A home in the Himalaya.
How wonderful to live in a home so high above sea level, to live at the middle of a mountain here in the Himalaya, to have your head at a height where most birds fly, so that you see crows and mynas and sparrows flying either at your eye-level or just over your head, like an Airbus jumbo jet taking off over you, with the underside clearly visible, the curled up legs of the birds, like the wheels of the jet starting to curl up, like when your gaze is parallel to the snowy peaks of distant mountain ranges as you stand on the top of a mountain facing it, and you see mountains behind the mountains that you couldn’t see otherwise, and you see that the clouds over the mountains are just as away from you as those birds.
Everything feels close, everything within arm’s reach, as if made only for you.
Mountains on the other side of Leh when viewing from near the Khardung La pass, Ladakh, India. September 2021.
I used to be who I was not.
Ever since living in the Himalaya, I never had to pretend, never even occurred to me to pretend, like I had to pretend and pretend so much, when I lived in big cities—
—where I pretended to be someone from the city to start with, pretended to be modern and professional-looking, pretended to be nice all the time and failed frequently, pretended to be happy, pretended to like that life and the way it is lived, pretended to care and pretended to not, pretended to like what others liked, pretended to not get offended by what was offensive, pretended to be cool when something bothered my very soul, and with sleep crawling under my skin like a fever I pretended to be awake and alert, pretended to be an idea of a person than an actual person, pretended so much that often I couldn’t tell if I was pretending or being myself, pretended so much that in spite of my great efforts, I became pretentious, in my being and my thoughts, pretentious when in the public gaze, pretentious in my room alone, pretentious in my sleep.
(Instances of pretending highlighted in italics just because.)
A red sari in the sun.
Woman in a red sari. Mandawa, Rajasthan, India. January 2021.
A woman in a red sari evading the camera’s gaze that the photographer intended for her blood-red sari dripping on the barren grey street made of concrete, the red dripping as witnessed by the photographer, the camera, and the sun, the sun that was beating down on everything in sight—
—except on the red sari. As if the colour red is his blind spot.
The empty glass of water in my room is colder than the mountains and distant stars outside.
Footprints in the snow.
Snowing stopped the day before yesterday. Yesterday was sunny but today is cloudy, and yesterday’s blazing sun ate through the insubstantial snow everywhere. Such as the snow suspended around the round rocks scattered on both sides of the ever-flowing Beas. Today only their heads are white; their wet black faces revealed from the sides.
I’m looking at them from Vashisht. From higher up here, the faces of the rocks look like black footprints on the riverbed snow. Big rocks are the footprints of lions and snow leopards, while small rocks the footprints of spotted deers and servals.
Hunters in the Snow, 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
My mind begins to wonder about these footprints on the snow while my gaze continues to wander among them.
Wild animals from everywhere come here at night when no one is looking, and drink from the Beas, drink from the Himalaya. They leave before dawn, leaving the footprints behind so that someone like me can imagine them drinking from the river. In broad daylight but no one else can see them.
Some of the footprints belong to the dusty camels of the Thar who had come from afar to quench their extraordinary thirst with the Himalayan water.
Sometimes that’s precisely what you need when the desert leaves you so thirsty that no amount of water in the desert will quench it. When the thirst is not an ordinary thirst, but an illness, a crippling affliction. When you must flee the desert, your home sweet home, in order to live. Only the cold, glacial water of the Himalaya can extinguish the thirsts of the burning desert.
I’m no stranger to such thirsts. I became similarly afflicted on seeing the Himalaya for the first time, thirsty from the first glimpse at 7:30 on December 28 2019. So I had to come here again when I came here again in February 2021.
Now I’m here, drinking this water, and I will be here until I’m not thirsty anymore. I still can’t believe I’m here, still drinking this water. It will certainly take years, many years. More years than one life can provide.
When I hesitate.
Snow through apple orchards. Vashisht, Himachal Pradesh, India. January 2022.
When I hesitate, when I sometimes falter, living here in the Himalaya when I lose sense of what I have been given, and given only recently, only a year ago, when I ever so slightly take it for granted even in my sleep, I remind myself—
—that for all these years, ever since I was born, I had ugly buildings of concrete and glass for views, I had endless roads of tarmac and concrete with rarely any earth in sight, I had rivers that had become gutters, and air that came secondary with fumes. I think of what my eyes had to bear, eyes that always preferred beauty and nature. I think of the immense anguish and misery that came, from seeing what repulsed me and seeing it all for decades.
And I think to myself—
—that this is all a tale, scenes of fiction, this cannot be real, cannot be what I’m actually living. I must have done some kind deeds, or I must have endured enough, to deserve these mountains.
These scenes that were not for me just a year ago, now they are mine. Given to me in the middle of a pandemic as if there was an end date to my city sufferings. So I remind myself to cherish this lovely dream and never fall asleep, never falter.
Where do clouds learn this?
Where do clouds learn how to glide and sit over huge mountains without disturbing the snow?
I want to learn it from there… I want to learn it from them.
Clouds and snow from Vashisht, Himachal Pradesh, India. January 2022.