Sikkim, Part 1

If November of 2010 had found you twiddling your thumbs and wondering as to why the world around you had come to a virtual standstill, it was because nature was busy somewhere else, whipping my ass.

Sometime earlier in the year, in a case of ill-timed and misplaced proactiveness, as a response to the missus’ annual ‘we never do anything together’ festival, I planned a vacation for the both of us. And since Dilli Haat and Marina Beach seemed inaccessible due to traffic conditions, the chosen destination, ahem, was Arunachal Pradesh. Needless to say, it wasn’t an easy sell. But there is something about the promise of cool climes and pollution free environs that renders the average Chennaite defenceless. So, after a series of enthusiastic Google searches and Flickr album browsing sessions, it was unanimously decided by the missus that finally after 7 years of marriage I had inadvertently done something right. This appreciation, however, was short-lived.

‘You know what’s funny? Onkoo is getting married around the same time in Guwahati. If we time the trip properly, we can spend some time there, and be on our way to Arunachal. What luck, eh?’, I smartly suggested.

I might as well have peed on the living room carpet in front of her colleagues. Before I could mentally say ‘screwed’, I could visualize the brownie points meter, laboriously cranked up through the last few months with abstinence from beer, occasional flower deliveries, keeping the room clean and refraining from blogging ‘all this nonsense about your wife’ being set to zero. Don’t get me wrong: the missus gets along well enough with her in-laws. But nothing irritates her more than ‘trying to be tricked into situations. Why can’t you just be forthright with what you want to do? Why do you have to play these games…’ You get the picture.

But the images of fog-covered mountain tops and amicable Buddhist monks running around in orange cloaks had long burnt into our minds. So, it was again decided, unanimously, by the missus, that despite the covert attempts by her husband to manipulate facts and deliver her into potentially controversial social situations without her knowledge, the trip was a go. I promptly set a date, booked the tickets to Guwahati, dry-cleaned the winter-wear, and triumphantly punched the air.

<if this were a movie, now is when you’d see the Indian Airlines flight take off>

Non-Punjabi Indian weddings are a lot of fun for the first five minutes. For the rest of the duration, it is quite frankly like a Ashutosh Gowarikar movie – meaningful and well-intended, but kind of boring with long pauses in between. Add to that an unwilling guest who doesn’t understand the language everyone else is incessantly trying to talk to her in, and you’ve a very strong dose of prosaic. (Critical Background info: Am Assamese, while the Missus is a Punjabi. This used to be cool till CB launched his book called Two States. Now our marriage just feels like a unintended justification of a badly written book filled with gross generalizations and unfunny stereotypes).

So by the time my cousin’s marriage was done, and I’d taken the Missus to all the interesting places in Guwahati, like the popular Kamakhya Temple, the not-to-be-missed Kamakhya Temple and the famous Kamakhya temple, we were well and truly ready for our adventurous trip to Arunachal Pradesh.

‘I have never been much for details. My talents lie in conceptualizing and thinking things through. I like to live life exclusively at a strategic level. The actual execution of the same doesn’t excite me.’ These are words that I thought I could offer up as defence to the missus when it was discovered that while I’d splendidly conceptualized the Arunachal trip, this tiny, unimportant, miniscule detail of how to get there had yet to be fully thought out.

Some more Google searches and phone calls to dear ones, while keeping myself outside of the missus’ arm-span, confirmed that we theoretically had 2 options: We could take the chopper that left every day, and promised to deliver us in Itanagar in 30 minutes or explode/ crash in under 15. The second choice was by road, which took around a decade and under the present weather conditions, had a strong possibility of being blocked for the last 50 kilometers or so. I tried dressing up these suggestions as attractively as possible, but neither the possibility of an explosive death or being in the same car for more than 36 hours seemed to go down very well with the missus. The ‘I’ll just give you cold stares for the time-being, but wait till we are back in Chennai’ treatment followed.

That’s when help came in from unexpected quarters. Over 35 years of experience in dealing with these delicate situations had taught Dad to always be ready with some contingency plans. While he normally followed a strict ‘do not fraternize with the civilians’ policy, seeing his son being skewered with spousal stares, I guess, prompted him to make an exception.

‘Sikkim,’ he whispered to me, and resumed his non-aligned movement.

Depending on what genre of movie you fancy, you can visualize this scene in different ways. Since the 80’s Bollywood Romance is a dear favorite of mine, I saw long-shots of ‘Sikkim’ from different angles, arms flung open, and running toward me in slow motion, amidst a garden of Eastman-colored flowers dancing rhythmically to an orchestra at the mercy of Bappi Lahiri. Sikkim was an awesome plan. It had good connectivity, not far from Guwahati, and everyone spoke well of their experiences there. To me, personally, It also had the extremely alluring quality of being the only option.

It took a monumental effort to convince the missus that Sikkim was just a ‘lite’ version of Arunachal Pradesh, albeit with a different name. Everything else was same – the mountains, the weather, the monasteries. Also, in Sikkim, it was not possible to generally stroll around and all of a sudden find oneself in China. The missus, long accustomed to seeing me deal with crises with a week or two of good, old-fashioned sulking, regarded this sudden change in strategy with a lot of suspicion, but finally capitulated on condition that one more mess-up and I had to voluntarily stay back in the remotest monastery in Sikkim for the rest of my life. That seemed like a not-so-unattractive option at that moment, and I readily agreed.

So, Sikkim it was.

Next: Sikkim, Part II (Getting There)

Read Chapter 8.2 (Web-Novel): The Strong and Silent Types

*The web-novel is taking a break. It will resume its assault on your senses very soon*