CHANDIGARH
Laks took the move from Amritsar to Chandigarh as an opportunity to do a little more traveling around the Land of Five Rivers. He had actually seen very little of it so far. It was at this point that the social network—no, the society—that he’d become a part of, just by sticking with it, humping the langar’s lentils and digging the akhara’s dirt, came into its own and he saw its full power and virtue. Sikhs were well represented among truck drivers. Pick a road out of town and everyone knew someone who would be driving a truck or a bus or even a motorbike in that direction soon. And if not soon enough, there was free food at the langar and maybe some pointers on where to find a place to sleep. So once he had established a basic fund of trust and cred, grown his beard out, learned how to dress and how to talk, then, just by virtue of being a likely young man traveling on his own he was able to move around the Punjab, if not always quickly, then at least cheaply. In a way, the less he spent, the easier it got, for people were more willing to help out a scrappy wanderer sleeping rough than they were a Canadian tourist with a fat wallet.
His objective was to go and visit all five of the eponymous rivers: from north to south, the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Ravi, the Beas, and the Sutlej. Eventually all of them flowed into the Indus, the great river that gave India its name.
He was under no particular compulsion to do this. It wasn’t a ritual pilgrimage or anything like that. It just appealed somehow to his innate sense of completeness. He’d be able to say that he had really seen the Punjab.
Amritsar was right between the Ravi and the Beas, so those were easy day trips. He went to the site on the western bank of the Beas where Alexander the Great had thrown in the towel, abandoned
all hope of adding Pentapotamia to his empire, and turned back toward far Macedonia with his exhausted and disgruntled troops.
The Ravi coincided, along part of its course, with the India-Pakistan border, cutting the Punjab in half—an amputation that had led to a great deal of trouble and explained in a roundabout way why Laks’s family were running gas stations in Canada. Since the fateful year of 1947 the river had evinced a total lack of respect for the boundary line solemnly drawn on maps, and strayed to either side of it as floods pushed it out of its banks. By choosing a meander that looped into India, Laks was able to visit the Ravi, wade in its water, and evaluate fish habitats without having to go through the rigamarole of crossing into Pakistan. In the minds of his people, what lay on the other side was West Punjab. He’d have liked to visit it. But he had now overstayed his six-month tourist visa. He was in India illegally. He could cross over into Pakistan, but not come back in. And being stuck in Pakistan was not on his bucket list.
The Chenab and the Jhelum ran decisively through Pakistan in their middle courses. Farther north, though, closer to their mountain wellsprings, they could be reached in Kashmir. So that leg of the trip was the first time Laks had seen mountains since coming to India.
He found that he had missed mountains. In Canada they just plunged straight down into the ocean. At night in Vancouver you could see skeins of light suspended in midair high above street ends: ski areas just outside of town, illuminated for nocturnal customers. He had gone up there and snowboarded with his friends. He missed that dimensionality to the landscape.
He got into a spot of trouble when, on his way back south, he encountered a roadblock where Indian authorities were checking IDs. It all had to do with the border dispute between Pakistan and India. So he had to bail out of the truck he was riding in—no feat at all, since it was stopped dead in a five-mile-long traffic jam, and the driver had switched off the engine—and backtrack on foot. Eventually he hitchhiked his way into the neighboring province of Himachal Pradesh and then found his way back down into East
Punjab just by hiking across the border in a mountainous area where there could be no roadblocks, since there were no roads. That was his first encounter with Indian wilderness, which—obvious as it might sound—was just that. No one lived there. The landscape was natural. When he did happen upon a road, he hitchhiked back down into the lowlands, feeling he’d made a connection with the ancient gurus. For many had been the occasions when early Sikh leaders had been forced by martial setbacks to withdraw into these hills and lie low for months or years.
The Sutlej, by contrast, meandered across flat territory, absolute Breadbasket land, not as spectacular as Kashmir until you got your head around the sheer amount of food being produced in the green fields that the river watered. Then it was as impressive in its way as mountains. Apparently a lot of other people down through the centuries had shared the same view, for the area he happened to visit, around Ferozpur, was speckled with battle memorials.