MOST WANTED: Unvaccinated entity in the Himalaya.
An unvaccinated male entity — ID #13A06G-20-21 — is on the loose since over a year, roaming freely across the Himalaya and spreading the Covid-19 wherever he goes. A life-threatening danger to everyone else, this degenerate was caught on multiple CCTV cameras riding an olive-green Hero X-Pulse 200 motorcycle with a big yellow backpack tied to the backseat.
As part of the government initiative to vaccinate everyone that we, the trusted Big Pharma scientists, are proudly sponsoring, we will offer a cash prize of 1 CRORE rupees to anyone who brings him to the local authorities so that we can vaccinate him thoroughly like a lab rat for our Wuhan-made viruses.
A memory from 22 December 2021 at 10:29 am in Vashisht, Himachal Pradesh, India.
A blindspot in flight.
Here in the Himalaya, in the upper-Manali valley, as I’m facing and looking at my favourite sight, the magnificent Friendship Peak mountain, a crow flies into my vision, flying from the mountain and towards me, a blindspot in my view of the mountain, I see him from the front, a vague shadow with flapping wings, and I see no other birds, I even forget to see the mountain as my gaze shifts to the blindspot, the bird itself, as I see him come so close and then pass over my head as if he was signalling to join him, then he takes a gentle turn towards the south-west, so I see him from the side like a plane, a pocket-sized Airbus A380 powerfully swinging the wings, I almost wanted to give him a push, I almost wanted to join him.
A memory from 18 December 2021 at 3:47 pm in Vashisht, Himachal Pradesh, India.
A sleepwalking truck.
Sudden confidence while I was riding behind a slow, sleepwalking truck, I overtook it from under it—
—or so I dreamed.
The cold zipper.
How wonderful the small zipper feels against my closed, warm eye when the eye leans over the metal zipper by chance, the cold zipper of my pillow’s cover.
A memory from 9 February 2021 at 1:13 am in Rishikesh, Uttarakhand, India.
Impossible shadows.
Patches of sunlight in barren fields,
there stands nothing
between the sun and the fields,
yet I see intense formless shadows on the ground.
I finally came down from the Himalaya to live at the sea level for a while. It’s all too flat here!
In praise of fucking up.
I am in favour of people making mistakes, be it in their thinking, speech, or actions. In favour of them not learning ever from such mistakes. In favour of neither trying for nor leaving a good impression on others.
The mountains before your eyes.
The greatest mountains in the world are those next to you, your neighbours, the mountains before your eyes that you look at every day, the mountains whose presence makes you feel like God.
To be a gust of wind in the Himalaya.
Impressive gusts of wind in the Himalaya that no one can stop. Hardly takes rest. The wind rushes in at whim and then vanishes into thin air. Magic like.
What’s it like to be a gust of wind?
Every day the wind is profuse, the constant flow of air around me, and yet I can’t get enough of it. How can I ever? I remember living in the cities, gasping in the dull stillness of the streets. I remember the silence of the wind.
What’s it like to fly through the mountains like a phantom — felt but unseen?