Aah, remember the days of adventure-filled wanderings - one backpack, a one-way ticket & a guidebook only? Just found this story in my archives,published in The Weekend Australian, way back in 2002: INCIDENTAL TOURIST by Kerrie Hall India; either you love or you hate it. Mother India, as locals and generations of adventurers know only too well, is a land of myriad contrasts. I was here for the food, adventure and a little education to add to my life curricula. Education comes in many guises. Fate forces us to rest at the border of Little Tibet, the last Shangri La, perched atop the Ladakh plateau of the Himalaya, described by some as more Tibetan than Tibet. Tomorrow, we should reach Leh, a mythical land in my imagination, but in reality home to many thousands of Tibetan refugees. Then suddenly, everything changes forever. For the first time in my life I pray, very serious prayers. Silently I promise that I will spend Christmas with my family, study at university, and do what I can to make a difference to the world. I cant believe what is happening around me. I argue, very briefly, with my travelling companion, a former partner, over whose idea it was to come here in the first place. As you do. We had stopped to change bus in Kargil, a predominantly Muslim trade centre close to the disputed border of India and Pakistan. The landscape is bare, bleak like a moonland, but strangely beautiful. It is a lovely sunny afternoon, except mortar shells shoot from the blue sky like hail in a summer storm. The earth shudders with thundering explosions every few minutes. The town is blowing apart. Taking refuge in a hotel dining room I feel like I am on a movie set. Men pace the room, chain smoking cigarettes. Women and children hide beneath head scarves and abandoned food buffets. One matron voices the collective fear and grief as she wails and weeps to Allah. Crouched beside me to my left, is Rinchen, a young Ladakhi woman of Tibetan ancestry, who has come to Kargil to be married. She shakes her head in disbelief whilst grasping a cloth amulet worn as a protective charm. I ask her what is inside the grubby red fabric. Her English is a lot better than my Ladakhi. Message from His Holiness, Dalai Lama, she replies in a whisper. Huddled on my right is a tiny, fine boned village girl. Tears streak her face. Clothed in a filthy, torn peasant dress, her tiny body shakes in terror. She is a pretty waif, about six years old. Traditional silver and turquoise jewellery hangs from baby earlobes and around her cygnet neck. I guess she is the daughter of a goat herder. She occasionally glances at me before crawling inward again to shed her silent tears. I can only offer a feeble attempt at comfort as the town groans and cries under the destruction of incessant mortar attack. The shells were launched from across the border, we are told. When it will end, nobody knows. By the end of the day, sources declare twenty people were killed. We flee Kargil in the blackness of the early morning aboard a TaTa freight truck. The driver wears a white turban. He is a Sikh. A third passenger, a Pommy named John, sits white-faced and silent for most of the journey as we skirt the Pakistani border. I too sit quietly, reluctant to breathe. We are sitting ducks. The driver coasts slowly hardly daring to switch on the headlights, toward our lifeline at the Drass Indian Army base. I hold my breath on the hairy razorback bends wondering whether this trip was indeed to be my last. After what seems a decade the sun rises, above a rose tinted bare mountain scape, glinting on a silver domed mosque. We had arrived. This morning I declare, in time worn cliche, is the first day of the rest of my life. We pay the driver his fee of three hundred rupees for smuggling us to freedom. It is well worth the money.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 05:33:30 +0000
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