By: Ganesh Saili
Who would have called a rough-cut plank with two slats nailed together a bench? But for a first timer coming in the middle of summer from Sail village in the border district of Chamoli-Garhwal, it was, you could say, sheer luxury.
‘Luxury suite – all yours!’ scowled the chowkidar, throwing a blanket his way.
When he first arrived here in 1920 my grandfather headed straight to the Garhwali Dharamshala in Khacharkhana, which once housed the famous Remount Depot. Later, much later was the place renamed Laxmanpuri. It was an ideal spot for breeding mules, with a plenitude of water. All one had to do was bring the mares together with male donkeys; once that was done, you simply fed them and left the rest to nature.
There are no rules for mules given their sobriety, patience, endurance, sure-footedness and courage – stellar qualities that make for ideal pack-animals. Oftener than not, horses can be too skittish, as Lady Emily Eden discovered on March 19, 1838: ‘This is where poor Major Blundell and his pony fell over and they were both dashed to atoms.’
‘We had to get off our ponies and lead them and altogether I felt giddy and thought much of poor Major Blundell.’
Safer were the gunths brought down from Tibet by Bhotia traders, and Fanny Parks attests: ‘The little fellow had never had a woman on its back before, but it carried me bravely up the sheer path, for road there was none.’
Then she found Moti, an iron-grey hill pony, which was more like a horse than a pony, with an exceedingly thick, shaggy mane, and a very thick, long tail. It was a most sure-footed and a sagacious animal; it never tired, and would go all day up and down the hill, seldom fought, and was never alarmed while going past the most dangerous places.
Of course, mules were another story: one fellow plunged down near a precipice and ended up stuck in the fork of an oak tree! A single wriggle would have resulted in certain death. But it stayed frozen to the spot until their minders dug a ledge on the side of the hill for it to stand on.
‘Let’s leave it here till next morning,’ they said, ‘To recover from its fright.’
At daybreak, it was their turn to be amazed. Having hauled itself out, the mule was found calmly chomping grass alongside the road. No wonder the saying goes: as stupid as hell and as stubborn as a mule. If it had been a horse, it would have struggled and perished. But the mule knew that sometimes it’s wiser to be quiet, so that its master could chip in to help.
‘My mule, Don Pedro, carries me beautifully. He has one fault – a dangerous one in the Hills – that of shying; he would be worth two hundred rupees if he were not timid.’
‘A queer tempered little fellow,’ observed a traveller. ‘He kicked his groom over one day, and always kicks at me if I attempt to pat him. He carries me capitally; nevertheless, he is as vicious as he is little.’
Mules are obstinate but also have the ability to clamber up rocky tracks no wider than just a goat’s trail. These were common mules used by the hill people of the banjara variety that were bred in the foothills and fed on a diet of grass, gram, barley-meal, and urad dal. Records have it that mules for the explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott, better-known as Scott of the Antartica, were trained to pull heavy wooden sleepers like sledges at this Remount Depot. After Independence, the Army Supply and Transport Corps shifted the Remount Depot to Saharanpur. On this spot a holiday home for army personnel was built. On one of my last visits there I teased a shard of metal loose from the ground. It was an old horseshoe that I brought home to nail to our front door frame. It is the only surviving memento of the day my grandfather slept here upon a bench.
Only a fool or a mule would deny his ancestry.
Ganesh Saili born and home-grown in the hills belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their own pictures. Author of two dozen books; some translated into twenty languages, his work has found recognition world-wide.
