The Buddha Smiles Again

AROUND 15 MINUTES after leaving Jispa—a village in Himachal Pradesh on the Leh- Manali highway—the cell phone signals disappear, setting you free from the rest of the world. The landscape starts getting more dramat­ic, beautiful, savage. The vegetation starts vanishing. There are no more trees, just shrubs and grass. A little later, it looks like even a blade of grass is struggling to survive. Yet, one wants to explore every bit of it. The wilder it gets, the more alluring it is. Intimidat­ing, but irresistible, or rather irresist­ible because it is intimidating.

Each time, Ladakh draws you fur­ther into the depths of its treacherous terrain in the trans-Himalayas, maybe to experience how fiercer it could get, or hoping to see the ethnical myster­ies that lie beyond the topographic sublimity. This time, the trip is driven by the temptation to go to Zanskar, southwest of Ladakh, by a new road connecting it. It takes around seven hours from Jispa to reach Padum, the headquarters of Zanskar, through the Shinku La pass, connecting Him­achal Pradesh to Ladakh. A board, half hidden by Tibetan flags, mentions the height of the pass to be 16,580 feet. By end of September, most of the snow has melted, but there has been some fresh snow. As a cold breeze sweeps through the pass, hot cups of tea from a shop on the pass are like a heady elixir.

Driving through the desert at high altitudes, as the sun beats down, one wonders, as always, what could have drawn people to settle down in these places, with its parched land, the un­relenting terrain, the hostile weather. Yet, you want to go back there, again and again. The road cuts through the mountains, in various shades of brown and jade, the stones that have rolled down, the shimmering deep-blue riv­ers, small Buddhist habitations where yaks sometimes seem to outnumber people. The villages, with white houses, small wooden windows and flat roofs with hay on top to prepare for cattle feed in the winter, are miles apart from each other. The monasteries, built along the incline of the mountains, in the most godforsaken places, make you wonder how people get there and what it would have taken to construct them on those steep slopes, some centuries ago. In a landscape dotted by chortens, Buddhist stupas, once in a while there is a signboard put up by the Border Roads Organisation (BRO), that connects this far-flung region to the rest of the country. Parts of the road are still under construction, where workers and JCB drivers stop to clear the way for a ve­hicle to pass, waving and smiling. The road through Zanskar’s Lungnak valley passes by Gonbo Ranjan, a standalone mountain, 14,800 feet at the base and 18,110 feet at the peak, considered sacred by the locals who practice Tibetan Buddhism. The tents near the mountain, meant for travellers and trekkers, have shut for winter.

In Padum, a small town said to be named after Padmasambhava, also known as Guru Rinpoche, an eighth-century Buddhist who intro­duced Tantric Buddhism in Tibet, it is crowded, swarming with tourists and locals, unlike the rest of the sparsely populated valley. The mobile phone signals resume somewhere before reaching Padum. A large gate on the side of the main road leads to a hotel run by a local, where a group of foreigners are checking in. The windows have traditional Tibetan wood carvings. The reception displays artefacts like Zanskar, including a mani, the Buddhist prayer wheel and a wooden table with Tibetan paintings, besides stickers advertising biking clubs stuck on the side and glass windows. The road has also brought a rush of bikers. Like in almost every Buddhist’s place in the town, as one finds out later, there is a picture of the Dalai Lama. The room is like in any mid-range hotel, with heavy brown curtains, apparently to protect from the sun in summer and the cold in winter, heater, thick quilts and a large bathroom, which also has a heater fixed to the wall. It is past lunch time and one has to look for a restaurant. The manager, Sonam, a local, suggests a nearby eatery run by a young man called Lobsang.

The menu lists out local fare like thentuk, a Tibetan dish with flat noodles and mutton, tingmo, a steamed Tibetan bread, thukpa, a popular Tibetan stew, and momos, fried or steamed dump­lings, but also mentions everything one can expect in an Indian food restaurant anywhere in the country, from butter chicken to matar paneer. On special demand, they also make chhutagi, a Tibetan dish of dumplings immersed in a vegetable stew. Two local police­women walk in saying “ju leh”, the Lada­khi way of greeting, and order a plate of noodles and momos. Familiar with Lobsang, they speak to him in the local Bodhi language, similar to Tibetan, which also has a Tibetan script. Largely followers of Buddhism, which preaches refraining from taking life though it does not forbid eating meat, several locals opt for vegetarian food. Lobsang is expanding his restaurant, with more rooms and a hall.

Walking through the town, looking for signs of what I imag­ined Zanskar to be—people wearing the traditional goncha, a long deep-coloured robe generally made of wool, or sulma, a pleated gown which married women wear, with turquoise and coral jewellery and headdress, selling yak wool products or embroidered woollen shoes, Padum came as quite a surprise. You can distin­guish the locals from the tourists only by their facial features, not their clothes of feather down or puffer jackets, jeans and trousers, barring some older women, with their weather-beaten faces, who could be seen in traditional attire. There are several shops run by women selling Western clothes, with labels of inter­national brands like Zara, Uniqlo, and H&M, at around half the price. In the midst of these is an inconspicuous shop run by an old man, selling traditional jewellery of silver, stones and beads. “You can select the stones and design and I will make it for you,” he says, as he makes a cup of tea on a stove. Browsing through the market, I find one store selling local attire, mostly on order, in silk and wool. At a store selling Western clothes, Aamu, one of the policewomen seen earlier at the restaurant, who is wearing a long beige down coat over her uniform, offers to show a shop where one can find traditional Zanskari jewellery.

The sun is unbear­able during the day. The night is cold. Down the street, above the shops, is the town’s lone bar, which serves only strong beer, and namkeen packets. A notice outside says “weed not allowed”. There are only men in the bar, but they are oblivious to other customers. As the sun is about to set, bringing the temperature down, more people come out into the streets of Padum, inhabited predominantly by Buddhists, with a Muslim population estimated to be around 40 per cent. Con­struction work is in full swing through the town. The new structures adhere to the traditional architecture of single or two-storeys, but several of them have large glass windows, replacing balconies of wooden latticework, and are made mostly of cement bricks. Traditionally, the houses were built with stone and mud brick, painted white with lime, on which there were decorations in red. Pa­dum is discernibly on the cusp of change.

Back at the hotel, where Biharis have been employed, a North Indian dinner is being prepared of dal, okra, chapati, rice and kheer for dessert. Sonam says it will be Chinese food the following night. The Bihari employees will return home in around a fortnight, when it gets colder in Padum. For the Zanskar festival later, when tourists again throng Padum, locals will be employed. “The road has changed a lot of things. More tourists come in now from Manali. A new road on the Chadar trek route is slashing travel time from Leh to Padum. But the roads are also cutting down treks. Earlier, people trekked. The locals now don’t have to take the Chadar trek, which took a week or more. They can go by road,” he says. The Zanskar river, on which the arduous Chadar trek is undertaken in winter, when the river turns into sheets of ice, was the only way to get to Padum. The nearly 65km trek takes around six days. For the locals, bound by the impregnable mountains, the winter months when the snow hardens, were the only time they could leave Padum by walking on the frozen river to get to any other part of the country, before the road. The Nimmu-Padum-Darcha road for all-weather connectivity is also encouraging winter tourism in Padum.

According to Sonam, a young man who lives in a village adjoining Padum, the locals are poor people; so, rich ho­teliers from Leh are buying land from them to construct resorts, anticipating that tourism will increase in coming times. Soon Padum, the only town in Zanskar, will be like Leh, Ladakh’s joint capital with Kargil. “But the road will be good for future generations. Our children will have better facilities and education. Life was very hard here when we were growing up.” In winter, when the snow falls and temperatures can go down to minus 25 degrees Celsius, most of the old people leave the town, which is at an elevation of nearly 12,000 feet, and move down to places where the weather is less hostile. The younger people stay on, but the town comes to a near standstill with everything shut. Sonam explains that generally in a family, if there are five children, then at least two would join the Army and two may become monks, in which case the monastery takes care of their needs. The roads are turning around the economy of the region. The locals in the small hamlets get jobs in the construction business, which is now booming in the villages.

This is evident on the nearly two-hour drive to the Drang Drung glacier, the longest glacier in the region after Siachen, at 23km. Along the Kargil- Zanskar road, which is still partly under construction, villagers are construct­ing houses, with sloping tin roofs in various colours, replacing the tradi­tional Ladakhi architecture of flat roofs. Google Maps take you to the nearest view point of the glacier, the origin of the Stod river, a tributary of the Zans­kar. Back in Padum by lunch time, the search for another eatery ends up in one above the shops in the market. As mo­mos and a soup with dumplings and noodles are served, through the large windows, one can watch life on the street below, where few locals and tour­ists, all wearing caps, are out braving the sun. Here too, one can order North Indian and some continental dishes. On another table are some monks, in their simple maroon robes and heavy sneakers, having thukpa.

LEAVING PADUM, I wonder if I will ever return. Maybe, at some time to see how it is when it snows, taking the new road from Leh. How far would Padum have changed by then? The pace at which things were moving, quite a bit. As Lobsang’s brother Phurbu Gaskit puts it, “culturally not much has changed so far, but with more and more people traveling, it’s a matter of time.” Meanwhile, the Union home ministry has announced earlier this year that Zanskar will be among the five new districts being created in Ladakh.

On the new road from Padum to Purne, a tiny ancient village around 75km away, blasting work is still on in some parts. Before the road came up, travel­lers stopped by at Purne, on their way to the Phuktal monastery, built around a cave, hidden in the mountains of Lungnak valley, and believed to be 2,500 years old. The road has cut down the trek, which used to take 10 days of walk­ing from Darcha, in the Lahaul area of Himachal Pradesh, to Padum and then to Purne. A friend, who had trekked for 11 days to reach the monastery in 1992, was surprised to hear that there is a homestay in Purne. The village, at a height of nearly 13,000 feet, falls on the other side of the bridge across the Tsarap river, which is the colour of a turquoise stone sparkling amidst the barren mountains. Apart from tented accom­modation, the homestay has recently built cottages with simple, small rooms facing the river, with wood-panelled roofs and attached baths. The beds are piled with quilts. There is no electricity in the village, so the homestay uses solar power to light up the place at night and heat water in buckets for bathing. There is no mobile phone signal again, and the Wi-Fi is unreliable.

Food is served in the dining hall, around 100 metres from the rooms. Dolma, a middle-aged woman who runs the homestay, gets some tea and snacks served. Asked about trekking to the monastery, she says, “Yes, you can go. Don’t wear heavy jackets. You can feel hot trekking in the valley. It will take around an hour-and-a-half one way,” and points to the road across the mountain leading to the point where the trek starts. Carrying a bottle of water, two of us set off. The drive to the place, where the road ends, is a treacherous one. It was noon and some people were returning, panting from the climb, steeper on the way back. Fortunately, we were walking against the sun. On the right side, the mountain slopes down steeply several metres, into the Tsarap river. After around 15 minutes, seeing a young woman taking a break to catch her breath in the shelter of a stone, I ask at what point the monas­tery can be seen. “You have not even covered three-fourth of the distance for that,” she says. The trail winds, up and down, along the Tsarap, with no sign of the monastery even after an hour into the trek. It is only when you reach the Phuktal Monastery guesthouse, less than 20 minutes from the monastery, that you finally get a view of it, secluded from the rest of the world. That is also what draws the world to it.

A monk from the monastery, sitting outside the guesthouse, says gener­ally around 80 monks live there, in the quarters built along the slope. He is indifferent to the road, which has pruned the trek, or the people visiting the monastery, unconcerned by the past or future. In the winter, the snow cuts the monastery off from the rest of the region. It has its own kitchen and a Tibetan doctor. After a short break, sitting under the shade of a tree to have water with sugar and salt as the guesthouse has run out of lemons, we start the climb to the monastery. Stone steps lead to stone cor­ridors of the monastery, and more stone staircases lead to the chorten built inside the cave. An old monk, wearing a puffer waist coat over a robe, takes rounds of it, holding a string of Buddhist prayer beads. Next to it is the prayer hall, with ancient Tankha paintings, a small brass lamp burning and robes of monks next to low wooden tables, on which there are Buddhist ritual items like a prayer bell and dorje, which together symbolise enlightenment.

Sensing that the way back will be more tiring, we stop by again at the guesthouse for Maggi and tea. Some European tourists are staying at the guesthouse, which has cosy rooms with a thick mattress on the floor, blankets, a low colourful table made in traditional Tibetan design and attached bathrooms. As we head back, the breeze is cold; the sun still unrelenting. We make some stops, where the climb gets steeper, absorbing the beauty of the Tsarap. It takes an hour-and-a-half, just as Dolma said, apparently factoring in that we are not locals. After the final climb, which is the steepest towards the end, I am almost as happy to see the car as I was at the first sight of the monastery. There is a thrill in finishing a trek, difficult or easy, long or short. I can imagine how people feel when they conquer a peak.

Back in the homestay, I freshen up, change, and get into the quilt with a sense of satisfaction, until dinner, a sim­ple vegetarian meal of red kidney beans (rajma), a mixed vegetable, roti, rice and gulab jamun for dessert, is served in the dining hall. On an adjacent table is a German who has travelled from Munich to go to the Phuktal monastery, poring over pages about it, discussing it with a local, who is accompanying him. He asks the hosts if he could get some beer. The homestay, run by a Buddhist family, does not serve liquor. He settles for a ginger, honey, lime drink. I cannot resist asking him what made him choose Phuktal. It turns out that the German, whose name is Christian, has visited the Himalayas over 20 times in three decades. “I was reading about Phuktal and I decided to come. I am interested in Buddhism, its culture, paintings, architecture and nature of course. My main interest is culture.” Of the monasteries he has visited, he found Tabo in Spiti valley of Himachal Pradesh and Alchi in Ladakh, particularly interesting, besides Toling in West Tibet and Mustang in Nepal. Christian was all set to leave for the Phuktal monastery early next morning.

At breakfast, Dolma recalls that when there was no road, a lot of foreign­ers used to trek up to Purne. “They pre­fer to trek and stay in tents. The Phuktal monastery is a big draw, without which not many people would have come here. After Covid, Indian tourists have increased.” She goes to check if there is Wi-Fi signal on her phone.

Back on the road, which has ended the seclusion of the people of Zanskar making them turn a new leaf, the mobile phone signals are yet to come back. I sit back soaking in the sun, remembering one of the tenets of Buddhism—live in the moment. Reminiscing the trip, I already want to go back there, to connect with a place which was long inaccessible by road, or to disconnect with the rest of the world. Perhaps both.

Buddhistnew highwayPadumPhuktal monasteryTravel Issue 2024Tsarap riverZanskar