Sahyadrica

A view of the outer Himalaya - the Shivalik, upwards from the city of Ramnagar in Nainital. As fate would have it, I would wound around the same road across groves of jamun in the marshes and stands of sal in the lower hills, by the same shop I fondly remember meeting a lovely she-dog with light-brown eyes who immediately liked me in return, and up the mountain roads like I did seven years ago, mesmerised by the endlessness of the forests of the Himalayan foothills, across wide riverbanks of the Kosi – the same river that many have, in another age, journeyed afoot, from the trading Shauka families covering many miles across the Transhimalaya to the terai plains, to Harrer and Aufschnaiter, two mountaineers who escaped from the Dehradun Internment Camp when the World War II started, following the Kosi at first, all the way to Lhasa. It was sheer coincidence that I read Harrer’s account Seven Years in Tibet as I crossed Kosi every day. I was in the Shivalik Range of the North-western O...

For the first time I felt it, being stuck in space, coming unstuck in time. Summers are always eerily quiet; I think to myself this exceptionally silent summer of 2020. As I lie in my bed, stuck in a room dimly lit, staring at the blank ceiling, everything is still. The summer loo creeps in from invisible gaps, and I imagine it propelling downward from the ceiling fan, heating up the bottled water enough to make it distasteful. I am paralyzed in space. How many summers has it been for this summer to arrive? I close my eyes only to feel a sudden rush of a steel breeze. I’m over 3,000 meters above sea level, on a shoulder of the Gharwal Himalaya that leads to the Bandarpoonch Peak. I’ve just awoken from a sweet afternoon siesta after a hearty post-eight-hour-walk meal. My friend is poised on a tree stump admiring the setting sun over the Gharwal Himalaya. It is May of the year 2006. After four days of clouds and rain and snow, it has opened up. Soon the darkness grips us and the cold w...