Here I am in Mumbai, my last stop in India! The contrast with the mountainous and green terrain of Sikkim, sliced by blue-green torrents and dotted with small villages, could not be starker. The last week was just sheer bliss with really good company and amazing hikes in the countryside, under the towering Himalayas. Here, from the cybercafe, the grumble of the traffic and the harsh honking outside remind me that I am yet again in the midst of 'civilisation' as we call it. Yet I know noone here, a total stranger in a huge city! Its a strange feeling after spending a few days in a small village of a few hundred, where everyone knows everyone. In Pelling in West Sikim, I had been invited to drink a local brew made of millet seeds in the home of my host, in their woodshed, near a crackling fire that warmed my cold bones, whilst sharing stories. On most nights, fellow travellers would share a table for dinner. Some of the locals could hardly speak English, but they were keen to know me, just as much as I was keen to learn their stories. In comparison, last night was the first I spent having dinner alone in a yet crowded restaurant, and then coming back to my room, watching some 'news' on BBC or CNN, and falling asleep.
The mountains and wilderness have a strange capacity to reinvigorate, to recharge ones worn batteries and to bewilder, leaving us gazing at our own relative insignificance in the face of the mighty world out there. The city has an energy of its own, but its strange how such a crowded place can also feel so lonely and foreign after spending time in some of the most remote parts of India.
When one is not working, one is killing time, waiting for excitement in whatever form is portrayed to us. It's the lack of such expectations, the certitude of oneself and of one's finite nature that I loved in the Sikkimese people. One guy told me ' You tourists want to see the world. We are born here and we will die here. We have no aspiration to see anything else. Our world is here only, amidst our people'. Another, when asked how he foresaw the future, told me that we live in the KaliYug, the age of destruction and he was worried about his traditions and ways of life. I hope to go back to Sikkim and find it unchanged in ten years, yet one can already see Westernisation at its doorsteps...