Five minutes after we reached the local school, three children appeared on the nearby hill slope. They walked, stopped, stared, smiled — all together, in one shy huddle. It was like three stalks on one root aflutter in the breeze. For a while they lingered near the school wall, then slowly drifted close to the trekkers.
Sheela is fun…
Suddenly, with no warning, the coy façade gave way to a burst of energy. They ran about, jumped and, in mock competition, two held hands while the third ran in and cleared the hurdle. Then, they carried each other on the shoulder; a tall demon from Dussehra on slender legs, punctuated at the top and in the middle by 70 mm smiles, the whole thing moving about like a drunkard as the restless weight on top dictated direction in the school yard. Three awkward steps, four, five — then, the tall demon collapsed in a heap of legs, hands, clothes and laughter.
Our tents were half up. That was when we heard — “my name is Sheela,
Two young men walked in; their strides firm, as though to remind all whom the small school belonged to. One of them had a radio glued to his ear. It emitted a very familiar set of sounds — Wankhede stadium in the throes of a cricketing spectacle. The World Cup final was on in distant Mumbai and India was playing Sri Lanka.
Namik was roughly to the east of Pindari Glacier in the Kumaon Himalayas. That is, however, a poor way of describing location and distance in the mountains. The route went up and down several ridges.
Finally, you came upon a village of a few houses, a shop belonging to one Mr Bhandari, who was delighted at the unexpected clientele, a clutch of smiling children, curious women, serious young men.
But Sheela is no painkiller
If what those young men of Namik told me was right, then the tiny village had only one television. It was powered by solar energy, and in the new climate of the Himalaya, when the seasons have stopped resembling those of yore, April had come to mean grey skies and too little sunshine for solar batteries.
So, on that crucial day of the cricket final, Namik's satellite TV stayed blank. M. S. Dhoni's captain's knock was a picture described in commentator's words; the way cricket used to be heard in Mumbai decades ago.
Yet, on some winter day, somewhere between the tail-end of 2010, when the film Tees Maar Khan was released, and that bleak April day of the World Cup cricket final, Namik had found enough solar power to see Sheela and she, in turn, had left an impression on the children. A piece of the latest from Mumbai while all else was decades behind.
Next morning, a woman stopped me in the village and made the routine plea of the mountains — did I have a painkiller? She was in pain; the sort that changes on query from headache to stomach-ache to some other ache, but an ache nevertheless. “We have no medicines here. The nearest hospital is in Bageshwar,” she explained.
If only Sheela was a doctor, I thought.
Such is development. What you get is rarely what you need.
(The author is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai.)