Category: Travel

It happens, at first sight, or never. If there is ever love possible at first sight, it has to be with the mountains. The places that the mind escapes to, each time, from the everyday is always a mountain for me. There is a music to them, even in the harshness that almost always accompanies them. It is the one place that I feel at home, if I ever do; even though I have never had a home up there.

Another two-months and life would have covered 12-months of time that has gone again, in things we rarely dreamt that we would do, but always feared we would have to, at some point.

In between, we escaped⁠—sometimes out of the sheer desperation of wanting to break the routine ⁠— other times we were lucky to be able to do that at will. We glimpsed what we would love to have; but we had to make peace with plans that kept changing that would not let us have that.

Death, eventually, made its dreaded appearance. It has a cold touch that never lets go. Everything feels so different now. Being the age that I am at, if I do somehow live for long, this is just the beginning of seeing off your loved ones one after the other. And watching, waiting, looking at life slowly slip away from someone—with no means left to express what they feel⁠—is the hardest way to let someone go.

More so when you are the primary caregiver and all the decisions have to be led by you. I was not the closest, but this is my first introduction to survivor’s guilt. I do not know how people who have had it worse live it down.

With an unknown road ahead in life we took the road unknown. Drove thousands of kilometers and found ourselves at home everywhere. We were surprised to find bits of ourselves still alive. Life was not all death certificates, reading vital signs, blood counts and trying for the umpteenth time to understand if there was something we could have done differently.

No matter how you ask the questions, the answers are always the same.

What is gone is gone.

What is done is done.

I have spent a lot of my younger years looking at the ocean and asking questions to it, only to get the answer in the form of the sigh of wave that just came in. Since I grew up next to it, I could not say for sure if that was a love at first sight or if it sang to me. Guess it was more a steady presence, ready to hear my endless questions, in my life.

The mountains, they are a different deal. The day I fell in love with them, I still remember vividly. It literally took my breath away and it immediately felt familiar. I did not know where I was headed in life when it happened. I do not know where we are headed now either. We just keep going.

But, in my mind, I can see the valley in the distance. It is dusk. The village has come to life in it, the houses lit up like hundreds of fireflies. An odd cattle bell goes off somewhere. There is a nip in the air, it may rain again.

The plants still need to be re-potted. We are short on milk. But those are all chores for tomorrow. The room is bathed in the warmth of the tall lamp.

Outside, the mountains sing to you.

A suspended layer of cloud; half moon above it, an icy wonderland below. A midday sun, blindingly bright, struggling to break the ice on the ground. We are gliding gently, approaching the earth in a tube, full of people, that has no business being airborne.

After a while, traveling across borders, the sameness overwhelms. The boarding passes stack up and a potluck of different currencies build up in the wallet. People are mostly the same as a whole, but starkly different in the last little fraction. They all line up the same at security checks and baggage claims, but the rounding error in their character makes for some stark differences.

Oslo streets are crowded when there are ten people hurriedly walking up a street than five. At this time of the year there is ice everywhere and a slip, or two, is never too far away if you are not being careful.

The locals run about their business as if the ice doesn’t exist. They walk nearly as fast as the Germans do when there is no snow. We tiptoe around as if only the ice exists. The key, it seems, is to take it head-on, rush through, and expect you will slip now and then. Don’t stay grounded long enough to go into a full slip.

Europe breathes its age into you in every possible manner. The passage of time, spanning numerous generations, expresses itself effortlessly everywhere. And, unlike America, not everything is an attempt at right angles.

In Europe, the right angle is what feels right. There is an abundance of curves, gradients, odd angles and a distinct lack of predictability (in architecture and not systems) that somehow escapes a undesirable descent into chaos.

We descended into chaos, back home, two months after we left. The moon cut the thinnest slice off itself and hung it in the sky. A totem that claimed the world was the same, only if you could imagine the rest.

The years of familiarity kicked in. Everything in boxes were taken out, arranged neatly. A door was a door and a book was a book. Names given, attached to labels and put on things. The world was familiar once again.

A suspended layer of cloud swept away the thinnest slice of the moon into the deep ocean of the skies.

People have no business being airborne.

Another turns into another turn
The miles, like days, they burn
And nights that never end

A few bright days
Of sun, ‘fore a season of cold
Where life survives
And, sometimes, thrives

A patch of pure gold
By the wayside
Claimed for just a while

The morsels you stole
The space you took
The life you lived

All that is never yours
All that is always yours
Is life

A break from the routine after such a long time. Open spaces and mountains busy draping themselves in a cover of green, preparing for the hard white winter to come. We saw solid frost in a town of dust on day one. Life is hard there. There was one shop open, two men huddled by a fire, another washing clothes in ice-cold water. It was many small cups of tea before we were able to feel some warmth.

It looked like a dead town and it felt like one. Apples left unplucked from the season long gone. The odd truck bumped along, raising dust that settled on another layer left behind by another. You may not think it, but it was a town that was quite prosperous. For an outsider, it smelt of decay. The truth was anything but decay. So much so that decay was a choice they could indulge in, should they choose it.

And that’s the crazy nature of truth. It is always right in front of you, should you choose to see it. To ignore it, there are many ways and what is considered normal is one of them. Normal is so subjective that there is really no normal beyond the outside appearance of obvious choices. Choices that are merely the beginning than the outcome. Yet, we judge everyone by that same currency — of normal choices — than its outcome.

For all that has transpired, by choice or from a lack of it, the thing that stands out as the truth for me is to live the life that I feel comfortable living. No matter how wrong this looks, all that matters is that this feels right to me. And, even in the face of how so much of this negates how everything should be, it has never felt so right. Sink or swim, this is the real deal.

A life lived on your own terms has no useful benchmark to compare against, as, living by it, you will fail almost every benchmark, if your terms are not aligned with what is considered normal. That way, mine is a world that has no right or left, no north, south, east or west. Everything exists and it does not; all at the same time. How do you reconcile that with a world that is adamant that is north is north, east is east and right is not what is left?

Much of that sounds like a lie, much like an elegant delusion. A delusion, not unlike travel. A departure from the normal. An escape from the ordinary. Yet, we revisit this delusion, much like any other delusion. We claim temporary spaces as ours and live in them for a few days. We meet people that we grow fond of, and yet, we will almost never meet again. Yet, we travel.

In all this, beauty is not hard to find, should you seek it; so is joy. For, the same frost that covers the dust also provides an invitation to life that we seldom give thought to. Should you be able to smile, not out of mirth or sarcasm, in the midst of absolute starkness, at the fact that much exists and thrives, beyond our own endless fascination with ourselves, it is easy to see how everything can exist and not exist at the same time.

So, we revisit these places time and again. We rue the meanings that we used to earlier find in them that we can’t find anymore. We ignore the fact that in our growth in the interim the earlier meanings have ceased to exist, while new ones have cropped up in their place. Sometimes you take the changes — your own and the place’s — in your stride. Sometimes you don’t.

And that is life.

The photo is from 2009, clicked on the famous More Plains on the Manali-Leh highway. Since that time, I have been on that road twice, and even as the charm has worn considerably from the first time, every sight of it, even in photos, still takes a bit of my breath away.

There used to be a time, as recently as 2008 (if you can call 2008 ‘recent’, that is), when I first drove to Manali and heard about places like the Spiti Valley and Rohtang Pass. Manali town, by itself, is quite the picture of what a hill town should not be — crowded, dirty and a disaster-in-the-making thanks to tourism.

Yet, the town also has one of the most spectacular views of Himalayas you will get to see, without having trek or drive to remote places. During that first visit, mostly inspired by that view, I made plans to some day see what lay beyond Rohtang Pass, even though I had no clue how I would go about it.

In the years that followed, plans were made, and also abandoned, at the last minute thanks to the predictable freezing of the feet. Having no rugged vehicle to go to those places, I chickened out at the last minute and eventually set out to explore other areas of Himachal Pradesh instead.

As luck would have it, I did wind up crossing Rohtang on that trip and even went all the way to Leh in Ladakh and then started to make a habit of it. Somewhere along the way I set my mind on getting that rugged vehicle and picked one up that eventually cost me a fair bit of coin, at a time when spending like that was probably not the best idea.

The point to this apparent pointless meandering of words is that I don’t often think things through very clearly. There is often a lot of prior planning to doing something before it is actually done, but, more often than not, the doing itself comes unhinged from that planning and it takes a life of its own.

Going by how you are supposed to live an adult’s life, this is folly of the greatest order. And justifiably so. Should things go wrong, there is absolutely no margin for safety and you will crash rather spectacularly. That said, it is often the case in life that you can’t really plan for all eventualities in life and often even the best plans won’t stave off the worst disasters.

Once again, seen through the prism of a normal life, my life has been anything but normal. At most stages I have made choices that would be considered crazy by most people and yet those have always been choices that I have made for myself, for better or for worse.

The choices have not always been easy. Yet, as a result of those choices I am richer in what I have seen and experienced of people, places and realities beyond the cocoon that I used to live in, even while I can justifiably be called a pauper in terms of possessions and belongings.

That is not to say my relative tangible poverty does not bother me; it does. I wholeheartedly believe that there are problems in the world that money and money alone can solve and I have always disliked being indebted, one way or the other. I can’t imagine living without money, nor do I intend to live a life where there will always be a shortage of it to lead a comfortable life.

But, I also believe that there exists a life beyond things you can touch and feel. To reach beyond that you have to invest in yourself and in the world around you and for all that trouble you won’t get to show much for it that most can touch or feel. While I didn’t intend to go down that route, the past 5-years have wound up being a chaotic ride down that exact path.

So, why do I have to write down all of this? Well, for one, at times it is not easy keep the larger picture in your mind when the smaller one obscures everything else. This is one of those times and writing this down provides structure and perspective of what is not seen clearly.

Secondly, this is beginning of another phase, where I’m attempting to loop back around to merge both what is tangible and what is not-so-tangible into the same life. So far, it has been a struggle and it feels like a force fit, but I know for a fact that the mountain looms, insurmountable and large, in front of me right now, but what I truly desire lies beyond.

And I do fully intend to get there, one way or the other.