The driver and I sat in silence, assessing our failure. He had tried twice that June morning to drive up a very steep incline on a road in Himachal Pradesh’s Kinnaur district – and failed both times.
We were trying to get to the last motorable stop of the village Miroo, where a young farmer, Lalit Mohan, had agreed to speak to me about how a hydropower project nearby was impacting their lives and livelihoods. This was for a story I was researching on how dams in Himachal were selling dubious carbon credits.
Since we were unable to press forward on the road, I called Mohan to ask if he could come down to where we were – the last bus stop of the village, a kilometre short of the point that usually small vehicles were able to reach. From there, residents hike up for about a kilometre through narrow forested lanes to get to their homes.
But Mohan had a crucial task at hand. He was at the dhar, or the highest slope of his village, where he and others owned apple orchards. It was his family’s turn that day to access spring water to irrigate his orchard.
“If I miss doing this today, we do not know if there will be enough water the next time our turn comes,” he explained. “Let me send you my friend who will be able to drive up this incline.”
Happy with the suggestion, I told my driver. “He is sending someone,” I beamed.
“So that you can interview them here?”
“No, so that he can drive the car up this…”
Before I could complete the sentence, the accelerator was pressed. Dust was thrown up. Tires screeched.
“Chala toh hum bhi lenge!” – I know how to drive – my driver spoke over the revving engine, as he zoomed up the slope, a final, successful attempt, with me holding on tightly to the seat.
Once we reached the last motorable stop – a government school – I called Mohan who told me that from there, I would have to walk up. He said the hike “won’t take more than 30 minutes”.
I knew this was an underestimation – what a seasoned pahadi could do in half an hour, would take me at least an hour.
It actually took me two.
As I started to walk up the incline, I met a young mother and her six-year-old son who asked me to join them since they were going up the same way till about half the distance. They had taken the bus back from the nearest hospital where the son had to be taken for stitches after he had hurt himself at school.
The injuries did not bother the child. Happy with the unplanned leave he got from the rest of the day at school, he hopped in front of us, enthusiastically navigating the narrow streets of his Himalayan village. We walked past an ancient temple and toilets built under the Swachh Bharat Mission before we reached the end of the village’s habitation – with a lane branching off to their home.
As I waved goodbye to my serendipitously found guides and walked ahead, I entered an alpine forest. A herder was coming downhill with his two mules. I asked him for directions to get to Mohan’s orchard. “Just cross over the two boulders,” he said.
I spotted five boulders soon. Taking a random bet, I crossed two, and then called Mohan. “Now you will see two tall deodar trees, take the path under them,” he told me.
“Deodar is the one which looks like chir pine, right?” I confirmed.
I heard a hearty laugh on the other end of the phone. “Chir and deodar are strikingly different!”
I was making peace with my lack of tree identification knowledge, when about an hour of walking later, I saw someone working on their farm along with two German shepherds. I took a break, giving the dogs a belly rub while their handler directed me to the correct orchard. “Just go straight up from here,” he said. “Na urey chalna, na parey,” he said in pahadi – don’t go left or right.
I tried to assess what “straight” meant when what lay ahead was not a path but terraced farms with young and old apple trees. Looking at my confused expression, he suggested, “Just follow the pipe of water you see, it is coming from the farm where Mohan is.”
The pipe went anywhere but straight. Huffing and puffing, I climbed from one terrace farm to the other, over bushes and stone fences.
I ended up at a wooden hut – the only habitation I had come across in an hour. From inside came an elderly woman who told me I had taken a wrong turn. She redirected me – but also offered me a cup of tea and the warmth of her kitchen fire.
By then, dark clouds had started to gather. As I took off again, the woman stood at the edge of her house, shouting out directions till she could see me. I hadn’t gone too far before I heard Mohan calling out my name.
We sat on the ground surrounded by his apple trees. I had concentrated so much on not getting lost that until then, I had completely forgotten to appreciate the scene unfolding in front of me – a bird’s eye view of the Satluj valley.
Soon, a drizzle began. Mohan and I moved to a shed where his family stored their wood. He turned a pail upside down for me to sit on, and then began to explain why the village was divided on the issue of hydropower — some saw it as an opportunity that got them good compensation for land they gave up for the dam construction, while others worried about the ecological damages.
The conversation then drifted to how apple farming was changing as temperatures rose and springs started to dry up, making water scarce. It was an informative peek into changes in Kinnaur’s cash crop.
An hour later, as I prepared to leave, Mohan said in jest, “Don’t get lost and reach the old lady’s house again. She is looking for a girl to get married to her son.”
Weeks later, we published the story I had reported on that trip. It featured the conversation with Mohan – as a single quote in a 4,000-word story.
All photographs by Vaishnavi Rathore.
