Touring the himalayas

My short brown hair only added to the fact that I clearly did not fit in. My jeans and casual t-shirt stood out among the salwar-kurtas that the women around me had worn and adorned with what is locally called the 'dupatta' - a cloth worn around the neck which hung around the bosom in V-shape and unlike a muffler or scarf had it's two ends hanging freely at the back. The purpose of this 'dupatta', as I had learned while I was still pre-adolescent, was to cover the bosom so that it would not attract unwarranted attention from the opposite sex. Wearing a dupatta, however, would not in any way make you resilient to the eve-teasing that would still form a part of your daily existence, if you happened to live in any part of India, is what I had learned on my own.

My travel bag was stuffed at the front of the bus near the co-driver's seat for it was far too big to fit in the tiny section that had been provided above each window. Every time the bus made a halt (which it did every five minutes) I would stretch my neck as far out as I could to make sure that my bag wasn't being carried off by someone who had decided to claim it for his or her own.

I was lost in thought when a poke from the passenger sitting next to me, a middle-aged man with white stubble and a moderately big belly, startled me. He was telling me to look outside the window, from which we had a clear view of what looked like an ocean. But we were deep in the mountains, and I knew in another instant, that I was looking at the Tehri Dam. Named so because to create it, the nineteen villages of 'Tehri' had to be submerged. The locals of course were rehabilitated but rumour had it that if that there was a major earthquake in this region, the dam would break and flood the entire state. "If it breaks, water will reach Delhi in less than fifteen minutes," he said in surprisingly good english. Fifteen minutes?! That was close to impossible, I thought to myself. "Really, my engineer friend told me," he continued as if he had read my mind.

But it was indeed a majestic sight. The water went on and on, it was too wide to even be captured as a picture on my cellphone. I could see a rope-way in the distance, stretched across it's narrowest width, connecting it to the villages on the other side - the villages that I had to travel to next. A ropeway to me had always been a ride, much like a ferris wheel. But I realised that here, it was an everyday means of travel, and inconveniently so.