On Bathing - A Free One

I grew up in Calgary, Alberta. When my mother and father were still married, they used to take us to Banff Springs Hotel. With the snow piled high around the spring, my brothers and I would have contests to see who could stand in a snow bank longest. (My little brother Patrick, fiercely self-disciplined even then, a born ascetic, now an Iron Man competitor, usually won). My father, a weightlifter, would hold my mother out of the water in the cold Rocky Mountain air until she screamed and wiggled out of his grasp back into the bath. After my parents divorced we could no longer afford to visit Banff. So for me, the mountains and a sulfur hot spring have the romance Combray had for Marcel.

Amie has had me beaten with rods by muscle-bound Russians, sanded and scraped by half naked Koreans, swimming with crocodiles and corpses in the Ganges, but now we were two miles high in the Himalayas, and when Prithvi Raj (more on his splendid hotel later), told us we could bathe in a sulfur spring nearby, I was excited.

“Is it far, Surender?”

Surender Mehta, the “father’s brother’s cousin” of our kind host, was a pot-bellied father with greasy curls. He had attached himself to us for some reason and was continually “wishing many blessings upon the prosperous beautiful couple. If I may say so you were made for each other by God in heaven. It gives me pleasure to see such a couple. I have a thin wife myself, she takes good care of the house, which allows me to come to the hotel and help. I work at the ayurvedic hospital; there are two wings, one ayurvedic, one traditional. I’m an accountant, I work with the papers. I have two sons. Their names are Mr. Raj Meta and Mr. Prashant Meta.”

I asked Surender how far it was to the springs.

“It is not far, sir. Maybe 15 kilometers.”

I get carsick very easily, especially in the mountains, and you don’t drive a hundred yards in District Kinnaur without a hairpin turn in the narrow pot-holed road. Also, our driver Rarvinder considered himself a kind of Himalayan Mario Andretti.

“How long will it take in the car, do you think, Surender?”

“I am having back pains today, sir. And also in the shoulder.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Surender.”

“Surender Mehta, sir,” he corrected me.

Surender Mehta, our host Prithvi Raj, our driver, Amie, and I all climbed in the Toyota. Surender Mehta called shotgun, Amie and I took the backseat, and Prithvi—who has impeccable manners—had to bounce in the rear of the 4x4 with the towels.

The drive was 15 kilometers as the crow flies. We were in the car for an hour. At one point I vomited my breakfast parantha and curd up into my mouth and swallowed it back down again.

“If I had known it would be like this I would have taken a Valium,” I complained to Amie. They give Valium to astronauts for motion sickness. We were driving next to a ferocious, muddy river, and our driver, exhausted with his lot in life, wanted to plunge his car into it. Every time we passed an army truck on the one-lane road, I could see he was willing to take us all down with him. (There is an Indian army base not far from where we are staying in Kalpa, in a 40-kilometer stretch of no-man’s-land before the Chinese-Tibetan border).

“We must be almost there,” Amie said. She patted my leg.

“I am thinking of ways I’m going to punish you. You and your goddamn baths. Seriously, Amie.”

“How much further could it possibly be?”

“Damn fine fucking question.”

If I asked Surender Mehta he would probably tell me about the corns on his feet. Plus I feared a truthful answer. It could be another hour.

When I was certain I would have to ask our driver to pull over so that I could vomit, he parked on the side of the road beside a construction site. Surender Mehta turned around and smiled: “The baths, sir.”

They were on the hillside opposite. We climbed the wet stone steps. This is looking good, I thought. I imagined a huge pool in the rock, perhaps with a steaming waterfall raining down, and Amie and I swimming naked in the water after our friends showed us the location and then returned politely down the steps to wait at the car.

Two pipes stuck out of the face of the cliff. A wooden plank was propped above them, and a concrete wall separated the woman’s stall from the men’s. A thick algae grew in the corners of the stalls, which were littered with one-rupee packets of Dove soap and a couple cigarette butts. Hot water—with the right rotten egg smell, to be fair—poured with the force of a cheap garden hose from the pipes.

“You first, sir!” Surender Mehta pronounced with pride. “Please. You have the honor.”

I turned to shove Surender Mehta off the mountainside.  Amie put her hand on my arm.

“We’re already here,” she said. “It might be nice. Look in mine, there’s a rainbow.”

I thought to myself, “A rainbow.”

The Indians looked away as we took off our clothes. I saw Surender Mehta trying to catch a glimpse of Amie.

“Why don’t you come in mine?” Amie said.

“It’s India, honey.” You can’t even kiss in public in this Surender Mehta country, I thought, and got under my pipe.

You may never have taken a shower outdoors. If you have, then you know what I had forgotten: taking a sulfur water shower in the Himalayas, with the river beneath and the glaciers above, while your lover laughs and splashes in the stone stall beside you—well, Surender Mehta, all is forgiven.

Amie and Clancy stayed at the Grand Shangri-La Hotel in Kalpa, which is an eight-hour drive from the Himalayan resort town of Shimla. Their room, with balcony, entirely made of wood with Tibetan designs, was about twenty US dollars per night. You can see the tops of the mountains and the glacier from the 800-square-foot room through floor-to-ceiling windows. While they were bathing, several more men climbed the steps, including two old men who had taken an eight-hour bus ride to take the baths, which are renowned in the area for their healing properties. There is no charge for the bath. Surender Mehta, their driver, and their host also bathed, while Amie and Clancy had tea at a small tin teahouse at the foot of the sulfur-bath steps.

Previously - Kissing in the Ganges