Summer holiday tips for the discerning traveller
Sarahan, 200 km from Shimla, is the perfect getaway, writes Geetanjali Krishna
Summer is upon us, and as the mercury rises and hot winds lash the plains, all I can do is yearn for the hills. Indeed, the chill of a mountain dawn, long walks in the day and starry nights are a balm to the urban soul — mine, at any rate. So when I reach Sarahan, a small town in Himachal Pradesh with a place in history and myth quite disproportionate to its size, my urban blues evaporate with the morning dew. About 200 km from Shimla, Sarahan is the summer capital of the erstwhile Bushahr kingdom and the gateway to Kinnaur. A couple of days here and I realise how sometimes even gateways can be places so interesting that one feels like stopping for a while instead of crossing over.
Many visit Sarahan for its ancient Bhimkali temple. It’s believed that when the angry Shiva held his dead wife, Sati, in his arms, he danced the dance of destruction, the Tandava. As he danced, parts of her body fell to earth and temples came up at those hallowed spots. Her ear fell in Sarahan, hence its importance. Today, it claims to be the last temple in the Sutlej valley to be served by Brahmin priests. The temple is next to the hotel I’m staying in, the state tourism corporation’s Shrikhand. Perched on the edge of a cliff, its gardens are typical of the hills, flowers that have long escaped their beds and tufty grass that has a mind of its own. One side overlooks the blue yonder, the other, the temple.
The peaceful sounds of temple bells draw me in. It’s dark and cool inside as I explore the temple, looking through its tiny windows and feeling the warmth of the smooth wooden floor. It is a unique structure, with a heavy concrete plinth supporting a tall stupa-like structure made of intricately carved timber. “This architecture is well suited to our climate,” explains the priest. “The wood walls and floors add warmth, the tiny windows keep the building ventilated and insulated, and the high stone plinth ensures accessibility even when the area is covered in deep snow!” Being on the old Indo-Tibetan trade route, Sarahan has seen a lot of Buddhist influence over the centuries. In the inner sanctum, I see a collection of Hindu as well as Buddhist bronzes, which bear testimony to this.
Evenings in Sarahan are always pleasant, and the locals tend to gather in the crowded marketplace to watch the world go by. I decide to do the same. The smell of frying noodles entices me to a little roadside eatery facing the temple. As I sit on a terrace, entranced by the sight of the ancient looking (or probably just not very clean) noodle press with which an old lady is making fresh noodles, I get into a conversation with Pratap Chand, a shopkeeper. He’s building a couple of rooms above his shop which overlooks the temple. “I plan to rent them out to tourists to earn some extra income,” says he. Why is it, I ask him, that all the new construction in Sarahan, is modern even though the traditional architecture (so beautifully epitomised by the Bhimkali temple) is so well adapted to their climate? It is, he says, because timber is so expensive and difficult to source today. “In my father and grandfather’s time, people used to go to the forest and cut their own timber. But now, government restrictions have made this impossible,” says he. “I remember the feel of weathered wood underfoot, but have no option but to build cold and hard cement floors!”
The next morning, I find myself up bright and early to the sounds of kirtan from the temple. Dawn is breaking and I feel a rare enthusiasm to step out and enjoy the early morning chill. Sarahan is a wonderful spot for birding, especially pheasants, I’m told. So after a cup of hot sweet tea at a roadside stall, I decide to walk to the pheasant breeding centre, known for having been the first to successfully breed captive Western Tragopans. Puffy clouds in the sky are improbably tinted by the rising sun and wisps of smoke arise lazily from homes. Wild flowers, the occasional butterfly and glorious specimens of traditional architecture (including the erstwhile palace of Bushahr king and the state’s chief minister Virbhadra Singh) keep enticing me to sidetrack. I jump the wall to trespass in an apple orchard instead of walking on the main road. Eventually, when I find the breeding centre shut, I’m not disappointed, for the walk has been worth it. Clearly the hills are working their magic — had the same thing happened in the city, I doubt if I’d have been as sanguine!
Later in the day, as I watch Chand’s house being built, I see workers reinforce beams and pillars. He tells of how the Bhimkali temple withstood the powerful 1905 earthquake that levelled every other building. “The use of timber saved the building, but all we can do today is reinforce the concrete in our modern homes,” he says. Old timers here say that earthquakes are merely aftershocks of Shiva’s dance of destruction, that it is humanity's fate to endure these quakes and atone the sin of Sati’s death. Do they really believe that, I wonder, or are these stories they tell by the fireside? As the evening winds down, I realise that folklore blends more effortlessly with reality in the hills than it does in the city. The sounds of kirtan rise again and I wonder if Shiva would have felt a quantum of solace knowing that his dead wife would continue live on in the hearts of the mountain people, centuries after she’d perished.