Turning 40 did it for me. That and a health scare – some nodules in the thyroid. The kid was nearly seven at that time and I had spent most of those years chasing deadlines that mattered only to the microcosmic world of the weekly magazine that I was a deputy editor at.
Quitting a paying job after having worked for 20 odd years is like jumping into an ice-cold pond. It wakes you up to certain realities in a way the drudge of the daily grind does not allow for. Who am I? What is my worth if I no longer earn a monthly salary? What do I do with my time? What do I want to do? How many times can one play doctor-doctor or teacher-teacher with Barbie dolls and an insomniac 7-year-old before wondering what is the meaning of life?
The answers have led me stumblingly to this point in my life as a writer where I am working on that cliché that is a first novel draft, while trying to build a readership on social media (ugh! I have a middle-class distaste for self-promotion, but such is life.) Quitting also gave me time to make a list of places that I wanted to visit. Top of the list were the Indian Himalayan foothills that I had seen so much of on Instagram, Facebook, and Bollywood movies. Any part of the foothills, every part of it.
I was born in a small corner of Kerala, tucked away into the folds of the Western Ghats, called Malappuram. After that first one year of my life in Malappuram, and initial childhood in the flat plains of Gujarat, I have spent my life by the seaside, at zero feet altitude. And through all these years my heart hankered for something else – a universal state of being, I realise. The literal translation of Malappuram is land of hills, and I have often wondered if something of my birthland seeped into my cells. Maybe that is why I am drawn to the hills and mountains of the world.
Let me clarify here that I have no ambition to conquer mountainous peaks, though I have gone on one high altitude trek. I want to sit somewhere a quarter of the way up and admire the beauty of it all. I seek the mountains, just to gaze and be awed. Mountains remind me that I am part of a whole – a tiny part of a system that somehow works without me and yet is kind enough to let me walk in it, breathe its air, and wet my feet in its waves. I am humbled.
I have experienced something similar when I stood at the sandy and sometimes rocky shores of Chennai and Pondicherry, the waves crashing rhythmically and humming with an energy echoed deep within us. The sea, with its untamed beauty and power frightens me, and I hang on to a pretence of control by telling myself, “As long as I don’t go in too deep, I am fine!” But high up amongst the mists, pines and rocks of the Ghats or the Himalayan foothills, there is no pretence of control. The mountains have my heart. I look up and I see gorgeous towering peaks, and closer to me towering alpine trees. I look down and I see the ground plummeting away from me, and the beautiful beginnings of massive plain rivers that are just happy to be gurgling and skipping over rocks and pebbles at this point. I witness Earth as God must have surely intended her to be – pristine and starkly beautiful.
While the hypnotizing rhythm of the waves keep track of every passing moment and I am intensely aware of the passage of time, in the mountains, time stands still. It is an illusion. I know that. The shedding leaves and gurgling streams… these are all our timekeepers. However, it is at a pace that I am at peace with. I am aware of the dangers and yet cede control. I willingly submit to what will be.
In the years since, the last two lost years aside, I have made it a point to spend at least a week either on the Western Ghats or the Himalayan Foothills. It involves all the juggling and contortions that mothers wanting to travel alone have to deal with before stepping a foot outside their front door. My first visit to the foothills, however, wasn’t a solo trip. It was a road trip with my husband, daughter, bestie and her family – a total of four adults and three children, under 6 years of age, in one XYLO, on the hilly roads for 9 whole days! You could formulate a math problem out of this – (4 adults + 3 young kids) x 9 days =?. Surprisingly, not chaos and bedlam.
This first road trip also laid the roots for my first novel which is set in the… surprise, surprise… Himalayan foothills.
This has become a longer post than I expected. Over the next few posts I will share the story of my first encounter with the Himalayas.
I want to end this post with an excerpt from The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009 that better sums up what I have been trying to say. In it Philip Connors, the American essayist and author says, “The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble — to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consume nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.”
Thank you for reading.
A Mountain Person
I loved the description of your journey to your current writing aspirations. I have always enjoyed how smooth your writing flows...
Loved it. So much. And thanks for signing out with that quote. I have a lot of respect for those who decide and execute their ‘once a year time in the hills’ type ideas. I have slightly more respect for those who execute their ideas and then capture their time like you have done here. Thank you