Cold and hot

©  2007  Rose George

I have been in the mountains. The Himalayas are very beautiful and very bloody cold. Like the Japanese, the mountain-dwelling Indians do not to associate the concept of “freezing” with the concept of “heating.” I arrived at my weirdly named Hunted Hill Hotel in Mcleod Ganj, just up the very steep road from the Dalai Lama’s place, dumped my stuff and went off to a sanitation workshop (in answer to my earlier question, it wasn’t cold enough in daytime to prevent the digging of latrines). In the evening, I was persuaded to travel an hour to a nearby town, stopping on the way at a Hindu temple, where I watched with astonishment a man who I thought eminently rational and scientific (being an agricultural scientist) buy some overpriced rice and go and stand in front of a goddess painted blue and with many arms and covered in skulls, and take it totally seriously.

I said nothing, but, mindful of my mother’s constant admonishment that I’m a terrible actor, I went outside and turned my expression in the safer direction of monkeys playing with litter bins.

The temple visit extended into a trip to find an old friend of the agricultural scientist, at whose house - a palatial new building done in Kashmiri style - we were guests/trapped until 11pm. Returning to the Hunted Hill at midnight, I found the gates locked, the staff asleep and - once I’d woken them by rattling the iron gates, which seemed appropriate on a Hunted Hill, no heating.

“No heating?’

“No madam. In Dharamsala we have no heating.”

“But it’s COLD!’

“Yes, madam,” he said, wrapped in three fleeces and a warm hat, in front of the sign saying “NO HOT WATER DEVISES IN ROOMS.”
“We have a hot water bottle?”

Thank god - even a many-armed, many-skulled daft blue one - for hot water bottles.

The mountains behind Dharamsala are majestic and stunning and the peaks are dappled with snow. Tibetan monks in plum and orange - several abominations of monks, according to the well-wikipedia-ed molmack - acessorise the scenery nicely. But on the way back from workshop day 2, a man from Manali said, as I commented on the stunning-ness of the sort-of-snowy peaks, “ten years ago, they were snow-capped. Warming.”

I have spent two nights out of three on trains. Both rides were considerably smoother than my other train experiences. The trains were relatively empty. There were no snorers. There were young girls who in the morning offered me biscuits. There was a gentleman with a beard and a flat cap from Kashmir, on his way to Delhi to try to get a British visa to visit his son, a doctor in A&E at Derby Hospital. I said, having bored him about sanitation, “how is Kashmir these days?”

“Frankly, it’s burning.”

He said, “every day, we hear of five new casualties.”

I said, because I watched Gandhi the other evening and that makes me an expert, “Partition was a tragedy.”

“Yes. And it still is.”

Then I go online and discover that the scandal of Kashmir is nothing compared to the scandal of what Jade Goody said to Shilpa Shetty. I haven’t seen it or read a transcript but the quotes I’ve seen are confusing. Indians do eat with their hands. Actually, hand. Shilpa Shetty, being an overprivileged and undertalented airhead - and that’s according to the papers, at least until she became a Diplomatic Incident - should indeed visit the slums for a day. And so should Jade Goody. And Gordon Brown for that matter.