Despite Avalanche Risk

📍Leh, Ladakh, India (Issue 192)

Right here I enjoyed perhaps the best chapati and chai in the world

1_ awareness contracts

When the going gets tough, we go blind. We become self-involved. The world keeps spinning on its axis, but we look at our feet, pedals, or screens shortsightedly. Our peripheries collapse; awareness contracts. I realised this because the steeper the mountain road I'm climbing, the more I overlook the invisible workforce of the Border Roads Organisation — The Border Roads Organisation (or BROs) is responsible for rebuilding damaged roads along the Indian border, high up in the mountains.

I was oblivious to the people, families, and communities when ascending. I rode past them as I climbed into the Himalayas.

But move your gaze down from the white Himalayan peaks and up from the broad desolate valleys, and you'll find families working in brutal conditions. They are coated with dust; their faces are covered with wretched T-shirts; heads under woolly hats, wrapped in heavy third-hand jackets, stood next to an indecisive cement mixer intermittently churning as if asthmatically gasping 50% oxygen up at 5,300 metres. Some passes are higher than Mount Kenya, others higher than Kilimanjaro.

It's dry: above the tree line and below thin, wispy clouds that don't threaten with rain. It snows in winter, and unpredictable avalanches wreck the roads on which the Border Roads Organisation work tirelessly. Like the Sisyphus, there is no end to the work required to reinstate the tarmac. Hired in Nepal, a family or a community secures building contracts. From Kathmandu they come to work in their thousands for thirteen hours a day, six days a week, for six months — in the most dangerous conditions. Either sat in a JCB digging dirt from the side of the road, or filling road holes, or re-building walls, or rolling tarmac. All the while, boulders the size of footballs drop among them; they live under the forever threat of an avalanche.

Women, beautiful and young, with their babies wrapped to their backs, climb up on the steep slopes above the road with sticks or lengths of rebar and cantilever loose rocks down to their colleagues who collect the rubble and, with bare hands, fill a waiting truck.

Each works tirelessly for £10 a day, or 1,000 Indian rupees.

Then, at sunset, when the orange sun is being chased from the peaks by nightfall, each family returns to their informal yellow tents: scarcely more than thick plastic sheeting held up by sticks, edges dug into the ground, filled with blankets to ward off the cold.

2_ generosity

Inevitably, in the remote Spiti Valley, my bicycle broke.

I waited for a while, hopeless and alone. Then, a couple of workers picked me up in their Mahindra Bolero, the ubiquitous white truck found throughout the mountains. I see a dozen Boleros a day, filled with blue water barrels, or fifteen workers, and always scratched and beaten.

I sat in the front as we drove with total ignorance of the condition of the road (the car is hired) and up toward the yellow-tented camp. At camp, after listening to Drake and talking in half sentences (though the Nepalis speak fantastic English), we sit and share chapati and sweet chai and talk about how life looks from this southern face of the valley, ten kilometres from the Kunzum pass.

It's not an easy life, but it's a happy one; the father of the man who collected me won the lucrative contract to repair a particularly wrecked stretch of road. My host has a phone, but his colleagues do not; they can't afford it. It's warm by day, but it gets bitterly cold at night, and they sleep with their children under heavy nylon blankets.

The kids, those beautiful kids! They are filthy from running around in the dust. It's so dry in this high desert that the really putrid aspect of the job is inhaling the dust. But these kids, like all others, maintain an innocent disregard for the cleanliness of their clothes, hands, or hair. They smile, put their tiny hands together to express namaste, and then roll into the dust.

3_ invisible

And the tragedy is, I didn't see them before my bicycle malfunctioned.

For days, I cycled past invisible families. All alone on the road, I waved and smiled, but (despite the long hours of nothing else to consider) I didn't think of the plight of the Border Roads Organisation. Where did they come from? Who, as people, are they?

And after chapati I realised they are just like me!

Sadly, it took their generosity and hospitality to wake me up to the plight of their lives. Lives spent rebuilding roads doomed to be destroyed next season.

And as we drove in the Bolero, listening to Drake, caps on backwards (them) or bucket-hat a-skew (me), I recognised our essential similarity. We all enjoy sweet tea and a warm bed, and it's a moment — fleeting, though it was — captured forever.

4_ similar

It will always be cliche to talk of the similarity of us humans.

Even so, it will always be necessary to state it! The chorus of voices examining our differences is one thousand times more numerous. Pointing out the similarities in our ordinary lives will lead to less conflict, less disregard for one another, and a shade less hate in the world.

I won’t forget those dusty, hard-working, underpaid, exploited people fixing the roads upon which I cycle and curse and take for granted.

I won’t forget the fresh chapati.

I won’t forget the jewel-like child’s eyes staring at me as I drank chai.

I won’t forget our friendship, which we discovered in that rocky land somewhere beyond a common language.

When climbing, I now take care to look up and out at the world, not down at my peddles, because otherwise — in my ignorance — I will miss out on lessons about life and about living.