With greater freedom of the self comes loneliness, and a suspicion of freedom.
Delicious mountains.
Some photographs of the mountains around the Baralacha La Pass in the Himalaya — looking like ice cream, like a spread of variety of delicious desserts all around you. These were taken on my way from Himachal to Ladakh on August 15 2021.
I wish I had carried a spoon.
Delicious desserts of the Baralacha La Pass. Ladakh/Himachal Pradesh, India. August 2021. 
Delicious desserts of the Baralacha La Pass. Ladakh/Himachal Pradesh, India. August 2021. 
Delicious desserts of the Baralacha La Pass. Ladakh/Himachal Pradesh, India. August 2021. 
Delicious desserts of the Baralacha La Pass. Ladakh/Himachal Pradesh, India. August 2021.
How to express gratitude to the Himalaya.
I just thought, or rather I imagined — but this is not something I would like to imagine, rather the imagination came to me — but that’s not what it absolutely is, so I’d say — I dreamed — dreamed with eyes open and mind conscious — that I scraped the upper row of my teeth against the rough edges of an enormous slate-grey rock here in the Himalaya, and I could see in instants my own teeth become powder, I scraped away until my gums bled and the rock was covered in teeth powder and blood.
— this is how one should express gratitude to the Himalaya, this is the highest way. It’s a prayer.
Because of words.
Usually, I am happy to write in my head. It’s easier. In your head there are no difficulties to get in the way. But, as soon as you write anything down, the thoughts change, become distorted, and everything turns out false. Because of words.
— Agota Kristof
From a 2011 interview with Agota Kristof.
Two great miracles of life.
It’s a miracle that we can be sad. It’s a miracle that we can be happy.
It’s a miracle when I am sad, it’s a miracle when I am happy.
Three mango pickers.
A woman and her young daughter are picking mangoes off the singular tree in their front yard garden. I’m as usual on my balcony and their house is at a small distance.
Intense envy. I wish I had this. A mango tree in my front yard garden.
Suddenly, I see a man in a red shirt — the husband — fall from the tree along with a green branch. And I laugh.
(If I did not continue looking until the man fell from the tree like a giant red fruit, I would have never come to know that there were in fact three mango pickers. Perhaps there were more?)
Demands of little flower plants.
Little flower plants
Demand
And the sun comes out.
The weather
Changes
At the will of little flower plants.
Time on the rooftop of a haveli.
Time is the blackest evil, a disease worse than tuberculosis. It runs around the eternal havelis of Mandawa, and—
eats and eats and eats.
Dot by black dot, it envelops the haveli like a cosmic plague of black spots.
In this photograph taken during the lab-made COVID-19 pandemic, I witnessed a natural pandemic of time on the haveli walls, from the ground to the rooftop.
Rooftop of a timeless haveli. Mandawa, Rajasthan, India. January 2021.
This is what it looks like when time is on the rooftop of a haveli, eating it carelessly. In the presence of the departing sun and the moon that has arrived too soon.
I stood on the rooftop, not moving, as if I was frozen in time to a time that now looks too ancient and false. Frozen to a time of Maharajas and splendid life, which is what the present time is eating before my eyes.
The Ghibli bus at night.
Past midnight, humid and boring night, five days ago. I’m on my balcony in Bhadrash village in Himachal Pradesh, looking at the road going across on the other side of the valley.
Suddenly, a local bus passes on the road, decorated with colourful blinking lights and blaring that old-style, musical horn.
It is actually a bus from a Studio Ghibli film, jumping and twisting itself while running, and gobbling down vehicles randomly.