Sunday, April 25, 2004

The Infy Days : Trek to Perdition

OUR TREK

To To the uninitiated and to those who have never trekked, our experiences will definitely come as an eye opener. To those who have trekked already and know what happens on one, I daresay this will be even more of an eye opener!

Our Diary

Friday

11.15 pm- Hectic last minute preparations for the trek. Buying supplies- bags packed with truckloads of noodles, bread, jam, and biscuits…

We are also carrying 3 tents and a sleeping bag each, courtesy Infy.

11.30 pm – The tempo arrives and everybody packs into it. There’s a light drizzle, an omen of things to come. The 12 of us are in high spirits, songs and music all round. Shinu* is at his irrepressible best, cracking everybody up.

(*Shinu A Wahid- He’s somewhat of a legend in our group, enjoys cult follwing. Typical mallu accent, listening to his Hindi is an enriching experience. With an uncanny knack for well-timed humor, he’s one the few who will have you in splits, both laughing at and with him. A true combo of Jay Leno and Johnny Lever.

**Ken- Veteran of many treks in Japan, this was the guy who did not flinch a muscle thru the entire trek. His only concern was the supply of odomos, because he was quite bothered by the mosquitoes. Equipped with an awesome cam, the excellent pics are due to him. He also had a rather fundu watch, which apart from a lot of things displayed temperature, altitude, direction and of course time. Also picked up the word “chalo” during the trip.. )

Saturday

5.00 am- Touchdown at Kukke Subramanya.Don’t quite know what to do so early in the morning, generally loitering around. Some brave souls venture to take a bath in the river, which is overcrowded with overzealous devotees having a bath. Early morning sightings of topless elderly aunties do not help our appetites.

8.30 am-Breakfast and buying water and other supplies done, we start the trek. Bear in mind that yours truly is the only one who knows the route and my memory of what happened 3 years back is abysmally low, but a very well-kept secret. All I manage to tell everybody to any question posed during the entire trip is “Yup, just a little further”.

10.00 am- One and half hours of solid trekking seems like an eternity. The heavy tents and supplies hardly help; the oppressive humidity has started to take its toll on the mind, if not on the body. Murmurs of dissent have begun, and the initial grumblings and cribbing are becoming more vociferous. Images of the air-conditioned room in Infy have begun to flash, and as it always happens on a trek, everybody is asking himself the same question “Why am I doing this?” Every 10 minutes we ask Ken** the altitude, half-hoping, half-expecting it to have increased, but the needle barely shows signs of movement.

11.00 am-The vegetation is becoming thinner, the sun is beating down harder and the climb is getting steeper. More serious doubts arise about the availability of water, which has fast beginning to get exhausted…. Generosity suddenly disappears as each one tries to preserve his water for himself…. matters get worse when a 2 liter bottle develops a leak and all the water is wasted. There is general rancor in the air, as the group debates whether to go ahead or return. Our water can last us for a maximum of 2 hours, and we have no idea about where the next source of water will be. Yours truly vaguely remembers a pond from the last time I trekked here and I keep telling everyone it’s just around the corner. What happens in the next one hour I will describe later, but for now it will suffice to say, that we found a house, where they actually served food and had lots of water.

1.30 pm-Lunches is served, none of us know the contents, just know that whatever we are eating grows over here.” Delicious” acquires a new meaning, and even the dogs were surprised that somebody could eat faster than them.

4.00 p.m-Refreshed from the break, and with renewed vigor we start on our climb to our final destination, Kumara Parvatha…where we were planning to camp the night. This time, we are more conservative about the water supplies and wiser to trekking. Our goal is to find the elusive pond, which is the place where most people camp. By the time we reached the top, we were pretty much exhausted and wanted to camp desperately. The pond, as it turns out has no water.

6.00 p.m- Found a nice place to camp, just near the peak…. Started the process of finding out how to actually set up the tent…and were quite successful….

The bonfire was up and ready in no time and soon we were eating bread, jam, biscuits and noodles, quite similar to pigs. After a nice quiet dinner and lots of chatting, antakshari, and general banter we hit the sack at 10.What happened in the night will be explained later

Sunday

6.00 a.m-Sunrise, beautiful sunrise…. pack up, and come down to base camp.

So far so good, eh? Nice trek, pretty adventurous. What I have described above constitutes most normal treks, of which I have been a part of before.

But there were 2 moments in this trip which I shall proceed to narrate, which I call moments of truth. These are moments when your life flashes before your eyes, when die-hard atheists start praying like priests, when you experience everything you have seen in Hollywood movies, the only difference being you know that the movie will always have a happy ending. These are moments that the 12 of us will never forget, and will shudder every time we remember them. In spite of them being the most exciting time in our lives, I sincerely wish no other trekker has to go through what we did. In the following narration, I can only err on the side of making it sound less nerve-racking than it was.

WATER CRISIS

As we were walking up the mountains, it suddenly dawned on us that the elusive pond we had been searching for may have had dried up. It was 12 noon and the heat was now unbearable. Our water supplies fast depleting, our energy levels close to zero, the only driving factor was hope. We realized that we now did not even have enough water to go back and reach the place where we started from. Let me try to make you realize the gravity of the situation. For people who have always lived in urban and semi urban areas, there are many concepts alien to us. Like absolute lack of civilization. Try as we might, we can never reach a place in India where there are no people or houses. We have been completely spoilt by the ease of communication, which we take for, granted. Help is always a mobile call away, e-mail is always a five-minute drive away, so is food, water, and even Pepsi. It took sometime for it to hit us that there was none of this and the reality of losing our way and getting permanently lost was a distinct, albeit dreadful possibility. Slowly signs of desperation crept up our spine as we realized that surviving the afternoon was going to be a Himalayan task, given that we were at an altitude where there were not many trees for shade. Somewhere deep in the horizon someone spotted a board. With a whoop of joy and running now purely on adrenalin, we made a final desperate lunge to survival. What we saw killed everybody’s spirit and chilled us to the bone, with most of us completely losing hope of ever seeing plane land again. The board said “Wild animal’s zone. Entry is prohibited”.

As everybody’s mind went into a tizzy, some of the theories floating around was that we should make a fire so that at least the forest department would come and arrest us!.........It is really an experience in finding how people behave in a real crisis…..Nobody was offering anybody any water any more……

Then when all hope seemed abandoned we saw a bunch of guys walking towards us with water! Apparently they were taking water back for someone who had stopped much before and could not continue. These were the first humans we were meeting since base camp. There was a house about 20 minutes away, which actually served food to trekkers!!!!!!!

To give you an idea of how lucky we were, that house is the only house in the entire mountain range, and the people there have plantations, apart from actually serving food to trekkers!!

WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES…

If we thought the worst was behind us, what happened during the night was enough to eclipse whatever else happened during the entire trek.

After we put up the tents, and were cozy in our sleeping bags, started what can only be described as the most brutal storm I have ever seen. Once again, for those living in the city, we are insulated from nature’s fury by our concrete structures. We never actually realize how cruel a storm can be, how heavy a thunderstorm can be, and how strong winds can actually be. We are always close to any concrete structure, the solid structures all round always manage to dilute the intensity of any thunderstorm and we always manage to watch the rains with awe and admiration.

As the rains started and the winds roared, we struggled to keep our tents from flying. There was not a tree in sight as we had come up so far, and the only thing between the clouds and us was our tents, which were soon past tense.

But believe it or not, the rain and the wind were the least of our concerns compared to what we dreaded the most. - Lightning…..

To most of us used to seeing lightning from the comfort of our windows, it soon became apparent that this time it was directly above us.

Wet to the bone, as we desperately held on to the tents, every bout of lightning was a potential life-taker. It was totally out of question to go downhill in this storm. The only thing we could do and what we did with great fervor was pray.

To those who have seen Lord of the Rings, you can have a fairly good idea of how the sky looked like. The frequency of lightning was almost 4/second and it was omnipresent…(Diwali and 4th of July- take a bow)

. Somebody then made an observation that completely turned our intestine upside down.

“Guys, did you notice the tree stumps lying all round and the grass...Its all burnt ……how?”

Each one of us knew the answer to the question, but I have never seen such collective fear envelope a group before…

Every second when lightning struck we knew the probability of the next one hitting us just kept increasing and the time was just 12 midnight….6 hours to sunrise!

The only analogy I can think of is imagine being held in a Nazi concentration camp, and standing in front of a madman with a machine gun, taking potshots at you at point blank range. Your only solace is that he probably has a bad aim, since he keeps missing you

That night, probably for the first time in our lives, nature became our most dreaded enemy, and fighting for our survival against her brute force seemed futile, even downright silly. Spoilt by urban comforts, we always pride ourselves on how we have so much control over our lives. But that night as we were holding on to our tents and dear life, something alien to our very existence developed in us-the feeling of absolute, total helplessness. It would not have mattered if we had an Einstein with us, it would not have mattered if we had Bill Gates with us. Bereft of all our human comforts, we can only be mute spectators to nature’s magnificent fury.

It is quite one thing to escape death in an accident, or come out alive from a fire. They are all momentary.

It is altogether a different feeling waiting in a place for six hours and expecting death at every bout of lightning, quietly discussing if Infy’s insurance policy covered death by lightning.

Finally at 2’o clock when the storm finally subsided, we hastily came outside and rebuilt our tents before it could return. Thankfully it did not.

Six am in the morning, we had all slept from exhaustion, and as we woke up to a fantastic sunrise, the sweet smell of life felt ecstatic. There were high fives all round and cries of “we’re alive “abounded.

************

Today when you come across the twelve of us laughing, giggling, and sometimes even bragging about our great adventure, you can also spot that radiance in our smile. That comes from experiencing true luck, and knowing that we are lucky to be here. Try as we might I don’t think we will ever be able to forget the scenes of that night sky lit up like Las Vegas. We can never forget how we coldly discussed death as such a distinct possibility. And believe me, no matter what the other eleven say about their versions of the story and no matter how much bravado they inject into their reactions, for 2 hours that night, drenched in the rain and struggling to survive, HAMARI TO G… FUT GAYI.