All the houses in Kaza are built in traditional Spiti style: massive
two-storied mud brick structures. Their flat mud roofs are supported
by beams of poplar tree trunks with a network of branches and twigs crisscrossed
over them. Stacks of shrubs pulled from the mountainsides and used for
fuel surround the edges of the roofs like thorny crowns. Such buildings
as these are practical only in a rainless climate and Spiti, lying in
the so-called rain shadow of the Himalayas, are a high-altitude desert
and see virtually nothing of the southwest monsoon that drenches virtually
the entire Indian subcontinent each summer. In winter, when huge amounts
of snow do fall in Spiti, the weight on the roofs would become unbearable
and so they are swept clean as snow accumulates. Every house has a long-handled
wooden snow pusher.

On that first visit to Kaza we stayed in a guesthouse built along traditional
lines. After attending the fabulous lama festival in Ki Gompa that I
described in my last letter we returned to our guesthouse and relaxed
on the veranda drinking cups of chai. The sky was a deep blue and as
the sun set; the mountains lining the Spiti Valley took on magical hues.
And there were some clouds in the usually cloudless sky.

We went out to cosy Layul’s restaurant for steaming bowls of skiu,
homemade noodle squares with delicious chunks of local vegetables in a
flavourful broth, and steamed momos with chilli sauce. Some juicy apricots
from farther down the Spiti Valley (it’s a bit too high here for
apricots trees to grow: 3600 meters) completed the meal perfectly. It
had been a wonderful day and we slept like logs.

The next morning was unmistakably cloudy and we wondered. After all,
we were in Spiti, virtually in Tibet, where the skies are a soul-piercing
blue, where the houses are made of earth and water carefully measured!
We did some shopping in the bazaar that afternoon and bought some incredible
wooden masks, just like the ones the lamas had worn in their dances and
beaded collars with strange tribal designs. Even a tantric mirror, a
convex brass disk worn to keep away evil spirits.

Well, there’s nothing evil about rain and no one would want to
keep rain away in a dry place like this, or would they? Anyway, that
evening it started to drizzle. It was not the sort of rain that would
attract much attention in temperate climes – a light, insistent
sprinkle, consisting of mist rather than discrete drops. But it fell
continuously for three days and three nights. During the first day, there
was no foreboding among the locals. A day of light rain is an infrequent
but not a truly unusual occurrence. Rather, there was quiet enjoyment–
a sprinkle to refresh the fields and lanes was a welcome event.

But the morning of the second day brought a change in local consciousness.
It was not only the fact that it was still raining, it was also that the
rain, light as it was, had been continuous – it had not let up for
more than five minutes in the past twenty-four hours. And the look of
the sky and the feel of the air promised more of the same.

The dry dusty paths that are the town’s streets were already turning
into a substance somewhere between mud and slime. It was earth not used
to being wet and didn’t know how to handle it. People started collecting
mud and putting it on their roofs: the idea being that the thicker the
layer of mud on the roof, the longer the rain would take to percolate
through it. No one seemed particularly worried about the extra weight
the mud-brick walls and the roof-support beams were being subjected to.
After all, these houses were “built”. The walls were two
feet thick. The main thing was to keep the houses from dissolving.

Before we retired on that second night, having sat through a day of precipitation
identical to the one before, and having watched bag after bag of mud being
dumped onto the roof, I carefully questioned the owner about sleeping
under this now sodden roof, bearing I didn’t know how many times
its usual weight. Our room, wouldn’t you know, was on the top floor
of the guesthouse.

“Don’t worry! No problem! The building is strong and the
roof is thick and the water will not come through,” he said. But
he said it with such hearty offhandedness that I was not at all reassured.
Before we went to bed we organized our belongings for a quick getaway.

It was two-thirty in the morning when we woke up, Carol having just been
nailed between the eyes by a dollop of water. Directing our torch beams
around the room, we noticed strange patterns on the white walls, ochre
stains that hadn’t been there when we went to bed. And in a few
places water was running quite uninhibitedly down the walls. We quickly
packed the rest of our belongings. Stepping out on the veranda, I realized
that the entire town was awake and that it was still raining. People
were on their roofs spreading still more mud. We moved down to a vacant
ground floor room and blithely resumed our night’s sleep.

The next day dawned grey, and yes, it was still raining. All the ceilings
and floors of the upstairs rooms were pocked with leaks, but the building
had not collapsed and our ground-floor room, though somewhat damp, was
unblemished and leak-free.

Nature called, and as I was inside the outdoor toilet, a piece of land
above it gave way and a miniature landslide composed of bowling-ball size
rocks and a ton of mud stopped just short of the outhouse door. And just
short as well of the nicely ambiguous headline that would no doubt have
appeared in newspapers throughout the world: “Tourist washed away
in toilet.”

About the authors of this article: Carol and Martin Noval
have lived in India for more than twenty-five years and organize and lead
cultural and adventure tours and treks throughout India and the Himalayas.
Check out their website: www.tripsintoindia.com
and can be reached at: tripsintoindia@usa.net