A Moonlit Night in Mcleod Ganj

It was a Thursday night in the hilly town of Mcleod Ganj, Himachal Pradesh. Having witnessed torrential downpour in the previous two days, the rains had finally decided to take a break. The dark blue sky was at peace, lit up by a bright full moon. Far across the horizon, the Triund peak shone like a vanilla ice-cream top, piercing through the sapphire backdrop. I absorbed this view from the terrace cafe of my hostel, while waiting for my friend Adam to arrive. It was the second week of my stay in Mcleod Ganj. That evening, I had decided to visit the hippie village of Dharamkot, which is located slightly uphill from Mcleod Ganj, in the direction of the Triund. I had convinced Adam to be my guide. I took out the mobile phone from my jeans pocket to click a photograph of the majestic moon in all its glory. Just then, a voice from behind told me,

“Don’t click!”

Startled, I looked back to find that it was but Adam. The day I first met him, was the day of my arrival at the hostel. He looked quite the foreigner with his fair skin and blonde hair. But when he had started speaking, his fluent Hindi had completely taken me by surprise. It was much later that I found out that he was born here, in India, and that these mountains had been his home for years.   

“Why?” I asked. “The moon looks so pretty tonight!”

                                                  

“Yeah, but you possibly cannot capture it in a photograph, that too on this mobile camera. Your friends back home will ask you which street lamp you clicked.” He grinned.

“Very funny! That’s a lot of photography knowledge for a shy mountain boy like you”, I said, pulling his leg.

But I knew he was right. The moon did somehow look like a street light in the frame I was aiming to capture.

“So then,” I continued, “shall we make a move to Dharamkot?”

“I’m ready” he said. “Let’s take my bike. We will reach faster, since it’s already a bit dark. We can take a short cut uphill and reach in no time.”

My immediate reaction to this proposition was to hesitate as it is with most things in life.

“Umm. I don’t quite think that riding a bike and taking short cuts through dangerous hilly roads is a good idea,” I said. “Can’t we walk please?”

“We can, but it might get a little too much for you, especially since you are not a shy mountain girl, acclimatized to make such a steep walk. Plus, we might get very late,” he said.

I smiled awkwardly.

Adam sensed my apprehension and said, “You will be okay. Don’t worry.”

Then, after a pause, he smiled and asked, “Don’t you trust me?”

The question took me back to a pleasant December evening in Kolkata last year when my friend Anisha and I had met over a cup of coffee. It was the lowest I had felt in my life, but somehow, I had found it hard to pinpoint on the exact reason why. I had hoped that a conversation with my friend would untangle my mind. That was when she had recommended voluntary work at Lha Charitable Trust, an organization working towards the upliftment of the Tibetan community in Dharamshala. She said it could possibly take my mind off the routine and may be inspire me.

“They invite applications from volunteers who are willing to devote their time for 2 weeks or more for a variety of activities,” she had said.

“Why don’t you check out their website and give it a shot?”

I had obviously turned down the idea, thanks to numerous ‘practical’ questions that crowded my mind. But then I had thought, why not shoot an arrow in the dark for once? After all, I had nothing to lose.

I had applied to their website for a voluntary position of 2 weeks in the same month. Within a few days, my application had got through and I was invited to take English conversation classes for adults, tutor one or more students for improvising on their English, and work with the Editorial team of their in-house magazine for 2 weeks in April. The next few months leading up to the trip were carefully betrothed in watching a lot of YouTube videos and preparing small English lessons, so that I was well equipped to impart as much knowledge, in as much fun way as possible. It was as if life had presented me with a bright little escape route, like a silver lining in an overcast sky, and I had accepted it whole heartedly. Come April, and I had reached my hostel with a purple suitcase and an orange ukulele, ready to make the most of my much-awaited solo trip.

Frankly, the challenges that awaited me were far greater than asking strangers to click photographs of me in touristy places for a Facebook album. The English classes that were assigned to me had students with varied levels of understanding of the language. Some were at beginner’s level, having only a basic understanding of sentence construction, while some were at an intermediate level, having a bit more advanced knowledge of grammar and usage of words. This meant that a pre-drafted English exercise, as I had prepared, would not be applicable for everyone. I had to improvise depending upon how each student reacted to the teaching. We had no common language of reference and often resorted to Google translator, at least in the first 2 days. I had faced gloomy days and thunder storms to the extent that my hostel room had been inundated with water puddles. Yet, I had managed to drain them off, being quite the ninja, with a wiper on one hand and a towel on the other. Thus, life threw in a surprise or two occasionally.  On one such day, a student had come up to me at the end of class and said:

“Ma’am, my English, so-so. Your English, too good! I want to speak English, like you.”

It had made me realise that even in my lowest of days I had managed to inspire someone. And just like that the sun had come out driving the greys away.

But most of all, the first week in McLeod Ganj had made me get rid of a multitude of inhibitions. I had befriended many people at the institute and at the hostel who hailed from different parts of the world, all of whom had travelled far for a purpose. I had learnt how easily they were accepting of people and how they did not let societal rules corner them inside a cage. There were trekkers, musicians, artists, lovers, loners and soul searchers. These strangers became my family in no time. I had explored new places with them each day, shared meals daily and taken weekend trips to villages where all one could hear at night were the sound of the chilly winds hustling through the trees. On cold nights when the power went off, we had lit bonfires and sung songs, in the august company of a bottle of Old Monk. And when nothing worked out, we had simply shared a bean bag to lie down and appreciate the constellations visible in the clear night sky from the terrace cafe of the hostel.

Coming back to my pending decision on whether or not to get on Adam’s bike, I was reminded of a class from the previous week where my students and I had discussed the topic of God. A student had answered:

“I do not believe in God. But I do believe in humans, and in nature.”

So did I.

“Let’s start then?” I told Adam.

I put on my warmest jacket and hopped on Adam’s bike. It was the chilliest and the most beautiful ride I had ever taken. I swallowed in the icy cool wind on our winding ride uphill, with the oaks and deodars occasionally smiling through the moon light. We were joined by our friend Paul and his guitar after the ride. A cup of hot chocolate and a few Himachali folk songs brought the perfect day to a perfect end. I knew then that when I would leave this place and go back to routine, I would always remember that one moonlit night in McLeod Ganj. On rough days, if the world felt like falling apart, I would remember what Paul told me that night:

“Come on, you have an orange Ukulele! Life is good!”

Artwork by: Tanmayee Chakraborty