DHARAMSALA, INDIA – Bus ride from Delhi . I’ll sum it up for you.
Twelve hours through the middle of the night, cramped beyond belief, knees crushed from the jerk violently leaning back his seat, cold as three witches breasts doing push-ups in the snow wearing brass bras because of a stuck-open window, the bumpiest road on the planet (one bump caught my butt in some sort of gravitational lacking suspension . until my head met the bus’s roof).
After all of that we got dropped off 12 miles from the Pakistan border in the middle of cold nowhere.
So anyway, for the past few days I’ve been acclimatizing to the cow pedestrians and wandering the streets trying not to act like a teeny-bopper at an `N Sync concert with those peeking views of Himalayans and all the Tibetan Monks walking the streets, who are even staying in the room beside me.
It is the Tibetan New Year, which means that every Tibetan monk in the world is here for celebration and protest of China’s annexation, but most of all, they come for the next 15 days of the Dalai Lama’s teachings. I got a pass and I’m in there.
The peaks above the village taunt someone like me, tease me . until finally after two hours of being here, I had the maps pulled out, met a willing man named Peter from Denmark and had a trip planned.
It was hot, even in the morning. Winding up through ever-smaller villages, big steps over the limestone and shaled rocks. And after walking five kilometers past the sign that said “1 km to chai shop,” we found the first chai shop.
We sat sipping our chai tea, leaning our peeping eyes over the valley under, following the greens and yellows of the terraced land below.
My legs crossed and leaning back, I noticed a sign that hung just over the Pepsi bottles. It read “For evil to take place, all it takes is for good people to do nothing.”
As it got higher and higher, the group of three spread out. I waited a few times but would continue my billy-goat pace enjoying the solace.
In my solitude I found thought after thought. While writing chapters of my novel in my head, jotting down scenes periodically from my head to pad, a few thoughts came to mind of the beautiful girl with the crescent moon on her forehead, whom I had met standing in line to get my Dalai Lama security pass. I think I finished the thought off with, “I sure do like pretty girls.”
The peaks came back into view and the temperature was dropping, gray clouds the culprit. Finally at the top, the little drops of snow had grown to soft, beautiful marblesized pellets of hail.
They sprinkled around as I dropped my pack and sat down, drinking up those mountains I’d waited so long to taste. I wanted to go higher, but that requires more than two days, and anyway, I’ve already planned that for next week.
Across the field, this girl came walking, hood drawn over and tight, knuckles bound by pulled-over sleeves. As she unveiled herself, I recognized her from behind my fickle-smitten, rose-colored spectacles . hard to miss a girl like this, drop-dead gorgeous, and again with the moon between her eyes.
She was freezing, but wanted to stay. She shivered in her lack of clothes and needed to go. I cursed myself, my mom and my dad and whoever else for not making me do the Boy Scout thing.
For, if just one of us had not fouled up, my “moonbeam” girl could’ve hung around as drop-jawed as I was, looked at those big sharp mountains and then walked back down to the valley at my side. If only I’d been a Boy Scout, I might have been prepared.
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