An old Kumaoni folk song has a haunting refrain: "Bharpuri baajaani dhura baanj ki hawai chaw, aaj ka jayiya bati kabaki awai chaw … suroo roo roo…" The poignancy of these words is difficult to convey in translation, but what we are reminded of is a hard (and, alas, fast-fading) fact of life in the hill villages. Through the oak groves there used to blow a cold breeze, which revived body and mind – lifting the heart and making the spirit soar. The men, departing for the plains as young recruits or domestic drudges, hummed it with moist eyes. They knew not when they would return to be caressed by that breeze; hence the wail, suroo roo roo… Another song pleaded, "Ni kato ni kato jhumrali banja banjaani dhuro thando pani" – cut not the curly oaks, their roots store chilled water.
For the past two decades or so, those children of the Himalaya condemned to toil in the hot plains have returned home to depressing disappointment. The oak groves have shrunk, and the cool breeze and chilled water are gone. The blue hills yonder, and beyond them the snow-crested peaks, are shrouded in the smoke of forest fires that now rage for months. Those who consider themselves educated mutter, Climate change! The unlettered, meanwhile, look skywards, and question the eternally silent deity.
The temperatures they are certainly a-rising. Coal tar on the motor roads melts as easily as the ice cream that now sells like the earlier hot cakes in hill stations. There are the hill outposts which, a generation ago, provided welcome relief from the loo, the killing gusts of hot winds of the plains. Today, electric fans and even air conditioners have become common in the houses and hotels of the hills. Streams of tourists have been reduced to mere trickles – and why should they come? The lakes are polluted and gasping in their death throes; the glaciers are galloping backwards. Local fruit is hard to come by, and the only fauna that one encounters are the marauding monkeys. Who is the culprit? Climate change, mutter the knowledgeable, and the helpless look skywards.
Long before the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) snapped into its current gung-ho mode, bursting out of the saloon with both barrels of its gun (scientific and moral) blazing, my beloved hills had already been dealt a fatal blow. Back home, where one was born and grew up, no one had heard of carbon emissions or greenhouse gases. People walked miles to school, and carried their sick on their backs to hospitals even farther off. The villagers prayed for the motor road to 'come', to make the distant developed world accessible. They foraged in the forest all day for fuel and fodder, constantly in dread of the predatory forest guards. The chilled water that dripped from the spring fed by the lovely oak grove was, even then, a priceless commodity.