Two years on the gates to the Roof of the World. An absorbing account from the diary of Captain Pinaka Roy, Indian Army.
The dominant feeling of those two years in the mountains was one of loneliness and boredom pierced by the glorious white panorama of great mountains harking the sky. One awoke out of cramped sleep in an unwashed smelly sleeping bag to the sound of the Gorkha pumping the primus stove in your rathole. Then he went out in the rocks with a pick axe and started hacking ice to make water. He came back carrying a quarried block of ice and started breaking it with a stone into smaller clods. They spluttered when he slipped them into the empty milk-powder can used to melt ice on the primus. I watched over the rim of my sleeping bag, as he worked in the light of a sooty lantern. It was still dark outside the small tin igloo perched on the ledge of a high, soaring mountain. Sepoys had made boulder pathways between tin igloos along the steep boulder slope. The rocks were the size of rooms and tractors, black gray rock that had lain for millions of years at the brimming pinnacles of the Himalayas. The mountains lay closed by the snow on all sides. The north face of our home mountain was Tibet. The highest wall that I have seen fell from our mountain a few thousand metres into the fissures of Tibet.
"Leave the door open". He pushed the steel door hard and it screeched, crushing and grating over the icicles. There was a dark void beyond the yellow shadow. The flame tongues of the primus danced like a movie playing on the sooty conclave wall. He knew his breath was frosting in front of his face.
"Should I light the bukhari?" asked the batman. "No leave it". The interior of the hut was swimming in kerosene fumes. Everything smelt of kerosene; it was the sour fragrance of his life on the steep mountain.
He looked at his Murga wrist watch. The battalion baniya sold it at fifteen rupees a piece. He pressed a small pimple on the watch face. The watch spoke out the time and a cock inside it did a cock-a-doodle. Still half an hour to dawn and the day's first report to the adjutant far down below in the battalion headquarters. He wondered if the telephone line was working. It was a recurring problem and for weeks they stayed cut out of communication. The best thing to do when it snowed for days on end was to stay inside your stone holes or your tin igloo, sallying out off and on with spades to clear your door and roof from getting buried under tons of snow. You cut the ice all around, using the spade as an axe and scoop and throw the ice over the snow parapets.
"I am going to get tea". The Gorkha left unobtrusively and followed the clumps in his thick snow boots. It was dangerous, negotiating the rocks in the dark. You slipped on ice and could end up with a broken bone. The Gorkhas could move with a blindfold within the spread of their company and on most of the scree trails and through the giant boulders. The snow boots were two or three sizes too big for most of them. The thick khaki woolen socks slipped into the empty toe space and bunched there; they had to frequently untie the laces and pull them up.
The green magneto phone started whirring. He picked it up. The sound of the man at the base telephone exchange came faint and dim over miles of cable.
"Snowing, visibility ten metres, NTR, nothing to report". He put the handset in the notch of the phone. The report hardly ever varied in the snow and ice months. On clear days when the sun came out, he would haul himself up, pulling at the ropes tied to iron pickets hammered home into sheer rock face. Ploughing through waist high snow he would bulldoze his way to the machine gun bunker that overlooked the pass. It was a grand wide saddle, sloping into India. The slope burst into emerald green grass in the summer months and hundreds of Tibetan yaks converged there to graze. Now it was all a sheet of ice and snow.
........to be continued.
Tailpiece.
Got up a bit reluctantly, the chores and was ready by a 20' to 10. Fixed up with Appu about our trip to Palakkad this Saturday. A course mate of mine along with his daughter have been tested covid positive. Thankfully, his wife is free from it!
Another quiet day, otherwise.
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