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6M

P12

The Man On Zoji La

By

S.M. Ghatak

Synopsis

A collection of twelve short stories providing humour, suspense and human interest.

There is the old lady flying in from New York in trouble with Customs, and how she extricates herself from it - with results the Customs inspector could not foresee.

There is the mysterious presence getting away the person responsible for keeping a snowbound Himalayan pass open, from the path of an avalanche, moments before it comes down.

A boy on his first trip to sea is caught in a savage hurricane, and graduates to manhood, fighting it through the night.

Shoumik, from a Darjeeling village reading mathematics at Cambridge on a scholarship, dreams of reaching the stars -and does.

These and more in this eminently readable compilation of short fiction by a skilled practitioner of the craft.

 

The Man On Zoji La

Four o’clock on a pitch black, bitter November morning is not the best time to be on Zoji La. The young Colonel of Engineers, responsible for keeping the Pass operational, thought so, as he looked up at the faintly luminescent white mass above him.

The point where Lt.-Col. Ranjit Das stood, a little below Zoji La top, was notorious for avalanches. A lot of snow had gathered on its hillside and the down convoy from Leh, bivouacked for the night at Dras thirty miles east, was due to pass under in about three hours time - unless Das decided It was not safe to let it through.

The Colonel had served in high altitude areas for many years and knew the ways of snow on mountainsides well. The stuff’s deceptively appealing looks, and the appalling havoc the white mass could cause to anything in its path going down.  He was not overly fanciful - It did not do to be fanciful at those heights; the cold and the thin air lent themselves too easily to weaving illusions that could be hazardous. But it appeared to Das that the snow mass above him. thousands of tons of it was a sentient entity. Waiting… waiting… ‘till it felt it’s time had come.  Then it would strike; moving unnoticeably, and with barely any sound in the beginning, so that there would be no warning.  Within seconds the snow would reach the speed of an express train and the note of it’s passing, rise to a dreadful thunder as it hurled itself onto its victims below.   

He shivered as he looked up, and not because of the cold -he was warm enough in his parka coat. No! he decided. He did not care for the snow up there, and would not risk traffic below till the stuff had come down and he had cleared it off the carriageway. This would delay the convoy but it couldn’t be helped.

The moon had set hours ago and only a few stars were showing through gaps between black scudding clouds. He did not like the looks of the clouds either, they presaged heavy snowfall later in the morning and more delay for the convoy till the fresh snow was cleared. He could see the staff at Corps working themselves up Into a frenzy - three hundred plus vehicles standing idle!  He shrugged his shoulders mentally. Such was the price of operating in the high Himalayas.

His Jonga. was some two hundred yards up the road, out of the snow’s path if it should start to come down. He was about to call the driver to bring the vehicle down to him, intending to return to his headquarters at Dras, when a muffled figure materialised by his side out of the gloom. Das took him to be a local villager crossing Zoji La on foot along the mule track below the motor road. In winter the locals generally crossed the Pass late at night or early In the morning when, because of’ the greater cold, there was a lesser likelihood of avalanches. Seeing the vehicle, the man had probably come up wanting a lift.

The villager beckoned to the colonel and pointed to his Jonga. Das nodded and assured him that It would come down to them. But the man shook his head and beckoned again, at the same time starting to walk towards the Jonga. Curious about what was worrying him, Das followed the man. The latter walked fast and looked back every few steps to see that Das was coming along. There was an urgency about the villager that reached out to Das, so that by the time he came to the vehicle he was almost running.

Panting a little, for there is little oxygen In the air at 11000 feet, Das stopped and turned round to look at where they had come from. Everything seemed to be In order; and he was on the point of asking the villager to get into the vehicle so that they could drive off, when an almost palpable feeling that there was danger about made him hesitate.

It was not anything Das could put his finger on. There was no movement anywhere and no change in the moaning of the wind. But somehow, the nature of the atmosphere had changed. The air felt heavier and more warm, and there was a feeling of expectancy on all sides.

And then Das heard it, very faintly. Snow, huge masses of’ snow, beginning to slide down. In moments the sound increased to a monster bellow and the entire hillside, below which he had stood moments earlier, seemed to come down. The grounds shook beneath his feet, a giant wind howled over him and the air became so thick with powdered snow that he could scarcely breathe.

The avalanche seemed to go on for ever, though it spent itself out in minutes; and again there was silence on the pass broken only by the soughing wind.

Das shook himself out of his numbness, brushed off the snow from his face and clothes and took a deep breath. It had been close. If the villager had come a couple of minutes later…!

He turned round to thank his saviour, but the man was no longer there. He asked his driver where the villager had gone. The driver looked puzzled. He had not seen anybody with the colonel...