Yuksam, the Village of our Future

After spending the day wandering around the quaint, homey village of Yuksam we were ready to buy property and set up a hotel. The village itself sprawls across sloping hills in terrace farms and well-built wooden house. Often, the mist of clouds fails to climb above the peaks and so rests in the valleys giving the town a pleasantly eerie feel. There is a small temple devoted to Guru Padmasambhava, a post office, several shops selling clothing and general goods and a large Tibetan monastery on top of a hill. Goats and chicken inhabit nearly every dwelling and prayer flags are always within view.

We walked down the state highway almost out of town and immediately were inundated with school children just dismissed from the secondary school. A little further down we spotted a gathering of long, white flags and decided to make that our destination. We came to a house, which seemed to be attached to the property that housed the flags and a smiley woman washing clothes said we could pay them a visit. We walked down a tiny path, passed an old man breaking stones, to the heart of the flags which encircled a water tank and then led through a field of baby corn stalks and down to what appeared to be a cemetery or memorial ground. We stood for awhile and enjoyed the silence and few raindrops that had begun to fall.

On the way back into town a small, elderly man called to us from a storefront, "Come here, I want to ask you something." We ended up engaged in a fi\fteen minute conversation with the gentleman who, we learned, is  a Hindu retired secondary school teacher who sired ten children with his wife of another caste. "There are only two kinds of people: male and female. Everything else: caste, religion, race, doesn't matter," he told us. He also told us that he had traveled all over India but no place was quite like Sikkim, no place so kind. Although we hadn't yet ventured into the heartland, we had to at that time agree.