helper leaned out the window and gestured and seemed to argue about our route, and we were let through. After driving a little way, we encountered a lot of parked cars along the road, and a bridge that was apparently damaged and out of commission. We would have to take a detour. The bus driver turned the bus around, and we went back to the barricade. By this time, I had my GPS out to find out where we were and where we should go next. (A GPS is a girl’s best friend in India, I’ve found.) Just beyond the barricade was our next turn to the right, but the driver pulled ahead a little too far to make the turn. There were buses coming toward us from the detour, vehicles coming from behind, vehicles in the other lane, and there was no possible option to back up even a little and make the right-hand turn. So, we went to the next intersection and turned right.

 I suppose it is no accident that road trips are frequently used as metaphors for the life journey. Life, of course, is rarely a straight line from birth to death, despite the best laid plans. There are detours, roundabouts, turnabouts, wrong turns, pauses, dead stops, speeding ahead, lagging behind, lost or unreadable or no maps, surprises, mistakes, distractions, successes, disasters, good people, bad people, good choices, bad choices, excitement, boredom, and a final destination. One thing is for sure, though. In life we are all heading in the same direction: Death. We just don’t know how or when, generally. It’s unnerving enough to do just about anything to avoid thinking about it.

 So, about that detour. When the driver made that right turn, he was taking a detour from the detour. And what a detoured detour it was! What had been a road immediately became a muddy gravel lane as we descended down the hill into the residential area of the town. Within a few moments, we encountered another vehicle coming the other way. And another. And another. Now began delicate negotiations between our enormous tour bus and all these cars and small trucks wanting to get past us in the narrow lane. Our tour guide and the driver’s helper leapt out of the bus to direct traffic, to little avail. One at a time, the cars inched forward and backward, got stuck, unstuck, came within less than an inch of the bus. We passengers all moved to the right side of the bus to look out the windows and watch the show. Residents came out of their houses to observe and offer their advice. We saw their lives quite close up, their patios, laundry hanging out to dry, and cows. One of the tour members leaned out the window to start a friendly conversation with a driver whose car was stuck next to us. It was a funny, surreal moment. Finally, we got past those cars, and we all broke out in cheers and applause. Little did we know just around the bend the next group of vehicles awaited us.

 Quite a while later, we arrived at a two-lane road…but there were new challenges. The driver did not know exactly where to go from that point to pick up the main road to Shimla. I had the directions on the GPS. But as I passed that information along to the tour guide who passed it on to the driver, it appeared he preferred to ask directions from the locals. Perhaps the locals did know the road conditions and directions better than my GPS. But from my perspective the driver made a couple of turns that took us even further away from the direction we wanted to go. In short, this detour from the detour took about two hours.

Once back on the main highway, we were again weaving back and forth on the curved road, up and down the mountains, and I was once again dozing, a little scared and praying. We stopped for a long lunch at a roadside stand. By now it was late in the afternoon, and we had hours to go. The sun would soon set. The bus driver sat straight in his seat, turning that steering wheel to and fro for hours, changing gears higher and lower, as we made our way up to Shimla. Night driving in the mountains on a ramshackle tour bus? I tried not to think about the condition of the brakes, the possibility of the bus breaking down. Or worse. I dozed again.

 Later, I opened my eyes. Now, it was dark, and the two-lane highway was crowded with hundreds of trucks, in our lane, coming toward us in the other lane, and parked on both sides of the road. Now we were passing, dodging, and weaving around them, horn beeping a warning of our intentions, the gears of the bus grinding as we chugged up and roared down the mountains. A new reason for anxiety and a new reason to go back to my uneasy rest. Would this trip ever end?

 As we arrived nearer to Shimla, we traveled on a rutted stone-road bypass lined with parked trucks, and the full effect of worn-out shocks was added to the weaving, honking horn, grinding gears, and near misses. Finally, finally, after being on the road for 12 hours, we arrived at the hotel.

 I wouldn’t say I feared for my life every single moment of the bus ride. But I will say that I did wonder a little bit if this would be my untimely end. The funny thing is that the bus driver was a master at handling the bus. He knew exactly what he was doing. Yes, there was room for error, and something terrible might have happened. But it wouldn’t have been because he wasn’t in full command of the bus.

And it made me think about life and how you can go through it, afraid and hiding from your fears, like I was, half awake and not fully engaged in the adventure of riding a rickety tour bus through the lower Himalayas. Too afraid to see what might be coming next around that bend rather than enjoying the view, talking with my new tour group friends, or simply marveling at the expertise of the driver on that amusement-park-like ride. Taking a chance and trusting his abilities or even feeling a calm stemming from the knowledge my end would come whenever it came, whether or not I hid from or anticipated it.

 I had been fearful all day on this Ash Wednesday in India. But I have to ask myself: Is fearing mortality the same as contemplating it?

In choosing to be afraid, what had I missed on the road to Shimla?

Christ Church, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India