Chapter One - Part Three - The ancient lost temple and ashram of the Puranas
The mysterious references in the Puranas
By morning, Nandipara had begun reassembling itself slowly out of mist and cold light. The village did not awaken dramatically. There were no loud announcements of daybreak, no theatrical burst of activity, no sudden eruption of human confidence against the silence of the mountains. Dawn here did not behave like dawn in the plains. In the cities, morning announced itself aggressively — pressure cookers whistling through apartment shafts, buses grinding awake, impatient scooter horns, vendors shouting prices into already exhausted air. But in these upper Himalayan settlements, morning seemed less an event than a gradual permission granted by the landscape itself. Life emerged carefully, almost cautiously, as though the mountain permitted movement only in measured increments before the sun properly crossed the eastern ridges and dissolved the night’s cold authority.
At first there was only a subtle thinning of darkness. Then shapes began returning one by one with hesitant clarity. A low stone wall appeared where earlier there had been only shadow. A sloping roof emerged beneath beads of condensed mist. Thin threads of smoke rose uncertainly upward from hidden kitchens before being torn apart by crosswinds descending invisibly through the valley. Even the dogs barked reluctantly, as though sound required energy best conserved at altitude.
The cold possessed a mineral quality that morning, dry and faintly metallic inside the lungs. When I stepped outside the tea shed and stood beneath the rough wooden overhang, I could feel the night still trapped inside the stones underfoot. Beyond the village, the mountain slopes remained partially concealed behind shifting vapour that moved slowly through the pine forests like thought itself — forming, dissolving, reforming. Visibility arrived in fragments. A terrace field would emerge briefly in pale light and then vanish again behind drifting white.
What struck me repeatedly about such Himalayan mornings was the absence of spectacle. The mountains did not care whether they were being observed. There was no performative grandeur in their silence. Human beings alone seemed obsessed with converting landscapes into emotional theatre.
A woman carrying a large bundle of firewood passed below the tea shed along the narrow descending path without the slightest awareness that, in cities far away, intellectuals, documentary filmmakers, urban environmentalists, and conference-speaking anthropologists would probably photograph her enthusiastically and describe the image with phrases like “traditional Himalayan resilience,” “sustainable mountain living,” or “indigenous ecological balance.” I found myself thinking, not without irritation, how easily suffering became vocabulary once sufficient distance existed between observer and burden.
She walked with the steady practicality of someone performing neither culture nor symbolism, but necessity. There was no romance in the movement of her body. The load of wood across her back was visibly heavy enough to alter posture and breathing. A wide cloth strap ran across her forehead to balance the weight, pressing deeply into the skin above her eyebrows. Her woollen shawl had been repaired repeatedly at the edges. One sandal appeared newer than the other. The path itself was uneven, broken by exposed roots, loose stone, and small patches of hardened mud left behind by older snowmelt.
Yet she moved without hesitation, adjusting instinctively to the mountain’s irregularities. Not graceful exactly. Not dramatic. Simply practiced. The kind of competence born from repetition beyond counting.
For a brief moment she disappeared entirely into a bank of drifting mist before emerging again several yards lower on the path, diminished gradually by distance until both woman and firewood became indistinguishable from the muted browns and greys of the mountainside itself.
The morning was cold. That alone mattered. Real resilience rarely advertises itself. It simply continues. The mule handlers were already awake by then, moving about the camp with the subdued efficiency of men accustomed to altitude, cold mornings, and difficult routes. One of them, a narrow-faced young man named Devendra, crouched beside a kerosene stove boiling tea in a blackened aluminium vessel near the stacked supply bundles.
“You slept well, Professor Sir?” he asked as I approached.
“Like a dying yak,” I replied.
The laughter that escaped him was so sudden and loud that one of the tethered mules jerked its head upward in alarm before settling again. I liked Devendra immediately after that.
Mountain people, I had learned over the years, distrust excessive politeness. Too much refinement in difficult terrain usually indicates either dishonesty or uselessness. In the plains, especially within universities, bureaucracies, conferences, and committees, politeness often functioned as camouflage — language polished carefully enough to conceal ambition, resentment, intellectual insecurity, or simple incompetence. But mountains had little patience for such decorative behaviour. At altitude, usefulness revealed itself quickly. A man either carried weight or he did not. Either he could walk the path without collapsing or he delayed everyone behind him. Even conversation changed character in such places. Sentences became shorter. Instructions became direct. Words were expected to perform labour rather than ornament thought.
One of the mule handlers, while tightening a rope harness around a load sack, grunted at me in acknowledgment that hovered somewhere between greeting and professional assessment. I nodded back with what I hoped was acceptable economy. Too much friendliness from outsiders often produced suspicion here, especially from aging men like me who arrived carrying notebooks, theories, and expensive walking sticks while asking questions about forgotten shrines and old routes that sensible local people had stopped discussing generations ago.
The morning then dissolved into logistics.
My expeditions always expanded beyond reasonable proportions. Even while planning them from the relative safety and intellectual optimism of my study back home, I repeatedly convinced myself that each additional item was absolutely indispensable. Every map might contain one overlooked notation. Every copied manuscript might preserve a geographical clue hidden inside some obscure Purāṇic metaphor. Every notebook represented future insight not yet discovered. By the time the actual journey began, the expedition resembled less a scholarly field excursion and more a migrating archive attempting, against all practical wisdom, to cross the Himalayas.
That morning beyond the tea shed, we reorganized supplies for the northern ascent beyond Nandipara, a process which took nearly three exhausting hours despite the apparent simplicity of the task. Nothing in the mountains was simple once weight entered the equation. Every kilogram acquired moral significance. Every badly tied knot threatened consequences several valleys later.
The mules stood patiently at first, steam rising faintly from their bodies into the cold air, though patience among pack animals always possessed visible limits. Their bells clinked intermittently while loads were shifted, removed, weighed mentally by experienced eyes, then tied again with coarse rope darkened by years of use. Food sacks had to be balanced properly across both sides. An uneven load could wound an animal slowly over long ascents. Cooking oil containers required additional wrapping because even one leak could spread through blankets, papers, woollens, and provisions with catastrophic efficiency.
Rice. Flour. Lentils. Salt. Tea leaves packed into reused plastic jars. Kerosene cans tied separately away from dry food. Tent equipment wrapped beneath tarpaulin sheets already patched repeatedly from previous journeys. Coils of rope. Spare batteries. Solar chargers whose efficiency reduced drastically whenever the weather turned uncertain. Water purification tablets. Extra socks and woollens compressed tightly into waterproof bags. Folding stools which I stubbornly insisted upon carrying despite repeated objections from younger men who considered them evidence of urban weakness.
My medicines occupied one entire weatherproof aluminium case with the solemn importance of a travelling pharmacy. Blood pressure tablets. Acidity medication. Painkillers for knees and lower back. Inhalers. Broad-spectrum antibiotics prescribed reluctantly by my doctor, who had long ago concluded that preventing my Himalayan journeys was medically impossible. There were strips of tablets for altitude headaches, digestion, muscle spasms, sleep disturbances, and several unnamed anxieties associated with aging bodies attempting landscapes designed for younger lungs.
Then there were the books.
Always the books.
Two cardboard cartons covered with waterproof tarpaulins were filled almost entirely with maps, notebooks, copied manuscripts, loose research papers, and photocopies of Sanskrit and Purāṇic references sealed carefully inside waterproof plastic sleeves. Some pages had travelled with me across multiple expeditions, their corners softened by years of handling, margins crowded with annotations written in trains, guesthouses, monasteries, forest rest houses, and dimly lit tea stalls across northern India. Survey maps layered with handwritten markings. Genealogies of rivers copied from obscure editions of the Skanda Purāṇa. Fragments from Vedic commentaries. References to mineral fires. Mentions of vanished hermitages hidden inside theological argument.
Looking at the cardboard cartons covered with the tarpaulin resting absurdly beside sacks of rice and kerosene cans, I briefly wondered — not for the first time — whether I was transporting scholarship into the mountains, or carrying evidence of a lifelong inability to let certain questions die quietly.
One of the younger porters attempted to lift a trunk experimentally and immediately looked at me with visible disbelief.
“What is inside this?” he asked.
“Books,” I admitted.
“All books?”
“Mostly.”
He blinked several times as though trying to understand a form of madness previously unknown to him.
“In school we were beaten for not carrying books,” he said finally. “This is the first time I have seen someone carry them willingly into a mountain.”
For a moment I could not answer because the observation was too accurate. The truth, when stripped of scholarly language, was slightly embarrassing. I trusted texts more than certainty. That was the real reason I had come northward. Not because I blindly believed in hidden temples, secret sciences, or mystical legends waiting obediently for rediscovery.
In fact, years of academic work had made me deeply suspicious of easy conclusions. Age had not made me wiser in the romantic sense people often liked to attribute to retired professors; if anything, it had made me slower to believe both certainty and fashionable skepticism. I had spent decades watching theories rise triumphantly through universities only to collapse a generation later beneath new data, revised ideological frameworks, or simple intellectual vanity disguised as progress. Entire careers had been constructed upon interpretations that now survived only as footnotes buried in forgotten journals. Confidence, I had learned, was frequently the most temporary substance in academia.
And yet certain patterns across the Purāṇas, the Vedas, and scattered regional traditions had begun disturbing me intellectually in ways I could no longer dismiss as coincidence, projection, or devotional imagination. Disturbing was perhaps the correct word because the unease they produced was not mystical but structural. The fragments converged too precisely. Not continuously, not cleanly, but with the irregular consistency of something partially remembered across centuries of erosion.
The directional indicators appeared repeatedly. Northern valleys. High rivers originating beneath snow regions. References to elevated fire enclosures beyond settled kingdoms. Mentions of “mineral flames beneath snow-fed valleys.” The phrase itself had first arrested my attention years earlier in a poorly preserved Sanskrit commentary whose editor had dismissed the passage as symbolic cosmology. But the references persisted elsewhere in altered forms. Descriptions of furnaces or ritual fires associated not merely with worship, sacrifice, or theological purification, but with transformation itself — transformation of substances, ores, metals, pigments, medicinal compounds. Certain passages described heat with technical specificity rather than devotional abstraction. Airflow. Bellows. Stone chambers. Coloured residues. Smoke that poisoned improperly prepared vessels.
Later commentators either misunderstood such descriptions completely or deliberately softened them into metaphor. Perhaps they had no alternative. Civilizations forgot technologies more easily than they admitted.
Most modern scholars preferred metaphorical interpretations. That was safer. Safer academically. Safer intellectually. A metaphor could never be disproven because it conveniently detached itself from terrain, material evidence, and measurable reality. One could speak endlessly about “inner fire,” “cosmic transformation,” “alchemical spirituality,” or “ritual transcendence” while remaining comfortably insulated from the embarrassing possibility that ancient texts might contain fragmented memories of practical systems now lost or misinterpreted.
I understood the caution, of course. Romantic nationalism had already polluted too much serious scholarship around ancient India. Most explanations now claimed aircraft, nuclear weapons, plastic surgery, and interplanetary science hidden inside Sanskrit verses poorly translated for political excitement. I did not wish to argue with them. The old texts deserved better than both blind worship and fashionable dismissal.
But I had spent too many years studying environmental systems, historical geography, river basin cultures, and civilizational adaptation patterns to ignore recurring spatial correlations entirely. Ancient societies encoded practical knowledge inside symbolic language constantly. Not occasionally. Constantly. Rivers became goddesses because rivers sustained agricultural survival. Mountains became cosmic diagrams because terrain organized cosmology and political imagination alike. Trade routes transformed gradually into pilgrimage circuits once memory accumulated around movement. Metallurgy became ritual because control over fire, ore, fuel, and transformation carried both economic and sacred significance.
Why should the old Indian knowledge systems have behaved differently?
That question had followed me for years now with the stubborn persistence of unfinished mathematics. Sometimes I resisted it deliberately. Sometimes I dismissed my own speculations as late-life intellectual obsession — the occupational hazard of retired scholars with too much time and insufficient institutional supervision. Yet the question always returned. Quietly. Persistently. Often at inconvenient hours.
And now it had brought me here.
I stood in the cold mountain light of Nandipara while mule handlers tied my travelling library onto pack saddles with practical efficiency utterly indifferent to my philosophical agitation. One of the ropes creaked sharply as the load shifted. A mule snorted steam into the air. Somewhere lower in the village a metal vessel struck stone with a brief ringing sound that vanished quickly into the valley silence.
Above us, clouds drifted slowly across the upper Himalayan ridges like unfinished thoughts moving through the mind of the earth itself. The mountains revealed and concealed their contours by turns, as though geography here preferred suggestion over certainty. I remember standing there with my gloves half-buttoned, watching the mist move across distant slopes, and feeling again that peculiar tension which had accompanied me throughout this journey — the uneasy possibility that mythology, geography, memory, and material history were perhaps not separate domains at all, but broken pieces of a much older continuity modern scholarship no longer possessed the patience to assemble.
