Subir Roy: Heartbreak in Himachal

OFFBEAT

One of the finest holidays that we as a family have ever enjoyed was 15 years ago in the surroundings of Dalhousie in the Himachal hills and the high point was the day we spent at the forest department rest house at Khajjiar. The clear meadow with a dip in the middle which created a little pool and had a wooden foot bridge across it, ringed by the tall tree line, was straight out of heaven or Switzerland, whichever you like better.

So when our daughter studying in Delhi announced that she would be joining friends in a trip to Dalhousie during the Independence Day weekend, I asked her to bring me an update on Khajjiar. She did pay a visit to the great meadow but with difficulty. There was a traffic jam a little before you actually got there. We, on the other hand, had gone in late March when the rooftop still bore a burden of overnight snow and mindless holiday makers were totally absent.

The foot bridge is broken. The second-biggest scar is a concrete walkway that now encircles the meadow. The biggest scar is a set of concrete structures from the car park to the meadow, running a bit into it, housing ugly restaurants which have created their own filth around them and blare out loud music. But perhaps the biggest outrage is a fair ground device, huge plastic globes into which you can go and sit, and then someone rolls you in it down a part of the meadow.

Khajjiar now has a split personality. Look to one side of the meadow and you will see garish plastic chairs, filth and concrete, look to the other side and you will see the green meadow and misty tree line. If I am still around, I will do another update after 15 more years to, as things stand, report that the other side of the meadow is also gone.

The whole of Himachal is reeling under the onslaught of mindless development and misconceived wherewithal for tourism, but like Khajjiar, it is not all gone.

Family fried Rana, who divides his time between flying airplanes and taking children to Himalayan treks (their golden retriever Saheb goes too) used an enforced break to make the grand trip that I have always dreamed of "" take the Hindustan Tibet Road from Shimla right up to the Tibet border and then turn to head for Rhotang to end up in Manali.

He tells me that bits of Himachal, once you go beyond Shimla and before you come to devastated Manali, are still glorious. The high points for him were the journeys on the way into the Sangla and Pin valleys. The Sangla valley glories in rich temperate vegetation and there are enough corners in it where you can rest the eye on green and take in the scent of the hills and not look at the man made waster poorly disposed. The vegetation in the Pin valley, by contrast, is more stunted and less abundant because of the altitude and the rainfall. But, as Rana recalls, the valley is simply amazing, the majesty of the mountains contrasting the green.

These upper reaches of Himachal have also had some beneficial development. Orchards and farmland now cover previously barren slopes. Taking the pluses and minuses, I am hopeful that in a few years when I finally make the trip that has been half my life's ambition, there will still be enough for me to want to stay back.

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