Zinc Oxide Tape. Waterproofing Wax. Leech socks.

These were the entries listed on the first page of my new notebook. And I ignored all three.

The fourth, written in slightly brighter blue ink read ‘Tanya Vad… Thank you’. I had arrived in India. Dhanyavaad was the most important word I wanted to learn.

This small 11 x 7.5cm notebook would accompany me for the next 18 days, safely tucked away like a baby joey in the blue pouch strapped to my tummy. I would dig it out regularly, flip the turquoise-green cover over the black spiral spine and scribble something, often illegibly, as I walked or rattled round a hairpin bend in our bus dodging landslides. Over the weeks it gathered names, email addresses, dates, details and ideas for my new creative project.

As anybody who has travelled with a purpose knows, the notes you take become an invaluable aide-memoire for when you return home. As you re-enter your everyday, the sharp outlines of a foreign, multicoloured present seal into a soft-focus bubble that drifts away to bob among other memory balloons in skies gone by. Experiences fade and jumble in a cacophony of impressions. Verbal re-tellings omit details as they settle into a condensed narrative designed for low attention spans. Bring out the notebook, however, and you instantly have a co-witness; a means to tangibly touch the past. 

I have boxes of such notebooks. They have helped me write or paint, jolting my memory, filling in gaps. That is why losing this little green one, felt like the end of the world.

It happened a few days before the end of the trip. I mentioned my impending adventure in my previous blog, how I was about to embark on a journey following in the 1939 footsteps of my Great Great Aunt Joan to the Valley of Flowers in Northern India. Our happy, harmonious group consisted of my sister, two female cousins, three or sometimes more local guides plus a driver. We made a dream team and I am telling you about this specific incident because I can’t yet put the bigger whole into words. And because in essence it captures the magic of the entire trip. The many small miracles we experienced and the power of stories.

On this particular day, just as Joan had done 85 years earlier, we were visiting the temple in Badrinath. An atmosphere of noisy celebration, dancing and orange-coloured joy pervaded the streets of this small but hugely important Hindu town located at an elevation of around 3,100 meters in the Garhwal Himalayas. Inaccessible and closed for six months of the year due to extreme weather, it is one of the most visited pilgrim destinations in India attracting 5-mile queues in the summer months as people line up to pay their respects to the 2000-year-old black granite deity of Lord Badrinath housed in the main temple building. 

Being slightly off-season due to the monsoons, we were able to simply kick off our shoes and, bearing wreaths of marigolds, join the gentle flow of pilgrims, many of whom would have travelled for days to be here. Once inside we planted ourselves on some steps to watch people of all ages circling the inner temple, taking (prohibited) selfies and videos and gathering goodie-bags of holy sweets, sultanas and nuts for their families. After some time, we shuffled out again in a bubbling counter stream that spilled onto the temple forecourt, an architectural wonder that miraculously clung to the riverbank while other sections downstream had succumbed to gravity and slipped into the raging, milky-beige waters of the Alaknanda River. 

We retrieved our shoes and stood discussing where to go for lunch. That’s when I noticed it was gone. My pouch was open and empty. An all-too familiar plummeting sensation drained my face and body as a memory surfaced from the depths of 1987, my last visit to India, when my bag containing 3-months of undeveloped film, diaries, recordings not to mention passport, visa, ticket home and money were stolen on a train, never to be seen again. A small wave of panic broke out within our group, scooping strangers into its current. The men in charge of storing shoes searched their patch; sister, cousins and guides dispersed in all directions to scour corners, dustbins and donations boxes both in and outside the temple complex. Our main guide, by now friend, Kiran, took me to a small nearby room stuffed with five uniformed security guards and fifteen or so screens of surveillance footage. We fast forwarded our way through videos following my movements – me feeling both relief that I had refrained from taking a sneaky photo and slight concern that a hidden camera might have caught me ducking behind a wall to remove my leggings. The loss of ‘a little green diary’ was announced over the temple’s Tannoy system, but our efforts were to no avail. 

Thoughts raced through my head as I searched the grainy grey images both for the moment of its disappearance and any possible symbolic significance I could attach to it. Maybe I am not meant to be doing a project on Joan – or Legge Ma’am as she is known in these parts. Maybe this is a sign I should have just experienced the trip and trusted I would remember what is important rather than constantly jotting things down. [This is just how my mind works.] Will this ruin the trip for me, for everyone? How could I have dropped it? Who could have taken it… why would they? Maybe…

Then the phone call came. The little green diary had been found. I restrained myself from hugging the guards in the rush of relief and hope. But for me to fully believe it, I had to see it. 

Our other guide, also now friend, Naresh, had re-entered the complex and gone to the place where people were gathered to listen to the teachings. The door of the temple was firmly locked for the daily offerings – the prasadam – so he made his way to the middle of the crowd and started reciting the beautiful story of Legge Ma’am and why we, her four descendants had come here. He was an excellent story-teller. And that’s when “the magic happened,” he told us afterwards. “It was so strong, so strong that everybody came near to me and started listening to the story. And they were very curious… finally they get to know the importance of this notebook, for all of us and for them as well.” 

A young boy then came forward. He had found the notebook but hadn’t known what to do with it so had put it in the main donation box at the foot of Lord Badrinath in the temple…. which was closed. Naresh called us back into the complex and we waited. We gained fresh red teekas (or bindis) between our eyebrows and more handfuls of sticky white sugar balls and showered the young hero, Shriansh (which fittingly means Part of God) with all the muesli bars we could scramble together from the bottom of our bags.

By now, people were very keen to help, including the priest. When the temple finally re-opened, we were all ushered in. The bright viridian green of the notebook cover could be spotted through the glass walls of the donation box, nestling on a bed of faded rupee notes. So close and yet… Only one man had the authority to open the box. A District Officer (DO) based 200 km away. He was the sole person to hold a key. And he came to Badrinath just once a month. 

That was the point when Naresh, who hadn’t planned on praying that day, asked the deity of Lord Badrinath to help us, just as some of us had already been asking St Anthony, the Christian finder of lost objects. One, or both, stepped in. 

The priest told Naresh to look behind him. There was the DO. Not on his official monthly visit, but by some serendipitous miracle, he had come to pray that day. He willingly fished the key out of his pocket and a little while later, a policewoman handed me my precious notebook. Hugs, tears, smiles and many clasped hands and bows followed… ridiculous really, but we all knew the true value of these spiral-bound pages.

Each one of us will interpret this story differently. For some it might be a random string of events with a lucky outcome. For others it might be evidence of God, a sign that Joan was watching over us, a meant-to-be moment or proof of the power of stories that need to be told. Meaning, just like beauty and truth, is made within. For me personally, the magic of the story lies in the glimpse it gave me of a huge force for good that works behind the scenes we snap with our phones and try to capture in words. Like the evasive Himalayan peaks – or ‘Majesties’ as Joan called them – that briefly appeared in their full glory between parted clouds only to vanish again, this benign power shone through the many eyes that sought contact and connection. It was what I saw in the faces that so readily broke into smiles and laughter; in the hearts that were wide, wide open inviting us to open ours too.