Instead of taking a plane out of Ladakh, we took a jeep. The ride starts at 2am in the morning and you can just hope, that your jeep is in a good condition, not too many people are booked on it and that your driver had a good night’s sleep before. It is a 16 -18 hours ride and there is only driver and not many breaks. Keep your fingers crossed.
The scenery is spectacular. Also spectacular is the condition of the road, practically all the 450km are full of holes. You feel like put in a shaker for a long time and the possibility is big, that you have sore muscles and a few bumps on the head the next day. They maintain the roads mostly manually and with poor material. This way the worker can start over again once they reach the top of the hill.
In Manali we rested two days before heading to Bir, the hometown of my family. Bir is a small village, a Tibetan colony about 2 hours away from Dharamsala. Since my last visit the village grew a little, there are several guesthouses now and many nice, new buildings. Nowadays most villagers have relatives abroad, who are regularly sending money. Comparing their standard with what we saw in Delhi and around, they are well off.
My family got us a room in a nice guesthouse where we could relax. We visited them at a busy time. My cousin had a baby a few months ago and on top of it, her grandfather in law died a week ago. When someone dies, the family has to do puja for the death. Puja is praying and can be done in various forms. According to the books a puja for a death has to be done for 49 days to ensure that the dead has a good journey into his next life and he feels worshiped. The more money a family has, the bigger the puja. This means that for 49 days as many monks as the family can afford have to come to their home and pray. Every 7th day is a special day, where an even bigger puja should take place. The monk’s status defines his salary, but even a lower ranking monk costs about 500INR per day. On top of the salary, the monks expect to be fed the whole day long with several dishes. Therefore, puja is a very busy time for the house’s wives, since they have to cook and serve all day long. My cousin and her mother in law where constantly hosting between 8 and 20 monks. The male relatives have to produce butter lamps for the praying, up to 600 a day.
Regarding the price, even if you do only a small puja with two monks coming for 49 days in a row, you spend about 50’000INR (750USD). Without counting the expenses for food and the butter lamps. This amount is equal to a yearly fee for a college. The in my eye critical part is, that if the family is poor, they rather do a puja than send their child to college.
My aunt and her husband where also busy. Most elder children go to boarding schools, mostly because there is only a school offering class 1-5 in the villages. At the boarding schools they have only one weekend off per month. Therefore the second Saturday per month is a busy day, since all the kids who are nearby come home on Thursday evening and stay until Sunday. The students that cannot go home due to the long way, hang out in the village and run errands. My relatives' business makes use of this fact. They run a small fast-food restaurant and a phone place. While waiting for a free phone, the kids eat potato skewers and aloo momo. Since it was the second Saturday of the month, this meant that also my youngest cousin came home from her boarding school 20 minutes away. She was watching TV and sleeping a lot during her time home. Totally understandable as they have to get up at 5am every day before having a fully packed day until lights out at 9pm.
The family was busy, but for us this meant that we got a nice insight into their daily life. Despite their full schedule they found time to show us around and we visited the many monasteries in and around Bir. Apart from showing us around they made sure that we were never hungry. We got stuffed the whole time we were there and after a while felt like Hansel and Gretel. No chance to eat all the delicious food they made for us. A cultural issue became that locals often say “no” out of politeness; we on the other side really meant it. We could not eat one more momo, one more spoon of rice and drink one more juice.
We had a great time with my family and it was very nice, meeting them again after such a long time and seeing that they are all doing fine.
Our last days in in Delhi were a lot better than the first ones. Nevertheless, it became clear that hopefully this was our last India visit.
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