Indian Summer

Six and a half years since I have last been in Dharamsala, and seemingly, a small lifetime. It is a strange thing, to return to a place that was never quite familiar to begin with. Memories come back to me in flashes, moments, with passing scents. I look through the curtained window of a small cafe ... and I have been there before. But with whom? What did we talk about, so many years ago? It is as if I encounter myself in a memory, in a dream. I was so young then, so fully vital and so alive. I am by myself now, and still quite young. In the early afternoon I walk out of McLeod Ganj along the Bagsu road. I remember a waterfall somewhere, and I want to find it again. Along the deserted road there is a small cafe with stone steps leading down to a small house. I remember that house, suddenly. It was the temporary house of a man called Gary, a crazy American who eventually left India to become an astronaut. Gary was a man of wild and ridiculous theories, and if he saw you from a restaurant walking down the street, he would run out shouting to you about his lastest idea. One thing he always complained about was the intrusion of artificial light in the night sky of the Himalayas. He argued that all artifical outdoor lighting should be replaced with red light bulbs, as it wasn't perceptible from space and didn't give the sky a purplish haze. Red light also has the added benefit, he said, of turning people on. So in addition to quelling the problem of light pollution, people would also become more sexually inclined in general. And how much violent conflict in the world might be averted, argued Gary, if people spent their nights making love and not war? He used to travel with this enormous telescope. He was a friend of my flatmate in Kathmandu, who told me he might be stopping by one day. The first time I met him, he was standing alone in my flat, all six and a half feet of him, wearing nothing but a sarong, looking into people's windows with his telescope in the middle of the afternoon. It's to see the stupa better, he reasoned, after introducing himself. I was in love with his best friend, and together we all had a few adventures in Nepal and northern India. I wonder what has become of him. I climb a shale path up through Bagsu and I eventually find the waterfall cafe - just a tin shack with a tarpaulin roof serving chai, in the middle of nowhere. I come upon a bend in the road, and a wilted rhododendron tree, and my mind flashes back again. There was a field of yellow mustard flowers, once upon a time, very near to here. On the roof of Gary's house I met two Swedish girls who taught me how to knit. One sunny day, I took my yarn out to this mustard field, when the rhododendron trees were in full bloom. There was in Indian woman there, picking rhododendron blooms and gathering them in her enormous shawl. She smiled at me, laughed at my knitting and sat next to me to pluck the blooms and collect the petals. She spoke to me in Hindi, and I tried my best to communicate in broken Nepali. Chutney, she said, I am making chutney. In response to my disbelief, she shoved a handful of flowers into her mouth, and gestured for me to do the same. Which I did. So we sat there together, plucking petals and eating them. She invited me back to her home for dal bhaat, and after lunch she began sewing and gestured for me to continue my knitting as I sat there on the dirt floor. I said goodbye after an hour or so, and as I left she gave me her beaded necklace. These are the things I remember.