A Solitary Aravalli

On Monday, I zipped through the hills south of Udaipur in a white Land Rover, on my way to the village of Helpia, one of 589 in which Seva Mandir is working. It was my first real glimpse of the Indian countryside, and I was grateful for it: Even after four years of city living, I think I'm probably still a country boy at heart. India is undoubtedly one of the more geographically diverse nations on the planet. In addition to the Himalayas (the country's highest point is more than 28,000 feet in elevation), it hosts an additional eight mountain ranges with peaks of at least 1,000 meters. The Thar (Great Indian) Desert dominates western Rajasthan, and the largest mangrove forest in the world is located at the mouth of the Ganges in West Bengal. Tropical rainforests and jungle cover both the northeast of the country (the part that kisses Burma) and the inland western coast, and all told, India has more than 4,000 miles of coastline. The only thing it doesn't have is tundra. But maybe somewhere in the Himalayas...

My initiation into this surfeit of biologic, geologic, and pelagic riches? The Aravalli Hills, the sputtering out of India's oldest mountain range, which cuts diagonally from northeast to southwest across the entire state of Rajasthan, nearly reaching Delhi in the north and the state of Gujarat in the south. Once upon a time the Aravalli Range contained snowcapped peaks, back before the subcontinent came crashing into Asia, back, even perhaps, to a time before the subcontinent existed. Now the southern Aravallis are a haphazard series of modest hills, beaten down by millions of years of weather and erosion, and in their current post-monsoon incarnation resemble nothing so much as (if you can excuse my inelegant metaphor) a rash of green boils breaking upon the face of an otherwise featureless and largely monochromatic landscape. But if I were a young, scarlet-caped ingenue, and southern Rajasthan were a devious wolf horizontal in its nightclothes, I would remark, "My, what lovely boils you have!"

Unlike the Appalachians, another formerly forbidding range reduced to a green and stunted senescence, there is no uniformity in the arrangement, shape, or appearance of the Aravallis, at least in the ass-end of the range, where I reside. The hills are sprinkled across the land without any obvious uniting rationale: bunches here give way to a stretch of flat land interrupted, perhaps, by a solitary Aravalli, which in turn gives way to another stretch of flat, perhaps hemmed in by another bunch, utterly distinct from the first. It is a lovely and chaotic assemblage, sometimes bordering on the whimsical. The hills near my home in north Udaipur are crowned with temples that, illuminated in the evenings, beckon to the pilgrim spirit in me (or maybe it's only the prospect of an encompassing view of Udaipur that stirs). Mt. Abu is near, offering the highest peak in the Aravallis, 5650 feet above the tumult of this country.

Into these hills I rode, on a new highway that in some cases had been hewn through rock (lancing a boil, as it were), pressing on toward Helpia, where a meeting of the village GVC (Gram Vikas Committee--a local governing unit with no official mandate, begun with the urging of Seva Mandir) awaited. Off of the main highway, the road narrowed considerably, becoming too thin for two cars to shoulder past one another, and as we wound through the hills, the road snaking unpredictably ahead, we dodged all manner of livestock--cattle, goats, domesticated buffalo, and the occasional donkey. Just outside of the only town (in this case, the only grouping of habitations with a commercial center) en route, we arrived at an impasse of sorts. Recent monsoon rains meant that a shortcut across a normally dry streambed was underwater. We could attempt to ford the stream, which was quite shallow, or continue on the more circuitous route to Helpia. We watched as men walked their motorcycles across the modest current. The driver, encouraged by their progress, decided to hazard a crossing. The five passengers, myself included, disembarked, rolled up our pant legs (in some cases ditching footwear as well) and began the work of stacking large stones in one particularly perilous depression. (The water was deliciously warm, so perfect, in fact, that I thought that to duck underwater here might be the closest one could come to returning to the 98.6 degree suspension of the womb (yuck! I know). If circumstances had been otherwise, I might have joined some local kids who had stripped to their underwear and were frolicking in a nearby pool.) In two attempts the Rover made it across, and we dutifully waded after, the water reaching not even to my knee at its highest point.

Helpia lay along a seldom used road of surprising quality (much better, say, than many roads in LaPorte County, Indiana, where I grew up), tucked among the hills and fronted by a stream that bent at a right angle close to the village (like most around here, really a scattering of hamlets). After bending with the stream, the Land Rover came to an abrupt stop beneath a tree whose branches canopied most of the road. "This is their meeting place," Anita, In-Charge of the People's Management School at Seva Mandir, said. "No one uses this road." The road and ground beneath the tree were spattered with cow shit, and after some minutes of waiting for the principals to assemble, a thin, coarse carpet of a deep reddish hue was rolled out under the tree and into the road, and a long and thin cushion arrayed at its fore. The cushion would have covered the lane line had the road been marked and wide enough to accommodate lanes. In total, about ten adults gathered, with a smattering of children present as well, and three men shared the cushion, presumably as a signifier of their positions of authority within the GVC. The meeting lasted perhaps seventy-five minutes; all told, we were in Helpia no longer than two hours, during which time, by my count, only three vehicles passed on the road, all motorbikes.

Unable to follow the progress of the meeting because of my woefully deficient Hindi, my eyes wandered about the world before me: buffalos wallowed in a limpid stream, some with egrets perched on their backs; cattle quietly filed past en route to their next feeding ground; the Aravallis rose verdant all around, overshadowing the neat village homes with their red-tile roofs (owing, Anitia said, to the nearby zinc mines). Forgive me for thinking I had entered some bucolic idyll. But alas this was September, the monsoon had ended not a month prior, and the world around me would be transformed come next June. Likely the stream would be dry, the earth scorched by a pitiless sun, and the Aravellis parched and wilted to a browner shade. The hale but already thin cattle would turn skeletal. Or so I imagined. I really didn't know. But I will find out.