Almost as soon as I get off the vehicle, I am greeted by a friendly street dog. I am not much of an animal lover and most of the time I absolutely despise street dogs but after the long, tiring adventure that we have endured this day, it is nice to be greeted with warmth, even if it is by a street dog. We take the short walk to our homestay. The homestay is a 2-storey building with a spacious courtyard. I am greeted by a smiling host who directs me to the first floor of the building. I take the stairs, open my shoes where I see other shoes lined and I enter a large hall where the rest of the people from our group are huddled around a wood burning furnace. It feels great to be in a warm room after the piercing cold outside. But as I drop my rucksack, exasperated eyes fire accusatory glances at me, and I hasten to shut the door. Neatly laid out across the room are several mattresses topped with carpets. In front of the carpeted mattresses are low tables with dragons carved in the wood. There are trays laid out on the table tops with dried apricots and fried pakoras, and most delighfully there are thermoses containing hot water and tea.
I find a place and settle down. A cup of tea. A handful of pakoras. And a sense of relief and exhaustion. As we finish our tea, dinner is laid out. Some eat. Some skip. Everyone is impatient to just get some sleep. 3 families have been given independent rooms. The rest of us share the hall. Everyone one picks their spot in the room. I lay out my sleeping bag, top it up with a quilt and a blanket provided by our hosts and hope that will be enough to survive the cold. Just as I am about to get into my sleeping bag, Jatin accidentally knocks over a can of kerosene oil placed close to the wood furnace. A rag is quickly found, and the spill cleaned up. We all lie down and that’s when Girish, a fellow traveller from Vizag and nicknamed “Anna”, who has missed the entire spill and wipe operation smells kerosene and is alarmed. He has good reason to be alarmed, after all, his spot is the closest to the furnace and at least some of the oil spill has been absorbed by his mattress. Someone points out that he is also in close proximity to a lighter and a pack of cigarettes (belonging to Gaurav who is fast asleep). “Is there a plan to murder me tonight?”, he cries out. Tired though we are, we burst into laughter. Wriggling in his sleeping bag, he continues “How will we even escape from this sleeping bag? This must be a ploy to murder us.” By now nearly everyone in the room is awake and laughing. Since every worthwhile slot in the room is already taken up, Anna’s 2 choices are death by freezing or death by fire. Knowing this he announces, “Let it be known – If I die, I will not go alone, I will take at least 10 more with me”. The whole room erupts in laughter.
Thanks to the comic relief provided by Anna, we all forget about – the cold and exhaustion, the anxiety about taking a dump in the morning in the freezing cold (most likely by squatting on a hole in the floor), and the looming dread about the even colder weather awaiting us in Kaaza. Minutes later, still in intermittent fits of laughter, I zip up my sleeping bag and bury deeper under the covers for warmth. Even as I search for warmth in the 4 layers of clothing and the 3 layers of bedding, three people from our group are out in the cold on an important mission – keeping our vehicles alive.
Most vehicles in our expedition group are diesel-powered. The problem with diesel in extreme cold is that it freezes at around -8 degrees celcius. At night, the temperature in Nako will drop to around -20 degree Celsius, making it inevitable that the diesel would freeze. So Puneet and our support team consisting of Jitu and Kaku have gone to start all the diesel vehicles. The engines of these vehicles would be kept running through the night to ensure that the diesel doesn’t freeze. Without this effort it would take 2-3 hours per vehicle in the morning to get them started. Admiring their courage to go out into the cold night, I drift into a shallow sleep.
As soon as I turn in my light sleep, the overpowering smell of kerosine wakes me up. Puneet hasn’t returned yet. As I think of him and the others in the cold, I cannot help but laugh at the irony of the circumstances – It is so cold outside that we are keeping vehicles turned on overnight for the fear that in the morning they may not start at all. And here we are sleeping on mattresses soaked in kerosene, fearing death by fire!