the Baralacha La, and we could even see the Karakoram.” The slides moved almost too quickly for us to register details as Veer showed us pictures of prayer wheels, exotic Buddhist dwellings, and the monasteries of Shey, Thikse, Alchi. It was remote, spectacular, and unfamiliar for those of us who had only seen such great heights from a distance. Another click: a view from the Ladakh plateau of barren land far below. Veer said, “That is China; half of Pangong lake falls in China. Nobody is allowed up that close to the boundary, but I knew someone in the Army. We left our motorbikes and trekked all over Ladakh and reached here in the end.”
“So if we start walking today in Ranikhet, one day we will reach China?” This was Ama.
Diwan Sahib said, “You’d get a bullet in your head when you crossed over.” Diwan Sahib had no patience with Ama’s garrulity and what he called her “animal husbandry department”. Every so often he had futile arguments with her over her goats lunching on the lilies and marigolds that still survived in his garden.
“Arre Ama,” the clerk said, “your forefathers and mine walked to China many times. That’s what my great grandfather told me. He went twice with some firanghis in the time of the British.”
There was a babble of voices. “Your great grandfather was a coolie,” Ama said. “What was he doing in China?” Himmat Singh gave a series of phlegmy coughs and struggled up a thought: “I have heard they eat tigers in China. And dogs. They also eat dogs.” “Aah, but then what do the leopards in China eat if the people eat the dogs?” the clerk wanted to know. They laughed. Charu, who had not spoken so far, said, “I would kill any leopard or Chinese who laid a finger on my Bijli.”
“That useless dog has a magic life,” Ama said. “So many dogs get eaten. But this one roams all over in the dark and next morning he’s sitting right there, by the stove, waiting for a roti to fall.”
I sat back, warm in my shawl, feet tucked into it, a woolly bundle listening to voices eddying over me. Diwan Sahib began to talk about the Great Game – the intrigues and spying, the explorers sent in disguise over the undiscovered massifs, passes, peaks, and ravines of the Himalaya by the Russians and the British looking to gain control of them. The names of early travellers fell from his lips like those of old friends: George Moorcroft crossed the fast-flowing Sutlej on the inflated skins of buffaloes and travelled disguised as a Hindu sadhu to search for the goat whose wool made Pashmina shawls. Nain Singh Rawat surveyed the Himalaya to map it accurately for the first time. He was a Pandit from our region, the Kumaon, said Diwan Sahib, and he reached Lhasa, Xinjiang, Nepal, and China not once but three times in the 1860s. His brother Kishen Singh Rawat went to Lhasa too. At that time nobody even knew exactly where Lhasa was.
How did they do that, Charu said in wonderment, on foot? To which Ama replied, impatient, “That is what was his bijniss. Other people run shops and offices, his work was to measure distances. Just like us: don’t we walk up and down the hills after cows day after day in rain and sun and snow? Can a city person do that?”
“You illiterate woman,” Himmat Singh said. “Walking Ranikhet’s slopes is not like walking through the mountains to China.”
“They could walk for days,” Diwan Sahib said, “Look at Corbett. When he was hunting the Chowgarh tiger, he went without food for about two days, and he was quite comfortable sleeping in the forks of trees.”
“Maybe he thought an underfed man would be less appealing to a hungry tiger,” Veer said. “And a lighter weight on the forks of those trees.”
I thought Diwan Sahib would lose his temper this time. Why was Veer attacking Corbett again? It was childish, the way he tried to antagonise Diwan Sahib. But Diwan Sahib went on as if Veer had not spoken and I relaxed in my shawl again. “Those people were made differently from us,” he said. Nain Singh Rawat had to use exactly 2,000 footsteps per mile, using a rosary with a hundred beads to keep count. Because the Chinese would have executed him if they found him, he travelled dressed as a lama, turning his prayer wheel, in which he had hidden a