Leh: Spell-binding atmosphere

Leh left us breathless. It always has. Even on the two earlier trips, when we drove up from Sonamarg, allowing our lungs to get used to the rarefied air, gradually. But when we flew in from Delhi to Leh’s 3,520m, Urgain, our Ladakhi friend from the Nubra valley advised, “ You must give yourselves 24 hours to adjust or you could get altitude sickness. You shouldn’t feel breathless” .

But it wasn’t the diminished oxygen but the mystique of Leh that has always left us ecstatic; and breathless.
We drove up to Shanti Stupa and gazed down at Leh.

Watered by the young Indus and ice-melt streams, terraced fields patched the valley floor, willows stirred in the wind, monasteries staggered up the bare mountains as if they had been stapled to them. It was as spell-bindingly unreal as Shangri-La.

Ambling down the winding roads of Leh was, as expected, a celebration of the senses. A traffic roundabout was a huge prayer-drum clickety-clacking in its own pavilion; carpets hanging up for sale had the warm, soft, smell of wool in the crisp, frost-sharpened air; dried fruit proffered by a pavement vendor recalled the delicious, tacky, richness of Christmas cakes and walnuts cracking when the Port went round the table.

Now we allowed our whims to drive us. “Shey” we told Ali who made his vehicle do things that Mahindra & Mahindras had never intended. Shey Palace, obligatory birthplace of royal heirs apparent, gazed at its shifting reflections in a small lake, inspiring soothsayers to prophesy.

The princely family had shifted to Stok Palace overlooking a willow-grove where archers competed in the favourite sport of Ladakh. A part of Stok is now a museum of legendary treasures including a sword twisted into a knot by the powerful king Tashi Namgyal, and sacred thanka paintings.

In Leh, such objects are often taken to be psychic communication hubs as are monasteries, which are also centres of art and tradition.

We renewed our acquaintance with some of the monasteries. Some distance out of Leh was Hemis: the largest, the richest and the best known monastery in Ladakh.

It is also elegantly beautiful with three storeys, and balconies and doorways of painted wood. In its stone-paved forecourt, monks were rehearsing their famous spirit dance while a small orchestra kept up a thudding accompaniment. Two monks, in particular, seemed to be as happy as singles in a disco.

Inside the monastery, we saw a glittering altar dedicated to a spiritually advanced monk. We did not, however, agree with a Kashmiri writer who claimed that there was a statue of Jesus Christ who, he asserted, had studied here during His hidden years.

Behind Hemis, smaller shrines protrude out of the rocky hillside. Thikse, much closer to Leh, also seems to have grown organically out of the rocks of its bare mountain. A professor of geology, accompanying a group of graduate students, pointed to a distant range and said “That is the suture, the line, where the Indian sub-continent stitched itself to Eurasia”.

In Thikse we photographed the imposing Golden Buddha. It’s third eye is represented by a stylized ammonite: a shellfish which lived in the Tethys Sea before our sub-continent pushed it up and created the Himalayas. Fossil ammonites are still unearthed in the high mountains and peddled as ‘Lord Vishnu’s Chakras’.

As always, we carried a torch when visiting Alchi: its electric supply is erratic. When Ladakhi Buddhism was threatened by a resurgence of the old, shamanistic, Bon, religion, monks were sent from this monastery to Kashmir to bring back the ‘authentic’ Indian Buddhist teachings.

We saw Kashmiri influences in the delicacy of some of its murals. Here when we photographed a beautifully-painted wooden door and a serene, Ladakhi woman we got adistinct feeling that a vibrant faith still permeated Alchi’s walls like the pervasive fragrance of old incense.

But then our perception could have been conditioned byour knowledge. Knowledge, however, had no influence on our next experience; or that of a high-powered Parliamentary Committee. We were together on a road near Pathar Sahib Gurdwara built to commemorate a miracle performed by Guru Nanak Dev. But the guru had nothing to do with the phenomena of the road.

A sign erected by the army said Magnetic Hill The phenomena that defies gravity. Park your vehicle in the box marked with white paint on the road. We did. The cars of the Parliamentary Committee’s convoy parked behind and in front of us. We put the clutches of our vehicles in neutral and released our brakes.

And slowly, at first, and then with increasing speed, our cars rolled uphill. Some claim that it is an optical illusion caused by the configuration of the surrounding hills. Perhaps. But clearly, altitude is not the only reason why Leh leaves people breathless.