Termination Shock

Rohtang

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 doab or 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 get to 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 you but 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. That—according to Ilham—was where the adventure would have ended for him and Laks had they made the mistake of going that way. For there was a reason the government had spent billions on that tunnel. And it was not to make things perfect for backpackers or to ease the lives of truck drivers conveying cigarettes and candy bars to the roadside dhabas of far Ladakh, though it did incidentally serve those purposes. It was first and foremost a defense installation, there to improve strategic communication with the China front. As had been quite obvious during today’s drive, much of the traffic was military, and a lot of the cargo in ostensibly civilian vehicles—trucks laden with rebar, say—had a military application. Anyway, it was now the case that civilian vehicles were inspected and IDs checked at the tunnel entrance. Both Laks and Ilham would have had their journeys cut short there. The rest of the Fellowship probably could have made it through and waited for them on the other side, but they’d made a decision to stay together. Jay and Sam, on the “in for a penny, in for a pound” principle, had decided to stick with them. It was a good decision; they had no real fluency in anything but English, and in many other ways had no idea what they were doing.

Eventually, in mid-morning, the taxi drivers kicked them out, explaining to Ravi in Hindi that they had long since reached the point where walking would be faster. This could be inferred anyway from the fact that several other taxis had pulled over and dozens of people could be seen trudging right up the side of a mountain ridge, cutting across all the switchbacks. The fellowship got out, loaded up, and climbed over the pass, shrieking for breath the whole way. In his proper backpacking gear Laks felt a bit foolish whenever their path crossed with that of some random local who was just walking right up the mountain in street shoes and clothes, carrying his stuff in a plastic shopping bag. Also making them look ludicrously over-prepared were Sam and Jay, who had apparently made the calculation, back in England, that any clothing capable of keeping them warm through a ninety-minute soccer game in Leeds would be more than sufficient for summiting Everest.

The snow thinned as they went, for they were passing over into Ladakh, a place that was dry for the same reason that the Punjab was well watered: the mountains stopped all the moisture and converted it into rivers, just as with the Cascades in Laks’s part of the world. Inland was high desert. Surrounding the hamlet at the foot of the pass was a redolent plateau where locals went out to defecate in the open. Laks was glad his sense of smell had been devastated by COVID. Stepping with great care across this, they came to a cluster of buildings and located the guesthouse where they would stay the night. There they encountered Pippa, Bella, and Sue, playing Dungeons and Dragons.

During his journey up from Shimla, Laks had crossed paths with all three of these women glancingly, enough to follow their stories at a remove. Pippa was a lanky, freckled Kiwi. Bella was Argentinean. Sue—presumably an Anglicized version of her real name—was Korean. They’d not been together at the time. But backpackers in general and women in particular formed ad hoc alliances when they discovered, in the dining room of a hostel or the lobby of a bus station, that they were going the same way. This looked to be one of those. They could watch one another’s backs when they weren’t huddling together for warmth.

Back in Kullu, these women might have taken one look at Laks and surmised he was going north to the Line of Actual Control. Laks, however, never would have assumed the same of them. Until, that is, he descended into the smoky guesthouse—dwellings here were quasi-subterranean—and found the three of them eating bad stew from a communal vat and rolling twenty-sided dice. They’d walked over the pass for the same reason as Laks: Bella had overstayed her visa while sampling the trippy delights of Goa and didn’t want to get caught at the tunnel checkpoint. Sue had come down with altitude sickness during the hike and they had holed up here for a day as she bounced back.

Bella and Sue, as it turned out, were just in it for the usual backpackerish reasons—to have adventures and see cool parts of the world before they settled down—while Pippa had a mission. Completely self-assigned, but a mission nonetheless. She had traveled most of the way up the Beas Valley in the company of some guy from California who, it could be guessed, was one of those aspirant filmmakers who came from money and so had the freedom to do stuff like this—or to tweet that he was doing it, anyway—but not the grit to stick with it when it got hard. Which it very much did, beyond Manali. Laks knew about people like that because there was a whole sub-Hollywood in Vancouver. He had observed them in their coffeehouses and brewpubs, hatching their plans and engaging in the strangely protocol-bound interactions of their tribe. Pippa had grown up in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand’s film industry, which was culturally quite different. Her objective in all this was to join up, at least for a time, with a network of streamers who were documenting the conflict that Laks intended to take part in.

Early in the conversation, Laks was inclined to keep Pippa at arm’s length. What benefit could there be in joining up with these three women? But the more they talked, the more he understood that they might need Pippa more than she needed them. She kept asking questions that Laks ought to have known the answers to. Which part of the front were they aiming for? The southeastern toe of the Yak’s Leg, perhaps, where the Chinese had lately encroached and needed to be pushed back? Or the “knee” farther north where Indian crews were rumored to be readying a counterattack across the high glaciers that fed the Pangong Tso? Were they going to join up with an established squad, or form their own new one? Did they intend to remain a purely stick-based unit, or were they going to team up with any rock throwers? Which langar network were they going to join up with; or did they have their own logistical train? Were they self-financed, or crowdfunded, and if the latter, which crowdfunding site were they using? And, most unnerving for Laks, how did he think his gatka was going to stack up in practice against various regional kung fu styles?

When Laks sputtered—for, sad to say, he was definitely sputtering by this point—that he thought gatka more than a match for anything mere Chinese might throw at him, Pippa had more questions. Was Laks aware that the Iron Lions Crew currently operating along the northern shore of the Pangong Tso consisted of hand-picked fighters from the elite Piguaquan schools around Cangzhou where they had perfected a simplified variant of the Crazy Demon style using asymmetrical red oak staffs? Or was he expecting to deploy along the ridge above Chushul, which was currently under pressure from a squad of Guangzhou-based fighters versed in the more classically southern, Wing Chun–derived style? Obviously different tactics would be called for in that case, given the latter’s preference for extraordinarily long and whippy carbon fiber staffs being produced for them by enthusiastic supporters in Chinese aerospace factories.

It might have been different, somehow, if Pippa had asked him these questions in a hectoring and contentious style. But she just wasn’t that way; her affect was unfailingly calm and pleasant. She spoke in the tone of a sweet, curious child. She wasn’t trying to flaunt the amount of research she had performed. It simply had never crossed her mind that anyone would get as deeply into this as Laks already had without knowing all these things. To illustrate some of her points she took Laks outside where she could get better satellite and showed him a few of the more relevant video channels. There seemed to be dozens of these—enough that their thumbnails covered at least one screen, anyway. Each was the record that had been uploaded by one streamer—a streamer such as Pippa aspired to be—on his or her journey along the Line of Actual Control. And each had at least a few (some had dozens of) videos depicting noteworthy moments in the conflict. Some of the streamers were in the mold of documentary filmmakers who wanted to show behind-the-lines stuff. Support volunteers ladling lentils in makeshift langars, that sort of thing. But others were stone martial arts geeks obsessed with different styles of stick fighting and following specific combatants, like kids collecting Pokémon. They had titles like “DEVASTATING leg strike by Big Talib on SHOCKED Chinese fighter at Kangju Ridge” and “NSFW! NOT FOR SQUEAMISH! Chinese rocker gets COMPOUND FRACTURE in glacier battle!”

Pippa began swiping to additional screens of such material before Laks could take it all in. Before long, Chinese titles were competing with English for screen space. Beyond that it was all Chinese. She must have sorted the feeds by language. Only after several screens’ worth of Chinese video channels did she turn up a few in Hindi, or in Punjabi. Most of the streamers on their side of the front were presumably using English.

Somewhat amplifying the effect of all this, Sam and Jay had wandered outside to smoke cigarettes (not that anyone cared, up here, but they were ashamed of their smoking habit and liked to do it outdoors, as a kind of penance). Since there wasn’t much to look at here except rocks and turds, they drifted over to look over Pippa’s shoulder and to make remarks about the various feeds flashing across her screen—remarks, the import of which was that they were familiar with a great many of these. “That’s a new one from Sanjay, innit?” Sam remarked as Pippa scanned through the playlist of an especially well-subscribed Indian-Australian streamer.

“Weren’t up there yesterday,” Jay confirmed. “Five hundred thousand views already, must be a cracking fight.”

Pippa obligingly scrolled through the new video to a slow-motion replay showing an airborne Sikh fighter’s legs being swept out from under him by a Chinese fighter’s thick staff. This appeared to be made from plastic water pipe. It was painted red and emblazoned with a row of Chinese characters and a corporate logo, somewhat in the manner of a race car or other corporately sponsored artifact.

The video then cut away for fifteen seconds to play a Kiwi advertisement for homeowner’s insurance. “That’s where your hopping up and down will fucking kill you,” Sam opined during the commercial break. “All very pretty on the dance floor, but if you ain’t stuck to the ground, you’re fucked.” Jay concurred in the strongest possible terms.

Laks felt his scalp growing hot beneath his turban. On a pure martial arts level there was a good rejoinder to be made to the objection just raised by Sam. No doubt it had already been debated at exhausting length in the comments thread dangling from the end of this video like a string of fecal material from a yak’s ass hairs.

But he knew better than to read the comments. He wasn’t angry so much as embarrassed. And he was embarrassed because he had come so far without doing any of the homework that these people took for granted. Pippa had taken to looking at him with an expression somewhere between mild concern and outright pity.

“Now that we have made it into Ladakh,” Laks announced, “we have choices to make. Where to go and how to get there and what to do when we make it that far. Tomorrow we have to go down the valley. From there we need to look at the latest videos, the maps of where the Line is moving, and see where it all takes us.” He made it clear, by look and gesture, that as far as he was concerned, “we” included Pippa and her friends.

The next morning the Fellowship, now filled out to a Tolkien-compliant head count of nine, simply walked the ten kilometers down the valley to the northern terminus of the tunnel. This was much faster than trying to find a vehicle in such a remote place big enough to carry such a large group. Though the altitude was high—thirty-two hundred meters above sea level—the way was nearly flat. They hitched rides a few more kilometers down the valley to a place where roads forked away to east and west. The east road would take them to the front. This was two hundred kilometers away as the crow flies, but the road distance was more than double that figure because of switchbacks on both a very large and very small scale. The way basically ran perpendicular to ranges of smaller mountains that filled the entire space between the Himalayas, which they’d put behind them, and the almost as formidable Karakorams. So in addition to being very long, the way was very slow. Along many stretches, bicyclists or even pedestrians would have left them in the dust.

Pippa’s remark about logistics networks, which had been opaque to Laks when he’d heard it, now came into focus. She and Ilham had a lot to say to each other about this. Though, as days went on and they got closer to the front, Pippa began to focus more on videography and Bella began to go deep on teasing apart the various logistics trains extending their tendrils toward the front. Gopinder, whose Punjabi was a lot stronger than that of Laks, got into the act helping Bella make sense of it all. Sue, the Korean, had learned Mandarin as a second language and became a sort of intelligence analyst, sifting through the latest videos that had been posted from the front and mapping out the hot spots.

They crossed through four thousand meters again, and then five thousand, before starting to lose some altitude. This was in river valleys; the bare crests of the ridges looked so much higher that they might as well have been on Mars. But eventually they dropped again to a mere thirty-three hundred meters so that they could cross the Indus River itself. This flowed northwest out of the mountains before hooking south toward the sea and collecting the waters of the Punjab’s five rivers along the way. The point where they crossed it was still ninety kilometers away from the ever-fluctuating border. Nevertheless, crossing over the Indus seemed a momentous occasion for anyone with a connection to India, and so they stopped there for a night, got the whole Fellowship—which had become scattered among multiple vehicles—together in one place for a meal and a night’s sleep, and then struck out together the next morning into the land beyond. They were now simply traveling in buses, all of whose passengers were people like them, going the same way for the same reason. They drove over a pass that topped out at fifty-four hundred meters, and stopped at the little village there to take selfies and inject cash into the local economy, such as it was. Then they descended to a somewhat more survivable altitude of four thousand, where there was a fork in the road. This was a choke point through which all traffic had to pass to reach any part of the Line. Accordingly the Indian Army had built a logistics depot there and set up a roadblock. Military vehicles, of which there were many, were simply waved through. Vehicles containing volunteers were diverted to an open expanse of dead, rocky ground and their occupants herded into a big inflatable building. A few of the new arrivals had previously been chipped, so they were allowed to pass right through to the other side via a row of metal detectors. The others, including all members of the Fellowship, were funneled into a basketball court where, sitting on the floor, they were obliged to watch a PowerPoint presentation and take a quiz.