It was a cold half moon night with the road ahead masked
in a foggy darkness making it difficult for us to determine whether we were moving
in the right direction or not. From somewhere in that darkness beyond us floated
the unbearably off rhythm whistling of Hai
Apna Dil which unmistakably signified that MKD was trekking behind us empty
handed in a cheerful mood.  For me, however
there wasn’t anything to cheer about and neither were my hands empty and that
was  basically because I had to carry a
whole bagful of rock specimens which MKD had collected over this week long  field trip in Spiti Valley. MKD was my
thesis guide and the only person in these circumstances who could lead us back
to our camp but yet there was something in that whistling that filled me up
with an irrepressible urge to empty all those rocks in my haversack over his
blissfully bald head. The only way to fight that urge was to think of something
nice which under the circumstances wasn’t at the moment coming to my head and I
was lost in those type of thoughts when Ravi’s voice rang out from below asking
everybody to stop because MKD was missing.

I joined theses under MKD since somebody told that Asha
Oberoi was also doing her theses under his guidance and I thought that I could
be with her in the field and if my courage permits, propose to her. However,
she chose to do her theses under someone else and I got ceremoniously ditched.
The ultimate fallout was this geological field trip in Spiti where instead of a
moonlight romantic escapade with Asha Oberoi I had to move about with almost a
tonne of rocks in a cold foggy night with three other lunatics and a super
eccentric teacher. This field trip itself was supposed to have taken place in
Udaipur but then MKD managed to net a big budget project sponsored by DST which
required a field study of the Spiti Valley near Manali. As a result of it, my project
proposal underwent a sudden gigantic geological swing and I landed up in this
godforsaken terrible depressing place called Takche in this horribly cold mid
autumn conditions. Not a single soul other than ourselves were visible anywhere
nearby and even the hills around were devoid of any sort of vegetation. Far
away in the horizon the glacial peaks of the Chandra Mountain stood across a
sun less dull grey sky making the ambience more frigid than it actually was.

The very day we arrived in the Spiti Valley and
camped in this remotely desolate place, things started to go horribly wrong. The
day of arrival was spent in planning the field work and none of the plans made that
day were actually followed in the rest of the trip. I was asked to share a tent
with Roy and the whole night he snored like a steam engine, so loudly that
anyone within a radius of five miles couldn’t have a single wink of sleep. The following
morning my bottle of drinking water which I had saved for the next day
fieldwork disappeared which I later discovered on the bank of the river where
somebody had left it after washing himself subsequent to attending the calls of
nature. This was too much for me and I spent a whole hour charging everybody I
came across of stealing my water bottle and using it for something it wasn’t
meant to be. This continued for quite sometime until I was assured by MKD that
I would be provided with a fresh bottle of water before waking up in the next
morning. The next day after waking up I found my bottle back filled with water
beside my bed side, the very same one that was left on the river bank,
thoughtfully and duly returned by its user with a tag ‘Water fit for drinking’
attached to it. This time I chose to keep quite fearing further disastrous and
degrading consequences.

The next few days we had to endure MKD and his
tuneless whistling as he explained us the different rock types of Spiti Valley,
their chemical composition, mineral content and their assumed genesis as if he
was Raju Guide showing us Chittorgarh fort. Within a few days it seemed that he
was repeating the same thing over and over and Rajnish was even of the opinion
that he was probably showing us the same rock repeatedly and giving it a
different name each time he described it. 
  Whatever be the case, there
wasn’t any other way out other than to note down his lectures, follow
everything he was uttering and then when he was out of earshot, curse him with
the choicest invectives under our breath. Yet each time we swore against him,
he seemed to know about it and it appeared to make him more and more cheerful.

Meanwhile the weather God did her best to add to our
miseries making the surroundings as grey and gloomy as was godly possible
without providing any speck of sunlight through out the entire day. Added to
that was the effect of the fog that made the mornings look like evenings,
thoroughly bleak and dull. Whatever we touched appeared to be in a perpetual
state of wet and dampness and our noses seemed to be in a perennially running
condition with fluids always oozing out of it. The outside temperature seemed
to fast approach absolute zero and nobody ever mentioned about taking a bath
and neither did anyone among us bear the courage of actually going through the
ordeal of taking one.  Back in Roorkee,
we had made a systematic classification of bathing where the degree and size of
the bath one undertakes is inversely proportionate to the outside prevailing
temperature. When it is manageably
warm, it warrants a full bodied Poster sized bath, a cooler weather gets a half
bodied Postcard sized one, then in still lower temp there are provisions of a Passport
sized or a Stamp sized baths which involves washing only part or whole of one’s
face. Then there is  an  extreme case, when one does a Dry Wash just
by  looking at the water collecting in
the bucket and feeling that he had taken a bath and then coming out of the
bathroom rubbing  a towel though everything
is as dry as in default  state.
There are
however situations when one improvises by gathering  enough emotional strength to 
bath, just by thinking about things more deadly than a morning bath like
a class of MKD and teachers like him and eventually come out after a  shower in a drop or two of water . Here
however nobody attempted such a courageous thing and was content to live and
stink like a pig in a pig pen type of ambience. Ravi did once try to be brave
and clean something very much unlike him and washed his face with the river
water. This kept him quiet for almost the entire day as his face, as he told later,
felt like a block of pine wood very much incapable of feeling, moving or telling
anything.

The third day of the field trip was one of those
days which began badly and showed every signs getting worse as the day
progressed. Earlier that day we suffered a dose of medication by Rajnish, who
felt that we were being subjected to too much fatigue and to boost our energy
gave us some sort of watery mixture of unknown composition. This however didn’t
have any effect on our energy levels but made its impact leaving us with a red
and puffed up face and a swollen nose making us really look like pigs as if it
wasn’t enough to just smell like one. Rajnish’s father was a doctor and this
made Rajnish a self appointed health counselor of everyone around him and most
of the times we were at the receiving end of this phenomenon. Last summer, when
there was an outbreak of pox in our hostel affecting most of us and Rajnish was
one of the few to escape from its clutches. This however had nothing to do with
his father’s medicinal qualities but was only because of is natural immunity.
However when his father heard about this outburst of pox, he got worried and immediately
faxed him a prescription of medicines that were to be taken immediately for
preventing pox. These, Rajnish took religiously for two days and within the
third day came down with a bout of pox at a time when most of us had recovered.
From that instance very few of us had any confidence left on Rajnish’s medical
sense or on his father’s reputation as a doctor. MKD however avoided both
Rajnish and his mixture and anyhow he didn’t need the mixture to look like a
pig, he resembled one by default and even sounded like one when he whistled.  

Later during that day’s fieldwork, at a place near a
ravine MKD stopped showing rocks and began to point at a set of footprints
claiming them to be that of a snow leopard. He was in the mood of tracking
those footprints and find out the where about of the alleged leopard but
somehow we managed to thwart his plans and escape from that area. Yet
throughout the day there was that haunting feeling and a nagging fear of the
snow leopard stalking us, ready to pounce on any one of us while we were busy
with the fieldwork. During the retreat to our camp, while crossing a stream,
MKD slipped and lost his footing and in an effort to keep him out of water all
of us ended up in the stream totally drenched, in a condition much worse than a
Poster sized bath. To make conditions further worse a mountain goat appeared
from somewhere and crossed the stream immaculately without ever slipping a foot
hold. This made MKD to comment, as he enjoyed himself in the mud like a pig, that
probably a goat was much more balanced creature in any sort of sense than any
of us. Finally, at the end of the day, at the camp fire, after MKD had finished
showing off his antics with a mouthorgan, which was a more harrowing experience
than suffering his whistling, he started narrating about the experience of one
of his last fieldtrips and how he saw a villager being dragged away and killed
by a snow leopard very much near to the place where we camped. The dead body of
the villager, he told wasn’t even cremated by the villagers but was cut into
pieces by the local llama and left for eagles and carnivorous birds to feed on.
This was a very much disturbing story and even after MKD had finished telling
it, it continued to haunt and made me edgy. The recurring thought of snow
leopard attacking me and MKD waiting to slice me with his knife came to my mind
and didn’t allow me to sleep for quite some time.

Just when I managed to fall asleep there was a
shrill sharp cry from outside that woke both Roy and me. It was the voice of
Ravi and the obvious thought of the snow leopard attacking him stuck both of us
as we rushed out to help him. The snow leopard however wasn’t anywhere in sight
but the entire tent that housed Ravi and Rajnish had collapsed and lay on a
heap with the shout coming from somewhere inside it. It took quite some time for
us to recover the inmates of the tent of which Ravi was found hiding under his
bed still crying for help and Rajnish lay on the ground totally confused at the
turn of the events. It was only later that we found out what actually happened
and there wasn’t any snow leopard involved in it in person. MKD’s story actually
gave Rajnish a nightmare of being attacked by a snow leopard and for that he
had cried out in his sleep. That had woken up his camp mate Ravi and gave him
the impression that it was the sound of a snow leopard attacking him for which
he gave out that shrill and sharp cry for help and tried to hide himself under
Rajnish’s bed. However in that attempt to get his buffalo sized body frame underneath
the small bed he overturned the entire bed along with Rajnish and the weight of
Rajnish pulled the entire rent down. The combined weight of the tent, Rajnish
and his bed upon him gave Ravi the impression that the snow leopard was perched
just above him and he continued shouting for help until we explained to him
what actually had occurred. However throughout the entire fiasco, MKD was out
of the scene and appeared only after everything got settled, brandishing a thin
piece of wood and then got very much disappointed on finding that there was
nothing of importance left for him to do.

The final night of the trip was the coolest and the
harshest of all but it had the associated comforting and motivating factor that
the trip would be over the next day and soon we would be able to return to the
comparative warmth of Roorkee. Somehow, somewhere at a corner of the heart
there was a longing to be in the comfortable, gentle and sunny winters of
Durgapur which at any time was far more enjoyable than this brutal and bleak
climate prevailing at Spiti, with or without the company of Asha Oberoi. The
field was finally over in the evening with all the geological formations duly
mapped and analyzed with as much sincerity as could be mustered in such a climate.
MKD however didn’t appreciate our efforts and kept on whining that things were
more difficult during his days and he had been far too lenient than his theses guides.
Ravi probably wasn’t too much convinced about it and enquired if MKD’s guides
were somehow related to Stalin, Hitler or Khrushchev. This uninvited curiosity made
MKD mad and earned us a punishment in form of a six mile long night time trek back
to our camp. I tried to escape the ordeal pointing out that the difficulties of
carrying such a burden of a bagful of rock samples while walking in such a terrain.
For that MKD considerately and compassionately reduced the load of the lunchbox
from my bag, leaving me to carry the remainder of the bag’s contents. From then
onwards MKD had been walking somewhere in the darkness behind us in a Dev Anand
like swaggering style whistling ‘Hai Apna
Dil’ in his patented tuneless rhythm.
It was only near the ravine where the tracks of the snow leopard were spotted a
day before when we realized that the whistling had stopped and Ravi pointed out
that MKD was missing.

The realization that MKD was missing was accompanied
by another uncomfortable insight that we too were lost since MKD was the only
one who knew the way back to the camp. Suddenly for the first time in the
entire trip a genuine sensation of fear gripped me. The creepy feeling of being
lost forever in these awkwardly deserted and cold mountains made me feel like
crying. Ravi seemed to be more anxious about MKD than himself and that wasn’t
because he cared for him but for the reason that MKD had our lunch box and our
dinner in it. He had this supernatural ability of getting simultaneously hungry
and afraid at the same time, the more he was afraid, the more he felt hungry
and the more he felt hungry the more desperately he worried about MKD. Roy
wondered whether there was any chance of the snow leopard carrying away MKD for
having his own dinner and this left Ravi in further doubts whether the leopard would
also eat our dinner after finishing with MKD. 
Rajnish never ever thought like someone normal and was more concerned
about the condition of the snow leopard and the extreme agony it would suffer if
it unfortunately came in contact with MKD. It took quite some time to register
and resolve our doubts and concerns and finally it was decided that for the
best interest of all of us we should turn back and search for MKD.

 The search
of MKD began desperately with all of us yelling his name hoping to get a reply
from somewhere and using our flashlights to spot any traces he that he might
have left. Our cries for MKD echoed against the high walls of the naked
mountains and returned back to us without carrying any message of MKD’s
whereabouts At that time there weren’t any mobile phones and even if there had been,
it is very much doubtful if a network would have existed in such a place. There
wasn’t any light visible anywhere except the thin faint moonlight filtering out
of a veneer of clouds and fog. Far below us, on the other side of the narrow
foot track the river Spiti flowed noisily in the darkness giving a lot of dangerous
implications to my troubled mind.   In a
few days, it would start snowing and the Kunjum La Pass that acted as the entry
point to Spiti Valley would be choked by snow. If we didn’t find our way back  to the camp, there seemed to be a lot chances
that we would be wondering around helplessly  and hopelessly in this wilderness for eternity or may be turned
into food by some hungry snow leopard. Ravi was a vegetarian but had huge front
teeth and I tried to gauge in my mind how much hunger he could bear before he
turned carnivorous and cannibalistic. I am not a brave person, in fact people
do call me a chickenhearted sometimes and the idea of praying to God comes to
me only when I am in danger. This seemed a situation where I felt that I should
send an urgent SOS type of prayer to God to rescue us all inclusive of MKD.

Probably it might have been the prayer but almost
after an hour of frantic search in the darkness from somewhere downhill a faint
whimper like sound could be heard. Roy who also had heard the sound thought
that it might be the snow leopard whimpering under the shock of meeting MKD.
Nevertheless, as we moved in the direction of the sound, we found it to be
coming from a gap in between two rocks. A further venture inside discovered the
source of the sound to be MKD, who was stuck in the between the two rocks in
such a way as if he was meant to fill up the gap between them. MKD in all his
vital statistics and body dimensions resembled a big fat pig and it really was
surprising how he managed to get inside such a gap. He had been stuck there for
almost half an hour and had was totally exhausted and despaired when all his
efforts to free himself had failed. He had tried to shout to get our attention
but we were out of reach. This time he saw the lights we were carrying and
tried to shout again but managed to get only a whimper and he was lucky enough
to get our notice. Apparently MKD had lagged behind us in the trek but then he
tried to be smart and wanted to overtake us along a short cut that passed in between
these two rocks. He had done that lt of times in his earlier trips and was
confident of doing it this time too, but what he failed to take into account
was his own volumetric increase from the last time he did it and that was what
got him stuck.

We tried to drag him, push him and pull him out,
applying all the principles of mechanics that were force fed to us but none of
that came of any help. The more we tried; MKD seemed to get more firmly stuck
in the gap than before. Roy began to use his geological ideas and told us to
wait until the rock underwent some amount of chemical weathering and became a
bit loose, so that it would be easy to haul MKD out. Rajnish proposed to keep
giving doses of Milk of Magnesia until it caused a good amount of dehydration
and loose motion to MKD and thus help him shed some of his volume. MKD listened
hopelessly to our plans, initially ordering us to get him out, then pleading us
to help him and ultimately just silently and helplessly listening to our mindless
insane ideas. It was almost an hour that we had been trying physically and
mentally to dislodge MKD but still he didn’t move an inch. The night was
becoming darker and cooler and our energy and patience levels started to dip
lower and lower.  Ravi was probably the
first to run out of patience and declared that there was no other way to save
MKD than to carve him out of the rock. MKD was advised to stay calm as Ravi brought
out his knife in an attempt to slice of some amount of MKD’s stomach that was
the most prominent part of his body. MKD held his breath as Ravi raised his
knife to slice and as he brought it down MKD came loose from the rocks and
dropped unconsciously to the ground with a resounding thud.

The next day was a sunny one, with the clouds
parting and showing that the sun hadn’t forgotten to shine on this part of the
world. It shone brilliantly and dazzled against the snow topped mountains
across the horizon. It was the end of the camp and we were to move to Roorkee
where the sun shone far more brightly and generously. The earlier night it took
more than too hours to trudge back to our camp and the entire duration MKD
walked silently before us, without any swagger or any whistle.  He regained his consciousness and his
composure after we emptied a whole bottle of water on his bald head, thanked us
in an inaudible voice and then clamped up falling silent for the rest of the
trip. The next day he left early and alone leaving us a note to return to
Roorkee as per our convenience and a request not to discuss the incident with
anybody else. We didn’t but he ever took anybody to field at any place after
that and only attended proposals that involved laboratory work. Nobody from our
junior batches heard him whistle or move about like Dev Anand or anybody else
from Bollywood or Hollywood. We however did ask our seniors about the snow
leopard and learnt that they dwell in further higher reaches of the Himalayas
and nobody had seen them in Spiti for the past ten to twenty years.