India. Brief Encounters

Holy Man

Relaxing on my verandah enjoying a small sample of whiskey from one of India's finest six dollar bottles of spirit, I saw him appear through the orchard like a spray of mist. A mat of dirty white hair covered the entirety of his head, his nose and the dark recesses of his eyes were the only remaining vestiges of his face open to any scrutiny. A woven shoulder-bag strap cut diagonally across the white robes he wore, and two dirty black feet protruded from beneath his garb like the gnarled roots of an ancient tree. Leaning on a silver three pronged staff he halted a short distance from my relaxation, bowed with hands in the prayer position, rose, and then placed an open hand flat against his stomach. He was thin and he spoke.

"Please, rice?" No movement manufactured these words. His eyes were passive and calm.

Reaching into his shoulder bag the man produced a silver bowl and spokie again.

"Rice?"

Going to the kitchen I located the rice container, its weight a relief. I returned to the ghostly figure at my step and poored half of my container's contents into his. He nodded, bowed again, placed his bowl back in to his bag and disappeared back into the apple trees.


Raju

Raju's first wife died falling off a mountain while she was cutting grass for their buffalo. His second wife ran off with her young lover. He has lost two of his four children at childbirth, and as a younger man he unwillingly spent periods of up to six months in maoist mountain camps as compensation for his family's inability to provide food for the nepalese rebels when they came to his village and demanded it. At twenty Raju left Nepal and sought safety and finincial security in managing a guesthouse in Old Manali, he having to spend six months a year away from his village to do so. Raju is up at six every morning cooking, cleaning, welcoming and managing the twelve room accommodation house until eleven every night, he earns two thousand five hundred rupees a month for his labour.

Although this man has endured more hardship than I could possibly imagine I have never heard him be anything other than greatful for his life, and his witty humor and broad smile light up the rooms, balconies and corridors of the building like a himilayan dawn. He displays enormous character and charm

This will be his fifteenth and last year in India he tells me, as he now has enough money to buy a small house and a small plot of land. Here he will be able to support his third wife and their two children without being away from Nepal. This makes Raju very happy.

Raju is the happiest person I have met in India. He could be excused if he weren't



Lady

I've see her most mornings in the last week, she always greeting me with a smile from under the load of rocks she carries on her back. They are held in place by a wooden ledge that is attached to her body via a chest harness and she walks with a perpetual stoop from the many years of this back breaking work. Her face is carved deep with lines, her skin like brown shiny marble, set as hard as the rocks she's laboured under all this time. She has been carrying her loads up and down a steep road that is under repair, it being to narrow to allow the truck to deposit the building material at the site required. I have seen her as early as six in the morning and as late as seven in the evening, plodding along with metronomic consistency under the weight of her occupation, she never failing to look up and smile.

The young men watch her come and go while they chat amongst themselves lazily, never once lending a hand.