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The Lady Sadhu
by Sue Kernaghan
Excerpts:
“To roam about in the Himalayas in gypsy fashion, meeting with trifling adventures from time to time, is a complete change for an ordinary English girl, and it is easy to find every scope for developing self control and energy in many a tight corner.”
— Miss Isobel Savory, 1907
I was preparing to visit a holy woman — the only Indian holy woman I’d heard of. She lived, I’d been told, in a cave in the rock above the source of the river Ganges.
The trip was a popular pilgrimage, and in India pilgrims are generally well catered to. There would be, I imagined, sweet tea and cardamom cookies, forest rest houses, buses when I needed them, and troops of holy men and eccentrics to keep me company on the road.
I was wrong. There were no buses past Uttarkashi and my last ride, with a forestry department truck, stopped only half way up what my map said was a highway. “Sorry,” said the driver, as he handed down my pack and geared into reverse.“Block.”
Block means landslide. I stepped round the next bend and saw what he meant. There, on a tight curve in the river, where years of wood burning had stripped the hillsides bare, a whole mountain had come to its knees.What had been a scree slope was now low-lying rubble, tangled with tree stumps, electrical wires and probably bits of villages. The slide had sliced away 50 yards of road, strangling the valley and trapping the holy waters of the Ganges in a great and growing puddle of debris.
The block had slid inconveniently between two sections of an Indo-Tibetan border police camp, forcing the soldiers to scamper back and forth across the rubble from their sleeping huts to their mess tents. I did the same, stepping gingerly along the six-inch wide causeway of granite chips that formed the beginning of the new road. The officer in charge told me that an earthquake the previous year had loosened the rock and this summer’s early monsoon had brought it down. The road had been closed for six weeks and no vehicle, not even a pony, had been able to enter or leave the valley.
He didn’t question my motives for traveling, or my solitude, but he wasn’t at all impressed with my paperwork. After leafing through my wad of permits, letters and guesthouse chits, he fished out pen and paper to add something of his own. He wrote in careful, capitalized English: “TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: Miss Susan Kernaghan (Canadian passport number 264587) is hoping to travel to Gamukh via Gangotri. As the buses are not yet plying she will be traveling by foot. I request you to give her every possible assistance.”
“Should I say you are carrying out very important researches?” He smiled and added that in.
“I do hope you have a most fruitful journey,” he said warmly. “The people in the valley are very kind and they will help you. If there are no more earthquakes, I think you will be quite safe.”
The soldiers outside his office hut politely handed back my diary, though not before finishing the pages they were reading, and namasted goodbye . . . . . . . . . I was grateful to reach the plateau. It was a flat expanse of grass cut here and there with streams — runoff from glaciers higher up. I saw a hawk flying east to Tibet. The colors, blues and greens, were deliciously intense and I could smell wood smoke from Bhojwasa several miles away. Every sound, color and scent was exaggerated in the thin air. I sat down in front of the cave to catch my breath and wait for the Lady Sadhu . . .
