A message from the Beas.
This is the Beas river posting as a guest. I have a message for some of you, to warn you of a devastating flood:
Pray that the day may never come when the huge concrete walls you have built on the riverbed for your illegal home or business will come flying on your back, leaving you bedridden. As restricted as I feel today.
Pray knowing that this day may come as soon as tomorrow, knowing that you may not be able to walk from tomorrow no matter how much you pray for prayers do no good for criminals.
What seemed like it happened yesterday was three years ago, in phone photos. Time flies in times of tech excess. Nothing is important, nothing to remember.
Hello, little black ant.
Where are you going on this lovely morning in the Himalaya with a tiny white crumb — half your size and more than half your weight — perfectly held in your black mouth?
A landscape for you.
Of the partially dry and colourful Tso Kar, with fresh snow on the mountains around this fluctuating salt lake. Taken in the bitter-cold (so lovely) morning, the day after the snow. It was September 13 2021, one of my many wild days of travelling and living everywhere in Ladakh.
Isn’t it a painting?
Fresh snow on the mountains around the Tso Kar lake, Ladakh, India. September 2021.
Doing nothing is my favourite thing. I never wanted to do anything ever since I was born.
I procrastinate.
I procrastinate when I’m bored. The more bored I am, the more I procrastinate. I procrastinate until the world is about to end, until things shake up, until it starts boiling. I procrastinate until my life is in danger, until I’m walking at the edge of a savage mountain in the Himalaya.
Suddenly, everything is interesting. Suddenly, I do what I need to do and save worlds from falling apart.
All mangoes I eat make a detour through my heart. The heart wants what it wants.
I miss the cotton candy days.
Snow in the apple orchard. Vashisht, Himachal Pradesh, India. February 2022.
The last snow was a little over a month ago and I miss it already. It’s so hot here this year. Mountain faces have turned almost snowless in just one month. Old people of Vashisht say they have never seen such April heat in their entire life.
Snow in the apple orchard. Vashisht, Himachal Pradesh, India. February 2022.
Without these photographs, it’d have been difficult to imagine and revisit those magical days from memory alone. As if none of it happened, or as if I wasn’t here when it happened. As if my memory of it melted in the cruel April heat along with the snow from the mountains.
I miss snow, the lovely, cotton candy days of snow everywhere that will not arrive again until December or January, depending on the mood of the clouds.