Mirror, Black Mirror on the Wall

The afternoon after Seema died, I was strolling around the garden, looking out over the valley, when a visitor came up the path, breathless and urgent. He handed me a fax from my brother-in-law, Amit, which read “Seema seriously ill. Get to Bombay ASAP”. Then, another scrap of paper, on which his employer, Mr. Joshi, had scribbled, “Actually, she is no more. Mr. Amit said to tell you.”

Seema, my wife’s younger sister, worked at Business Standard in Mumbai. Her parents were on a cruise ship, and could not be reached. Her colleagues knew that we lived on a remote hillside, without a phone connection, and were lost as to how to reach us. Till one of them remembered an interview with my sister’s husband, Amit Sharma, who headed Motorola India. And so, eighteen hours after the tragic event, his fax was printed out in Joshi Communication Center, Almora, driven down to the Suyal Valley, across the bridge at Kwarab, then up the winding road to the bottom of our hill, from where its bearer asked his way through the forest to our little cabin.

One piece of information, of the most vital kind, transmitted at three vastly different speeds: electronic, automobile, and pedestrian. That was the best those times could afford. When the communication was less urgent, fax messages would wait in Joshi-ji’s shop till we made our fortnightly visit to Almora. To the 3-speed mode was added the pause mode, long, long pauses. How much information really matters?

I often think of my first trip to Ladakh. In April of 1992, Annu and I had driven up to Kasol, on the banks of the Parvati valley above Kulu. Kalyan had told us to look out for an old schoolmate, Sanjoy Mukherjee, who was living in an apple orchard. We had just parked our car in the forest rest-house and taken our first steps on the road, when I saw a trim man of our age tackle a steep slope with the assurance of practice, his jet-black hair swinging about his shoulders.

“Sanjoy!”, I bellowed on instinct. He stopped and turned, and we walked to him.

For the next two days, we camped in his little home of wood and earth, drank excellent coffee, and heard the Parvati gurgle. “I learned the sitar from Nikhil Banerjee”, he shared, “but this music…I don’t need anything else now”.

We talked of the mountains we loved, of journeys cherished, and journeys still to be taken. You haven’t been to Ladakh? You will really love Ladakh. And so, a plan was made, to meet in Leh in the second week of August, after he had seen off the French tourists he would be escorting from the end of July.

Back in Delhi, Annu made our travel arrangements, and a few weeks later, I sent Sanjoy a postcard, one of those pale yellow rectangles of pulpy paper with the pre-printed stamp of an Ashoka pillar, to confirm we would be in Leh by the 13th of August. In the slow course of those times, a postcard arrived from Kasol, instructing us to meet him for breakfast at the Rainbow Cafe on August 14th. Which we did, beginning my life-long romance with Ladakh.

What would we do without Whatsapp?

Keep a significant date - is one thing I can think of, without sending each other a barrage of updates, to the very last moment - “We’re at the entrance. Where are you?”

Well, Sanjoy was at a square table, sitting on a wooden bench, quietly sipping his green tea with honey, and we talked with the ease of old friends, about our journey through a Kashmir I had never seen before, bristling with soldiers and barbed wire. A white tourist shared our table; in a break in our conversation, he spoke in an accent I couldn’t place, “I know what it means to be a soldier in a place where you are not welcome”, and talked of his tour of duty with the Israeli army, driving an ambulance into Lebanon ten years earlier.

Ron became a dear friend, and over the decades, we spent time in his homes in Israel, and he in ours, in Delhi and the Kumaon. He was driving back to Ashkelon after an all-night Kaballah study session when the first Hamas rockets exploded over Israel, the sirens screamed, and he dived into a road-side ditch. He called me the moment he got home.

For the next several months, Israel and things Hamas and Netanyahu dominated our news feeds. ‘Feeds’ may be the wrong word actually, because ‘feed’ suggests a gentle flow of sustenance, usually to someone who lacks the ability to sustain herself without that lifeline. But there is nothing gentle about the barrage of news and views that floods the screens that dominate our lives. And of course we can sustain ourselves without that unceasing flow of gigabytes about Gaza, or Musk, or the vermillion that has replaced someone’s lifeblood.

Luckily, we don’t need a nurse to regulate the flow of liquids in the various IV lines to which we are perpetually plugged: the roller clamp is in our hands. The news will not become old if we don’t consume it the moment it is produced, even if we ignore the fact that most of it is not news, but highly motivated views.

Mea culpa. Mea culpa in spades, and as I grow older and have fewer responsibilities, the draw of these feeds is more and more seductive, even as I question how much value they add to my life.

But life unfolds one day at a time, and now that this column is written, I will take the rest of the day in slow time. Drive my wife to the edge of the Mukteshwar forest, and celebrate the old, the essence of being that doesn’t just sustain, but nurtures us - the deep green oaks and the ferns dripping the rain-drops of last night, the impossibly melodic call of the koel, and the joy of moving one’s body through the fresh, cool air of the mountains.

The title of this piece is inspired by the Charlie Brooker series, Black Mirror, which refers to the screens into which we gaze, and examines the ways in which they can play with our lives.