Huffing and puffing, panting and ranting, I had climbed the 500 feet vertical rockface of Silakheri at Dhauj off the Gurgaon-Faridabad Expressway, two years ago, without helmet or climbing gear, using bare hands and feet to crawl up what looked like a sheer impossibility. I was young then, 60 and running. If only just.
By the time I summitted the table top, I had run out of breath with multiple momentary blackouts, my lungs bursting for want of oxygen, heart pounding with the rush of blood, against my chest, with the heaviness of what seemed to be the 5G gravitational pressure that astronauts withstand on their way up to heaven. I was intermittently staring at a pitch-dark horizon illuminating into a lush green pasture below once drained by the Yamuna, in a psychedelic play of light and shadow.
I pleaded with Sunil, my guide to wait an extra half-hour to help me catch my breath, before proceeding with the trek. He dismissed my submission with contemptuous disdain, abandoning me on the ridge, where I settled to exchange notes with Rizwan, a local goatherder from the village below. By mid-day I had to wind my way down through mountain rubble to the valley. Dejected. My pilgrimage to mankind's primordial past had come a cropper.
Back in DC, guided tours to clinics revealed that both my heart and lungs were intact, and in good fighting condition to cope with G-force on extraterritorial adventures. All I needed was a second chance.
"It's the excessive smoking in your past, and the underlying chronic bronchitis that got you gasping," both, my pulmonologist and cardiologist, agreed, after running me through an assembly line of contraptions. "Change your sedentary, arm-chair lifestyle. You are not yet fit to die. Go, climb every mountain," my cardiologist egged me on. "The next time you are there, push two puffs from your inhaler into your lungs, at the start of your climb, two puffs midway, and two at the summit. You are ready to go," added my pulmonologist.
Two years later, I was back this spring, older, at 62; wiser, with inhaler in pocket and Gatorade in sack; and a well-fed-well-rounded tummy to tug along as extra baggage. The world was back under my feet. To conquer. If only.
I embarked on my re-adventure, on a lazy weekend, two days before flying back to DC, commandeering and commanding my 20-year-old beefcake of a nephew, Aditya, and his supremely agile elder sibling, Parakram, to join a lifetime's climb, in which, I was dead certain that push would frequently come to shove.
It's no longer the summit, stupid, I cautioned them at the foot of the vertical wall, sleeves rolled up, for all-fours, over slipping flake and flint.
Silakheri is a summiteer's paradise for climbing up and rappelling down the Aravalli rockface. It's also Eden for goatherders from the village below. For us, unknown to them, the summit was not a destination, only means to an end... for a descent half way into a ravine, plunging 75 metres from the top, at the far end of the ridge, visited infrequently by archaeological treasure hunters, and cavemen spotters, deep in wild leopard country that runs well past Alwar to the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve 221 km south over unbroken mountain tops of a wasteland, before plunging further south at Kota, bypassing Agra, Bharatpur Gwalior and Jaipur flanking the ridge, and onward right down to the plains 700 km as the crow flies from here at Dhauj to Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh, once believed to be the navel of the world we live in.
We are at the 77° 11' 20.4" E longitude that runs from the North Pole past the Pur river in Siberia, home to migratory cranes that winter on the Yamuna and at Bharatpur every year, through Almaty (Kazakhstan), Khotan (Xinjiang), Depsang Valley (Ladakh), Shimla, Dehradun, Kurukshetra, Delhi, Silakheri (where we are right now, at an intersection with 28° 21' 48.3" N latitude); Mathura, Vrindavan, Agra, Gwalior, Bhopal, Ujjain, Hyderabad, all the way down through to Kanyakumari before plunging into the Indian Ocean and, thence, the Southern Sea to Antarctica.
Somewhere along this meridian, north of Dehradun and Shimla, around Depsang, the great Gondwana landmass, made its first point of contact, some 55 million years ago, ramming into the Tibetan massif, after tearing apart from Africa, raising the Tethys seabed to the sky as the mighty Himalaya.
Along this arc, first William Lambert, and then, George Everest, undertook the pathbreaking Great Trigonometrical Survey of India to chart the first scientific and mathematically precise topographic map of the country in a dramatic transcontinental adventure from 1800 through 1843. That journey is the equally dramatic tale of scholarship in historian John Keay's The Great Arc.
Informed, probably by the Brahmins of Madras, Lambert embarked on his great hunt soon after landing in India, to chart what he understood to be the central median of India’s great civilisational arc between Manipur in the east and Nishapur (Khorasan) on the northwestern frontier. But his was only a beginning.
As I subsequently discovered a few years ago, informed by a wandering Nath minstrel, the 77°E-78°E meridians (roughly corresponding to the Yamuna-Ganga doab in the upper Gangetic plains) also work out to be the central median of the ancient world, from the Bering Sea in far east Russia, dividing Asia and America, to the North Sea in the far west separating Norway from Britain, a landmass we know as Eurasia today, and referred to as Jambudvip in ancient Indic texts a long time ago.
"Delhi was always the centre of this world," even before Indraprastha came into existence in the vicinity, a rock's throw from Silakheri, so to speak, Pannanath, the wandering minstrel had told me once when Gurgaon was still my home. "And the Iron Pillar of Mehrauli marks that spot," he had declared, defying conventional historical narratives.
Somewhere along his adventure, perhaps, Lambert and through him, Everest, too got wind of the centrality of Delhi, where the latter climbed the onion dome of the Jama Masjid to plot his map, and the significance of 77° meridian, from yet another wandering minstrel in the Aravalli hill that I was now struggling to climb.
In 1841, Everest proposed to map the entire arc from Cape Comorin (Kanyakumari) to Nova Zembla in the extreme Siberian North in Russia. For some 'inexplicable' reason, the permission never arrived from London's Royal Geographical Society, and work on the Great Indian Arc was abruptly terminated at Hathipaon above the Doon Valley two years later. Soon, thereafter, the Royal Geographic rushed to declare the imaginary Greenwich meridian, on which it was located, in faraway imperial Britain, as the central median of the world, at 0°. And with it, the Greenwich Mean Time became the global timekeeper to turn night into day.
Now at 12 noon IST, the Eighth of March, 2025, I was finally at Silakheri top, literally hauled up by Ady and Victor, between puffs of steroid, and sips of electrolyte, our track charted forward through the thicket by the masterly hobby archaeologist Tej Mavi, the hero of this series.
Gradually, we walked the distance, taking in the dramatic 360° view of the world around us. On a normal bright and sunny spring morning, with a clear sky and an endless horizon, unrestrained by the heavy pall of smog that envelops north India almost all year round now, a caveman stood here once, some 10,000 years ago, or even earlier, with a straight-line sight of the mighty Himalaya, taking in the divine sight of the snow-clad Kalind mountain (4,421 metres above sea-level) from which flowed the Kalindi that we know as the Yamuna today, running past Silakheri and cutting a deep gorge below at Kot three-and-a-half kilometres due east. Downstream at Vrindavan, Kalindi, daughter of Sun (Kalind) becomes the wife of Krishna (yet another manifestation of the Sun).
The distance from Kot to Kalind along the trench of Kalindi is also portal to another world, hidden in India's pre-historic past. Along this line, somewhere close to Hathipaon evolved the subcontinent's first hominid, Dryopithecus- Ramapithecus some 14 million to 4.8 million years ago. Also, India's first human settlers, first the Homo Erectus (1.4 million - 50,000 BCE) and later the Homo Sapien (50,000 BCE), made home along this meridian that cut the country into east and west. You can see their life size replicas at the Indian Archaeological Society in Delhi's Qutb Institutional Area.
I had finally arrived here in the Silakheri gap in search of my ancestry from 50,000 years ago to shake hand with a long-lost forefather and see the world through his eyes, as far and wide as my vision could take me… to the past… and the distance in front, on the south slope of the ridge.
"Mind your step, hold my hand," Ady reached his arm out backwards to grab my palm. "There is no ground here to plant your feet. Just sliding rock debris. Take one step at a time. Or the abyss is right below," warned Victor. "Don't hold on to the shrubs, their stems are dry and will tear," cautioned Tejveer, making our way to the ledge below.
One step at a time, we found our way to the spot. A narrow strip of rock jutted out, hanging over the crevice, barely wide enough to rest our tired soles in a single file. Our cave dwelling forefather had carefully, and painstakingly, chipped away at the overhang above for years with flint and flake, to create a shelter. This was, possibly, man’s first rock cave in the wild, far older than the man-made Barabar caves in Magadh (Bihar) a thousand kilometres to the east, variously dated to the first millennium BCE.
Did the first caveman who found his way down here, also bring his ageing dad along, I wondered, for a communion with the Creator? My strong armed nephews certainly had.
I stared out into the yonder, filling my lungs deep, with the sweet fresh scent of the south wind that wafted across the valley below from way down south in Kanyakumari the last tip of land on line 77°E before it plunges into the ocean.
“If there is a paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here," I told myself, wondering if I needed to return to where I had come from in search of Eden.
“Look up,” Victor directed my attention to the ceiling. Strange patterns were drawn high up in crimson pigment. I had not seen such patterns in any other cave paintings before, not even the world heritage site at Bhimbetka from 12,000 years ago, 700 km due south from here on the same meridian. Were these symbols telling us a story about what they were almost certainly all about? About comets, and asteroids, and stars, and planets, and the milky way. Perhaps, they were, I wondered. Did my ancestor stand here alone watching the clear night sky an aeon ago, plotting the stars? Was this the first visual symbol of Om, from where all the four Veda and the entire corpus of Indic spiritual thought had flowed? I had no answer. I doubt if anybody else has either. Certainly not the mavens at the Archaeological Survey. This script, or visual imagery, or whatever else it was, predated Bhimbetka where men and animals abound on hand-painted cave walls in similar red pigment. This certainly predated the Indus civilization, its script yet to be deciphered in the hundred years since its trading seals were dug out.
Who was that man, who got in here, just for the pleasure of a view? Was he the Ramapithecus, the Homo Erectus, or the Sapien who lost his way? Or was he an Oraon, a Tudu, a Murmu, all distant cousins of the Indus Valley Brahui, who walked east to Jharkhand in the millennia that followed. Whoever he was, he was certainly archaic. Very ancient. Older than time.
Was he, then, a faraway alien? An extraterrestrial, leaving his mark on a wall in a hidden perch? Leaving a note that he was here, before anyone else had. Once upon a time.
Or was He God, teaching us that whatever we are, we all just end up with a Big Zero in a Big Hole to complete the Whole?
I thought and thought and thought, before realisation dawned upon me. It didn’t matter who He was. What mattered is I too got to see what He got to see here first. Standing on a rock ledge hanging over an abyss. One with the Universe. One with Him.
We have got to return, Tej Mavi shook me out of my stupor, my vision alternating between a pitch-black horizon and a lush green pasture below, once drained by the Yamuna in graceful curves around the rocks, in a psychedelic play of light and shadow.
Half-an-hour later, we were back at Kot-Mavigarh where our journey into the unknown had commenced.
“Let me take you one last time to where no one dares to tread even now,” Tej whispered conspiratorially, leading us to the rear of Latadhari Baba’s shrine 3.5 km away from Silakheri, that I have written about in a previous post. There, over a mindboggling rock field, boulder piled atop boulder, with no track to lead, no thicket to tear into, no shrub to latch on to, he led us across, on all fours, to yet another cave hidden from human sight, staring over a deep ravine once gorged by the Yamuna.
Soon, we clambered up, barefoot, to yet another cave, dangerous. It didn’t look as ancient as the one at Silakheri. But it had a mysterious aura of pristine spirituality about it, right in the heart of leopard land, not far away from where we had walked into the primtive sacrifical altar in my previous post.
“There are no cave paintings here,” informed Tej, when we made our final footfall, hanging 500 feet above a rapid drop into oblivion, “but notice these human and horse footprints carved on stone." Mavi said he had dug up the mud on the cave floor to find pottery shards buried here. They are now with the Archaeological Survey for carbon dating.
Perhaps, Latadhari baba, the horse-rider, frequented this spot, leading his mount, once upon a time, from where his cave shrine stands in solitary splendour today, I reflected on his communion with nature in the wild, chanting verses from the Veda, to the reverberation of Om. For man to merge one last time with the ultimate unseen, unheard Divine!
Go, check it out yourself.
© Shubhrangshu Roy
10 March, 2025
For my tryst with the past from two years ago, click here.
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