On the trail to Bhadra - Part 4 Chapter 1 - the lost temple and ashram of the Puranas
Nandipara to Bhadra
By the time we finally left Nandipara, the morning had already begun leaning toward noon, though in the higher Himalayas sunlight often behaved deceptively. One could stand beneath brilliant illumination and still feel cold lodged deep inside the bones. The preparations alone had exhausted me more than I cared to admit openly before the mule handlers. Age transformed even beginnings into undertakings.
The trail northward rose immediately beyond the last cluster of stone dwellings as though the mountain wished to remind travellers, without unnecessary ceremony, that human settlement ended quickly here and that effort would now become compulsory. Behind us, Nandipara shrank gradually into fragments of slate roofs, smoke threads, and terraced slopes dissolving into mist. Ahead lay only the narrow brown trail curving upward around the shoulder of the ridge.
The old man, Samara, walked in front with a long wooden staff polished smooth by decades of use. He must have been seventy-five at the very least, perhaps older, though mountains altered the mathematics of age. Some faces weathered into old age by forty. Others survived astonishingly beyond eighty with the stubborn endurance of alpine shrubs growing from cracks in stone. His body was thin almost to dryness, yet his movements retained the measured balance of someone who had spent an entire lifetime walking uncertain ground.
Every few minutes he would stop briefly, not from fatigue, but to inspect the sky, the trail, the mules, or occasionally nothing visible at all.
“You walk slowly, Professor-saab,” he observed eventually without criticism.
“I have spent most of my life climbing university staircases,” I replied between breaths. “The Himalayas appear unconvinced by my academic qualifications.”
That produced a brief laugh from one of the mule handlers behind me.
“No degree works here,” the younger man said.
This was perhaps the most accurate educational philosophy I had encountered in years.
The air smelled faintly of damp soil, pine resin, mule sweat, and distant snow. It was a layered smell, not unpleasant, but ancient in some indefinable way, as though the mountains themselves preserved odours the plains had long forgotten beneath petrol fumes and concrete dust. Each breath entered the lungs cold and sharp. The sunlight overhead looked deceptively warm, yet the shadows retained the authority of night. Our boots pressed slowly into the wet brown trail where earlier frost had softened into mud under the hesitant morning sun.
Somewhere far below the ridge, hidden entirely from sight, water moved continuously through unseen channels with the subdued roar common to Himalayan valleys. One never escaped the sound of water in these mountains. Even when invisible, rivers remained acoustically present — beneath conversations, beneath wind, beneath thought itself. Sometimes the sound resembled distant traffic heard through sleep. At other moments it became almost liturgical, like low chanting emerging from the earth.
Rivers announced themselves long before they became visible.
I remember thinking, not for the first time, that entire Himalayan civilizations may have been built not around geography alone, but around acoustics. Human beings followed sound before they followed maps. Water guided memory. Pilgrimage routes probably emerged first as audible corridors through mountain terrain. Even mythology carried echoes of this. Sacred rivers were always heard before seen. The Ṛṣis of the old texts listened constantly — to forests, wind, streams, stones, thunder, birds, silence. Modern civilization observed; ancient civilization listened.
Samara walked slightly ahead of me with his staff tapping rhythmically against exposed stones along the path. Now and then he would stop and turn half sideways while speaking, not fully facing me, as though conversations in the mountains were best conducted while continuing movement. He explained that it was his responsibility to visit the remote hamlet of Bhadra once every fortnight and prepare a report regarding the people living there and the condition of the domestic animals. He spoke of this duty without bureaucratic importance, almost casually, as though describing seasonal weather patterns or grazing conditions.
“How many people remain there now?” I asked.
“Depends on weather,” he said. “Ten huts maybe. Sometimes fewer people. In winter some come lower down.”
“Huts?”
He nodded.
“Mostly sheds only. Stone below. Tin sheets. Wood. Smoke everywhere.”
The image formed slowly in my mind — a tiny settlement hanging somewhere above the ridges, exposed to snow, isolation, and months of uncertainty. The sort of place modern maps acknowledged reluctantly, if at all.
“And the name?” I asked. “Bhadra?”
At this Samara slowed slightly, perhaps pleased that I had asked the correct question.
“Named after Veerabhadra,” he said quietly.
The mule handler behind us muttered “Mahadev” almost automatically under his breath.
For several moments only the sound of our boots and mule bells accompanied the conversation.
Samara eventually continued in the unhurried cadence of people who carry stories not as performance, but as inherited weather.
“You know the story?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Daksha Prajapati. The great yajña. Sati entering the fire.”
He nodded again, satisfied.
“In old times,” he said, “people here believed Veerabhadra crossed these mountains after destroying the yajña.”
The statement was delivered matter-of-factly, without theatrical mysticism. That was what interested me increasingly about mountain oral traditions. They rarely separated mythology and terrain cleanly. The epics here did not occur in abstract sacred space; they moved physically through valleys, rivers, glaciers, ridges. Divine anger travelled across actual mountainsides.
As we walked, fragments of the ancient story returned to me from years of reading multiple Purāṇic versions and regional retellings. Daksha Prajapati, proud and rigid in ritual authority, refusing to acknowledge Shiva. Sati was humiliated publicly at her father’s sacrificial gathering. The unbearable collision between cosmic ego and wounded devotion. Then Shiva’s fury — not controlled divine justice, but catastrophic grief transformed into force. Veerabhadra emerging from that rage embodied destruction itself.
An interesting civilizational detail had always lingered in my mind about the Veerabhadra narratives. The old texts repeatedly struggled to describe him within ordinary human proportions. He appeared less as a person and more as an event — fire, storm, violence, disruption of ritual order. Such figures often fascinated frontier cultures living amid unstable geographies. Mountains understood destructive energy intimately. Avalanches, landslides, glacial floods, earthquakes — perhaps Veerabhadra survived here not merely as theology but as metaphor for the terrifying instability embedded within the Himalayas themselves.
Samara pointed upward toward distant dark ridges partly concealed by drifting clouds.
“The old people used to say,” he continued, “that Veerabhadra rested somewhere in those upper mountains after the destruction.”
“And Bhadra remained from that memory?”
“Maybe,” he said with a shrug. “Who can say now? But old names stay longer than old people.”
That sentence stayed with me.
Old names stay longer than old people.
It struck me then that much of my own journey into these mountains had emerged from precisely that suspicion — that names preserved continuity long after explanations collapsed. Sacred geography survived not because civilizations remembered perfectly, but because they forgot incompletely. A ruined shrine. A distorted legend. A valley named after some impossible event. A fire ritual no longer understood. A route still walked though nobody recalled who first opened it.
Above us, clouds drifted slowly across the upper Himalayan slopes while the hidden river continued speaking somewhere beneath the world of stone and mist.
“Otherwise nobody remembers them,” he said simply.
“What exactly do you report?”
He shrugged lightly.
“How many people? Whether somebody is sick. Whether the sheep survived winter. Whether mules were lost on upper paths. Sometimes if there are births. Sometimes deaths. Whether salt is needed. Kerosene. Medicines. Which dogs have become dangerous. Which roofs are collapsing.”
“And all this reaches Dharchula?”
“Eventually.”
The word eventually floated in the cold air with quiet Himalayan honesty.
He explained that the written report was carried back to Nandipara and then sent onward through the shopkeeper at Trishul-ki-Chatti whenever a rare bus, supply van, or shared taxi descended toward Dharchula. Communication here still depended less upon systems than upon memory and chance alignment of movement. I found something oddly moving about that. In the cities we imagined connectivity as instantaneous transmission. Here information still travelled physically through terrain, carried by weather-beaten men along dangerous paths.
“The people in Bhadra,” Samara continued, “mostly keep herds. Yaks in upper grasslands. Goats. Sheep. Mules. Some dogs also. Fierce dogs.”
He glanced toward me carefully while saying this, perhaps assessing whether I belonged to the category of elderly intellectuals who considered all animals spiritually symbolic until bitten.
“Families?”
“Some families remain there during warmer months. Some have people lower down in Trishul-ki-Chatti. Two families have children studying at Dharchula now.”
He pronounced Dharchula with a curious mixture of pride and suspicion, as though the town represented both opportunity and corruption simultaneously.
“One boy joined the army,” he added after some thought. “Garhwal Regiment.”
“Officer?”
Samara waved dismissively.
“Maybe. Maybe jawan. What difference? Uniform is uniform here.”
I remember smiling at that. The mountains often reduced distinctions that urban India treated with obsessive seriousness. Rank mattered less than return. Salaries mattered less than whether roads remained open through winter.
As we climbed further, the trail narrowed dangerously in places where old landslides had eaten away sections of the path. The mules crossed such stretches with infuriating confidence while I negotiated them with elaborate caution, planting my trekking pole carefully before each step. Loose stones shifted beneath my boots. Twice I stopped entirely to steady my breathing.
Below us, valleys opened suddenly through breaks in the cloud cover, revealing impossible depths streaked with old snow channels and dark forests descending toward invisible rivers. Beyond them rose additional ranges fading into pale blue distance toward Tibet.
I asked Samara whether Bhadra was truly the last settlement ahead.
“On this side, yes,” he said.
“And beyond?”
He pointed vaguely toward the high ridges beyond the eastern slopes.
“Other people. Other valleys. Tibet side also. Nepal side also. Mountains do not care for maps.”
That sentence remained with me.
He explained that people in Dharchula across the Nepal side sometimes claimed Bhadra belonged to Nepal rather than India, though nobody from the Nepal government had ever come there to verify anything. The Indian government also appeared only intermittently, usually through rumours of officials rather than officials themselves.
“Then how do the people decide?” I asked.
Samara looked genuinely puzzled by the question.
“Decide what?”
“Which country they belong to.”
He adjusted the shawl around his shoulders before replying.
“They belong to the mountain first.”
The answer silenced me more effectively than argument.
After another steep ascent over the first hillock north of Nandipara, our entire expedition collapsed gratefully beside the trail for rest. One mule immediately attempted to chew at a rope harness. Another stood perfectly motionless, steaming gently in the cold sunlight. My cook removed his woollen cap and wiped sweat from his forehead while muttering darkly about professors who carried libraries into glaciers.
I sat heavily upon a flat stone, lungs protesting sharply. My heartbeat seemed absurdly loud inside my ears. At sea level this incline would barely qualify as exercise. Here it felt like negotiation with mortality.
Samara lowered himself beside me with surprising elegance for a man his age. Then, after several moments of companionable silence, he reached somewhere deep within the many layers of his clothing and produced a long bamboo pipe assembled from mismatched local materials darkened by years of handling.
The ritual that followed possessed almost priestly concentration.
He loosened a small cloth pouch carefully, mixed tobacco with slow deliberate fingers, packed the bowl thoughtfully, then lit it with a coal preserved inside folded bark fibre. After two or three deep pulls, he exhaled with visible satisfaction into the cold mountain air and leaned back against a rock looking momentarily at peace with both earth and sky.
The smoke smelled strong, raw, and oddly sweet.
“You carry many books,” he observed eventually.
“Yes.”
“You are searching for some old place.”
“Yes.”
He nodded slowly as though confirming something privately suspected all along.
Then he turned toward the northern ridges, where clouds drifted slowly across distant slopes like moving curtains.
“You will be interested,” he said quietly, “in the old temple. The most ancient temple to Mahadeva in these mountains. Almost as important as one of the Pancha Kailasha. Or one of the Pancha Kedara.”
Even the mule handlers stopped moving for a moment.
The wind shifted lightly across the ridge.
And something inside me — some old scholarly instinct buried beneath fatigue, skepticism, age, and altitude — sat upright immediately like a half-forgotten animal suddenly hearing its true name spoken aloud after many years.
(c) Bharat Bhushan
17 May 2026
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