Northern skies

In India, if you have a big group of people going somewhere far away, you can't do better than to take a train. And so around 8pm on a Friday about a week and a half ago, I boarded the train at Cantonment station, to join the wedding party which was on its way to Nainital - way up north in the mountains. Two days later, and several stops for chai at random stations across the country, we reached our first stop over by noon in big bad New Delhi. Hung around the rest of the day and picked up a few more people to join the motley crew. The bride's family lodged happily in Kathgodam, just down the hill from Nainital, in the northern state of Uttaranchal, sent us a bus to bring us to our destination! We boarded by about 10 in the night and we were in Kathgodam by sunrise. Every person on the bus was frozen - it gets cold up there. That night our friend Kamal got engaged to our friend Tanya and the next evening they got married with Kamal coming in on a horse accompanied by a live band and us going cuckoo dancing in front. And the next evening we were off to celebrate with a cocktail party up in Nainital at a higher and lower altitude and temperature. Somewhere in the middle of all these activities, we did some exploring and found some lovely spots under blue skies in the surrounding forests where the famous Jim Corbett used to hunt man-eating tigers in the first half of the last century. There are no more man-eating tigers. I don't even think there are too many tigers. Saw a bunch of good signs as usual. This one on a stall, this one on some toy, this one on the gateway of a mansion, and this label on a sweater. After the celebrations a couple of the guys were headed to Allahbad to check out the Kumbh Mela but I decided to head back to Delhi to see my cousin Ambu, his wife, and their daughters - my nieces. Good fun, but everybody was sick and I caught the virus too. Now I'm back in Bangalore and I've lost my voice. So I type instead.