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Journalism of Courage
My closest friend from school and I once met as 20-year-old students in London, on St. Patrick’s Day. We won ourselves two Guinness hats at a pub—one was given for every four pints you drank—and, on an impulse, took an early morning bus to Edinburgh, where we started the evening with a pub crawl, went to an indie concert and then the band’s after-party, which ended with a group of us doing karaoke to Wake Me Up Before You Go, Go and find it hilarious every time we yelled, “Jitterbug!”
Poornima—or PM as I call her—and I promised ourselves we would do this every five years, in a different country each time. It was a little over five years after we met in Paris, but we finished our ritual of a night-long pub crawl and managed to get to the airport just about sober enough to be allowed on board our respective flights.
It was a little under five years after that, when we decided to go to Machu Picchu, before Indian tourists — who were visiting en masse — did unto it as they have done unto Maldives. PM, a seasoned hiker, booked us on something called the Salkantay Seven Snakes Survival Trek. It was only when we had made our ways to Cusco and the adventure tour company’s office that I realised this was not for novice hikers. It would be a five-day trek through all sorts of terrain, and the guide recommended horses for a particularly tough stretch. Not only did I refuse a horse, in line with my animal rights activism, I refused to hand over my luggage to be loaded on a mule. So it was that I carried a backpack complete with sleeping bag, changes of clothes, electronic equipment and everything else we would not need while panting our way through mountains and forests.
We were on a glamping trip — chefs with us made “normal”, “vegetarian” and “vegan” meals as preferred, hot showers and clean toilets and neat beds waited for us at every stop, and a guide spoke to us about his conflicting loyalties to his Andean origins and his Catholic upbringing.
The only other first-time hikers were a Sherpa whose genes carried him up the first mountain and an Irish nurse whose gym trainer boyfriend would have carried her up the steepest slope if her horse had hesitated. In the group was a couple from Australia who ran marathons when they were not running their horse-riding school, a sprinter from South Africa, four hikers who had met at the Kilimanjaro and decided to do the Machu Picchu trip together, and PM who worked sixteen-hour-days through the week and then woke at 4:00 am to hike on weekends.
It wasn’t long before our guide Marco came up to me as I took painful step after painful step, and said, “Señorita, you need a horse.”
The Sherpa and the Irish gym trainer chivalrously offered me their horses, but I put my principles ahead of the group’s itinerary and irritated Marco, who accompanied me for half an hour and then announced that he would have to press on ahead to catch up with the fastest of our group and hope I’d reach the first stop.
I found myself all alone in the snow, and could just about make out PM’s silhouette turning once to see if she could spot me. I waved. The world dimmed a little, and I began to chew on the coca leaves Marco had given us for altitude sickness. PM had put us both on a course of diuretics well in advance, but chewing the leaves seemed more effective. It also brought to mind the concept of Pachamama that Marco had told us about — an Earth Mother who would help us on our journey. Suddenly, I felt like the only person alive in an alien universe. I also felt ill and dizzy, as if the snow was simply waiting for me to die and be buried under. And as I imagined myself sinking dramatically into its cloudy white depths, I heard my dance teacher’s voice go “Tha ka dhi mi, tha ka dhi mi, thai…ya…thai … thai…ya…thai”, and I remembered our little ritual of asking Bhoomadevi permission to dance before we started our Bharatanatyam practice. I was a non-believer, yes, but in a surge of sycophancy, I begged Pachamama to let me join the others before there was no one left to take a photograph of me at the meeting point.
When I arrived, I found the entire crew taking photos.
“You came!” Marco sounded surprised. “It’s been only ten minutes. I was going to go look for you after the photo session.”
“Pachamama was in a good mood,” I said.
Once we were done posing, I looked around myself. The steep cliffs, the white snow, the gaping mouths of caves, the narrow pathways and rivers in the distance… It was like a scene from Lord of the Rings, and I said as much.
“Who are we all, then?” one of the Australians asked.
I could only identify three of the Fellowship for certain — Marco would be Gandalf and the South African sprinter Legolas, and I would be Samwise Gamgee.
“We are now going to pray,” Marco said, and everyone groaned and then looked around in amazement. One is always amazed to be among the nonbelievers. “No, no, do not worry,” Marco added. “We are only praying to Pachamama.”
He gave us each three leaves.
“One, you drop to the ground as an offering to Pachamama to thank her. The second, you drop to the ground as an offering for the safety of this group till the end of the trek. And the third, you drop to the ground and make a wish for yourself.”
As I dropped the third leaf to the ground, I thought of my brother who had fallen in love with an American woman while doing his Master’s degree and was in danger of having to leave unless he found a job within the next two days.
This, we were told, would be our last evening in civilisation for five days. We would be diving into valleys and forests and clambering up hills until we arrived in Aguas Calientes, from where we would be taking buses to Machu Picchu. The only use our phones would have once we left the Sky Camp with its view of Humantay Lake would be to take photographs of Soraypampa, the Salkantay Pass, Collpapampa, the leaves of the Amazon jungle, Inca archaeological sites and a coffee plantation that we were to visit because it was on our way.
And it was during those five days that my life would change. The world had fallen away. We were in the Nineties again. Well, the Eighties, but the Eighties did come to India in the Nineties. And so, there we were, eleven of us, with only the sounds of nature and our own voices, our panting, our laughter, our thoughts. It would be the most peaceful week of my life, a week when PM and I caught up on all that had happened through the nearly two decades we had lived in different countries. It would also be the most disturbing week of my life, as we passed mounds of tourist-generated garbage, plastic bottles and paper bags food and wipes, lines of mules with sore feet and trembling gaits, and exhausted baby llamas in the arms of women who were charging money for posing with the sucklings for photographs as mother llamas with full breasts bayed for their stolen babies. How much of the world’s resources, how much of its animals’ lives and happiness, were we taking, while giving nothing in return, simply to capitalise on the boost tourism would give the economy and to satiate our own desire to explore the earth? Inviolé, I thought, was the French word for “unexplored”, and viol the French word for “rape”. This, I knew, would be my last trek, perhaps my last trip to a tourist destination.
In Aguas Calientes, I saw I’d missed several dozen calls from my mother and brother. There were several WhatsApp messages too, and the first I saw was from my brother: “Guess what, I got a job!”
The writer is an author and translator based in Madras
