We rose quickly, almost vertically, the passing peaks abstracted on the reflective surfaces of our foil heat blankets. The chopper would take us to Munsiyari, where a coach would drive us on to the new town of Mool Sarovara.
In our extended absence, a narrative had formed: Hindu pilgrims detained on holy route by Chinese forces as border battle intensifies. I just wanted to get home, but it became clear that we didn’t have much of a choice about going to Mool Sarovara. I could escape political reporting, but I couldn’t escape politics. The small town, still essentially a construction site, was deeper into the mountains, and further from our route back to our normal lives, but the government wanted to capitalise on the press. As pilgrims, we would now pray at the new lake, the “new source” of the Saraswati River, on the Indian side of the border. I managed to get through to my editor, who was keen for me to go along with it all and send back some words each night.
The sun set behind the peaks as we flew, the sky an intense and varied blue through the glare-resistant tint. We landed on a school playground in Munsiyari. A representative from the Centre for Research into the Saraswati River met us on the makeshift helipad and led us to our coach. Because of the border, she explained, Mansarovar and Kailash, the spiritual sources of the ancient Saraswati, couldn’t be reached by the river works. But, in any case, she continued, as we walked to a bend in the road, the science was clear that the source had shifted across the border and could now be found in a recently formed lake in the Nanda Devi National Park. “The Saraswati starts in Uttarakhand, heading north to Himachal, then out through Punjab, Haryana and then Rajasthan and Gujarat.”
The camera crews were waiting for us. I pulled my scarf up like Katrina had, covering my face. We rushed out of the coach and entered the largest of Mool Sarovara’s new hotels. The CRSR had left their leaflets in each of the rooms. The town had been built with funds allocated to the river works, as part of the regeneration of the entire Saraswati route. It would become a tourist destination once the river began to flow, as pilgrims flocked to the new springs. The source, the literature claimed, had sprouted around the same time as the water had been detected along the river’s ancient palaeochannels. A glacial lake had formed in Nanda Devi, almost ten times the size of nearby Roop Kund.
Several cities would be built along the Saraswati River’s route, the largest of which would be New Lothal, at the river’s mouth. Some governmental functions would move to the coastal city, the leaflet said, which was inspired by Lothal, the location of the world’s first port, built in the time of the Saraswati Civilisation.
I met Katrina in the hotel bar, after she’d been for a night swim in the basement pool. There wasn’t yet any beer on tap, so we went for wine. The bartender had moved recently to the town, abandoning the flock of sheep his father had expected him to tend to after his death.
“There are herds this high?” I asked.
“Sure. Sheep, cows. They come up for the summer when the grasses appear. And there are more grasslands now there is less snow.”
When we ordered a second bottle, Katrina asked me again to share what I’d discovered about her family in my research. “Tell me where I come from,” she joked.
“Sejal and Jugaad,” I said, again, “had seven children, all named after the rivers of Punjab. Their eldest daughter, their second child, was called Beas, and she was your – let me get this right – great-great-grandmother?” According to the records, soon after her marriage to a man from a neighbouring village, Beas and her husband moved down to the coast, where the two of them were spirited away by the British. In a ship log I’d seen in an online archive, Beas and her husband were bound for Trinidad. They were recorded leaving Karachi and arriving at Aapravasi Ghat in Port Louis, Mauritius, where they were to transfer to a larger ship, better suited to the longer and more arduous stretch of the voyage past the Cape and on to Port of Spain. But they disappeared from the records on that second ship, not recorded as boarding in Mauritius or deboarding in Trinidad.
They might have found work during their short dock, or perhaps one of them had fallen ill over the course of the journey and couldn’t go on. Maybe, strolling through Port Louis, they lost track of time and missed their connection. Or they fell out with a friend on board and vowed not to return. Perhaps they were kicked off the ship, had committed a crime. Or maybe they changed their minds about going to the other side of the world, wanting to stay at a distance from which they might feasibly return home – not that they ever would. There were endless possibilities that didn’t appear in the records, but what was certain was that they took on a lodging in Port Louis and ended up having three children, two of whom survived.
The next day, certain I had enough for the piece, I made arrangements to get to Gairsain, Uttarakhand’s summer capital, but Katrina wouldn’t return my texts. I found her in the hotel bar. She was talking to the bartender about a local farmer who had gone missing with his herd.
“In all likeliness,” the bartender said, “something has happened.”
“You think he’s dead?”
“He was an old man. It’s not impossible. If he has kicked the bucket, they’ll probably send a search party out for the cows. A helicopter.”
As the bartender made my cocktail, I asked Katrina about which bus she’d like to get the next day.
“I’m not sure I’m ready to leave,” she said.
“Oh.”
“It’s nice here, don’t you think? I think it’s a good place to clear my head.”
I would pick apart the nuances of the tone in which she delivered that line a day later, after she’d WhatsApped me the audio recording she’d made of Edward and Jay that night in Svalbard.
Passing this on, she said.
I listened to the recording in the bath. It was strangely intimate, Katrina’s husband’s voice in the room. He spoke more than I expected, Jay, often interrupting the flow of Edward’s meandering story. As he laughed, I remembered that Edward had only told Jay the story about Kailash when he knew he was about to die. And Jay had only ever revealed it to Katrina when he knew the same. Why had she sent it to me now? I got dressed without being properly dry and went down the hall to knock on her door. There was no answer. I checked the lobby, the pool and the bar.
“She said something about a walk,” the bartender said.
I figured she might have gone up to the lake, the new source, and I put on my hiking boots. The way was easy along the newly paved path. My blisters had become callouses, and the adrenaline lent me much-needed energy. The lake still looked like a building site, diggers frozen around its perimeter. It began to snow, and snow heavily, and not finding any sign of her, I turned back towards the hotel.
There was talk of movement in the hills on the lobby TV. Apparently a landslide further north had revealed a pit of bones, frozen for so long that scraps of perfectly preserved flesh remained. Even hair. Jeremy and I formed a search party and we set off in different directions.
I walked clockwise around the source, staying in touch with the others via radio. I veered away from the lake and turned north. My breath thinned as I headed uphill, towards the glaciers. I should have waited for backup, for a local who knew the terrain, but Katrina had been missing far too long to delay any further. I hugged the side of the hill, coming out in a new valley. The lake disappeared from view and I began to walk down, snow cascading with each step. The mountains, pockmarked with dark cryoconite holes, cast crisp shadows. I spotted a patch of darker snow ahead and sped towards it. When I reached where I thought it had been, there was nothing of note, and I thought the valley was playing tricks on me, the light. The dread within me had morphed into desperation. I had to find her. Everything ached. I was getting increasingly light-headed and beginning to consider turning back But then I came across a footprint.
I dropped to my knees. I yelled out and my voice echoed on the surface of the hills.
With renewed determination, I followed this trail for several minutes, until I looked back and realised that I was leaving identical prints. Katrina and I had the same shoes. The same shoe size. Was I following her, or following myself? I looked around, utterly disorientated. The mountains seemed to move, to dissolve and reappear in different configurations. I sat down, dizzy, and looked up, stunned, to see a cow, a white cow, drifting through the air. It was suspended by a harness and a long cord from the chopper above, floating serenely over the white valley.
Katrina looked up and saw it too, from where she’d fallen into the hidden crevasse, that deep well, the white cow drifting up above, held for a moment in the narrow view she had of the blue sky, before vanishing beyond the ice.
Excerpted with permission from Saraswati, Gurnaik Johal, Hachette India.
