JULY 29, 2018 • THE WEEK 65go up to the hills and get high. It is an open secret
and the government mostly turns a blind eye.
“I’ve come here to do a yoga course,” said an
Israeli woman called Shaked Katzil. “Th ere is an
energy to this place that you don’t fi nd anywhere
else.” Everyone there seemed to be free-spirited,
living an alternative lifestyle, even Indians like
Jimmy Arora, the middle-aged music instruc-
tor from Dehradun I met outside a homestay
giving a guitar lesson to a white woman. “I teach
everything from kalimba and violin to ukulele
and harmonica,” he said. “Th e money is s***, but
I no longer want material things.” When I asked
him why he chose not to marry, he said per-
plexingly, “I don’t smoke up, so I don’t stand a
chance of fi nding anyone.”
Perhaps more committed to the search for
enlightenment were the monks of the mud
house place. You have to walk down a narrow
road through a forest of rhododendron and
cedar trees to reach the place, where around 40
monks stay sequestered in elfi n mud houses for
years meditating and praying. Each mud house
is equipped with a bed, a table, a chair and a
small kitchenette with a shelf. I saw stacked in
one of the shelves interesting items like crunchy
muesli, Tata salt, Nutralite butter and Ajanta
baking powder. It made me wonder about the
monks’ diet.
Th e house belonged to a monk who asked me
whether Malayalis communicated in Sanskrit.
Or at least, I think that’s what he asked. He spoke
English with great diffi culty, like each word had
to be carefully scrubbed in his mind before being
uttered. So, it was either whether we commu-
nicated in Sanskrit, or whether we consumed
sandwiches; the former seemed more likely.
“I came here when I was 25 years old and now
I am 50,” said another monk called Lob Zang
who had a mischievous smile. “I used to be very
naughty as a child. When I became a monk, a big
change took place in my life. Ninety per cent of
my mind is totally changed. But I still have some
ego which I need to get rid of.”SALIL BERA