We drop into a roadside café, where truck drivers eat dosas and samosas and sweets. The tarpaulin pulled over the top creates small corners in which bugs hide in piles of dust. The cans of coke we buy are crusted with something similar. No trail mix or kendal mint bars for us here, so we buy a few backets of bourbon biscuits and head on our way.
Farizabad advertises itself as a ‘tourist resort’ and there’s a sign on the right of the car park for a ‘bar and restaurant’ we won’t even bother to follow, even though we’re all starving already. A sign for ‘boating and sailing’ points to a dried-up stagnant river in the middle of some marshland. In it, water buffalo toss algaed water into the air with their snouts. Strangely, someone decided it would be a good idea to sell camel rides, and two of the dehydrated beasts lift their heads dejectedly as we pass. Children run around us, their mothers pulling them forward for us to take their picture, clicking their fingers in the air in front of the faces in that universal, futile attempt to make children look at a camera.
The Indians we meet can’t quite understand why we would want to go hiking. Why walk up a pile of rocks, just to walk down them again? We attract the attention of a gang of boys playing cricket beside the water buffalo, and they want us to join, but we politely decline. Indians are the world’s cricketers, and even without our hiking boots on, our certain thrashing would frankly be embarrassing. But where are we going? They ask. As we point to the distant horizon they are even more confused.
So, covered in burrs and sporadically emitting shrieks every time we loose a footing, we hike to the top of a small hill. We stop to survey the safety of our next step, try the solidity of the next rock, and try and find some kind of non-thorned bracken to hold on to. In the meantime, two skinny brown ten year-olds have spotted us from below, and leap like nymphs from boulder to boulder. They are now standing above us, looking down quizzically. They leapfrog before us, singing softly and occasionally asking for biscuits and money. We give them some bourbon biscuits. A few hundred yards to our left, women are working amid the hot stones, hacking away at the bracken. They all stare at us in confusion as we snap pictures of each other and giggle as we attempt to climb trees. The boys munch and look on in bemusement.
India is beautiful. It’s always been the dream of photographers and travel writers, even the most inexperienced of whom find themselves with the Midas touch, writing about maharajahs, and taking the mandatory pictures of beautiful dusty children adorned with jewels and paint. There’s a mystique that touches GAP year students and young travellers, and infuses in them a spiritual ephiphany that they return home and evangelise to their friends and family. India has created music, dance and art that the West finds irresistable. And here it’s humdrum. Incense is burned like charcoal. The embroidered and bejewelled saris women wear to work are ‘only everyday styles’. Men sit atop elephants which saunter down the inside lane of the road, and nobody bats an eyelid. Candles and colours and music and dancing happen every day and everywhere. It’s Indian Ikea. The fact that it might be at all special both confuses and delights locals. As far as they are concerned, there is no mysticism or magic about it. As the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, once said, “To a Western observer our civilisation appears as all metaphysics, as to a deaf man piano playing appears to be mere movement of fingers and no music.”
It’s easier to feel that you are part of generations of foolish Westerners who, standing agog, have bought into the idea of some kind of magical Indianism. But, when you sit in a tree, on top of a mountain, looking over at the vast scape of trees and strange-shaped birds, children playing cricket and buffalo crouching in the water, you realise that it’s even easier to be seduced by it. And it’s pointless trying to resist.
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