A road, a hill and a little tea

6.15 pm, National Highway no. 3

54 kilometres from Dharamsala

I sit in the car speeding through the hilly road with treacherous terrains on either side. The speed does not really bother me; neither do the deep pits besides the road. Some pits are so deep that you cannot see the bottom of them; they are filled with dark vivid darkness; it sometimes makes me wonder if I would find hell on the other side of that darkness but my curiosity is not strong enough to make me jump into it to find out. Night was falling over the cold deserted hills slowly. There was still some light of the day left but it was as if it had already surrendered itself to the dark with a barely audible, determined and constant mutter which sounded like, “I shall see you tomorrow.”

We stop at a roadside tea vendor to refresh ourselves; there is this thing about the tea you have in these small roadside shops in hills; it has a way of reaching out to your soul. As soon as I take the first sip of the steamy brown liquid, a chilly gust of winter air sweeps upon me like a cold blanket. It was as if the winds were complimenting the tea. The colder it got, the more wonderful the tea felt. Some wild bushes line the road in front of me and as I sit there sipping my tea the bushes sway in the wind, making ruffled noises which added to the whole atmosphere of the hills somehow. There is no real inhabitation barring an empty house a little to the right of the tea vendor.

Sitting there in dim daylight with cold wind all over you and not even a hint of humanly sound does something to you, you go into a trance and for some wildly incomprehensible reason you get nostalgic about old times. As I sat there, still and calm two small kids walk through right in front of me, a boy and a much smaller girl. The boy holds a small steel container in his hand and he walks swinging the container wildly in his hands making a clanky voice with it. Milk spills down from the sides of the container slowly but the boy, unmindful of that fact or of the fact that there was someone sitting there sipping his tea while appreciating the calm and peace of the surroundings; went on in his own world. A small girl walks behind him. She walks with a spur in her step; the kind kids generally have when they have just discovered this wonder ability of human legs known as walking, she is probably singing a song in a dialect I barely decipher. Her mother probably sang her this song when she used to cry as a baby and she just won’t shut up whatever her mother may try.

I should have had been angered, disturbed, irritated and frustrated at the sudden entry of these sources of noise into my tranquil world. But I am not. For some reason they just delight me even more. An emotion sweeps over me as I watch them go. Sadly I cannot describe the emotion; I don’t think I will ever be able to but it was something divine shining upon me through the innocent beauty of the children and the angelic brilliance of the hills. Those two kids of the hills were a part of the scene, they belonged there. They were a part of nature.

With the innocence, truth, carefree-ness and simplicity of the children the human race is as close to nature as it will ever be.

Ishaan Kumbkarni