While arguably the areas being disputed between China and India were far from the Punjab and belonged to distant provinces, the truth was quite different once you started to think about the Five Rivers of the Punjab and their significance. For all five of them, as well as the Indus into which they all eventually flowed, originated in the Himalayas. Once you had gained control over a river's headwaters, you could put a dam there. As soon as you did that, you could control its flow, and thereby control the lives of all who lived downstream of it.
Sorting out the details of where to go and how to get there had been a somewhat bewildering process because of the convolutions and forkings of the river valleys in the mountains. But once Laks had uploaded the geography into his head, the place that leapt out as being of greatest interest was where the Chenab and the Beas originated within just a few kilometers of each other on opposite flanks of a high spine of rock spanned by a nightmare of switchbacks called the Rohtang Pass. Northeast of there was the even higher region of Ladakh, indistinctly bounded by the Line of Actual Control.
Down in the lowlands--basically everything west of Chandigarh--it was easy to move laterally from one river to the next by crossing the table-flat doabor Mesopotamian plateau between them. Now, though, topography made it imperative simply to choose one river and follow it up to its beginning. By far the most direct one was the Beas. It had stopped Alexander the Great. Perhaps it could stop the Chinese as well. Shimla, a city of a couple of hundred thousand that the Brits had planted up in the mountains so that they wouldn't all perish of heat stroke during the summer, was not on the Beas. But one of the least terrible ways to getto the upper Beas from Chandigarh was to pass through it, and anyway Jasmit was bound in that direction and avidly wished to support the quest of (until this morning) Laks and (now) the Fellowship. Halfway there, they stopped at a factory that, like all other structures here, was perched improbably on a slope, and picked up cargo, which the boys helped load, then sat on the rest of the way.
Once they had parted company with Jasmit at Shimla, Laks's bhais only slowed him down, since group hitchhiking was slower than solo. But before they went very much farther they entered into the valley of the Beas, which ran straight north to the destination. There were two roads running parallel to the river on opposite banks. It was impossible to get lost. So for a couple of days they split up, leapfrogging one another on various modes of transport, staying in sync with phones, reconnecting in hostels or dhabas. They were now decisively out of the Punjab, in a Sikh-minority part of the country, predominantly Hindu of course. But the farther north they went, the more strongly it was inflected by Tibetan Buddhists and Western backpackers. Of the latter, some were pure adventurers while others were pilgrims, figuratively and literally on the road to Dharamshala.
This put Laks into a funny state of mind when he found himself, as happened increasingly, among such people in hostels or bus stations. To extend Ilham's analogy, if this was the Fellowship of the Ring, Laks was Aragorn, part man and part elf, equally capable of hanging out with Lord Elrond at the high table of Imladris or slamming down pints in a tavern in Bree. When not standing next to his modern backpack he looked absolutely like a Punjabi Sikh, and so was assumed to be just that by locals and Westerners alike. When he started talking, most would peg him as American, though people in the know could guess from his articulation and certain vowel sounds that he was Canadian.
He generally kept his distance, though. The backpackers carried their own rolling soap opera with them, with an ever-shifting cast of characters and set-piece dramas: who was sleeping with whom, who was a cool kid, a user, a narc, or moocher, who was in the know, who was clueless, who had left the communal bathroom in a terrible state. None of this was going to help Laks and so he kept his mouth shut.
During the first part of the journey, the truck drivers who picked him up, all of whom were Sikhs, seemed to assume he was just a young wanderer who needed a lift somewhere. But north of about Kullu this all changed. South of there this young hitchhiker might have been bound in any direction, and the thing in his hand was just a walking stick, the kind of thing a savvy traveler might carry to fend off rabid dogs. North of there his destination and his intentions were obvious, the purpose of the stick unmistakable. His bhais discovered likewise. They opened up the bundle of rattan and passed out sticks even to the non-combatant Ilham. Their baggage grew heavy with food and even clothing donated to them by truck drivers and dhaba staff who knew what they were doing.
The ease with which they reached Manali--the last settlement on the Beas before you climbed up into high mountains--forced Ravi's hand. He had been waffling the whole way, claiming that he was only tagging along on the first leg of the journey so that he could see the mountains, and that he'd peel off and go home at some point in the not too distant future. But just like that they were in Manali, where you couldn't look in any direction without seeing a genuine Himalaya erupting straight up just a few miles distant. Far from running low on supplies, they had stocked up as they went. No one could claim that they had suffered any hardship. Even the most coddled traveler would think twice before whining in earshot of Ilham, who had endured shit you wouldn't believe. No obvious opportunity had, in other words, presented itself to Ravi to justify his falling away from the quest.
Manali was a curious place where a number of very different streams of humanity came together. They did not clash but sorted themselves into parallel worlds. The economy was based on tourism. Indians traditionally came here on honeymoons. Western backpackers used it as a base camp for mountain forays. The styles of accommodation for those two classes of visitor couldn't have been more different. Added to that was a less visible community of refugees from the north, who naturally collected here because it was the first place a person coming down out of the mountains would have any chance of survival. The fourth stream was military, but they occupied their own facilities and drove their own vehicles--sometimes on their own roads. A neophyte wandering into town would have burned a day or two trying to make sense of all that, but Ilham vectored them straight to a hostel, half in the woods and sufficiently down-market that it also served as a logistics base for a certain number of Tibetan and Uighur refugees camped out nearby. The Fellowship settled in there for an afternoon and a night, ate that portion of their donated food that seemed least likely to keep much longer, and then proceeded to draw attention to themselves by doing squats and push-ups and burpees in the courtyard until they were near to passing out. Manali was at two thousand meters: a mile high, basically. Nothing compared to where they were going but enough that the lungs noticed.
Two young men came over to watch. They looked South Asian but, to judge from speech and attire, were working-class Englishmen. Laks guessed--correctly as it turned out--that they were Sikhs who were non-observant, at least when it came to hair, beard, and turban. They were at least wearing bracelets. Perhaps they were now trying to remedy that by letting their beards grow, or perhaps shaving had just been inconvenient for them during the last week or so. They had walking sticks, but in no other way did they seem to have any interest in backpacking just for backpacking's sake. They introduced themselves as Sam and Jay, which Laks could guess were Anglicized variants of whatever traditional names appeared on their passports. Squinting through their own cigarette smoke, they appraised the stick-work of Laks and Gopinder with what seemed to be a discerning eye and asked questions that seemed extremely practical in nature.
Once they had all made friends to a certain point, they explained flat-out that they were hooligans. Soccer hooligans. Not just casual brawlers but members of organized bands that would travel en masse to foreign countries and use organized tactics to make war on their counterparts from Athens or Lisbon or Warsaw. They had reached an advanced age (twenty-five) where introspection and wisdom had begun to cloud their judgment. They'd heard of the war being waged with rocks and sticks at the top of the world and it had occurred to them that the skills they had acquired in combat against supporters of rival football squads could just as well be put into service holding the Chinese at bay. Sam and Jay were too dour and grudging to come right out and say we'd like to team up with youbut thenceforth they simply behaved as if this were a done deal.
The way it worked here, as Ilham explained, was that drivers aspiring to go north tried to get as early a start as possible, to beat the traffic jam created by all the other vehicles pursuing exactly the same strategy. They had to get up so early that it basically wasn't worth going to bed. They pooled funds with Sam and Jay and hired two taxis. Luggage went in the boot or on the roof, and sticks were strapped alongside the luggage racks, which to the eyes of adventuresome males of their age looked cool. The road north out of town was already dismayingly crowded.
Until recently it had been necessary to drive all the way over Rohtang Pass, an infinity of switchbacks cresting at four thousand meters, then down an equal number of switchbacks into a hamlet on the upper Chenab at more like three thousand meters. From there the highway followed a maddeningly indirect route up into Ladakh, the water- and oxygen-starved province that bordered China. Remote and thinly populated as it was, Ladakh was connected to the rest of India in only a few places through which all traffic in and out of it was funneled. Hence all this traffic in the wee hours in what otherwise seemed like the middle of nowhere.
A few years ago the government had at last succeeded in punching a very long and deep tunnel all the way through the spur of the Himalayas separating the Beas from the Chenab, bypassing the dreaded Rohtang Pass. Several kilometers north of Manali, the road forked. A newer road ran to the left toward the entrance of the tunnel. The right fork, which led to the pass, was less traveled. It wandered through a little settlement and then struck out decisively uphill. Before too long there was snow on the ground, then banks of it plowed off to the sides, and then they were driving between vertical walls of it, as high as the taxis' windowsills. As high as the roof racks. At one point about halfway up they stopped for a bit at a little dhaba and were able to clamber up a snowbank and look down on the road they had not taken: a snake of red brake lights winding its way up a valley toward the entrance of the tunnel. They couldn't see the entrance from this angle, but could guess where it was from a nimbus of arctic cold white LED lights above a spur of rock.