The sky scraper

Our driver is KC (Karma Chopel would die but not be called un-cool). He wears a beret,doesn’t call a kaffiyeh a scarf and has never listened to a Hindi song after 1990. The last is my conclusion,given the only Hindi song he played in the last three days can be traced back to Aashiqui. He comes from Lachen,a small village nearly 120 km from Gangtok,our first stop in the north Sikkim itinerary. So it sort of explains how he hip-hops over the small but fierce waterfalls gushing over the ribbon of the road that coils up the mountain till Lachen and further up.

At night,Lachen is a swarm of lights floating in a pool of darkness. Our hotel,a small two-story structure,stares at dimly lit houses glued to the edge of another mountain road,on the other side of a valley.
Here time stands still. Very still. The cellphone’s network signal dwarfed to a blank hours ago,hours back,and unlike in Kolkata,here I can’t tell time from the number of taxis on the road. And if your fellow tourists haven’t descended upon you,with their uncomfortably chauvinistic logic of security,to figure out what miracle or blasphemy has catapulted two single women (single in the tourist dictionary meaning,not accompanied by men of any kind) to 9,000 feet,you can probably hear the muffled drone of the Lachen river some hundred feet below.

The strange defiance of the night melts away with dawn. The mountain looks less otherworldly,more because,you can see the road twist upwards,little box-like houses dotting its course.
The population of about 1,000-odd thrives on tourism and every other house is some variation of the Snow Lion or Royal Hill Hotel. And as you walk down,green signboards pop up every ten feet asking you to keep the village clean—an order issued by the local civic authority,the Dzomsa. Lachung and Lachen follow a traditional legal system almost on the lines of a panchayat. “It’s not like a kangaroo court by the way. It was a very strong administration system. Constitution too recognised it after Sikkim became a part of India in 1975,” he says.

It is 5.30 a.m and a landslide sends KC into a fuss. Some landslides can be apparently fixed in half an hour. Or so we are made to believe by the army personnel who clean up the mess that is a bit of earth peeled off the side of the mountain.
Café 15,000,run by the 22 Sikh Battalion,is the last stop before the Gurudongmar Lake,nearly three hours from Lachen,is the stuff SUV ads are made of. Once you have managed to scurry into the tin structure that serves tea,coffee and a watery tomato soup from the vending machine,your eyes runs over what looks like a stretch of unforgiving,unrelenting canvas of hostility. The sun is blinding,the wind literally whips your face—and even if you manage to squint long enough,you would fail to tell where exactly the stretch of brown and grey bows out before the mountains.

The next hour to Gurudongmar Lake comes as a teasing flagrant challenge to urban conditioning. What you drive over is not a road,it’s a desert—aloof,rambling. I can’t tell if KC speaks to the stones,or is a 16th century mariner in his heart,but he seems to see some sort of a direction in the waste. And when he finally jerks to a stop,ten seconds of rubbing my eyes later,I realise I have probably run out metaphors,and words have finally met their match. It feels like somebody tore a page out of my junior school art book and pasted it at 17,000 feet. A pool of sheer guileless blue cradled by a string of rugged,cold mountains. Stuff legends and bedtime stories are made of.

Well,literally. As Gurudongmar shimmers in the sun,it’s not difficult to see,why one would fight for it. Like the Sikhs and the Buddhists,who have both claimed that the lake was blessed by their own prophets. While the Sikh legend has it that one of their Gurus,while traveling in this desert felt thirsty and created the lake,the Buddhists claim that one of the first seers to bring Buddhism to India blessed it.

A temple a few feet above the lake stands testimony to the disquiet over this impossible bit of silence. The Sikh Battalion,when it was posted at the Chopta Valley,set up the temple. This did not sit too well back in the 1990s with the Sikkim government. Today the temple bears a secular look with strings of colourful flags,quintessential to Buddhism,fluttering in all corners of the temple.
Down at the edges of the lake,little piles of stones sit still in the water—stoic like hope,relentless,like faith. You’re told they make wishes come true. At Gurudongmar,I am tempted to believe.

FAST FACTS
Getting there
You can share a cab with other tourists for a Lachen-Gurudongmar-Lachung-Yumthang trip,from Gangtok for Rs 2,000. You can plan your itinerary too and give it to the hotel you’re staying in.
When to visit
In summer the temperature at Lachen is 3-10 degrees centigrade,and makes it a good time to visit.
What to see/do
Thangu is the last village after Lachen on way to Gurudongmar. It has a handful of shops that stack everything from popcorn to rum.
Precautions
You could feel nauseous and dizzy at high altitude. People with high/low blood pressure and respiratory problems should take precautions. Visit Gurudongmar before 11.30 am. The army closes entry to the lake after this time,as it gets too windy.