The story behind a painting
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau
I once had a wonderful opportunity of working a short duration NOLS course – an outdoor management development programme for a bank – at a ‘dude ranch’ in the Bighorns in Montana. Three of us instructors had reached the ranch a day in advance to lay out navigation routes. That evening the ranch wranglers – trail guides of horsepacking* trips – invited us for a barbeque dinner. The chatter was typical, filled with stories about clients and students and near misses and joyful experiences. And then a wrangler, a big cowboy, asked me if I had been to the Himalaya. When I answered in the affirmative I saw his eyes go big! He actually shifted his position to face me completely and started shooting questions. You should have seen his face when I mentioned some altitudes that I had been to!
The multiple adventure trips to the Himalaya over decades often tends to dull my mind to the marvel and magnitude of this stupendous phenomenon called the Himalaya. And it needs an occasional outsider’s perspective to remind me of everything that this range is – a young, raw, dangerous and yet incredibly thrilling, beautiful and inviting terrain on Earth! Moments like this take me back to the awe and wonderment I had experienced when I first went there. Most ‘firsts’ tend to generate nostalgia rooted in strong impacts on one’s mind. My first experience of the Himalaya happened when I was a reticent youngster, and which led me to paint a scene that still adorns the walls of a dear relative. This is the story behind the painting.
I was in the third year of senior college. I had gone to Manali to attend a Nature Education Camp organised in the summer of 1983 by the erstwhile World Wildlife Fund (now known as the Worldwide Fund for Nature or WWF). While sitting transfixed by the views seen from the bus lumbering up the mountains in the final stretches of the road to Manali, I caught a sudden fleeting glimpse of a snow clad peak in the distance and felt the ludicrous excitement experienced by persons from the regions south of the Gangetic plains when they see their first snow, however distant! So it was with tremendous excitement and expectations that I reported to the nature camp which was situated along a steep stream somewhere above the hot springs of Vashistha. I was privileged to have as our instructor the renowned (late) Shri. Lavkumar Khachar himself, celebrated ornithologist and nature conservationist who had conceived and initiated the nature education movement funded by the WWF. In addition to his ‘nature nuggets’, what I also enjoyed tremendously was striding up and down conifer covered slopes and traversing snow patches in gullies, hardly believing that I was finally, finally experiencing the enchanting world of the Himalaya!
As soon as I had registered for the nature camp my father, as ardent and enthusiastic a tourist as I have ever seen, had promptly planned a family holiday in Manali, then a dream destination for the modest middle class. My parents and my younger brother arrived in Manali on the day my nature camp ended and I moved into a more leisurely mode of experiencing the region. This time I was armed with a prized possession of the family: an Agfa Isoly II camera! The camera used the 120 format film that had sixteen 4 x 4 cm. frames. I remember how I used to scrupulously switch between its shutter speed options of 1/30, 1/120, ‘B’ and self-timer, and aperture options of portrait, group photo and landscape! Those were the days when photography was uncommon, an esoteric hobby, and where a photographer’s position by default was behind the camera with the lens pointed at the world. I was mighty pleased with my father who had splurged on two black-and-white rolls for the trip. I had already developed the approach of giving much thought to deciding a frame before taking the plunge to depress a tentative forefinger placed on the ‘click button’. So two film rolls was a luxury!
One of the trips that we did was to Rohtang Pass (3,980 m. / 13,058 ft.) that connects the Kullu Valley with the Lahaul and Spiti Valleys. That road rose up steeply above the village of Palchan and we soon started passing patches of snow, and then narrow stretches where the road squeezed through passages excavated in massive slabs of old snow and ice. At some places the height of the snow walls on both sides of the road was seen to be believed. Clouds occasionally swirled around us, the only sound in the surrounding silence being the growl of our vehicle’s engine. While the nature camp had been a heady experience of days filled with lots of information, adventure and camp life, the quiet drive up to Rohtang Pass brought in a contemplative pause for me. As the scenery changed with altitude, becoming more and more austere with each turn of the road, I became aware of how wild and rugged a world the Himalaya was. The vast landscape with its windswept slopes was bleak, a very different one from the luxuriant, lively green world that I had experienced down in the valley. The play of enormous forces exerted by the slowly sliding masses of snow and ice was everywhere to be seen. The road frequently crossed little drainages gouged out in the mountainside, flowing with fresh melt water. Rocks and boulders littered the road, and our driver halted the car a few times to check if the stretch of road facing us was ‘alive’ with falling rocks.
At one point when our taxi swung around a turn I noticed downhill from us an arresting array of birch trees that kind of fanned out in a section of the slope that narrowed down to a rocky outcrop hanging over a drop. The patch also had what looked like the debris left behind by an old landslide that had swept down the slope, a chaotic clutter of mud, rocks and boulders halted in its tracks, temporarily frozen in time. I requested a halt and got out to stare at the bizarre tableau. To me it represented a dynamic dimension of the Himalaya, a weird blend of enormous forces, poignant desolation, resilient life and astonishing beauty. There was certain breathlessness about the scene, a mysterious attractiveness that had a sense of danger and risk inherent in it. I felt a strange reluctance to photograph the scene and wanted to sit down then and there to start painting it. But of course that was impossible. My mind then shifted to camera mode, formed a frame, and I took a shot. Back home when we finally got the black and white prints from a local photo studio I realised how very challenging it is to photographically capture the essence and grandeur of a scene that can evoke such a profound mix of emotions in someone.
And that would have been it but for a random family visit to the Abhyankars, my relatives in Pune. Knowing that I sketched and painted as a pastime, they said why don’t I paint a scene for the blank section of the wall just above the entrance to the inner rooms. And the desire to paint that scene came back sweet and strong! It did not strike me for one instant that people may not be interested in a scene depicting the barren world above the treeline. In my mind surged the visuals of misty mountains and the cold of high altitude and the quiet streams flowing down through the rubble of fresh landslides that spoke of the enormous forces at play in a world that had completely enthralled me. And so I wielded the brush with a flourish and painted the scene to the best of my abilities and the Abhyankars liked it and put it up in their living room.
And that is where it hung for years and moved with them to their new flat to once again hang over the entrance to the inner rooms and has been referred to every time that we met at the odd wedding or such. The painting is not much as such, quite amateurish actually. So I find it intriguing that the Abhyankars liked it and have held on to it for all these years. A simple explanation could be that it is just like any old persistent piece of furniture that somehow manages to not be thrown away, its various parts held together by random nails hammered in it at various points of time. The painting does have a vertical crack in it after all! Another explanation could be a bit more inspirational – that the Abhyankars saw in it that something that Henry David Thoreau refers to in that quote stated at the beginning. Maybe the painting evokes in some the magic of my experiences that I recount to the few that are curious enough to know about my sojourns in the celestial lands…
It’s been forty odd years after that first-trip that had filled me with awe of a primeval looking world that had drew me in. I ended up choosing a lifestyle that has immersed me in it. The painting was an expression of all the feelings and emotions that I felt during my ‘first contact’ with that world. It had appealed to the Abhyankars, bless their souls, and I feel it to be a privilege to find such a connection.
*Look here on the internet for a hilarious take on ‘horseback riding’ and other American English-isms by the famous stand-up comedian and writer, Michael McIntyre.