Mother Earth as Dragon

Published December 2020 in Vessel of Voices, An Anthology of New Tipperary Writing

 
Sara watched dawn unfold as they drove through the outskirts of the remarkable mountain city.    She was leaving.  And she was glad.  Her taxi driver did not speak any English and Sara did not speak any Hindi.   But that was ok.  She didn’t feel like speaking.  She just wanted to drink it all in.  The leaving behind of the yoga group she had been part of.  The dawn.   India.  She had hired the private taxi to drive her through the foothills of the Himalayas, from Rishikesh to Chilianaula.  She was going to an ashram dedicated to the guru Haidakan Babaji.  It was a three-hundred-kilometre journey and taxi was the safest way to travel as a single woman in this part of northern India.  It was not just the safest way to travel, it was really the only way to travel through these mountains. 

Knowing that they had eight or nine hours of driving ahead of them Sarah soon found a comfortable comradeship with her driver, through their enforced silence.  For the first hour they did not say anything at all.     The shadows of the early morning light metamorphosed into sacred cows lying in the dust.   Old men were hunched over small fires at the edges of the road, warming their lost dreams.  On and on the city sprawled into smaller towns, the traffic and the people never ceasing.   As soon as the sun was fully up, and life was busy on the roads, Sara’s driver pointed to a building up ahead.  
“Chai.”   It wasn’t a question.  It was a matter of fact. 

They entered a very basic cafe.  The building made of corrugated tin.  Four tables.  A few chairs.  No menus.  Sara presumed the driver would sit with her.  She was disappointed when he left her sitting at a table all alone and went to sit with other drivers outside in the sunshine.  She would far rather have been with them, for it was lonely in the café and she was the only person sitting at a table.  A few waiters stood around watching her.  She was ravenously hungry but did not know how to ask for anything and the lack of menus made her task impossible.   She ordered and drank a very hot sweet black tea and returned to the car.  It wasn’t the best start to her independent travelling.

They drove through mile upon mile of farmland.   In the fields either side of the road, sugar cane was being harvested with teams of local men felling the crop with murderous-looking machetes.    Oxen lined the roads, pulling huge carts that towered over the small taxi as it swerved in and out between the beasts on the road, avoiding the carts, bicycles, children, dogs and monkeys that were running alongside the wagons.  They passed three elephants lumbering along the road.  Tourists piled high on dilapidated baskets on top of the wretched-looking animals.  It was the only time Sara had seen this spectacle since she had arrived in India.  Many years before she had been guilty of taking elephant rides with her children in Thailand.  That was before she realised the extent of the cruelty used in the training of them.  She still felt a thud in her stomach when she thought about it.  Each time she wished she could turn back the clock and make a different decision.  No elephant should have to live that life.  Here on the side of the road she witnessed three and wondered what lives they had, if any.  She turned her eyes away.  She did not get out her camera.  There was nothing she could do but stay in her taxi and continue past.  Sara wished them a happy life, prayed for their rescue, closed her eyes.

Soon the air grew cooler as the taxi began to leave the towns and cities behind them, climbing higher into the mountains.  They drove for hours through the Jim Corbett National Park and Sara gazed out of the window, longing for a glimpse of tiger and leopard.  None were visible, but she felt them.  The presence of the large cats prickled her neck around every corner.  Instead, she had to content herself with monkeys.  Everywhere.  Sitting on village walls like old men.  Scavenging the rubbish like thieves.   Watching the taxi pass by with rude indifference. A lone sacred cow stood among the rubbish outside one of the towns, munching on a heavy-duty plastic bag as if it were toughened grass, oblivious maybe, of her impending death from a stomach full of plastic that was not food.

A baby monkey held tight to a plastic bag that once held cheap crisp snacks and tried to stuff the bag into his mouth while his older siblings and cousins chased him through the traffic to grab and claim his prize.  This one piece of trash, one in a million of the other pieces that were scattered around them.  A stray dog was pulling garbage from a larger rubbish bag, in the hopes of finding something to eat and leaving the contents strewn, for no one to clean up.  The trash wound its way up the mountain like an inanimate snake, all reverence to Mother Earth a parody to the poverty Sara could see from her window as she was driven past.  It galled on her.  Humans; cows; monkeys; dogs; living on the edge amongst this Armageddon of impending environmental collapse.  It was not what she thought the Himalayas would be like. 

Sara and the taxi driver began to communicate with gestures of the hands, the odd word, a smile.  They shared food - Sara breaking bits off her protein bars and passing the mangled chocolatey wedges to him.  He, breaking apart large bunches of grapes from a huge paper bag at his side and passing them to Sara.   She worried for a time about them not being washed but hunger won over hygiene.  They stopped again at lunchtime and this time Sara didn’t mind eating alone - a simple meal of chapati and lentils.  She was so much more relaxed than at breakfast chai and she watched the other diners animated in the act of eating, with their friends and families.   She was the only European.  She didn’t mind.  Everyone smiled at her.  Acknowledged her.  Left her in peace to eat.  She realised how much more relaxed she was than when travelling with the yoga group in Rishikesh.  She liked the freedom of it. 
 
Bloody hell!  I’m doing it.  Here I am, on my own, making my way through the foothills of Himalaya.   I feel so very much alive.
 
All Sara’s heaviness of heart was left behind in Rishikesh.  She was breathing freely as the layers of constraint of the previous two weeks fell away.  She had felt a mantel of judgement from the group she had been with and from the wannabe guru running the retreat.  Now she was free, and her spirit was learning how to dance again.  She could feel the change coming over her.  An expectancy niggling at her senses.  A waking up. 
They climbed higher into the mountains.   Traversing each hairpin bend gifted Sara with spectacular vistas.  The impossibility of nature caught in her breath, as trees grew fearlessly out of the rocks, horizontal to the road.  Bare roots clinging to the rocks in a desperate bid for nutrition; the mighty trunks, ninety degrees out of kilter and flourishing despite of it.   Each one a travesty of natural law.   The scenery was like Sara had never seen before as they wound up and down through the mountains.  Ragged peaks spread out ahead of her in a never-ending blue grey mantle which seemed to grace the heavens.   Her eye unable to ascertain where the earth stopped, and the sky began; the summer haze smudging the edges of shape and form as they drove.  Around one corner Sara saw ahead of her little more than dust and rock, held together by roots of trees, barely able to call itself a road, and somehow, it hung on and supported them.  Around the next corner came a myriad of colour as they passed a mountain farm.  Graduated terraces, hand dug hundreds, if not thousands of years before, with their irrigation canals snaking down amongst the crops, brought a life force and a green hue to the otherwise barren environment.  Terraces were covered in a rich diversity of their traditional crops, interspersed with green leafy vegetables that Sara could not identify.  Herbs, flowers, pea vines and blotches of root vegetables all worked themselves into a patchwork of texture and colour; a cow or two munching on the rough grasses framing the edges of the picture postcard view.    They passed families walking along the road.  Sara noticed a school in the middle of nowhere, smiling faces leaning out of glassless windows, all the children waving as they passed.  A herd of goats taking themselves to new pastures.  Stray dogs.  More monkeys.  A gasp uttered from Sara as they turned another bend, and Himalaya in her full glory was spread out before them.  The mountains reached lazily ahead.  Rearing up, challenging the sky, dominating the horizon.   The glistening sun reflected back from the bracelet of white from the higher peaks, just an eagle’s flight away.

Another corner and all colour faded back into greyness.   A single piece of corrugated tin, balanced on top of two large rocks right on the edge of what was supposed to be road, was a home.   To a family of mountain people.  The rusting corrugated tin, the roof.   The rocks, the walls, of this rudimentary home.   A mother squatted in the dust, with a baby swaddled on her back.  She was stirring whatever was in her singular pot, with a stick, over a sad looking fire.  Her husband, if there was one, was nowhere to be seen.  Two children played at the side of the road with a stick, a stone and an empty food tin.  Their torn clothing and grubby faces just a mask for the humanity within.  As Sara passed by, the mother and children looked up at her and smiles spread wide across their faces in genuine greeting.  They waved with an innocence that was unbearable to witness and Sara felt ashamed.    Too privileged to be alive.  For being witness to this level of poverty.  For doing nothing.  For passing on by.
 
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
See the woman squatting there,
three children, two at play;
one on her back, still fully trussed.
A rotten stick in hand to stir the single pot.
One silver piece of corrugated
their only shelter, propped on two large rocks. 
 
I see her too, as the wind blows through the land,
dust swirling like a dervish
in some sad demented dance.
Her eyes find mine and my heart disbands.
No meeting of our worlds can I comprehend,
No words can travel through.
The difference in our circumstance I simply can’t defend.
 
I close my eyes to blank out what I see
but no void rewards this impassivity.
I ask the driver of my shiny car,
chances of survival in these Himalayan wilds.
“Rockfalls are common and the leopard
hunts quite free.”  The sound of my anguish
echoes long, after losing sight of that wretched family.
 
There is not even silence in the mountains.
 
Sara had travelled to India and to many places around the world.  She’d watched the world pass by from train windows, over lands never visited from high up above in airplanes and out of bus and car windows.   She had swum in the azure waters of the Aegean Sea and skied down slopes of new white snow in the Alps.   She had flown in a four-seated plane across the southernmost mountains of New Zealand and sat in a steaming hot geyser in Iceland.   Sara had been alone, albeit only for a few minutes, with a brown bear and her cub in the Poconos mountains in the USA.   She had felt alone in the most crowded places in the world, yet Sara had never known the isolation that this woman must feel, alone with her children, against the backdrop of Himalaya.    Did the woman fear the loss of her children at any moment?   From a snake bite in the rainy seasons, or from an attack from the leopard who waited for his meal with an arrogance of a predator untamed.   She would have been born there and was destined to die there and her children would be no different.  She lived on the edge of the world under her single sheet of corrugated tin with her children and yet her smile had penetrated Sara’s heart, as she passed her by.   Sara doubted that she, or her children, would ever leave that place.  

She had met another mountain woman, who had sat next to her on a bus during a day trip from Rishikesh.  The bus driver was giving her a lift down to a hospital.  The woman was terrified and was clutching chest x-rays to her stomach.  She hunched beside Sara with tears running down her age and weather worn face.  They had held hands.   Sitting side by side in the bus.   Two women with a chasm between them, yet they managed to give each other comfort for a while.    Sara had squeezed the sick woman’s hand and leaned into her more closely as the woman’s tears had flowed freely.  She had hoped to give comfort, but found herself seeking absolution from the stranger, yet having no idea what she needed absolution from.   Maybe the absolution was for this moment.  For driving past this woman on this mountainside, who lived with a piece of corrugated tin as her home.  And she had driven past.  She had devoured her own humanity in a swallow of nothing more useless than shame.
​


“What’s that ahead?”  Sara mimed to the taxi driver, as around another corner they saw dense plumes of smoke ahead.  The driver just shrugged his shoulders and continued driving.  Sara did not think he had the words to explain.  The seeming smoke grew denser.  Covering the side of the mountain in a giant blanket of grey, the visibility deteriorated but the taxi continued to drive into it.  The driver started to wind up his window and pointed at Sara’s urgently.  She did the same.  She watched his face for signs of alarm, but he said nothing.   A dusty rather than acrid smell was invading the car.  It certainly had no sense of heat or fire.   Around another corner workmen were waving flags to signal them to stop.  To the left, a steep cavernous wall of rock reached up beyond Sara’s sight.  Shrubs and trees clinging as usual to the impervious greyness of their host.  Six feet, at a push, of sandy, sort of road.  To the right, a sheer drop to nothingness where Sara’s stomach found it difficult to return, from the looking.  Ahead?  Ahead was tens of thousands of tonnes of rock that had just avalanched down from above and was sitting on the road, blocking the travellers’ way.  The smoke?  There was no smoke.  They had been driving through a dust cloud created from the falling rock.  The side of the mountain was still smoking from the disaster, Sara’s and her driver’s eyes barely able to adjust between mountain, cloud, dust and rock.  The sun was no longer visible.

A low groan.  A scraping thudding sound.  More clouds of dust.  The driver handed Sara a cloth to protect her nose and mouth.  Men were running backwards, but towards the car.  A question rose in Sara’s mind as to whether it would be a good time to panic, but it stuck in her throat.  For out of the greyness, loomed a monster.  A machine giant awaking in their path.  Ahead of it, scraped and pushed along, was many tonnes of stone.  Heading Sara’s way.  The stone ripped and tore at the surface of the road.  And just as she wondered if the driver of the monster had actually seen them, the headlights of the yellow beast turned direction and headed straight for the edge of the road.  With a roar of freedom, the rock and stone went over the edge, tumbling, crashing, hurtling towards the valley.  The beast retreated behind the corner of obstinate rock and Sara could hear it revving up for another assault on the fallen stone.  She and her driver watched it for what seemed like hours.  It was as if half the mountain was being thrown over its own edge.  Crumbling in on itself.  Mother Earth continually in motion, never changing her nature.  The mountain will always exist, she thought.  This part of it, changing its form in a moment of time. 
Sara looked at her companion questioningly.  He smiled. 

“Many die.” 

His body language showed rocks falling, taking cars with them down into the valley. 

“Oh.  Right.”  Sara tried not to look.
​
Eyes watering and rock dust smothering their lungs, the road cleared after an hour of waiting and the road men waved them on their way.  Sara was about to ask if it was a frequent event in these mountains, but there was no need.  The road they were travelling was negotiating a pass right on the edge of a mountain and Sara could see miles of road ahead, snake like, winding its way down to the valley.  Two more clouds of rock fall were ahead of them.  Monster machines already working.  Men already waving flags.  Seeing it from a distance, the rocks fell like huge waterfalls off the sides of the vulnerable road as they were pushed.  Sara wondered about the lives of the animals, humans and plants below.  What about the people of the mountain, living under their flimsy corrugated roofs?   Would they be caught up in the rock fall?  What of the leopard and the tiger?  What of the other roads, lower down the mountain?  What of her, if another rock fall happened and she was underneath it?
 
I didn’t bring you all the way to Himalaya to fall off the side of a mountain.
 
Sara heard His voice strongly in her mind.  Her beloved guru, Babaji, whose Ashram she was heading to.  Babaji was with her.  In the car.  She felt his love and his strength wash through her.   All fear of being caught in a rock fall left her.  Instead, she watched the road ahead with fascination.  She got used to the stops they had to make as the machines continued to push the rubble off the road.  It would fall, to make new form below.  She got used to the bone shaking assault on her spine as they drove over the areas that had been cleared.  Shale and branches of trees, leftovers from the small natural disasters occurring regularly along their path.  If anyone ever questioned how alive Mother Earth really is – Sara would recommend a journey through Himalaya.
 
Because you can feel her heartbeat here.  Feel her breathe.  She stretches and moves her form.  Like a giant sleepy dragon, she flexes her muscles, turns, shifting boulders, shifting whole sides of mountains as she does so.  Her aliveness is contagious.
 
The cells of Sara’s body vibrated to the dragon energy around her.  She felt the essence of the dragon and felt a part of her.  She trusted her.  And she trusted Babaji to see her safely through the pass.  They did not fail her.