 
### The Anatomy of Journey

A Soulquest

-

Rohit Karthik Nalluri

Copyright 2015 Rohit K Nalluri

Published by Rohit K Nalluri at Smashwords

Edition 2015

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

*

Reader's Review

...beautifully written descriptive passages and some remarkable insights into the nature of traveling – how the journey becomes a thing onto itself and how it effects the traveler. What I found fascinating were the glimpses of modern Indian and how ancient customs and traditions lived side by side, if not hand in hand, with modern society. – Rod Raglin via Smashwords.

...great book not just for bikers but anybody who wants to seek more out of life and understand the existence! – Shekhar B via Flipkart.

Beautiful Narration, good travelogue. A good read for an aspiring Leh-Ladakh rider. It's a long book just like the journey. – isen via Flipkart.

This is a very well written travelogue of the road trip. The story resonated with several of my travel across India. A must read for anyone planning an adventurous road trip. It beautifully brings out the essence of travel and author has done a brilliant job by connecting it with the philosophy of life and living. – Vinay Rajagopal via Flipkart.

Author's Note

I wanted to say something about the linearity of the novel. In the last seven years, I've undertaken many road trips, many journeys, the dates of which are intact in my mind - I'm not yet an old, cranky, absent-minded writer, although I do like the idea of becoming one, complete with a bristling white beard. I remember the date of each and every journey. Dates are important to me. But to form a single, flowing narrative, I have had to shift the dates of some journeys and events around. These events did occur, but they may not have done so on the dates I have mentioned, except for the trip to Ladakh, which did begin as mentioned in the novel, on the 23rd of July, and end on the 6th of August, with our return to Bangalore.

I also wanted to say something about the truthfulness about the events and circumstances. Most of the book is true to form, and derives from personal experiences. All the places mentioned in the book, we have actually visited. There is no fiction in them. And, although the characters in this book are not fictional, they are only a derivation of their real-life counterparts. Any flaws you visit upon them, any judgment, is a judgment upon me and my skill as a writer, and is a flaw totally my own. They have only been the best of friends. I have also taken the wonderful liberty of embellishing the story where I deemed it fit, but you will find that I have never strayed too far from the truth. It is, after all, our sole pursuit.

*
Table of Contents

Of Legends

Travelers

Xession: Ocean Cave

Preparations

The Anatomy of Plans

The Hazrat Nizamuddin Express

Delhi to Chandigarh

Xession: Speaking with Dogs

The Anatomy of Roads

Chandigarh to Manali

The Anatomy of Mist

Rohtang Pass to Jispa

Xession: Eye and 'I'

Zing-Zing Bar

Xession: Illusions

Leh at Last

The Anatomy of Mountains

Magnetic Hill

The Anatomy of Sky

This Way of Life

Khardung La

The Anatomy of God

The Anatomy of Rain

Catharsis

The Anatomy of Death

Gestation

Rebirth

Nights

The Anatomy of Words

Epilogue

For those who understand

&

For those who must

.
Of Legends

Thought is the labor of intellect, reverie its pleasure.

Victor Hugo

Do you remember those days in school when you'd look out the window at the empty playground shimmering in the afternoon heat? And your mind would wander and find a red, leather saddle on a leathery, spiky Pterodactyl that is just itching to take off with you on her wings. Bleary, dreary afternoons. Fit for day-dreaming. The dull murmuring of all the kids in school reaches your ear, like the buzzing hum of many, many bees, blocking out your teacher's voice. Your vision begins to fade, your eyes glaze over and you leave the classroom behind to go swimming in the blue afternoon sky on the back of a Jurassic bird.

Road trips on a motorcycle are very much like this – an afternoon reverie come to life. Your hair feels luxurious, caressed by the warm breeze; and the thrum of the engine puts you in a trance until you realize you have fallen right into the dream you've always dreamed – to be in school, but without your teachers and only with your friends, to be able to day dream all you want without having to worry about the teacher smacking you over the head, and to finally live the happy, happy dream of dreams turning into reality. Cozy, unhurried afternoons on the back of a metal Rhinoceros, charging down a dark highway melting in the heat, with your friends around you lost in the silence of their own reveries, and no one to tell you to stop. The best part of a road trip is that when the dream is over and you decide to return to reality it is just as good as the dream.

I have been struggling to begin this work because I thought I should mention why we undertook this journey - why it was so important for us to run around for fifteen days over a distance of eight thousand kilometers across the length of the subcontinent. But now I realize that no other reason is required. There are dreams we dream at night that hold value on a different plane. Perhaps we dream of a better career, more money, a particular woman. But day dreams are where we create legends and myths; where men become boys. Where Pterodactyls come to life and help you climb the saddle with a toothy smile. Dreams often come true, but legends come to life rarely.

We wanted to bring our legends to life.

*

Travelers

Travel often; getting lost will help you find yourself.

The Holstee Manifesto

I have always loved roads, because the very fact that you are on it is a sure sign of you being somewhere and getting somewhere. It is a sign of your hard existence, of a reality that is moving and physical. Roads are the physical representation of the very thin line that exists between being and becoming. If you are on a road it's either because you are sure of your destination or you are lost, neither of which is bad.

I must say I have been lucky – we have been lucky, my friends and I. Our destinations have been diamonds at the end of long onyx necklaces of beautiful roads. Roads that inspire prose to be written like poetry. And in our repetitive admiration of such roads, we have slowed down our speed, and our need to reach the destination. Without thinking about it, we touched upon a core aspect of any spiritual philosophy – the total appreciation and acknowledgement of the present moment – the aspect of mindfulness. For this, we are thankful.

The monotonous whip of the wind and the drone of the engine compel one's mind to think, to revisit the past and explore the darkness of the future with the multicolored torch of imagination. When one is on a motorcycle and has a long way to go, the mind is the best of friends. And motorcycling, road trips and camping out have all been constant ingredients of my imagination. A long road trip on bikes that would force me to camp out under the stars had always been a fervent wish, always burning deep behind my eyes, flickering brightly every time the possibility of a trip was mentioned.

My thoughts switched from road trips to the smell of eucalyptus and back to road trips again as we rode into a thick fog. Moham was riding, and I sat behind him, stretching my neck up to the heavens and staring in silent awe at the line of tall eucalyptus trees. The minty scent of scores of eucalyptus filled the air, the fog lifted and we rode into Ooty.

Experienced bikers will agree with me that over time one develops two kinds of road trips; the exotic road trips – the long ones, the ones that are planned over months and years on paper and in the mind, and the regular road trips – the staple diet of a spiritual biker, the weekend getaways - nutrition for the soul.

Ooty is one destination out of many in our staple diet list. Kemmangundi is another. Others are all places near Mysore, my spiritual home, the tree under which I found my nirvana. The borders and forests of Tamil Nadu and Kerala are just eighty kilometers from here, and Ooty is a hundred-and- forty. Mysore is also close to Coorg, known as the Scotland of India, an epithet it earns through a mystic beauty. Mysore is close to another gift of paradise – the enchantingly melancholic Western Ghats. Everything west of Mysore has provided much needed fodder for my wandering spirit and has fuelled a million thoughts.

How can I not be a traveler? Five roads lead out from Mysore. One goes to Hassan, one to Madikeri, one to Ooty and Tamil Nadu, one to Sultan Bathery and Kerala and yet another leads inexorably beyond the Western Ghats towards the Arabian Sea. The Hassan route leads inspiringly north and north-west, towards Belur, Halebid, Chikmagalur and Kemmangundi, and from thereon to some of the tallest mountains in Karnataka. The Madikeri road brings us thickly into the forests and the waterfalls of Coorg, to the iced, green heights of Tadiyandamol and the cascades of Mallalli. The road that leads to Kerala is also the road that takes us to Tamil Nadu, forming a crossroad at Gundlupet, a haven for the road-hungry. From Gundlupet one tosses a coin to decide whether to head straight or take the right turn that leads to Kerala. The straight road takes us through Elephant-infested forests to Ooty. And if you take the right turn, you encounter the Edakkal caves of Sultan Bathery, the Sentinel Rock waterfall nestled amidst tea estates and a wild ghat-section ride that ends at Calicut, where the Arabian Sea wets the city's sunbaked shore. Like tentacles spreading from an immortal Kraken, these roads spread luxuriously towards the north-western edge of Karnataka, beyond her sky-skimming mountains and acquire a Konkani flavor. It is in the very air, the tastes and aromas and the possibilities that erupt from the mixing of two cultures. Approaching the Goa border, one finds a strangely tolerant mix of hippies and orthodoxy at Gokarna and her sister beaches of Om, Half-Moon and Paradise. My friends and I have explored these roads until Vasco da Gama, a town on the northern edge of Goa and stared wistfully at the signposts that indicate the proximity, or distance, to the borders of Maharashtra.

On this particular trip to Ooty we could only stay half a day. We needed to return to Mysore by midnight and had planned accordingly. Returning via the Bandipur National Forest at night, we turned our headlights off for a full thirty seconds, riding blind in the pressing silence under the cover of enormous rain trees. In the complete blackness, we see specks of flickering light – fireflies – that hover over the hedges on the edge of the road, marking our path. This is an unspoken tradition, one of the things that unite us. Sometimes, the darkness has been mellowed by the chalky, white light of a full moon, and the effect is ethereal. My friends and I are left speechless at times like these, and the effect they have on our friendship is profound.

On another such occasion, as we rode with our lights off in the silent white light of a gibbous moon, we were startled by a sudden trumpeting. Two great ivory knives and the sharp glint of a watchful eye made us decrease our speed, and when we turned our headlights back on the yellow lights painted in the darkness the grey form of a giant elephant mother, gently pushing her two kids towards the opposite bank of the road. Our lights and sudden appearance startled her just as she had us, and she released the noose like grip she had on a branch of an overhanging tree before trudging away into the forest, visibly annoyed.

Once beyond the range of the national forest, the highway is still poorly lit; we slow our pace near a roadside dhaba where we sit down to eat, unusually quiet. The trip has ended much sooner than we expected, and we yearn for more. Left to our own devices, we wouldn't hesitate to travel the length and breadth of India... if someone would only take care of the money involved. And this foreboding thought always brought us back to reality. Responsibilities and realities were knocking at our teen- aged doors, and we could no longer ignore the incessant noise.

At the time, Moham and I worked for a small Knowledge Process Outsourcing outfit in Mysore called ThoughtFunction. 3 had joined us at ThoughtFunction too, having taken a year off after his graduation. In a fit of adventure, we had all resigned, and invested most of our savings in what was in those days a lucrative business - Data Entry.

Data entry processes are legal and do occur ethically in places. But outside these places, when it becomes locally available, I'd be wary of signing myself up for it. Because \- they are sub-sourced repeatedly and in time they are so deeply sub-sourced that no one knows who originally needed the data and who approached the market in the first place. Sub-sourcing is a phenomenon that occurs when no one wants to do the work but wants to earn the money, even if it is a little less money. For example, if I receive a contract to do 'x' amount of work for 10 rupees, then I can sub-source it to you for 6 rupees. When you send me the finished work, I pay you out of my pocket and send the data onward to the company that pays me 10 rupees. I earn a profit of 4 rupees without doing any work, without investing on computers and employees and offices and internet costs.

We are riding again. I have taken over from Moham, and he is riding pillion. After miles and miles of journeying together, we have an unspoken understanding about what to do when on a bike. It is automatic now because of years of mechanical but wonderful repetition. We are in mountain country now, and the road descends and twists like a snapped band of black ribbon. Motorcycling on such roads is pure bliss, and I am wondering why Moham has handed the bike to me – he wouldn't, normally. I feel the bike throbbing rhythmically through the handlebars, and get a better grip on the accelerator. The road ahead is dark and a slow mist is rising, and my mind settles into a similar rhythm.

We had signed ourselves up as individual 'processors' for small packets of data entry projects. It was all very simple - We pay a certain amount of money up front - 'service charges' - to receive our identification and packets of monthly data. Our job was to enter the data available in a .pdf format into the provided software. The objective - data in the .pdf format is hard to edit and hard to search but when it is converted into a digital format of individual letters, the same data becomes fluid - easy to edit, easy to search, easy to manipulate. You can't do that with .pdf, unless you start out with that intention. In any case, we got the .pdf files and we got the software and we manually entered (typed) all the data into the respective entry fields provided in the software. About 5000 .pdf pages had to be entered with 98% accuracy in 28 days. We'd get our paycheck on the 45th - which felt like a nice deal, so we signed up and worked through insomnia-inducing days while still working overnight at ThoughtFunction. It was only after we received the money from our first two or three submissions that we decided that we could risk 'up-scaling'.

One fateful night in March 2010 – these things always seem to happen to me in March - I met Moham on the terrace of the four-storied building that ThoughtFunction held in ransom. We talked about outsourcing. The idea was simple - We'd pay for 10 'individual processors' contracts. We'd employ 10 persons to come in and work for us eight hours a day to enter the 5000 pages in 25 days. The remaining 3 days before the submission would be for Quality Analysis, in which we'd ask our employees to check each other's databases for any errors. It was highly important for us to achieve 98% accuracy, as anything below that would cut our payment by half. If we dropped below 90%, we would end up with nothing. The employees would be paid 4000 Rupees per month, and an extra 100 for every hour of overtime, which was the going rate at the time in a tier-2 city like Mysore.

'How much money do we need initially?' Moham had asked.

'Let's see - 80,000 for the 10 contracts, 12 computers at 500 per piece per month, an Internet connection at 1000, and a place to rent at 5000. That comes to 92,000 rupees.'

'We are renting the computers?' 'We're renting the computers.'

'Okay. Who has that kind of money?'

Good question. I didn't. Moham didn't. We needed a financier, an angel investor who'd see the logic of our calculations and give us the money.

'3?' Moham asked.

'3,' said I.

I knew 3 since our school days. But by the time I was in ThoughtFunction, 3 and I were hopelessly out of touch and hadn't even seen each other in 7 years, which is saying a lot considering the size of Mysore. We roped him in to our project, and he was ready to invest (risk) about 50,000. When he agreed to the plan, Moham and I decided to cut our figures down the middle and submitted our resignations. This way we'd need fewer contracts, lesser employees, fewer computers and lesser space to fit them all in.

This would have, should have worked. But it didn't. We lost everything that we invested - money, time, energy and emotions. Why? One reason - we were after easy money. Another reason - we trusted the wrong people.

Data is everywhere. It does not matter what kind of data needs to be input in what kind of software, as long as people are made to believe that the contracts they've paid for will fetch them a thick stack of papers that needs to be typed into the software. With time and publicity, enough people had paid an initial amount to access the data. They were paid for their submissions regularly by the 'company'.

Everything was going fine - until they reached critical mass. By this time, the company had made enough money from the initial deposits of the hundreds of people who had paid to receive the data. Enough to market data entry, enough to pay the first few months of submission money, enough to re- generate the data, enough to maintain the outlook of a legal company. Once critical mass had been reached and enough people started complaining about irregularities in corrections, they packed up whatever profits they had made and disappeared overnight. By irregularities in corrections, I mean the ploy the company used when they didn't have enough money to pay for the submissions - they said that the data you submitted was worthless to them because it was less than 90% accurate. There was no way you could prove it because the data was not released back to you. If you asked questions, you were told to read the contract... that you'd signed. All neat, all quasi-legal.

I relax my grip on the bike. My thoughts have taken me into the past and the motorcycle has taken me farther away. The gang has stopped near a small tea shop for a cup of tea and a cigarette, and I lean the bike left off the highway to stop.

"What's the total damage?" I asked 3, catching up to him as he sat down on a wet concrete bench that was placed under a giant rain tree. The 'bench' was once part of a long electric pole and now had been cleverly recycled. Three or four other regulars hung around, watching us remove our riding gear.

"Eighty thousand", he said, blowing smoke from his nose.

"How are we going to pay the Internet bill? That alone is costing us 20K."

"We'll figure something out. Let's talk to Moham - he'll know."

Moham was our goto man for anything criminal, underhanded, slinky and kinky. He was our stationary store, our man Friday. And he was at the moment speaking to someone on his cell phone. I watched him lean against the trunk of the tree \- he is twenty-nine, older than the rest of us. He is thin and short and strong as an ox, with good, dark hair and a straight, thin nose. He is one of those friends you could rely on to come help you out of a situation at any odd hour of the day. He is the oldest and also the funniest guy in the group, making us laugh and allowing himself to be laughed upon, which is the essence of all friendships, really. It is the sweetest sacrifice of friendship - that you allow yourself to be laughed upon. You allow some few selected souls to puncture through your ego and laugh at you, laugh with you.

We watched him finish the call and slowly walk back to us.

'That was Ashok,' he said, pointing at the cell phone in his hand.

Uneasy ripples spread through our stomachs. At least, they rippled through mine. I don't imagine anything ruffled 3. I have rarely seen him lose his cool.

'What did you tell him?' I ask.

'I told him we'll pay the bill, but it will take time. I told him that our project was cancelled at the last minute, and we're out of money - I gave him a version of the truth.'

'How are we going to pay the bill? We don't have twenty thousand rupees.'

'We have to get it from somewhere, or we have to cut and run.'

'You mean not pay at all?'

'Yes. It's just 20K. They won't miss it. They'll threaten us for a month or two with court cases and money-collectors, but they can't do anything beyond that.'

'Is this do-able?' asked 3.

'Yes it is. Except they know where the company is set up - they have our address.'

'Is that a problem?'

'Not necessarily. We need to make them believe that we've moved from the original location; that we no longer work out of that address. And when they start sending people down there - which they will - we need someone to tell them that the company moved shop a long time back without a forwarding address.'

'They can't send a court notice to the address in general?'

'It's a private house – with two separate families living there - they can't do that.'

'Hmmm...What do you think?' 3 asked, looking at me.

I considered. 'We don't have a lot of options. If we are sure of this, then we should do this completely \- no half measures. Stop receiving calls from Ashok, stop responding to his e-mails and letters.'

'Dude, it's just a telecom company. You make it sound like we're planning to murder the President.'

I gave a sheepish grin - I've been known to be dramatic.

So we went ahead with it - our first great crime! We avoided Ashok for a month, until he came down to the "company's" address himself and tried to speak to us. We were, of course, long gone.

Eventually, he stopped trying.

I was nineteen at the time. My personal goal of coming out of this entire project clean became impossible now. Exposed to the underbelly of the Indian IT scene, we had grown up quickly and suddenly. In the blink of an eye, we had gone from being naïve and enthusiastic to wise and enthusiastic, which is perfect, but only in retrospect. And those cold January mornings saw the three of us disappointed and staring at a gap in our resumes that needed to be filled. I remember being confused, as if I had lost the plot somehow. How did we manage to come out dirtier than we had gone in? I think we needed time then. We needed time to think, to understand in their entirety our actions of the past few months. True, our sins were nominal in the wider view of the sins of the world, but the fact that we had sinned put us in the leagues of men, not children, not teenagers. It disturbed us to think that we were no longer clean, no longer not-responsible for our actions. Suddenly, the world was no longer simple - no longer black and white. New shades of grey had been introduced to us and this fact troubled us the most. If the world wasn't cleanly divided into black and white, what else were we wrong about?

We gained from those ten months of struggle and eventual failure a tight knit friendship that survived through a lot of acidic things that usually eat into the core of good friends. When we came out unscathed, it gave us an abiding confidence in each other, and in our friendship. We managed to get back on our feet soon – 3 enrolled to do an MBA in Finance, Moham re-joined the real-estate business he was part of before he had started working for ThoughtFunction, and I got a job with IBM in Bangalore. Things were looking up for us, but the fog in the mind remained, the doubts remained.

*
Fifty-two kilometers from Chikmagalur the land slips away to give way to the ghosts of mist, and nestling in their midst is Kemmangundi. I don't know what to call it - a village, a town, a hamlet perhaps - there is nothing here except a horticultural department that studies the local ecosystem, a few tea stalls, a kitchen-slash-hotel, a run-down guest house that has since been closed, and stunning views of the mountain range. Its name basically translates to the 'red-mud hill'.

On another road trip, we reached Kemmangundi after a wet, four-hour ride in a slow, desultory rain. The uphill ride to the top was delayed by the swimming pool sized pot holes that formed in the rain. In many places, only a narrow strip of road remained between the pools of red-brown water and the endless valley to the left.

We parked the bikes at the first tiny tea shop we spotted through the haze of mist and rain and, while some of us stayed back to enjoy a hot cup of tea, Sumanth and Moham half-jogged into the fog to book us a room at the guest house. Rooms here were generally unavailable to the public, but Sumanth was able to get us in through the contacts he had made working at the Lalbagh Botanical Gardens, Bangalore.

'Who has the vinegar?' 3 asked.

'Why do we need that?' I asked, watching the smoke coming out of my mouth. We had ridden the last fifty kilometers to Kemmangundi through a constant, cold drizzle, and we were wet to our bones. It was getting colder as the evening progressed. But as a thumb rule, it's a good road trip if you can see your breath condensing in the air.

'There are leeches hiding in the grass here. When we go to the waterfalls in the morning, we'll have to trek through a lot of grassland. If the leeches stick to you, they don't come off easy.'

'What does vinegar do?'

'You pour a little on the bloodsuckers and they fall off immediately.'

I raised an eyebrow, surprised by this piece of information, and sipped my tea. Smoke from the tea would rise and mix with the cold, condensed air from my mouth and nose, but I didn't notice. It would take me six more months to notice.

Sumanth and Moham returned with keys to our room. We quickly went inside, dropped our bags and chose our beds. Looking around, we realized it was more a dormitory than a room, with a row of eight beds facing an empty, crumbling wall. The roof overhead was leaking, and algae and grass were growing into the room. The wetness and the constant mist encouraged this growth. Changing into dry clothes, I thought to myself that it was cold enough to snow, and then said this out loud.

To which Moham replied, shaking his head, 'It's not cold enough. You have to go to the north of India if you want snow.'

'You mean Shimla and Manali?'

'No, Ladakh!' Sumanth interjected excitedly, bringing the subject back to an exhausted topic.

'Oh don't start with Ladakh again!' said Moham, putting on a pair of socks.

'Why not? You know you all want to go there someday. I am just planning ahead.'

'Plans never work – we will go to Ladakh when we go to Ladakh,' 3 said, coming out of the washroom.

Through the window, I could see that the twilight sky was a torment of grey and mist. The setting sun blazed bleakly through the fog and added an infusion of dull gold to the mix of spreading colors. The fog itself swirled around slowly, seemingly losing energy with setting sun, playing half-heartedly with the world around it. From behind the fog, trees and tea-stalls and people would appear suddenly and disappear just as quickly, apparitions in the haunting light.

I knew the Ladakh argument would continue into the night. It was another thing that united us. Ladakh is a district in the troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir that is frozen in time. The capital, Leh, is a modern nugget of a city set amidst dusty mountains of rock and scree. For the intrepid biker, the ride from Manali to Leh is a litmus test, a test of strength, skill and stamina. A twisting and unforgiving mountain path that crosses many bridges over mighty rivers connects the four hundred and eighty odd kilometers between the two destinations. This arduous journey is compounded by the altitude itself, as the increased height decreases the oxygen content in the atmosphere, making it difficult to breathe and to think. That there is no electricity, no cellular network, no place to stay overnight except in thread-bare tents and no gas stations between Tandi and Leh - a distance of 365 kilometers - only adds to the difficulty. The very word 'ladakh' translates to 'land of the mountain passes', and to reach Leh one must cross five of them, some over seventeen thousand feet above sea level. But the journey inspires awe, and I have spent many nights dreaming about it.

The ghostly night in Kemmangundi was spent in the Ladakh argument, a keenly-participated discussion of the infrastructure and the planning that would be involved in undertaking such an expedition. At the time, the discussion felt futile but still exciting.

*
Xession*: Ocean Cave

*Xession (/ˈx-se-shən/):

1. A state of mind that is characterized and guided by temperance, knowledge and balance, along with an awareness of one's true self, leading to true happiness.

2. A meeting or gathering of friends, while smoking weed.

'Walk down, but be careful. That rock is slippery with moss!' 3 shouted over the sound of the crashing waves.

I walked down gingerly, knees half bent, arms spread out to gain balance. The rock-face was steep and set at a crazy angle, and a million drops of spray from the crashing waves made it slippery. Suhas, Manoj and Moham were sitting on the edge of the outcrop, enjoying the sun, their legs dangling in the air, watching us as we made our way to the cave.

We were hiking to Paradise Beach from Half-Moon Beach. We had arrived the previous night to the little town of Gokarna, and had made our way on foot to Half-Moon. The trek is relatively easy and takes you along a much-used trail. From Half-Moon, the trail rises from behind huts, and disappears at a steep angle into the forest. You climb single-file, as the trail is narrow, and turn right at the first fork. The left fork takes you back to Om Beach. The right trail takes you up gently first, and then rises sharply, until you burst through the canopy and are invited to witness a panoramic view of the Arabian Sea. In the mid-morning sun, we saw a few ships and large boats dotting the horizon. Far we could see, far enough to see the Earth gently curving. Down below, we saw white surf wet the cream-colored sand repeatedly and the sun would immediately dry it off. It seemed futile, in a funny sort of way.

About half way through, right before the trail descends to meet Paradise Beach, it seemed as if a chunk of land had succumbed to the lure of the ocean and had fallen away, leaving a large rock hanging in the air, right at the edge of the cliff. Another large rock had fallen sideways and downwards, facing a cave. We didn't see the cave immediately. We were standing there admiring the way the sun glinted off the surface of the ocean, when we spotted it. 3 and I jumped off the outcrop and onto the 'crazy-angle' rock, and made our way slowly.

From our position, we could see more than the others. We saw that, at high tide, the cave was flooded by the ocean. Crabs and snails and other assorted sea creatures crawled around in it and the low tides down below were doing no harm except wetting the stones. The smell inside was of salt and fish and of wetness that hasn't dried properly.

The cave was quite large; four men could have easily camped inside at low-tide. I mentioned this to 3, and we immediately caught on to that idea. We discussed for some time were we would place the fire, the directions we would sleep in, what we could do about the smell, and things like that. This is a nice aspect of warm friendships – the serious contemplation of pointlessness.

While we ran away with our imagination, the rest of the gang descended and everyone wanted a piece of the cave. We all took turns to venture inside, carefully slipping, but not enough to fall into the ocean. We took some pictures and shot a video of the cave as the waves crashed in, and then climbed back. As we walked away, I looked back at the cave a final time. The light of the sun shining off the wet black rocks of the cave was clear and starched. We would return again, I knew. It was a good find, a rare find. It was obvious to me that many others must have found the cave, but the fact that no one had to lead us to it, that it was there waiting to be discovered and that we had actually found it gave us a sense of ownership that linked us to the cave. I think this is a key aspect of traveling - the discoveries you stumble upon. It makes a place your own, for this lifetime.

*

Preparations

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

John Steinbeck

We made it back to Half-Moon beach late in the afternoon. We ordered lunch quickly, and plunged into the ocean to escape the heat. About thirty minutes into our swim, Sahil, the owner of the resort, hollered about lunch being ready. I argued with the guys all the way to the tables.

'We will never go to Ladakh without a semblance of a plan.'

'Dude, you are already on a road trip! You are walking on a beach, with blue waves and blue skies,' 3 said, gesturing with exasperation at the sun and sea.

'I am not not-enjoying the present, bub. I am just saying we're all here; it's as good a time as any to talk, really talk, about going to Ladakh in twenty-eleven. I don't want another year of empty discussions. How about we just begin by deciding the date? Just the date! All of us are here; let's find a month that works for everyone,' I said, gesturing wildly in equal exasperation.

'Yeah, that's a start. Let's do that at the table.'

When we sat down at the table, lunch arrived piping hot. Sahil served three different dishes made from fish he had caught that morning, prawns marinated in some kind of white sauce, chicken, roti and rice, and jugs full of cold, fresh orange juice. As we ate, I spoke to Suhas and Manoj about their plans for the year and what month could they set aside for the trip to Ladakh.

Suhas, Manoj, 3, and I have been friends since our school days. I wasn't part of their group back then, having arrived in Mysore in the last year of High School. But they had been fast friends almost all their lives, having been born and brought up in Mysore. Even though we knew each other since High School, I had lost touch with them, until one, fateful day, I ran into Manoj and 3 near ThoughtFunction. We've been close since.

'I am free in March,' Manoj said.

'I don't think we can do it in March. The Manali-Leh highway is closed from October to May due to heavy snowfall. So March is out of the question. We have to do it once the roads open.'

'How would you know if the roads are open?' 3 asked, biting into a piece of chicken. 'There is a website for that.'

'And when is the highway open?'

'Around May.'

'How long is it open?'

'Usually from May to September.'

'When can you do it?' Suhas asked me.

'I've been thinking about that - I have the final semester exams in the first week of July. I am free any time after. I think we should start from Bangalore around July 15th. For now the plan is for it to be a fifteen-day trip. I'll show you the chart I've made when we get back home.'

'What chart?'

'It's an itinerary – a breakdown of where we should be on a given day along the highway. We have a lot of ground to cover – Delhi to Chandigarh to Manali to Leh is a distance of over eleven hundred kilometers. So a little bit of planning is needed, guys. Another reason why I insist on deciding the date is so that we can book our flight tickets in advance.'

'Flight to Delhi?' 3 asked.

'No, from Delhi. I am thinking let's reach Delhi by train with the bikes, finish the trip, load up the bikes on a train heading home, and return by flight. We will reach two days before our bikes arrive, so we can pick them up from the Railway station when we can.'

'Sounds good,' 3 said, 'who is ready for July 15th?' We all raised our hands.

After the long and lazy lunch, we walked down to the beach languidly. Sitting in the warm sand, we stopped speaking in the dying glow of the sun while 3 rolled a joint. We smoked it slowly, enjoying the rush of it as things began to slow down all around us. I don't remember standing and I don't remember walking down to the sea. But I remember sinking into her, eyes level with the water, bubbles forming, bursting and hissing all around me, and a wooden boat looming suddenly wide and large, her hull painted green with a strip of white running around the middle. I could see each chipped grain of wood where the white paint hadn't entered. The clouds soared from blue sea to blue sky, their edges etched in silver and in the orange and pink of the diminishing sun. And as the sun sank to kiss the water near the horizon, it shattered into a billion shards of diamond and gold and spread upon the ocean.

*
As they tend to do when one's mind is focused on a point in the future, things began to happen quickly. Suhas and Manoj dropped out of the trip. And Sumanth joined us. A crazy biker, Sumanth had embarked on a seventeen-hundred kilometer, week-long, solo road trip across Kerala when we were all in ThoughtFunction together. His enthusiasm for biking was only exceeded by his passion for photography.

By mid-May, the date of the trip was postponed a week to July 23rd. The train tickets to Delhi and the flight tickets back to Bangalore from Delhi were purchased. The itinerary I was working on was modified a million times over heated discussions between 3, Moham, Sumanth and I. Three bikes were set aside for the purpose of the trip. They were stripped apart piece by piece over a period of three weeks to make sure they wouldn't just stop working on a cold and windy mountain pass in Ladakh.

In June, 3 and I went shopping. I wanted to buy a really nice leather jacket, but 3 saved me the trouble by giving me his riding jacket. We bought balaclava masks, goggles and shades, helmets, few lengths of bungee cords, a Swiss army knife, ponchos, rope, large plastic trash bags and gloves. Sumanth and 3 were both bringing their Nikon SLRs, so we weren't short in that department.

We also bought two strips of Diamox, a tablet that helps prevent altitude sickness, which can be dangerous and life threatening. Acute Mountain Sickness or AMS is a condition wherein you can suffer symptoms ranging from nausea, vomiting and dizziness to insomnia, nosebleed and peripheral edema (the swelling of extremities). This condition is caused by the increasing lack of oxygen per volume of air as you ascend vertically. In other words, the higher up you go, the lower will be the oxygen content in the air, which will have a negative effect on your body.

To prevent AMS, it is important to acclimatize yourself. Tourists to Leh are generally asked to spend two days acclimatizing to the conditions before setting out to explore the nearby areas, as those roads can take them even higher up the mountains. Within a day or two, however, your body will have normalized to the rare-air conditions. It is important not to ascend too high too fast, as these symptoms can progress quickly to HAPE (High Altitude Pulmonary Edema) and HACE (High Altitude Cerebral Edema), both of which can be fatal.

This is why I had suggested to the gang we ride instead of fly into Leh, as the slow and eventual rise in altitude from Mandi to Leh would allow us to acclimatize to the conditions of the region.

Also, of course, flying into Leh would mean missing out on the stunning vistas from Chandigarh to Manali to Leh. The almost thousand kilometer long ride from Manali to Leh and back was the whole point of the trip.

As days flew by, a familiar feeling of excitement and euphoria surged through my veins, the flow of a strange and addictive elixir. Falling asleep became difficult; no conversation began or ended without Ladakh being a keyword; a slight paranoia set in. But most of all, there appeared, in a slow, strengthening crescendo, this undercurrent of an impending something, of the uncertainty of something heavy, large and beyond. It is surprising how similar these emotions are to those of romantic love.

Friday, July 22nd arrived sooner than I had anticipated, and I found myself hauling my large duffel bag into the IBM office. I was working the night shift that month. I logged in, sat at my cubicle, day- dreamed and did not work. Sorry IBM. My colleagues knew I was leaving the next day and they were excited for me. At 4 AM, I walked out with my bag and a couple of friends who wanted to wish me luck.

In the pre-dawn dark, I walked to Manoj's house, which was nearby and found 3, Moham, and Manoj still 'celebrating'. I forced them to go to sleep, telling them that we had only three hours to go before we were to get up and rush to the Railway station and catch the train. There was a ton to do still – we had to pack the bikes neatly before loading them on the train, make sure to empty the gas tanks, buy a hundred little things and manage to do all of this in rush hour.

'The train leaves at 1 PM!' I had to shout, not kindly, before they all went to sleep. I don't remember falling asleep.

*

The Anatomy of Plans

The catch with any plan is that it is devised against only what is known to occur. We can't plan for things that we don't know may happen, because we don't know what they are. One cannot plan for all eventualities because one simply cannot imagine all eventualities. All plans therefore carry within them an inherent seed of failure, because not everything is considered. Plans backfire or fail because they are linear, whereas actual life-events are simultaneous and synchronous.

And so men and mice plan, winning some and losing some.

In a Newtonian universe, all plans would work if they would take into consideration all permutations of all relative events. For example, if all data is available, then the path of the flight of a feather that has separated from an Eagle in flight can be calculated and an accurate prediction may be made of where that feather may finally land.

But we live in a Quantum universe, where they tell us things observed are different from things not observed; where perception changes the behavior of things; where spooky actions occur at a distance and god plays dice with the universe.

All plans, moreover, are affected by man's tendency towards stupidity, arrogance, ignorance, presumptions and prejudice. The most difficult of these to overcome is stupidity, because one doesn't know the extent of one's stupidity until he or she does something to toe that line. By then, more often than not, it is too late. In view of all this, it seems safe to say that this universe is against the idea of plans. How does one, then, get around to creating a plan that works?

Perhaps, we are not meant to be sure of anything. Perhaps, we are only meant to be aware of possibilities, not all of them, but only of the existence of possibilities. Perhaps, only by infusing a plan with salts of doubt, by allowing each plan to have enough space to change and evolve, can we arrive at a plan that works. And not only must we allow plans to evolve, but we must allow ourselves to evolve with the plan. This is tricky and this is the ethos of all travel – to move, to change, to evolve, to adapt, to lose inhibitions, to lose boundaries, to become something new.

If you do this, if you allow yourself to be molded by this universe that scoffs at your plans, the universe gives you a gift. A gift of a new plan, a stranger plan, a far more exhilarating plan than you could have ever dreamt of. And this plan is exciting, because you haven't thought of it for days on length and repeated to yourself in the eye of your mind; it is exciting because it is unplanned.

*

The Hazrat Nizamuddin Express

A journey is best measured in friends rather than miles.

Tim Cahill

Day 1

Elevation: 3000 ft.

Distance from Leh: 3351 km.

When the alarm rang three hours later, I woke up grudgingly to Saturday, July 23rd, 2011. In Manoj's room, the sun is never invited and smoke from a million cigarettes hangs in the air near the ceiling fan, clouding the already dark room. Men of varying sizes lay strewn around and it took me a moment to recognize them as my friends. I stood up and went to wake myself up with cold water, picking my way amidst random hands and feet gingerly in the permanent gloom of Manoj's room.

By nine that morning, we had a billion things to do, but were still trying valiantly to wake up. I had been half-awake and half-frustrated trying to wake everybody up since seven. Eventually, and painfully, all of us began moving around like zombies, gathering speed, energy and focus at snail's pace. I mumbled angrily at everyone and informed them once again that we had now only two hours to get to the railway station, miles away from Manoj's house, to get the bikes checked and signed, packed and loaded, finish whatever minor shopping remained, and get ourselves on the train.

I worked everyone up into a frenzied and irritated mood, including myself. We decided it was best to split up. 3 and Manoj would take two of the bikes, and Moham and I would finish the shopping and reach the station as soon as possible. The first group left, leaving Moham and me behind, trying to start Manoj's bike. The bike (the very same bike that had carried us majestically on the trip to Kemmangundi) wouldn't start! And when it did start, it would go a few hundred meters before stopping again. My nerves, already frayed by our lethargic start, were beginning to disintegrate. Moham was - thankfully - still cool, trying to fix the bike. After fifteen minutes of frantic kicking it spurred into action, and we went into high gear. Through all of this, I was trying to reach Sumanth, who hadn't spent the night with us and hadn't bothered to touch base. Somewhere in the middle of buying four pairs of cheap slippers in the crowded markets of Shivajinagar, he called. He was almost at the railway station! I called him thirty minutes later, and he was still almost there, but hadn't reached.

All in all, it wasn't a very happy me that reached the station less than half hour before the train was to leave. 3 and Manoj were getting the bikes packed and had finished all the paperwork. We took the bikes behind the station to get them parceled and stuffed with polystyrene for the three day train ride, and the man there asked us to give him twelve hundred rupees more to pack the three bikes. This was, of course, under the table. After a bit of bargaining, we agreed upon three hundred per bike.

While that was being taken care of, I went around looking for the train. There was a train to Delhi on the same platform that I was on, but the number on it was different. A little apprehensive, I went down to the enquiry, and found 3, Sumanth, Manoj and Moham standing there, talking about the very same thing.

Where's the train, they ask me.

It should have been here by now, I say, not meeting their eyes.

We all turn around and march to the enquiry counter and ask the old gentleman there about the Hazrat Nizamuddin express. It was supposed to leave here by one in the afternoon, I say to him.

The old man replies, 'That train? That won't be here till ten-twenty.'

'But it's already almost one!' I say, almost hysteric now with the fear of missing the train.

'I meant ten in the night, son. Give me your ticket...'

I hand him the ticket, nervous now. My friends gather around me, equally tense and giving me the eye.

'Yeah, this train – Hazrat Nizamuddin Express - will leave tonight at 22.20. You must have got it mixed up with this other train, as the train numbers are so similar,' he says, and guffaws heartily.

I froze.

I did not want to turn around to face my friends, all of whom I had hassled, irritated, rushed, scolded and shouted at to get to the station nine hours before the train would actually depart! But I had to turn, and face them. I broke into a tentative smile, and was met with six pairs of cold, dark eyes. The tension in the air was so thick I could have cut it with that misread ticket. But I managed a grin, and they burst upon me like a swarm of annoyed bees. They grabbed me and hit me mockingly and let a few well-chosen expletives fly. I was embarrassed, but if you ever do a mistake, it's best to do it in the presence of your best friends. They can make you feel good even about a mistake.

What better way to start a long road trip than a goofy story like this? As we mulled around the station, illegally using the first class lounge, I realized there was a very important lesson for me to learn from this moment. There was no point pushing for things and forgetting to enjoy the experience of it all. I was panicky, pushy and not being a good traveler that morning. And this incident was just the slap in the face I needed to wake me up and actually taste the excitement of the trip, rather than worry about particulars. I learnt that day that it was enough that I was with friends, about to embark on a life-changing journey, and the fact that I had messed up the beginning was the whole point. The only thing I was doing wrong was that I wasn't enjoying the little things. Personally, it was the best thing to happen before the trip. I'd have been just as stuck up on the entire trip, and probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I eventually did. A traveler has to leave his old self behind, like a piece of luggage you don't need on a trip. What they really mean when they ask you travel light is to leave home minus the ego. Traveling is not only a gateway to new experiences, but also a chance to become a new person, to even invent a new persona.

The time we spent in that station became as important as the rest of the trip. There are some moments I remember now from the nine hours we spent on the platform, waiting for our magic carpet to arrive. If I close my eyes now, I can see Moham and Sumanth laughing with each other, sitting in one corner of a long and empty wooden bench, the loop of Sumanth's camera around both their necks. I can see 3 running towards us after the train had arrived, in the final tense moments when we were waiting for him to return from a tiny escapade. I can see 3, Moham and Sumanth secretly smoking in the Railway station, in front of the 'No Smoking' sign. And I can see myself, craning into the gathering dark, following with my eyes the slightly twisting parallel lines of the metallic train tracks, and forgetting to breathe when the yellow light from an engine turned in the night and began to approach the station.

*

To embark on a journey is commonplace, a matter of routine. But what one must try to embark on from time to time is a pilgrimage; a walkabout. A journey of rediscovery and un-learning, a journey fuelled by spirit and exuberance. When we boarded the Hazrat Nizamuddin express, we had unwittingly embarked on our pilgrimage.

When the train finally rolled in we lingered on the platform only long enough to make sure our bikes were loaded. After a few minutes arranging our luggage and getting ready to settle in for the night, we opened up a pack of cards and settled in comfortably in that cabin lit by the lights of the night. After almost an hour, the train jerked suddenly and began its unhurried journey to Delhi. I tried imbibing this spirit into me, this unhurriedness, with an objective of better experiencing the minute moments of the trip that occur suddenly, like the flash of a falling star in the dark of night, and that disappear just as quickly. And as the train chugged along the heart of this land, holding us in its arms like a machine trying to distill things, this spirit rose to the top of our emotions and everything else was left far behind.

Two nights we spent on that train, playing cards, drinking tea, smoking weed, staring out at the stations that rolled past with a strange feeling coursing through the pit of our stomachs. It wasn't a deep emotion, but it was a wide one – in that it spread through the mind and soul, disturbing us at various levels. We walked the connected bogies searching for girls to flirt with and found none, taking pictures of tiny towns and dusty cities and large industries filled with lights, and talking. Friends can talk forever, the most meaningful things and the most meaningless. Friends can talk with words, with expressions understood over time, with a sly wink, with a meaningful glance, with thoughts and with silence. You pay for such telepathic cognition by spending time in each other's company. To be able to talk of the most absurd and the most awe-inspiring, to be able to, to be even allowed to paint a picture of the turmoil of the great dark storm of your soul using all the words available in the dictionary of friends is friendship.

For me, everything was exciting, everything felt new - as if rain-washed. I walked through the train, discovering travelers of a million kinds, tasting the turmeric and vermillion flavors of India in the many dialects and languages spoken by them. Each compartment was a stained-glass window into the many ways of life. I will not exaggerate and say that everything had a deep or profound effect on me, although to travel by itself is an exaggeration, a deviation from the mundane ways of routine life. But I will say everything had an effect on me in varying degrees of strength. I remained open to all experiences and felt a sense of joy at anything related to the journey, which allowed the million shards of the elements of the journey to enter me completely; they may not remain with me in precise visual memory, but they do remain with me in the form of words, sense and spirit. In infinite ways this pilgrimage added to my nature, to my core being, to my vocabulary of words and emotions and smiles, to my vocabulary of philosophies and principles. In one short fortnight, it increased infinitely, the expanding vaults of my memory.

As day turned to night and night into day, we saw evidence of the massive diversity of India both inside and outside the train. The many bogies provided a kaleidoscopic view of the rich Indian heritage, colored in the inks of its many cultures. With every state we crossed, we saw the change in theme and scenery. The first to change is the language and with it the scripts on the name boards of shops. Some scripts are round and cursive, some sharp and slanted. With the change in language, the flavor and warmth of a place changes, for every language carries within it a certain degree of hospitality. Food, culture, religion and industry add elements to the entire experience of an Indian state. The final ingredient to this heady Indian mixture are the people – they are formed and molded and informed by the language, food, culture, religion and industry that decorates each state, which were formed and molded and created by the people in the first place.

Each Indian state, divided by language and culture, is united in that they have all come together to accept this certain shape, this seemingly random outline of lines we call boundaries as their country and their nationality. They have come together to form a billion people; to form one patriotic sentiment. Who convinced a billion people to accept the notion of 'India' as their nation? What is a nation but a powerful idea in the minds of its people? Then, aren't we divided more by ideas and imaginary boundaries than by geography and distance?

*

Delhi to Chandigarh

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

Dr. Tehyi Hsieh

Day 3

Elevation: 709 ft.

Distance from Leh: 1240 km.

The train rolled to a stop on the sun-lit platform of Hazrat Nizamuddin on the morning of the 25th. Our bags packed, we immediately jumped off and walked to the end of the train to retrieve our bikes. Helpful railway men at the station helped us unload the bikes and we rolled them out through the rear entrance of the station.

We stepped out of the station, and Delhi hit us hard - the steaming Sun, the thin, chaotic streets, the clamor of sellers and buyers bargaining and arguing, the scents and smells mixing in the air, forming a heavy perfume dominated by strong flowery notes from the enormous garlands of fresh rose being weaved right in front of our eyes; the _ittar_ (perfume) shops with their own magnificent aromas, hording the scents of an entire religion; the distant-but-still-nearby sound of prayers coming from the _dargah_ (mosque) Nizamuddin; the uplifting, insistent tunes of mournful, soulful _qawwali_ ; the spiraling minarets and clock towers; the very Mughlai air - all of it hit us hard, like we had just woken up to a dream suspended in an era bygone. Our senses transported us suddenly to an emerald-green past, filled with the images of simple, white pearls and decadent peacock feathers.

But the heat brought us back. Outside the station, standing clueless under the hot Delhi sun, we realized our bikes needed fuel, as we had emptied the tanks before loading them on the train, as per Railway laws. Moham and Sumanth decided to get it from a gas station nearby while 3 and I stayed with the rest of the bikes and the bags. As soon as they rode beyond our line of sight in that narrow alley behind the railway station, 3 and I realized in the same instant that we had sent Moham and Sumanth out on a simple task, so of course, they were bound to screw it up.

As predicted, they managed to get into trouble in less than five minutes. Moham was stopped by a traffic cop as soon as he entered the main road because Sumanth, who was riding pillion, was not wearing a helmet. This was easily remedied, except the cop asked for Moham's Driver's License, which Moham then remembered was in his bag, and the bag was back with us. As the cop wasn't stupid enough to let both of them return to get the license, Moham sent Sumanth back on foot to retrieve his license. Sumanth however had other plans, and promptly got lost in the labyrinth lanes of Delhi's suburbia and couldn't find his way back.

I received his frantic call in the sweltering heat, and managed to keep my patience in check as I tried to make him see that I was not the best person to get him out of the situation he was in because I had as much idea of the streets of Delhi as he did. The best he could do, I repeatedly told him, was to find his way back to the railway station and find the rear entrance of the station, at which point he would immediately spot us, as we were waiting in a tiny cobbler shop right near the gate.

This tangle was exacerbated because of the lack of mobility 3 and I faced, as we had our luggage and the remaining two bikes to look after, and they were already receiving covetous glances from the kids on the street. After trying for close to an hour to guide Sumanth back to the station, I left 3 behind with the bikes and the bags, and went to meet him in the railway station, leading him back fifteen tense minutes later to where 3 was waiting, fuming in the heat.

Around the same time, Moham escaped from the clutches of the cop and returned to base, with enough petrol to take the bikes to the nearest gas station. We loaded the luggage on to Sumanth's Yamaha FZ in a haphazard fashion, because we couldn't really think anymore in the stifling heat. We could only think of one way to cool our tempers and bodies down – riding. So we jumped on the bikes and rode out of the unbelievable mess of humanity that the gullies of Delhi are, and found ourselves soon on NH1. As soon as the wind fingered through our hair, smiles returned; the heat went away and the warmth returned. All impatience melted away in the excitement of simply being there; being where we had planned of being for ages and ages. We were headed to Ladakh!

We saw Indraprastha Park, Sanchi Stupa and the Red Fort. We stopped outside the grilled compound of the Red Fort and stared at the unending lawn of green grass that took the eye unimpeded towards the red façade of the ancient monument. Thousands and thousands of birds rested on the lawn. In spite of the signboards warning against photography, I stepped off the bike to take a couple of pictures on 3's camera. As I arranged the camera settings for a third snap, 3 shouted and I jumped back on the bike; he had seen a policeman approaching, and it was best to ride away. We rode through countless flyovers on our way out of the city. We saw imported cars competing with donkey-carts and old, rusty tractors. We saw trucks overloaded with cotton and hay and cows and elephants (yes, elephants!) and brand new cars. We saw parks and rice-fields, old, colonial buildings, ancient mansions and modern towers, all bustling for the attention of the city and the city-dweller. And we saw the India Gate.

Somewhere along that highway, after getting through the snarling traffic of Delhi, we entered the state of Haryana. We stopped at a Coffee Day in Sonipat, and were greeted by a fellow from Karnataka who was ecstatic to hear Kannada being spoken. He had seen the number plates on our bikes starting with 'KA' and was simply happy at being allowed to speak in his mother tongue for a change.

Until we stopped in Sonipat, we hadn't realized how much in need of a break we were. I removed my shades and the balaclava in the washroom of Coffee Day and looked into the mirror to find someone else staring back at me. Moham took one look at me and sniggered. The bridge of my nose, the only part of my face that was exposed, had turned black. At first, I thought it was just dust. But when I tried to wash it away, the color wouldn't change. I was sunburnt, five hours into the road trip.

After a couple of cold, cold drinks, we packed up again and this time did a better job with our bags. Moham, who was riding alone, had enough space behind him on the bike to rest his rather large bag in the pillion seat. 3 and I didn't have that luxury, as we were sharing the 220 cc Karizma. So we came up with a simple idea to protect our bags and stop them from falling off – we used bungee cords to secure them onto Sumanth's FZ, as he was riding alone too. First, we opened those large, black, plastic trash bags we had bought and placed our bags into them. The trash bags come with threads that you can use to tie them up. We did that and placed our bags one on top of the other, and used three bungee cords to secure them in place on the back seat. They wouldn't budge after that, and the trash bags protected the bags against rain and dust.

The National Highway is very well kept. In fact, this section of the NH1 is part of the twenty thousand kilometer long Asian Highway Network that runs unbroken from Tokyo to Turkey via Korea, China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran! It was a pleasure to ride on the dark, neat roads. We maintained an easy pace of eighty to hundred kilometers an hour, and quickly crossed Panipat, Karnal, Kurukshetra and Ambala. The stretch from Kurukshetra to Chandigarh is truly a concrete marvel. When on that section of the highway, you don't even touch the earth of Ambala, as you are constantly on top of a massive flyover that stretches over the skyline and gives you a bird's eye view of the entire city spread beneath on both sides.

When the flyovers descend, we return to the plains - the great plains of Hindustan, on which and for which a thousand armies battled a thousand times. Green stalks of freshly planted rice stood in the contrast of yellow heat, and the rectangular fields with standing water shone like elongated mirrors, reflecting the dull blue sky. In the gaps between towns and cities where civilization hadn't made its mark the view of the land was immense and unimpeded and our eyes reached the horizon with ease. A dull haze hung low and continuous over the fields; and from time to time, flocks of birds would suddenly erupt and take flight and add color to the scene, in the way they do. Peacocks would jump out of fields and amaze us in a sudden rain of magnificent color, and then, as if sensing their job was done, disappear again into them.

A little way from Ambala, where the highway had become rural again, we stopped for a late lunch at a road-side Dhaba. This was to be our first taste of north-Indian fare and I was excited. The thought of enjoying the culinary delights of North India was for us a major incentive of the Ladakh road trip. And we knew that once beyond Keylong, we would have to survive on dal-chaval (boiled rice and lentils) and instant noodles, so we were really keen on loading up on some Punjabi food.

Each stop is a pit stop - a chance to refresh the mind, body and spirit. When we stop after a long leg of riding, we beeline to the washroom and spend at least ten minutes washing the dirt of the journey away. It is an important ritual for bikers. The bikes also receive a lot of attention during a stop. We checked the bikes, checked the engines and the brakes, checked for signs of oil leaking, checked to see if the bungee cords were still holding the luggage in place, re-adjusted them a little, and finally walked in. We asked for parathas, which was the whole point of the trip, really – hot alu parathas in north India with lassi and thick, creamy yoghurt and pickle. And then they offered us Gobi parathas, and until then I wasn't even aware of their existence, so we ordered some of those and then we sat back in our seats and watched the scenes of the highway unfold.

A small truck loaded with cotton crawled into our field of view. Pure, white lumps of cotton were stacked higher than the body of the truck, and the whole thing was leaning to the left at a dangerous angle. The highway here sloped upwards and the truck had a long and difficult time climbing it. When it reached the top of the curve, we could almost hear it groan in relief and descend.

The cold-frosted glasses of Lassi arrived; in long, stainless-steel boats the thick yoghurt arrived and the steaming parathas arrived; and it turned into a good meal. You don't often remember the meals you've had. But I remember this one particularly because we stopped time in our effort to enjoy it. A cool, late-afternoon breeze wafted in from the highway, the sun was behind the dhaba and the light was already a little twilight-ish, we were thousands of kilometers away from home on the strength of our will – all this made for a great setting and a great appetite.

We reached Chandigarh around six thirty that evening. In the spreading darkness of summer dusk, we fell in love with the roads of that city. It had been a long, dry and dusty day in heat of the plains, and we had hoped Chandigarh would be a lot cooler and thankfully it was. We lost our way a bit once inside the city, but we weren't complaining as we got to see a lot more of it that way. When we finally caught the highway again, it was at that time of dusk when the light plays tricks on you. We saw a thin, young boy on an old rickety Scooter becoming a victim of just such a trick when a Honda City misjudged the distance between itself and the Scooter and nudged him from behind. Just a little nudge, but the Scooter and the boy jerked and screeched forward and crashed and the boy's helmeted head hit the road hard and in the impact he lost the Scooter. He skidded and bumped along a long stretch of the road, as Honda City desperately tried to avoid him. The car squealed and came to a halt in front of a city bus and the driver jumped out. By this time, the boy had stopped rolling and had also come to a stop. In the gathering dark, the traffic came to a standstill and the onlookers formed clumps of four or five discussing the accident and whose fault it was. The boy was shaken but unhurt and Honda City promptly loaded him up in his car and took him to the hospital. The crowd cleared and night fell.

That woke us all up. We were right behind Honda City, and it became suddenly clear to us as we faced each other silently that it could have been us instead of the Scooter. We stopped for a few minutes, while Moham and Sumanth lit up. This gave us time to become grounded again. I wondered what would have happened if it was one of our bikes instead of the Scooter. How our plans would have changed. Would we have stopped the trip and returned? Road trips have always evoked thoughts of the what-could-have-been. Perhaps this is because we are more in control of our decisions when we're traveling than in any other time and place. When we are in control, we are clear to think of permutations. Traveling also enables anything that can go wrong to go wrong. The final enigma of road trips comes from our secret craving to be in complete control in a situation of complete chaos. Only in moments like these are we informed of our self by ourselves.

Crossing the city slowly in the dark of night, we returned to the true highway – lined with fields and small streams and old, unused narrow gauge railroads, still within the flat plains of the subcontinent. It was late now, and we really wanted to rest. Almost near Kiratpur Sahib, we spotted a Dhaba and rolled our bikes off the highway and into its simple but ample front yard.

The owner, a short, round Punjabi man with a blue turban and a large, black beard came out to greet us, smiling a cherubic smile and chattering away in nasal Punjabi. His father, who had a larger, flowing beard of pure, cottony white, stared at us with owl-like eyes as we began to unpack. A few minutes of one, long, unblinking glare later, he lost interest in us and returned to his TV. Frankly, we were relieved because as we were unpacking, we were all consciously aware of his stare. 3 even tried to smile at him but couldn't get a response back and it was beginning to get unnerving. I think the old man was just trying to have some fun with us, his smile hidden behind his bushy moustache that disappeared into the white mists of his beard.

After another heavy meal of deliciously hot alu parathas with loads of butter, we couldn't move an inch. We still hadn't found a place to sleep yet, so a small conference was held and we decided to ask the owner if he had any cots to sleep on, the kind usually reserved for tired truck drivers. He replied in his sing-song Punjabi, and said he could provide us with four cots at fifty rupees per cot.

In the first drafts of the road trip, this idea of sleeping out in the highway in a Dhaba – like truck drivers do on long, tiring routes – had come up, so when our host allowed us this chance, we lapped it up excitedly. He even agreed to keep our cameras and valuables in the small cottage where he slept, for safety. So we unpacked for the night, our first night out with the elements. We tucked the bikes away into a neat corner, laid out the four cots to face the highway, using a fifth cot for all the bags, shoes and odds and ends. And as soon as were ready to go to sleep, sleep left us, and we sat down for a long and winding discussion, both of the important and the mundane – sinking into the beautiful luxury of an unhurried night. The highway too gradually became silent, and sounds of vehicles were replaced by the call of crickets. Our host retired for the night around one am, his father having gone to bed earlier after another hearty stare at us. We remained awake, gazing at the stars that twinkled down on us, each of us exhausted but still brimming with the driving adrenalin of the road that denied us sleep. It was hard to believe that it had only been twelve hours since we came to Delhi.

The ghosts of girlfriends, past and present, were invoked and we wondered sadly how it happens that you hurt a person the most when you are trying absolutely hard not to hurt them; how good intentions turn sour and go bad like milk on a hot day, how life and circumstances place us neatly in uncomfortable crossroads where the only way to do the right thing is by hurting the person you love.

People insist on giving names to relationships, instead of effort and patience and time. I like the freedom and the breathtaking freshness of relationships that don't demand a title, a nomenclature; as if we are naming newly discovered species of bacteria. Why must two people in love be defined by a spectrum of titles? The problem with naming relationships is that as soon as you give it a name, you've to assume a role. Girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, partner. What are two men who are in love with each other called? Two women? Society sits down and comes up with new names. Gay. Lesbian. It doesn't make a difference to them that all relationships, all the social structures of the world are being woven only with love. When this is the case, can it not be possible for two people to be introduced only as people who are in love? 'Meet Jack and Jill. They moved here yesterday, and they are in love.' I think it is possible, and I think it's the way of the future. I think it is possible for two people to meet, to feel a mutual affection, to open up to each other in the dark like flowers that bloom in the night, to whisper to each other all the truths that they have slowly gathered from the grasslands of the world, and by sharing these secrets, to fall in love. A relationship without name and structure needs only love, a love peppered with friendship and joy. If two people can make each other laugh and cry and can still see each other eye to eye, soaked in the truth that their love demands, then I don't think time has any power over them. If circumstances separate them, they know that what has come between them is merely space. Such a relationship, nameless and hence timeless, is an enduring kinship of two affectionate souls. Love such as this reaches out across all distances of space and time. It has no boundary because it has no structure, and no name. And so I don't know why people insist on giving names to relationships, instead of love and truth and laughter. I would like nothing better than to sit down with a girl under the shade of a tree on the banks of a river and spend an afternoon, or a lifetime, whichever is more pleasant, talking about why the stars are so far away or, what is it that two ants discuss when they touch their tiny heads to each other or, what is it that exists when nothing exists, and kissing. Oh yes, lots of kissing. I don't know of any other way to become timeless than to love immortally.

Conversation started conversations, aided by the silent road. It felt like we had stolen a tiny bit of the universe and had run away with it - a moment of timelessness and eternity we could call our own. Nothing stopped us from anything, and I slowly became aware of the immense possibility each second held. This realization – this understanding that we could stretch a second to infinity, to its maximum potential, that each second holds within it unlimited, unimagined possibilities – changed me. I've never been the same since.

One by one we fell asleep under the star-strewn sky.

*

Xession: Speaking with Dogs

By 2 AM, the world was dark and the world was swimming.

It lurched at the slightest movement. Only 3 and I remained awake, or as awake as we could be. The rest of the gang had fallen asleep right where they were sitting. We were more alive than awake, really. We could hear our ragged breathing hanging like smoke in the still and silent night.

'Let's go for a walk,' 3 says.

I get up and follow him out of Manoj's room, closing the door behind me. Outside, the cool air wakes us up further and the world stops swimming a little. The darkness is muffled and blurred by the glowing, yellow street lamps. The sounds of the night are louder because the silence complains against them – don't you know that the day is for noise, and the night for silence? We tiptoe across a narrow corridor to the next apartment. This apartment is owned by an ancient, one-legged uncle who owns the entire building and from whom Manoj rents his room. We walk right up to his front door where two wicker chairs are kept, and sit down, laughing silently and uncontrollably, our sides heaving with mirth.

One side of the corridor is bordered by many doors that lead to tiny apartment rooms, usually rented by bachelors working in night shifts, and the other side a long, metal railing protects you from falling thirty feet to the ground. The railing and the corridor look out at the courtyard of a large, Hanuman temple.

Sitting in the wicker chair owned by someone else in front of a house owned by the same 'someone else', we rest our legs on the railing and look at the dark night sky through the long, thin leaves of a coconut tree. Our confidence derived from the fact that we knew no one was home.

A sudden shuffling makes me turn. I see a tiny, fluffy-white dog approaching and I raise my legs higher up the railing.

3 laughs.

'Why are you afraid of dogs?'

'I am not,' I say, defensively.

'You are. You are afraid of a lot of things, buddy.'

'I guess I am. I don't know why I am afraid of dogs. They don't seem to like me.'

'Yeah, I've noticed that - I think they are afraid of you; they think you are weird. They're like - why is this tall, thin, stick-like thing coming near me!' He said this in a thin, sing-song voice, trying to mimic a tiny dog.

I laughed at the way he said it and there was no ego now.

'Come buddy, I'll teach you how to speak with dogs.'

Something in that sentence triggers an old memory, but I push it aside for now, focusing on what 3 is doing.

He takes my hand and rubs it against Snowy's forehead. She snaps at my fingers but can't get to them.

When I start scratching her forehead and ears, she snuggles into my hands. I stop, just to see how she'd react, and she looks up at me with wide, wet eyes. I don't know if it is the reflection of the yellow lamps on her watery eyes, but I understand what that expression means.

So I continue scratching her ears and she settles into my hands once again, eyes closed. 'See? There's nothing to be afraid of.'

'Yeah,' I say, still a little nervous.

The memory comes back again now so I say, "When we were in high school, I used to cycle to school every day. Every Saturday, I'd make it a point to take a different route. One particular Saturday, this large cow suddenly turned on a narrow street and blocked my way. I could only see one of its eyes and I could see it was looking right at me; at least, it felt that way. With a little exuberance, I said to the cow, 'Move, Mr. Cow'. And it did; it moved! It just turned and walked away.

All the way to school all I could think of was how amazing it would be if we could talk with animals and if animals could talk back, you know? And they'd have names too - because language would make it necessary for all animals to have separate, individual names; individual identities. So instead of calling the cow 'Mr. Cow' I would have called it by a proper name. And if it could talk back to me on the street that day it would have told me, "Hey! It's not 'Mr. Cow' - its 'Mrs. Cow'!"

We both explode at that and our laughter ricochets across the corridor. Silence disappears completely for few, brief seconds. Snowy looks up at the racket we're making, but I comfort her and she goes back to sleep in my hand.

3 takes out the half-smoked joint and lights it - the last of the evening. As the joint shortens breath by breath the silence creeps back in. We sit in it for a long time, not needing to speak at all.

Finally, 3 asks, 'What's your biggest fear?'

'That I'll turn into my father. That I'll waste what potential has been gifted to me.'

For the first time since we've been sitting there that evening, 3 turns and looks at me. I can't meet his eyes and I avoid them by inspecting Snowy's ears.

Again we fall silent, thinking the same thoughts in different perspectives - he trying to solve the problem, me trying to avoid it.

The silence of the night absorbs us like a giant sponge, making us feel distinctly uncomfortable if we dared to make the slightest of sounds to disturb her presence. A group of bats fly by, screeching into the night unheard. The moon climbs over a building and casts a beam of chalky, white light at two dark figures sitting in someone else's wicker chairs.

'There is only one way I know to get rid of fears, bub. You have to stand outside of them and look back at them. Inside the fear, you are a part of it. But outside of it, you can see its dimensions, its strength and weakness. You see its irrationality.'

I nod silently and continue scratching Snowy.

*

The Anatomy of Roads

Roads are rivers that do not flow, frozen in time and space. On the banks of such a river you may find forests, mountains, plains, rice-fields, cities or rivers that do flow. And just as the banks of the river mixes with its waters and dissolve a little of their essence into the water, the forests and mountains and cities lend their texture to the skin of the road.

These roads remind me of other roads I've been on in the past. Each one has a distinct flavor, and when you run into a similarly flavored road again it brings back memories of the other. With each journey you gain an understanding of different roads, and you begin to classify them. It is an incredible vocabulary to gain, and one that takes a lifetime.

One distinctive virtue of roads is how they acquire or imbibe the texture and emotion of their destinations. So the highway to Coorg is wet and dark, compact and twisting, rising and falling like a folk song. The road to Ladakh is dry, dusty and tough, with a leathered strength that comes from age and winter. The sky- road of Kemmangundi is made of material that weaves clouds; everything feels like it is ripe and ready to explode in a shower of water if touched with insensitivity. There on that road the grass and the flowers catch cold and sneeze when no one is looking. The road to Paradise Beach is hot and grey, the air so thick with the hint of salt and fish it has no room for moisture. And then some roads, like the one that leads you to Ooty, are dark and cozy and melancholic because the trees of the forest block out the sun and the sounds of the jungle remain trapped under the canopy. Some of the best roads we have been on are the ones that gave us stories – like the narrow mountain road that leads to Tadiyandamol, on which we set up camp in the blind color of midnight, complete with a tent and a bonfire, only to wake up in the morning and see that we were blocking the traffic. You can imagine our embarrassment. And then there are the thin, narrow roads, unnamed and rarely used, on which only two bikes could ride abreast so you have to ride single file; roads crowded by tall, prairie grass that try to win back even that strip of land; roads that invoke the nostalgia of the nowhere, that reach out from the city and connect small villages and hamlets and empty grasslands and undulating hills, little nowhere places that lead nowhere and somewhere and everywhere. They are the roads on which you stop to view the storm-lined horizon, and park your motorcycles on lazy, balmy afternoons under the shade of the one single tree you could find, and lean back against the tree to watch the storm roll in with arms wide open, waiting for the rain and inviting it. These are the roads you take in search of the rain.

What intrigues me is the idea that if I chase one unnamed road to its limitless end, I will have in time been on all the roads in the world. I cannot begin to imagine the wide variety of experiences one leading road may allow me. Roads are carriers of friendship; a medium of meeting, and are benevolent in the way they share experience.

I opened my hands and felt the air touch my sweaty palm and brush my fingers, trying to absorb the emotion of the road to Chandigarh. At first contact, it felt parched and political, with no trees and dry, cracking, empty fields waiting to be planted, waiting for the rains. The heat of the plains caused mirages to shift and shimmer over the bone-dry tarmac, and the horizon felt distant and alien. But beyond Chandigarh, the road slopes upwards, taking us into hills that lead us to the mountains. At some unclear point we leave the plains behind, and the heat behind, and catch a skyward wind.

*
Chandigarh to Manali

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

Matsuo Basho

Day 4

Elevation: 1053 ft.

Distance from Leh: 1010 km.

The highway is a constant companion on road trips. But to wake up right next to it is a magical experience, like waking up next to a person you've adored for a long time and who suddenly becomes your lover in a night of rain and passion. On those mornings you tend to smile before you open your eyes, knowing you are about to wake up to something beautiful; knowing, in the thrill of that moment, that life will never again be the same.

We awoke to the twilight and to the silence of dawn. It seemed to hold its breath over the emptiness of the highway. We sat on our rough wooden cots, backs hurting unnoticed, lost in a vacuum of thoughts. It was one of those moments that stretch and stretch, until you make a conscious effort to break out of an invisible reverie.

When the Sun broke over the horizon we fell back to sleep, only to be rudely awoken by the cacophony of a large Punjabi family demanding breakfast. Disoriented, I walked around until I found the Sun and found identity. A train hooted and appeared and disappeared in a rush behind the Dhaba – a railway line ran right behind where we had been sleeping, but we hadn't noticed in the night. I looked around and found the faces of my friends, each one of them equally taken aback. The sudden appearance of the train added to the charm of that place, and we sat down to a hot breakfast talking about that night we slept between a highway and a railway track. At this point in the road trip, we are slowly acquiring the sometimes annoying trait of a traveler to be enamored by the smallest detail of his journey. We are slipping into love.

As we ate, two very old and very thin farmers rolled in on their brand-new, shiny, blue tractors. Glancing at the bikes and our luggage strewn over two of the cots, they smiled at us and, understanding we were on a trip, pulled us into a lengthy but happy conversation. They told us the story of how, when they were younger, they had taken their tractors (not these new ones) down all the way to Bangalore and had visited Lalbagh, and we listened to the old men like children do.

When we realized it was time for us to leave, we continued the conversation as we packed our bags and readied the bikes. Sumanth and I climbed the tractors and took a few snaps. After a final cup of tea, we said our goodbyes and they wished us luck. We started the bikes, rolled to the edge of the highway, turned left and roared into the sparse, morning traffic. There is always a fresh breath of air in the wind when the ride begins anew in the mornings. There is, especially on long road trips, a newness and a tiny sense of exhilaration, as we launch ourselves again into the unknown.

A few kilometers beyond Kiratpur Sahib, we entered Himachal Pradesh and the long, long climb began that would only end at Khardung-La. It was a relief to leave the heat of the plains behind, and it was heartwarming to see the land rise and turn into green hills. The ghat sections immediately began, and after a quick and fast ride to Swarghat, we stopped to pull over our raincoats as a heavy rain began to fall. Through sheets of icy rain, we saw - captivated - the hills give way to distant mountains and the mountains gain detail with every passing hairpin turn.

Thirty minutes into a slow and wet ride, the rain stopped, leaving the air cool and fresh and smelling like mud. The trees started to change as the altitude changed. The leaves were healthier and lusher, the branches longer and slimmer, and the trees themselves seemed taller in their eagerness to reach the sky. And because of the rain, each limb of every tree was a darker shade of brown and each leaf a darker shade of green.

There was a small problem for which we had been trying to find a solution - we hadn't showered since leaving Manoj's room four days ago, back in Bangalore. We carried the dust of India upon us. So when we spotted the fast flowing river and the bridge at Gambhar, we stopped to consider a plunge in the river.

Approaching Gambhar Pul after a long c-shaped curve, you head down a straight, sloping road and suddenly there are tiny shops to your right and trucks parked to one side of the road and the bridge appears, miniscule in front of the looming hill that it connects to.

You can hear and see the river on your left. We parked our bikes near a tea shop, on a narrow, inclined access road parallel to the highway and waited for Sumanth. Riding in the ghats, Sumanth had been floored by the mountain scenes and had stopped at every opportunity to take photos, so he was about ten minutes behind us. As we unpacked soaps and shampoos and towels, a truck came in and parked right in front of us. Moham and I looked at the truck, looked at each other and then suddenly realized that if Sumanth happened to pass by, he would not be able to see us behind the truck and wouldn't know to stop, and we ran out from behind the truck exactly as Sumanth zoomed past, got on the bridge, took the sharp left and disappeared into the mountain foliage. We shouted and raved over the sound of the roaring river, trying to grab his attention, but he couldn't hear us. And we couldn't reach him on his cellphone because there was no network in the mountains. Moham and I walked back and informed 3, and we cracked up when we realized that off the four of us, Sumanth had been the most desperate for a good, cleansing rinse.

There are steps built into the earth to descend to the river. While Moham secured the luggage, 3 and I gingerly climbed down the wet, muddy steps. They are not exactly steps, but a goat track that has widened since humans started using it. To the left and right of the track is a thick growth of shrubs and weed that blocks your view. The track descends steeply, so it is best to descend slowly. And as we did, I glanced to my left and did a double-take. A leaf stared back at me, green and shaped like a star. Its five-pronged shape surprised me, and I leaned in to get a closer look. My doubts confirmed, I turned to 3 and pointed at the shrub. He turned and saw the same five feet tall stalk of Marijuana that I had been surprised by.

Everywhere, Cannabis grew.

We stood there inspecting the plants until Moham came and jolted us out of our reverie. We started walking down again, and we could see many, many more clones of the plant. Smiling, I said to 3, 'It grows like a weed.'

'Bad joke, dude,' he said, shaking his head.

It was around ten o'clock in the morning, the traffic on the bridge light, the sky cloudy and balmy, the air cool and playful, and the river valley filled with the sound of the rushing river and flitting birds. We reached the sandy banks, and found thousands and thousands of smooth grey pebbles under the clear blue waters. The river was cold, but not cold enough to bother us. We spent an hour in it, undisturbed by the passing world, laughing about Sumanth each time we thought of him, wondering where he must be, and how we were going to explain our absence to him.

We found him waiting for us outside Barmana and decided not to tell him right then. He was already miffed that we were late and had made him wait for over an hour. The road and the weather were becoming increasingly fresh as we rose in altitude, and all distances seemed to grow short in effort but long in time as we savored every scene, every fold of the mountain and every hanging breath of fog. United again, we rode in rigid formations in the Ghats, enjoying the rules of the formation, informing each other with signals and helping each other through blind turns.

We entered Sundarnagar around one and settled down in a tiny hotel for hot cups of tea. In the table opposite ours, an ancient sadhu sat smoking his chillum. Openly. We stared and he stared back. The thick, pungent smoke from his chillum began filling the hotel. His long and dirty salt-and-pepper beard remained unmoving like cardboard in the strong breeze that flew into the hotel, and his eyes remained focused on us as he pulled on his chillum until what little of his face could be seen became red, and then, almost luxuriously, released clouds of Marijuana smoke into our dumbstruck faces.

Without taking my eyes off him, I said to 3, 'Is this really happening?'

'Looks like it.'

'How come he's smoking weed publicly?'

'Isn't it part of his job?'

'Nice job.'

Moham and Sumanth sat opposite to us, in the same direction as the Sadhu was, so they couldn't see what was happening, but they could definitely smell what was happening. Sumanth kept touching his nose and grinning, while Moham repeatedly kicked me under the table, each time more urgently, as I tried to tell him without speaking what 3 and I were witnessing.

After about ten minutes, the Sadhu gave up on us and left without paying the bill. The owner didn't seem to mind. In fact, we noticed he was treating the sadhu with a lot of deference. We drank our tea in silence, occasionally glancing out at the thick, rolling clouds and the people near the Sundarnagar Lake, boating and laughing and eating from small road-side shops. There was a general holiday air in Sundarnagar that Tuesday, and you can't help but fall in love with unhurried places like these.

Five minutes after we left the hotel, we were forced to stop again at a busy intersection in the city as a crowd of girls came out of a women's college, laughing and looking like a bouquet of flowers with their sun-yellow dupattas and moss-green churidars. We did not mind one bit. We sat on the bikes, not speaking, but simply watching as scores of kohl-lined eyes glanced at us and we replied. If you've gone swimming in the glory of another eye for a long, long time you'll know this – you will know how things around you rise like dust and fade like old monochrome memories. You will know, in the steady gaze of eyes holding eyes, how the world disappears and only you exist and she exists, suspended. I knew then how easily hurried, stolen glances turn into long, unhurried contests, and then turn into the shadow of a smile.

We left behind aptly named Sundarnagar and the highway lead us on a meandering path to Mandi. There we stopped for a late afternoon lunch, and entered a small restaurant. As we ate, we saw the pictures Sumanth had taken riding alone. After about thirty minutes, we got up to wash hands but couldn't find the washroom. The owner led us to the back of the restaurant, where a small hose acted as the washbasin. When I bent down to collect the hose, I did a double take, the second of the day, and saw that the backyard was choking with weed, and not your usual kind. I turned to 3 and by the look on his face realized he hadn't missed them either.

'What is happening?' I said quietly, slightly numb.

'Ganja,' said the owner with a happy smile.

The zigzag ride from Mandi to Pandoh through tiny tree-lined hamlets and villages we spent in the game of 'spotting Cannabis'. We saw them everywhere. And this may not come as news to people who live in the northern parts of India where marijuana grows commonly, but it did take us by surprise. It is a taboo subject here in the south, although I am not sure how open the discussions of marijuana and its effects are in the north either. I learnt later that different species of marijuana is found in the Kullu valley, with evocative names such as 'Parvati' and 'Kasol' and 'Shivjanya', and of course, a modification of Marijuana \- hashish. Trying to spot as many marijuana plants as I could, I fell into observing the tiny road-side shrubs that grew all around in the fertile, moisture-laden earth. But more than the plant, I saw entire constellations of wild flowers, some as tiny as buttons, some as blue as turquoise stones, some as red and ripe as pomegranates and some yellow like the sun. The memories of Sundarnagar's blue lake and kohl-lined eyes were still fresh in my mind, and when I saw the array of colors nature displays, and the way they are used in the cosmic dance of dawn and dusk, of spring and fall, in the play of clouds and sun and in the way nature expresses through them the sheer, brimming energy of life, I couldn't help but think that god must be psychedelic.

*

On the now narrow highway, we saw wherever we turned a rush of pilgrims, we saw people wearing orange bandanas and orange clothes rushing to reach the Vaishno Devi Temple. We saw people loaded up in buses and trucks, we saw them in cars and taxis and rickshaws, we saw them on motorcycles and on bicycles, every one of them decked up in orange, every one of them drunk with the fervor of faith, every one of them shouting and singing 'Jai Mata Di', and every one of them heading to Katra, more than four hundred kilometers away. We saw people hitch-hike to Katra. We saw people walk to Katra. It was the season of the goddess. And I wondered again how faith works, how it gathers such force, such energy; how and what it does to us on the inside, how it replaces a lack of faith with the presence of faith. And again I wondered if it was possible that faith itself is god.

I used to do an unsure balancing act on the blade of a knife whenever I'd ponder these mysteries. Each passing day would bring a new conviction, which would later be shattered by an opposing argument. And both ideas would stay alive in me, pushing me forward on a narrow bridge along this blade of knife, bringing me closer to an absolute faith, but I didn't know this at the time. Having been brought up in a Brahmin family, I grew up amidst the thickset rules of laws and bylaws of strict traditions and rituals. But I found that the more I enquired into the nature of god, which in my mind is the purpose of all religions, or at least should be, the more I came to realize that religion seemed to provide only half the answers. Religion these days is more focused on finding out how to gain from god, instead of gaining god. These days, we confuse belief with faith, and use the two words interchangeably.

On a long, enduring, nine-day road trip, Moham and I traveled from Mysore to Goa, and along the way found ourselves one, dark, dusk on Mangalore's famous Harbor beach. There I retraced my twenty- year old journey to the edge of religious thought - it was a short retracing. But the journey I began then to understand the differences between my thoughts on god versus religious thoughts that are hundreds of years old, if not thousands, lead me to think that the path taken by religion and rituals is the path of an outward journey, a 'physical' road that involves you in the quest of god only on a physical level. You pray, alone or in a group, in a church or in a temple or in a mosque, you kneel before a god that has been defined for you by someone else, and you perform rituals that demand sacrifice and penance. I have come to believe religion involves you on a strictly physical plane. I have also come to believe that religion is an inspiration, but not a necessity, for the more personal spiritual quest. My need for that road trip stemmed from my need to come to terms with a growing personal faith, which took me to the edge of the physical plane and held me suspended as I pondered the sky of spiritual thought. I needed that journey because I realized that I had reached an impasse. I returned from the Goa trip a markedly different person. I am willing to dissect more and believe less, and in this way I have, over the years, strengthened faith through doubt.

From that point onwards, I started to look within and inside to find and to pursue god on a metaphysical plane. On the metaphysical plane, on the spiritual plane, all religious differences disappear. This is what Moham and I discussed over that faraway sunset. On the physical plane, we assign our human differences and quarrels to the nature of god while he watches mute and amused. We project our ego and our very humanity on to him and give him our shape. By this we personify, or humanize, something that predates humanity.

This impasse, I realized, was the start of a personal religion, and all personal religions are synonymous with spirituality. I realized then that the spiritual quest for god is a singular pursuit. This suited me better, because religion, in my opinion, involves too many people; there are too many people to get through before I am allowed to speak with my god. More and more the belief strengthened that it was important to find my own way to worship my god; that it was important that I don't succumb to someone else's ideas and rituals of worship; that I don't allow someone else to speak to my god on my behalf.

From the seeds of the individual spirituality of men and women are religions of the world born. A spiritualist always seems to find his god, and in his tenderness and eagerness for his fellow beings to experience the same god, he gathers a few followers and takes them through the same path he took in his discovery of Him. Followers become believers and attract more followers, and slowly a path that should have been a spiritual path becomes a religious one; and what should have been a trail blaze to god becomes a highway. Spiritual ideas and ideals turn into rituals and laws, and the love for god is replaced by the fear of god. By this time the original spiritualist has died and has taken the secrets he tried to teach with him to his grave, and left behind written words that are interpreted by his followers, but not grasped, and things that shouldn't have been lost are lost in translation. More and more people join this burgeoning religion; and the followers become the masters and begin altering the religion with their own perspectives. Hierarchies form within the core group of the religion, and hierarchies beget hierarchies beget politics, and from there it's a downward spiral. These words makes it sound like I dislike religions, but I don't - I believe them to be important stepping stones towards a higher calling. But what I am sad to see is the organization and institutionalization of something that must remain liquid. There is something to be said of the advantages of standing quietly over a narrow, wooden bridge painted white and red, watching the river flow beneath your feet, fast, sure and unlimited. There is something to be said of the advantage of watching – but what am I doing? I am becoming an outspoken spiritualist, and that is one step short of a prophet.

As a writer, I have experienced those very rare and breathtaking moments of dilemma when the words I write lead me to a crossroad between what I believe in and must write, and what I want to write but should not. And here is that dilemma. If I tell you the advantages of spirituality by giving you examples of things I do to share a moment with god, then I dissolve airy spiritual ideas and thoughts and practices into chunks of solid rituals, into mathematical and chemical equations. I am jumping now, from one kind of ego to another trying to tell you that _I cannot assume to tell you_. But I do want to provoke you into thought, and therefore my descriptions are about the abstract and the adjacent and the tangential and not the direct.

We go through a couple of carved tunnels, and the roads are different now. All around us the mountains rise – the road follows the curve of the river, and the river follows the curve of the mountains. We are riding through canyons, and the light is dull and gray even in the middle of the afternoon. The light seems almost porous, and accompanies perfectly the echoes of the flowing river in those massive halls. The roar of our motorcycles reverberates across the river, bouncing repeatedly between the walls.

That evening, we stopped and witnessed with a child-like wonder the rush of churning white water that gushed out of the open gates of the Pandoh dam. They poured out in thick walls of watery fury. Photography is not allowed, but Sumanth still managed to capture a few shots. The roads near the dam are dramatic, having been blasted and hewn and cut through an arm of the mountain. The grey, mangled visage of the brutalized mountain forms a wall to our left and above our heads to become a disfigured, half-hearted tunnel, and to the right is the hugging river. It is an enduring thing to ride alongside the gush of a singing river.

The river's whispers and its angry hush crashed against the mined walls of the highway and echoed through our senses. I remember the rush of adrenalin we felt when we saw these roads. They screamed of dynamite and danger and with the river so close, they seemed symbolic of living on the edge. With excitement we chased the road.

After you take a rather squarish hairpin turn, the road descends to run parallel with the river in a long, slow curve. At the end of the curve, the vista opens up and for the first time you see a thin, narrow bridge, connecting your side of the hill with the one on the opposite banks of the river. This is the Hanogi Bridge. We came across a lot of different bridges in various states of disrepair, but Hanogi was the most spectacular in terms of both the view it offered and how well it was maintained. Its steel railings were painted black and white; it stretched into the other side of the hill like an elongated zebra. Except for hundreds and hundreds of pellets of goat poop spread across the length of the bridge – evidence of a large herd of goats and sheep having passed by – it was neat and looked like it was swept every morning. You walk down the low-hanging bridge, gingerly at first, avoiding the pellets, and slowly take in the view – you see the river flowing beneath your feet through the gaps in the wooden planks - fast, sure and perennial; you see the terraced hills on the opposite bank with houses and people and goats peppering them with random, moving colors, and far away, in the middle of a 'v' formed by the sloping faces of four mountains, you see a thin, white waterfall, the waters of which empty into the river right near the bridge forming a large, alluvial fan in the sand. We spent an inordinate amount of time at the bridge, and returned to our bikes grudgingly. But we immediately forgot our impatience when we saw the Hanogi Temple, and its location. The temple is built into the rock face of the hill on the other side of the river, and narrow steps, painted red and white and cut into the stone, lead you up and up until you reach the heights of the temple. We wanted to visit, but couldn't without swimming across the rapid river. I am told that there is usually a man with a boat there who takes you to and fro, for a coin.

The twenty three kilometers from Pandoh to Aut are a breathtaking example of what man and nature can accomplish in tandem. At Pandoh, the fury of Beas is controlled to generate electricity, and just after Thalaut is a two kilometer long, underground tunnel to Aut that cuts under hills and mountains and ravines and saves a lot of time and effort. At a layby inside the tunnel, we stopped in the darkness to allow everything we had just seen to sink in. After the adrenalin of the last thirty kilometers, our conversation was halting, and we quickly fell into a strangled silence and watched the traffic pass us by.

On the other side of the tunnel is Aut. We entered Aut early in the evening, and were instantly entranced by the precarious sheet houses hiding one behind another, rising and rising with and into the hills surrounding the town. The highway passed along the river around which the town had come to form, connecting hills across the river with rows of bridges at frequent intervals. We were spellbound by the picture it provided - a river in torment disappearing into a range of distant, foggy mountains that seemed to gain a lesser shade of grey with increasing distance. The mountains themselves hiding behind hulking, grey clouds pregnant with rain, and the Sun somewhere amidst these elements, glowing like a firefly trapped in oilskin, leaving a brilliant rainbow in its wake. We stopped and watched. We stopped to breathe in the crude but colorful sheet houses crowding the hills - a picturesque, color-drenched favela - making the hills look like a landscape of green porcelain inlaid with tiny, colorful square tiles of blue and red and white. Near the river on thin footpaths, people milled about, and the air smelled like ice and morning and mud and rain and dew and wet grass. The clouds were the color of smoke and chalk, and a sharp, full rainbow completed the scene. I have never seen a rainbow spread out like that – we could see it completely, from one end to another.

There is a lot of silence and patience and waiting in a journey before you encounter nature's absolute brilliance. Those moments can be brief, but unforgettable. For the most part, a traveler is on a perpetual quest to be amazed by nature, to be forced to surrender, to become weak in the knee in the force of nature's majesty. He is willing to surrender, but only after being witness to the awe-inspiring aspect of nature.

In due time, the rainbow faded and we removed ourselves from the epic settings of the river. From Aut to Manali, one follows the way of the meandering Beas through narrow gorges and valleys amidst the Pir Panjal range of mountains, until one enters the smoking Kullu valley. One color dominates the landscape and the scenery – a particular kind of grey that seems stolen from a rain-pregnant cloud.

Pine trees stand like sentinels on either side of the highway and on the sloping hills, their very nettles hanging on to the rising fog. The highway near Kullu runs straight towards the horizon where the mountains and the river seem to converge behind the mist. Here and there grey alleys branch out to the left and right, and here and there the river rushes in to touch the road, so close that you can stop and dip your feet. Hundreds and hundreds of buildings un-decorate and crowd the highway, blocking the view from time to time, but you just turn your head and find another view. There is no dearth of nature and her charms in Kullu.

In the melting colors of twilight we reached Manali. Heading straight into town, we found The Tourist Lodge run by the HPTDC, and booked one room with four beds in it, at a surprisingly low cost of five hundred a night. We needed only a place to rest our tired legs, because we planned to ride to Rohtang and Sarchu early next morning. We were given a room on the first floor, with a view of the spectacularly crystal-blue Beas and the Beas Bridge, and a fireplace that was cemented shut. Wistfully I imagined a fire burning the winter away in days gone by. From my bed next to a large open window, I could see the Beas thundering below. The HPTDC Lodge is a common abode of the Ladakh biker in Manali. We saw many sojourners, tuning their bikes or packing their gear, preparing mentally and physically for the ride ahead. The Lodge thrummed with the excitement for tomorrow.

As night began to fall over Manali, Sumanth ordered a couple of buckets of hot water for his long awaited bath. The showers don't have hot-water facility, so you have to ask for hot water especially, and I imagine they have one geyser running somewhere to heat the water, because they bring it up to you in twenty minutes or so. Sumanth was really looking forward to a shower and was surprised when we didn't share his enthusiasm. The hot water arrived, and he lugged the two buckets to the bathroom. While he was busy, 3 tied a line of rope from the door of the room to the window overlooking the river. On this rope, we put to dry all the clothes that had become wet when we were splashing around in the river. A line of wet clothes stretched right across the room but when he returned, Sumanth never thought to question it. We still laugh over this one.

After our own quick showers, we locked the room and went down to breathe in the Manali air. The night was cold, and we were thankfully dressed warmly. The town center was alive with people and lights, and the main street was crammed with shoppers and shops. At the end of the street is a temple of a goddess, and her name I cannot recall. But she is beautiful, and diminutive, her nose small and sharp, her image carved from ivory-white marble. The temple itself is made from a deep-brown wood that shone in the night lights, and through the skill of the artist the marble goddess looks more delicate than the temple of wood.

We walked around town and I bought a couple of shawls made from the 'finest wool', I was promised. The shopkeeper insisted on proving to me that it was indeed the finest wool, the 'Pashmina', by showing me a trick – He said that the real test of fine wool is in its ability to compress itself into tiny spaces, and he borrowed my ring and proceeded to pull the entire shawl through its loop.

Walking out, we spotted a hotel on the first floor of a rickety, wooden building, and being hungry and tired, we walked up the building through its narrow, wooden staircase to reach Hotel Zanzibar. We went there because we liked the name, and because we liked the dim, yellow lighting we had seen from the outside. Its large windows provided a nice view of the town center beneath.

Dinner arrived, and I don't remember at all what we ate. But I remember the night and the dull, checkered light of the yellow electric bulbs ensconced in hand-knit bamboo boxes shine against the deep brown lacquer of the furniture, and the four of us at the table, trying to allow the facts of our trip to sink in. We realized we were far ahead of ourselves; the fact that we were in Manali and that we had succeeded to come all the way from one destination to another hadn't sunk in yet. We were simply delirious in the realization that we had somehow skipped dimensions and stepped right into a dream.

*

The Anatomy of Mist

It held sway slowly - the fog - swirling in the distance in clean, white splendor, hiding the glowing sun behind her skirt, making the sun look like a dying flame behind sheets of oilskin. From time to time the sun would break upon it and through an alchemical magic turn the fog into gold. Weighed down by cool moisture and pulled to the ground by the gravity of mountains, the fog flowed with the effortlessness of water through the nettles of old pine trees.

As we ride up a narrow mountain path, silence descends then deepens. The road is thin, the fall to our left deep and green and the curves sharp and wild. And as we climb, the road ahead of us begins to fade in the encroaching mist. We follow it excitedly - willing, needing and wanting to get lost in its enveloping whiteness that will hide the world from us. But the mist is yet thin; its resolve not yet strong. And so it plays a game of hide-and-seek with us. We climb slowly – the road is difficult and wet, and the views pristine and wet.

Minutes later, I stood trembling in the cold, looking down a steep valley as the driving fog rushed in to block our view of the land below. The mountains are swathed in swaying green Shola grass that seem to enjoy being wet all the time. Whenever the mist disappeared, we saw a range of mountains, receding into a blurred horizon, covered incoherently with the thick green shawls of Shola forests.

We were halfway up the narrow road that leads to Kemmangundi, a tiny mountain town lost in the mists. Fifty two kilometers from Chikmagalur this road runs, becoming narrower and narrower, until the bikes are teetering right on the edge, off the mountain face. This road isn't kind - Olympic-size swimming pools form in the middle of the road during the monsoon; the motorcycles get through by going around the swimming pool, right at the edge of the road - flirting with the open sky, skirting death. This wouldn't have been as thrilling if we could see the valley descend – but we were for the most part enveloped in a sheet of glowing white fog, and the hairpin turns were all the more scary because we didn't know where the whiteness ended and empty space began.

Stopping at just such a turn, we tried hard to stare through the white sheet to allow our senses a semblance of identity, to locate ourselves. Our combined voices were suppressed by the fog, as if demanding silence in its awesome presence. Our faces flushed with cold, hands pressed deep inside riding jackets for warmth, the leather rough and comforting against numb, frozen fingers, we stood glancing at each other and the fog, staring at something that gave us no definition, until a sudden gust of wind collected all the fog and pushed it away, or perhaps it was the mountain sighing with nostalgia, but it was as if the white curtains had been pulled apart to reveal nature's extravagant display of the emerald Kemmangundi valley sprawled beneath us. The amphitheater of god is full of such inspiring surprise and mystery.

I have always loved mountains for this very reason. They come with a dizzying array of elemental beings, offspring's of earth and water – fog and mist and wind and Pine trees and snow and rain and thunder and clouds - things that have an arctic energy. I like the deciduousness of mountains, and I find they quench the thirst when the soul is parched.

We are on our bikes again and we can see now that the mountaintop above us is covered in a blanket of fog. At some very near point in the future, this mossy road will lead us into it. Thickly. There are already signs of it – our faces are sprayed with cold drops of water as we pass through random wisps of earth-bound clouds.

And suddenly we are part of the mist and the rest of the world is forgotten in our awe and in the whiteness. All around us is the sky. The earth and trees recede into the mist. Above us the clouds are thick and wet. The sounds of our bikes are muffled by the mist and the only sound now is the distant sound of rain drops beating against the metal tanks of the motorcycles. The transformation into this cave of white is as real and sudden as the mountain was. We look all around us, shouting nonsense, and gaze up to see only the tallest of trees stretching to the sky to escape the clouds. And in this cave of smoke, the mist was a liquid that seemed to dilute the color of all that was solid. The world became monochrome. The world began to melt. The ink of leaves and grass and bird became dull and grey and wet and swirled, like a drop of violet paint in a gallon of white. Swirling thus, all solidity became ghost. The mist lends its characteristic fluidity and smokiness to all things earthbound and turns them all into silent spectres. Only the sight of the dark road beneath us kept us from becoming skybound. We would have become ghosts. We would have become mist.

Nothing stops the mist but the sun. In Kemmangundi as well as in Manali, in Gulaba, on Rohtang Pass - in mountain country - the sun is kind to the union of earth and sky. Regularly do the two lovers meet. Trees and mist are fingers of earth and sky, twining in diffused colors of green and brown and grey and white. It is full of soul this meeting, and must be witnessed. This is perhaps the only time they meet so directly. Almost all other times, earth and sky touch each other randomly in the rhythmic anatomy of rain.

*

Rohtang Pass to Jispa

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.

Cesare Pevase

Day 5

Elevation: 13,050 ft.

Distance from Leh: 423 km.

The air in Manali is rare and pure, as if spewed and churned by the mountains of ice and fog that surround the town. There is an industry here of mist. Beas hugs the mountain feet fleetingly in her journey towards and beyond the hotel we were staying at. From the second floor window, we could see her dance her way to an unknown destination. We slept late and woke up late. I, for one, experienced a dreamless and easy sleep. A sure sign of the fact that you are actually living your dreams is that when you fall asleep, you fall into a dreamless state of being.

The plan for the day was to ride as hard as we could to reach Pang. The four hundred and eighty kilometers from Manali to Leh is a tough journey, as the increasing altitude and decreasing oxygen level affect the mind, the body and the motorcycle. On this route, we were about to encounter four of the world's highest motor-able mountain passes – Baralacha La (4894 meters above sea level), Naki La (4740), Lachulung La (5065) and Tang Lang La (5360). As you have probably figured out, 'La' is a Ladakhi word for 'way' or 'pass'.

In retrospect, our plan to reach Pang on the first day and spend the night there was overly optimistic, if not ill-advised. You can't jump from an altitude of 2050m (elevation at Manali) to Pang's altitude of 4630m in a single day and not expect some mountain sickness. In retrospect, the things that happened to derail our plans happened for the best. In hindsight do all disturbed plans reveal their perfection.

Before you reach the mighty mountain passes in the Ladakhi country, you must cross the first of them near Manali – Rohtang. Fifty-two kilometers from Manali, Rohtang Pass is almost four thousand meters above sea level. With a self-confidence that lead to ignorance, or rather with an ignorance that lead to self-confidence, we decided we would be able to cross Rohtang pass in a few minutes and reach Pang by the end of the day's ride. Boy, were we wrong!

Rohtang was also to be the first real test for our motorcycles. As we climbed the steep road to Gulaba, we noticed them choking in the oxygen-depleted environment and the sheer cold. A little apprehensive about the bikes and the various climbs ahead, we decided to stop to check them, and for a cup of tea.

Gulaba was a town that we could not see. Perhaps it was tucked away in the folds of the mountains and the fog. Markers on the road to Rohtang seemed to indicate at a certain place that we had reached Gulaba. But all we could see was a long dirt road curving into the mist. On both sides of the road, short, bell-shaped trees closely stood waiting - the snows will come soon and will soon blanket them in white. To the left, the mountain ascended and lost itself in the thick fog. Large, woolly Yaks meandered about gently chewing the grass. Wispy, white tendrils of mist rose from the ground, escaping from the clutches of grass and gravity. They formed fingers everywhere, rising slowly and reaching for the sky. To the right, the valley appeared in bits and pieces as clouds hung about suspended mid-air, moving with lethargy, as if they too were on a vacation. The melting snow descended and turned gullies and channels into instant waterfalls that shone white against the mossy, green skin of the mountain. The sounds of our engines and our excited shouts echoed and died throughout them, permeating everything like the mist itself. Here we heard the mountains speak in our voice.

I remember trying to recall the name of the bell-shaped tree. I couldn't remember the names of many of the trees we passed by. I seem to recall a time in the past when we knew the names of trees. We knew the names of birds and flowers. In the exponential rush of easily accessible information, we seem to have moved to an age where trees and their names don't matter, and we seem to have lost touch with a simpler way of life that allowed us to learn their names. As a child in Bidkin, a small village outside the city of Aurangabad, I watched my parents grow sugarcane and livestock on fourteen acres of lush and fertile land. Those memories come back to me now, because I remember being able to call by name the trees and birds and the animals that ran amok on our farm. I remember waking up and brushing my teeth with twigs of 'neem', and then running into the fields to pluck ripe tomatoes and carrots for breakfast, and chasing barefoot through the wet mud, white Rabbits to their homes under the earth.

Farther down the road, we came across a tiny hut and a young boy boiling milk. We stopped for a small break there, and parked the bikes. Stretching our legs, we asked for cups of hot tea, omelet and toast and instant noodles. This was delivered ten minutes later to our small plastic table where we had huddled together in the cold. Tea at a rarefied height, with the green theater of the Manali valley polka-dotted by slowly moving balls of cotton. The clouds were taking their time, and so did we. The hut looked faded against the rich green-ness of the grass and the trees that looked faded against the white glow of the clouds, and so our eyes jumped from contrast to contrast.

Inside the hut, the boy kept himself busy. He looked to be about fourteen years old and perfectly capable of looking after himself. I peeped inside and found in a corner a very cozy and warm looking makeshift bed, filled with thick rugs and quilts. I asked the boy if he slept here at night, and he said yes, because he couldn't pack everything up every day and take it back home; that the hut couldn't be locked and his house was too far and the effort simply too much. So this was his summer abode, during the tourist season, year after year, amidst the mountains.

'Are you happy with this arrangement?' I asked.

'How can I not be, sir?' he said, with a small smile, nodding at the view. It is nice to see a person fully content with his surroundings.

As I write this, I am looking at the notes written in my cell phone from that time. One note says –

Smoke from the tea mixes with the cold breath coming from mouth and nose. Tea at 10000 feet!

Place – Gulaba.

Finally, I notice.

After taking a few pictures, we rode on. But when we reached the bottom of the pass, people stopped us and told us not to go on. We picked up words like 'traffic jam' and 'landslide' and 'rain' and 'mud', but didn't give them too much attention. It was only when we cleared a small hairpin-turn and were stopped immediately by the tail of a long traffic jam that we realized how much trouble we were in.

The roads of Rohtang-La that day were not roads. They were a careful mix of mud and sludge and water. Then they were grinded, churned and pulped by the giant military trucks in convoy that took up more than half of the road, almost pushing the rest of us off the mountain. And when you felt the mud had reached the consistency of quicksand and found yourself knee deep in it with a bike between your legs, you had to contend with the traffic - hundreds of bikes, cars, trucks and cyclists jostling with each other to cross the eight kilometers of slippery, squelching roads.

In this mêlée of adventurers, we found ourselves momentarily speechless. The climb was steep, the road looked more and more like a river-bed, and the traffic was stagnant. In that moment all of us mentally decided that either we counted this as fun, as part of the experience we were wanting, or go through the eight kilometers painfully. This is important and this changed us immediately, instantaneously - that we learnt to ask ourselves what we'd like to take away from an experience. To this day, in our day-to-day lives, this act of self-analysis, of responding to an event instead of reacting to it, saves us a lot of bitterness that really does not exist. And there really is no place for bitterness and disappointment in a journey, especially considering the show the clouds and mists of Rohtang were putting on for us. Standing at the edge of the road, staring into deep, cloud-flooded valleys, watching them float beneath us while tourists walked and cyclists squeezed through whatever gaps in the traffic they could find, are memories we will never forget.

And this attitude of optimism is driven home by the locals there - the people who witness these conditions every day and live amidst them with a smile. One enterprising old man walked to the shoulder of a hairpin turn, cleared a little space at the layby for his small table, placed a large, clay pot filled with tea on top of it and started selling. He placed four chairs behind him and we immediately parked the bikes to drink a cup of tea, relaxing in the chairs as the traffic struggled to move slowly. I guess one has to de-attach oneself from the situation one is in from time to time, to gain a fresh perspective of his condition. If this is done often enough, he realizes that it's really not that bad. The good and the bad are gently extricated from each other.

As we waited for the traffic to clear, we were joined by a group of French women in their late thirties and forties, dressed in white and looking angelic all. We shared our chairs with them and sat on our parked bikes and we managed to communicate in a mix of English and French. I had learnt a little of that language a couple of years back and I tried my horrible French on the kindly ladies, who valiantly tried to understand and respond. It was all in good faith and that spirit kept the conversation going.

Right before they left, I was speaking to this really tall woman from the group, taller than I am, and we stopped speaking suddenly - both of us - our dialect of murdered English and French for ten complete seconds, when the clouds and the fogs of Rohtang lifted and emptied the suddenly expanded valley in a burst of green, velvet richness. The mountains rose dramatically in smooth folds of green and white around us. And we paused.

Later, we were joined by a couple of Bangaloreans and an Italian fellow who called himself Raaz. He had a helmet on with a camera attached to it, to record every moment of his trip. He regaled us with stories from his travels, told us about a Rastafarian he had dated for a while, and went on for some time about the advantages of freezing one's sperm and storing it for posterity. It was here we first noticed that all the bikers became part of an uninitiated family, from Rohtang pass onwards.

Strangers, when on bikes, become friends, we realized. We shared a common zeal, the same yearnings, the same spirit and the same destination. I am sure that we are not at all the same in any other respect, in any other moment of our lives, but only in this moment, sharing the same time-space, were we united. We all recognized this instantly, without speaking of it. There is no explanation of why and what creates this bond – we are just suddenly part of it. And this was reflected in the way every biker smiled or waved at another biker as they'd pass each other. In the slippery mud someone would fall along with his bike, and we'd all rush to help him up. And every time an exhausted biker would stop his bike near the small tea shop on the shoulder of Rohtang, we'd all congratulate him for making it this far, encourage him and order a cup of chai. This is another kind of camaraderie, one without introduction or continuation, but still memorable. It makes you realize how many layers of technologies you've built up over yourself to resist interacting with anything directly human.

In such journeys you suddenly discover that you have it in you to be patient, to be mindful, to apply yourself, to be tolerant, to make tools, to make do. To smile at strangers, to talk to them, to turn them into friends. You discover that there are no strangers - only a lack of context and simple conversation. You discover that language is not a barrier. You don't need language to stand at the shoulder of a mountain twelve thousand feet high with a woman from France and stare at the passing fog in shared awe. You don't need language to share awe; to share nature.

What you finally take away from each journey is a little more knowledge of yourself. At the end of a lifetime of journeying, you lie down on your deathbed and piece yourself together by smiling at old pictures of you off on one of your adventures. Each journey becomes an uncovering; a journey of discovery of a part of you that you did not know was alive within you. And the slow discovery of your deepest self is the most important thing you can do with your life. True journeys are monologues and soliloquys; conversations that you have with yourself. And you must never stop conversing with yourself.

There is a reason we are born alone and die alone. It is an indication that there is a limit to how much we must try to explore the depth of another person. You live with a person your whole life - your parents, your friends, your wife, your husband, your soulmate - and you discover them - their richness, their laughter, their depth, their pain, their texture, their moods, their anger, their love, their kindness, their cruelty \- you sink deep into them and you discover them. You begin reading the grooves on their soul with the soft pads of your fingers. But, in the very fact - in the very fact - that you are two separate souls, you reach an abyss in the process of discovery through which you are not allowed, through which you must not attempt to go. This abyss is the surface of the soul, and each soul has its own journey to make.

When you reach this abyss in another person, leave them be. You've discovered enough - the fact that you've come this far is itself commendable, and I can easily imagine that your relationship with that person must be incredibly rich and fulfilling. But you owe it to yourself to reach that abyss within you, too. And once you reach it, you must begin to dig deeper, until you enter the realms of the soul.

There is a simple test to know if you've breached that abyss - to know if you are in contact with your soul. You are in contact with your soul - if you are comfortable being alone with yourself, if you sing to yourself, if you smile at the little things, like the shapes of clouds, or the way the breeze plays with your hair, if you notice the many ironies and paradoxes of life and laugh at them, if you are thankful, if you are filled with gratitude, if you find yourself awed by everyday things and rare things, if you find yourself awed by how easy it is to give thanks.

This realization will change you. Don't ask me how - you'll know how. You will look up at the sky more often. You will speak with passing dogs or cows or goats. You will smile without reason. You will sing. You will stare at birds taking flight and wonder fervently if it would ever be possible for you to do the same. You will leave a room full of people happier than you found them, and a room full of things exactly as they were. You will attach yourself to attributes and attributes will attach themselves to you. Habits will change; you will change. You will fall silent.

You will fall silent.

It is important, therefore, to work on yourself - to allow yourself the freedom and space to fall in love with yourself; to become your own best friend.

But in the city this is not allowed. People seem to acknowledge the existence of nature only on the weekends. They do not even seem to acknowledge the existence of air and sky and breeze. Every day, on my way to work in Bangalore, I pass by this large, tall apartment building, the kind of tall building that has become commonplace these days in any IT-city of India. It has a number of circular balconies on every floor. Every day I pass by that building and those balconies and every day I crane my neck and scan them, my heart bursting with the hope of finding at least one person out on at least one of those balconies, enjoying the view. And every day my heart breaks a little when I see them empty. In the city, I don't see people out on balconies any more. I don't see them on terraces. I don't see any one flying kites these days. Whatever happened to kites?

What we do not do any more is accept nature as a way of life, and so we have lost a sense of respect towards it. We have forgotten how it feels to be transformed by geographies. We must pursue the migration of birds, the curve of hills, the crest of waves, the stretch of trees and the assault of mountains. We must breathe knowing we breathe the exhaled efforts of billions of trees. We must drink knowing we drink the cosmic interaction of Sun and Earth and Sky. Only by travel is the commonplace of nature broken down into its awe-inspiring constituents. But we fail to see this, because we are so trapped, by the mindless jungles of concrete every day. We are strangled by the artless air of cities. Our instincts that cause expression are stifled by the heavy solidity of routine. We need this, more than anything else we need this – We need to escape and cut the cords that bind us and float effortlessly in the cool, cool air of freedom that travel allows, that nature allows. We must explore the scenes that the mountains provide us, that the forests and the sand dunes and the oceans provide us. We must listen to the song of nature and allow it to flow through us and by this find expression to our own songs. By this trial we will learn that all songs that have ever been written or will be written exist already in the heart of humanity, and all we ever need to do is be moved enough to sing.

*

Time seemed to stand still on Rohtang. The sky was a dawn that had stretched into the afternoon. The morning and the afternoon soon blended into one another in the white background of glowing mist. It turned into a picnic, that afternoon on Rohtang - picnic with hundreds of bikes and bikers and cars and taxis and military trucks. 3 and I couldn't ride together anymore as the mud was making it difficult to control the motorcycle. So he dropped me off at a shoulder and I trekked the rest of the way up. I walked along the edge of the road, staring down when the fog cleared at the tiny, tiny tourists milling around like multi-colored ants. In the valley below, they ate and drank and rode horses and climbed to a nearby waterfall and then rushed to avoid the cold, cold spray that fell on them like a blanket of semi-transparent haze. From my vantage point high up in the mountains, the thin veil of spray seemed to hang in the air, a ghostly unmoving specter.

It took us four hours to get out of the maze of mud and magic and we got out to come face to face with a long wall of ice and snow. In the gray mist, we discerned a huge cascade of water that had frozen in places. It cut through the ice and cut under the road and rolled on towards the ravine to our right. We had only just begun to get the hang of riding on proper roads again when this wall stopped us in our tracks. This was the first time all of us had seen ice on that scale. We had to stop. And we did, and we posed next to the wall and took a lot of pictures. 3 took a stone and etched the word 'HOT' on to the ice and drew an arrow '->' and stood at the end of the arrow, and I have a picture of that. Then we crossed to other side of the road, and saw that the cascade of water had frozen into a large sheet of muddy, dirty ice that looked like a giant, dirty tongue of ice. Breaking the sheet with the stone a little, we saw that inside the layer of ice, water still flowed unimpeded and fast. I put my hand through the hole we had made and filled a bottle with fresh, cold mountain water.

Leaving the snowbank, we descended towards Khoksar, and by doing so left behind the deciduous Beas River valley to the more arid Lahaul and Spiti valley. Hoping to make up for lost time, we increased our speed until Moham caught up with 3 and me and indicated for us to stop.

We slowed to our left and stopped, and Moham walked back to us and pointed at the motorcycle's rear tire. It was flat. 3 and I groaned. So I switched with Moham and we rode together until we could find a place to fix the tire. In an awesome display of willpower, 3 rode the motorcycle alone for the next twenty-one kilometers through switchbacks and hairpin turns and half-roads and no roads, all the while standing and shifting all his weight on to the front tire. And he did this without complaining, singing and shouting at the top of his voice, as oncoming bikers watched amused. This was to me evidence of the fact that something on Rohtang had changed us the moment we decided that we wanted to take away only the positive from an experience, and in that doing, translate a negative event into a positive one. I use the word 'translate' there because translation involves interpretation, and interpretation of events is many times a matter of choice and perspective. It is a matter of attitude.

Near the village of Gramphu, in a picturesque and expansive landing on the other side of Rohtang, filled with multi-colored prayer flags and tiny Buddhist Chorten, we found a mechanic. He spent thirty minutes trying to fix the tire before Moham and I realized he didn't know what he was doing. So we sent him away and used his tools to fix it ourselves. 3 and Sumanth returned from a nearby tea stall and laughed before joining us. As we worked, I looked around and noticed again the flags tied to strings, fluttering in the breeze, filled with prayers in an ancient language. The script of the language is by itself beautiful, and adds to the mystery of the words. Buddhists believe that writing prayers and leaving them out in the elements this way allows the prayers to be carried by the wind to the listening gods. The string of prayer-flags - locally called 'lungta' - and the white-washed stupas immediately arrested my attention. We were now in the territory of Buddha.

Everywhere I could see signs of our arrival into this new land. The sky was also somehow different on the other side of Rohtang – it was a slightly deeper shade of blue, and we watched it deepen as we approached Leh and Khardung-La.

A few kilometers further, at the end of the descent from Rohtang, we reached Khoksar, where we stopped again at a proper mechanic shop for an oil check and an overall. While the mechanic got busy with our bikes, we sat down and watched a bunch of kids, perhaps six to eight years of age, all with shaven heads, playing football in orange robes. We laughed as their play became more and more robust, with pockets of friendly tussles turning into all out wrestling matches, as the other kids swarmed around and cheered in strange tongues. I remember mentioning to 3 that it must be a Sunday and so the kids were out playing football instead of being at school, and then 3 and I sat there for a few minutes trying to work out what day it was, until we finally gathered that it was Wednesday.

I wandered off searching for the river to refill our water bottles, and as I was returning, I found what to my eyes looked suspiciously like a human jaw bone, half buried in the sandy banks. I recoiled a little, and rushed back to tell the gang. We all trooped back to the river and were tense until Moham declared the bone was from a cow or an ox and not human.

We are now entering arid zones that lie in the rain-shadow. The thick, lush greenery is left behind on the Manali-side of Rohtang, and what little vegetation we see on this side is due to the Chandra River. The greenery becomes ever sparser as we approach the five thousand meter mark. From Khoksar onwards the skies change, the mountains change and the trees change. We slowly enter the highest, cold-desert in the world. The locals here say that Ladakh is the only place in the world where you can get a sun-stroke and a frost-bite at the same time. The altitude causes freezing temperatures at night, and during the day sun beats down cloudlessly. The mountains are dry and stony and rough, like sandstone daggers with jagged peaks. The trees are short and scrubby, and barely survive above the tree line. Wherever the river flows, though, a trail of brilliant greenery follows, surrounded by an arid area of grey and dust and sand. The contrast of this pattern of green and sand repeats across the desert land, and was clearly visible each time we climbed a mountain, or took a turn on a switchback.

From Khoksar it's a pleasant ride through tiny villages and hamlets, and lonely bridges and river- crossings. The river is a good companion to have at these times. Her gurgling laughter and the constant swish of her flow induces an unconscious meditation. Near Sissu we spotted our very first snow-capped mountains. We stopped for a short break to commemorate, craning our necks and staring into the sky to look at the way the ice glinted in the sun. From Sissu we could also see a spectacular waterfall that separates from a ridge on the other side of the river and falls for what feels like a long time. The waterfall is large and long, the distance between us and the fall is far, and so an effect is created where you feel the water is actually falling up, in reverse.

The road from Sissu takes us to Tandi, a village at the confluence of two rivers – the Chandra and the Bhaga. From here the now united river flows east as the Chandrabhaga River, and becomes the Chenab in Punjab. Tandi is an important destination for the Ladakh biker – it has the only gas station between there and Leh – a distance of three hundred and eighty five kilometers. We filled our tanks with petrol and our bottles with the river water and, crossing the bridge over Bhaga, we started the ascent again.

Late in the afternoon, we reached Keylong. It was getting alarmingly cold for us, and we stopped there for an eager lunch and a long break. We also found an ATM here and took out cash for the next leg of the journey. We wouldn't see another ATM until Leh.

Sitting outside a small but picturesque café in Keylong, we drank smoking coffee and watched the snow melt on distant mountains. To our right, a narrow road separated us from the deep gorge of a river beneath. Beyond the gorge, the mountains stood out in icy-blue and white, as proud as crystals. The contrast of the wet, dark tarmac, the green valley and the blue mountains embraced by white shapeless clouds was hypnotic and enchanting. It was raining, but the awning of the café sheltered us, and the pattering sound of rain on canvas and the slow pace of time in Keylong transported all of us to some rain-washed afternoon of the mind. The snow on some of the mountains was so thick, and the mountains so close together that we could see it had formed bridges of ice and snow and connected peak with peak. We really didn't want to move, and contemplated for some time spending the night in Keylong. Here the mountains intrigued us, the river intrigued us, and we felt somehow much closer to nature. By now it was also clear that we wouldn't reach Pang, and even Sarchu seemed a stretch. We finally decided to push ourselves to Darcha and rest there.

On the way to Darcha, we encountered streams and rivers, countless old and rickety metal bridges, villages and hamlets and places with names but no people and no houses (like _Killingsarai_ ), and places with no names but with a collection of ghostly barren barracks. Sometimes, the roads return to earth and run straight through a valley or a plain for miles, rising and falling with the breathing land. In the suddenly expanded vista, one is allowed to see the real vastness of this geography, of the territory of Ladakh. Suddenly the land becomes a brown-green ocean, and the tiny hills that slowly undulate become the waves, and it became easy for us to become lost at sea, but the roads rescue us.

By and by we reached another village, set in the foothills of a mountain rising straight and fast. It was more a collection of shops and huts and tents than a real village. At the mountain's feet was the river, doing a complete one-eighty degree volte-face. The highway jogged along but was interrupted by the river, over which the army had constructed another bridge. Each bridge in Ladakh is given a name by the army, and I remember promising myself to remember all their names, but they have slipped from my memory now.

Parking the motorcycles at the side of the road, we ducked into a small, gloomy place. I hesitate to call it a restaurant – it was too small for a restaurant and too large for a tea shop, and it hung somewhere in the middle, dark and gloomy and nameless. Hunching under its low ceiling, we quickly found a place amidst the thick crowd of locals. What struck us immediately was that almost all of the men there were drinking Mountain Dew. And not from those personal glass bottles that is common in India but from those large plastic Mountain Dew bottles. With curiosity we watched them all drink; while strong whiffs of locally-brewed alcohol pointed us to the answers we sought. Ten minutes later we walked out, unable to breathe, and there we pieced together the answer.

A middle-aged man in a dirty, once-white turban was selling the bottles of Mountain Dew next door. All the bottles had the decidedly unwashed look of having been used too many times. In these bottles he filled, from a large black cylinder, cups of alcohol of questionable heritage. And the men formed a long queue, buying recycled Mountain Dew. We smiled as we witnessed the entire operation and we smiled when it struck us how entirely apt the name mountain dew was for this particular moonshine.

We crossed the bridge and the mountains took us again. We ascended quickly a few hairpin turns, and just as we gathered momentum, we turned around a sharp curve and slowed in surprise when we saw a crowd of people and vehicles blocking the road. But we couldn't see what was causing this blockade and so 3 and I moved slowly forward. We came to a stop next to a gang of bikers from Maharashtra who waved at us. On the road in front of us, a barrage of enormous rocks had descended to block it completely. There had been a landslide, but thankfully no one was hurt. People from the Border Roads Organization had already arrived and were doing their best to clear the road for us. We chatted with the Maharashtra group about their route - the usual Ladakh discussion - and exchanged route plans and details. Then we walked to the edge of the road and saw with wonder the huge rocks tumbling down and crashing against the mountain side as the BRO pushed them over the brink. Some boulders were as large as a car. To watch them fall is a vertigo-inducing realization of gravity and its deadly effects.

As soon as the landslide cleared, we raced the Maharashtra gang for a few kilometers until they lost us or we lost them, both of which are easy in that wilderness. We cut through switchback after switchback in our final descent towards Jispa and that evening we saw a beautiful sight. To our right we could see a village down below in the depths of the valley, sunlight barely reaching it. The village stood out like a colorful patchwork carpet amidst the thick grey stone walls of the valley. Rectangular sections of neatly divided fields filled the land with green. The rushing river that fed the fields filled the land with a crystal shade of blue. Small, wooden houses and their roofs of chalk-blue and chalk- grey filled it with life. It was a neat little village, with thin, un-extravagant roads all at right angles to each other, all leading to the river. A temple stood near the river, white-washed and well used. And we were perched, like eagles high in the sky, seemingly not human enough to live in splendidness like that. I contemplated spending a year in that village, just waking up in the mornings and swimming in the river, and writing. Can you imagine – I asked myself - what the stars must look like at night from the depths of that village?

Those high roads descended into Jispa, still maintaining a surprisingly smooth and dark tarmac. At a distance we saw a large sign indicating we had reached the Jispa Tent Camp, where we immediately decided to spend the night. Exiting the highway and entering the camp, we were greeted by a laughing stream that separates the entrance from the rest of the camp. The stream has been skillfully channeled from the nearby river and forms many erratic tributaries throughout the camping area, gurgling its way among the tents. We parked the bikes into a neat corner and trooped to the reception area to ask for a place to stay. We were given a huge tent for the four of us for eight hundred rupees – money well spent.

Our tent opened right onto the spirited river. It cut through the camp, frothing white with a happy fury and silencing the camp with its incessant hiss. Behind it were three grey mountains, one behind the other, each changing into a different shade of grey as the sun went down opposite to them. Following the line of the river into the distance, we saw the village and the lights of Jispa come to life slowly with the approaching night.

As soon as the sun set behind the mountains, the night did not give dusk any chance to hold court. It descended rapidly, and submerged the camp in total blackness. Yellow lights inside each canvas tent came on, and suddenly it was as if the camp was being lit by enormous, magnificent fireflies. The thick skin of the tent dulled the yellow bulbs, and the light that was thrown around was blunted and dimmed. And those lights were not enough to light up the entire camp, which is as it should be. We walked along the dark bank of the river, watching the dwindling lights of Jispa slowly fade, far from the camp. The town was going to sleep. The people inside the tents also fell asleep with time and one by one the fireflies extinguished from within.

We ate our dinner in the community tent, sharing our meal with the other travelers there. The night was cold, but the mountains protected us from the worst of it. Returning from dinner, we walked along with the river, unable to see it in the darkness, but listening to it. To experience a natural phenomenon with a different sense from time to time; to listen to the river instead of watching it, to get wet in the rain instead of just listening to it - gives you a strange calm and a deep sensation – the sensation of experiencing or recognizing, for the briefest of seconds, things that tend toward the eternal. When we turned away from the river we saw that the camp was plunged in silence and in darkness. All the firefly-tents were asleep now; but our tent still shone from within, and guided us home.

*

Xession: Eye and 'I'

A noise somewhere.

A deep noise, like noise from the throat of an enormous, ethereal being.

Like mountains making love.

Thunder.

Rolling, rumbling thunder.

Rumbling, grumbling, and rumbling, until a sudden crack of lightning and light becomes sound through a beautiful alchemy.

Inside, the dance of rain on canvas begins and the monochromatic music of rain comes to life. Strictly binary music - creating infinite permutations of heart wrenching rhyme in the narrow gap between the sound of silence and the sound of a drop of rain hitting the earth. An infinite spectrum of sounds, of melancholy, of a joy that can never be expressed accurately, fully.

Inside, I am outside with the rain. Every fiber of my being is with the thunder. I can see the night outside \- the dull, grey cast from the light of a cloud-soaked moon on the wet, wet bark of a tall Pine tree, chalking one side of the tree white against the black of night, as drops of silver rain slide down the branches and the trunk of the tree, riding the ridges of its rough bark, and as it rises and rises - this tree that pines - against the slope of the mountain, straight as an arrow, its grey-green branches and its green-green leaves explode against the storm-grey of the storm clouds like a roman candle, shearing the vision -

Thunder!

I cannot match this rain's meter and rhyme.

She sings with such carefree abandon and yet is well within the bounds of poetry. The grey clouds make fun of my writing; if I could only borrow their glorious dark color for my ink I would write a song that should make thunder dance. I don't know why I still exist when I cannot even come close to letting you know how I feel when it rains. I don't know why I still breathe when I cannot write two rhyming lines that capture this epic painting that is being drawn by the most mystical creatures of the land - thunder and clouds and lightning and rain.

Why should I be alive after witnessing such perfection?

Why don't I just melt into a poem?

A limitless pause we spend listening to this music in monochrome. Eventually, 3 gets up and walks to the mirror with a torch in his hand. Now, I am back inside. The shape of the tent, my friends on their beds, the texture of the canvas and the sound of the raindrops on canvas come rushing back, sound and sight mixing before separating, before making sense. I stare at 3. He is kneeling in front of a dressing table that has a mirror attached. He turns on the torch, directs the painfully bright beam of light at his eye but doesn't look at the beam; he is staring into the mirror.

'Dude, come here. I'll show you something,' he says to me, still staring at his eye.

I get up from where I am sitting, walk to the mirror and kneel next to 3. The floor is bone chilling. My knees start to become numb immediately.

3 hands me the torch and tells me, 'Point the beam into your eye, but don't look at the beam. Keep looking at your pupil - the pupil of the eye on which you are directing the beam. Then see what happens.' I turn to the mirror and turn on the torch. Looking straight at my right eye in the mirror, I point the beam directly into it.

The pupil contracts.

I turn the torch off, and to my complete astonishment the black, circular pupil immediately dilates, like a crosshair locking on to its target. I point the beam again, and again, immediately, like an instinct, the pupil contracts.

You know and I know that pupils dilate and shrink. But to witness the great design of the eye at work is an amazing experience. When I saw my pupil dilate - change shape in beautiful display of form and function - it caused a cognitive shift in awareness. In that moment I realized how separate I am from my body.

*

Zing-Zing Bar

The path to our destination is not always a straight one. We go down the wrong road, we get lost, we turn back. Maybe it doesn't matter which road we embark on. Maybe what matters is that we embark.

Barbara Hall

Day 6

Elevation: 13,383 ft.

Distance from Leh: 304 km.

The Sun at Jispa plays with all the theories of light. Nestled at the foothills of majestic mountains that cover the village from three directions, mornings at Jispa play with the conditions of dawn longer than is fair. But that is its beauty. True morning only comes when the sun finally rises high enough in the sky to overcome the mountains. Until then, however, Jispa holds its breath soaked in the half-light of dawn.

When I peeped out from the belly of our 'firefly' tent that had been home for the night, I saw in that half-light the true size of the camp. The river we had heard last night was a large stream, breaking into laughing tributaries at every silly obstacle. The sun had definitely risen – I could see a dull yellow glow restrained by the mountains, its strength bursting through whatever gaps it could find between them, crepuscular rays escaping through them like golden sand from fingers – but the campsite was still and empty. I walked to the kitchen tent, more to warm myself than for the tea I wanted to ask about, but I found a guy standing in front of a large, kerosene stove, boiling milk. I asked for tea and he nodded and showed all five of his fingers, indicating time, not being able to speak as he had covered his head with a large, brown monkey cap.

As I walked back I counted the tents around us. Last night in the dark we had counted seven glowing tents. Now I saw eleven of them. The floor of the camp site was gravelly and muddy, like a river bed, and perhaps in times of heavy rain the place floods and they have to move the camp higher. Walking around, I found two more tents – smaller and a contrasting red in color – one each on the opposing ends of the campsite. A man-made channel from the river passed right under these red tents, carrying the river water right beneath them. Curious, I walked to one of these tents and looked inside.

A commode stared back at me, thankfully empty, without any human perched on top of it staring at me with baleful eyes for interrupting his (or, god forbid, her!) privacy. A forlorn, red bucket stood to the left, trying to look as dignified as it could under the circumstance and in the company it kept.

From within, one was allowed to 'lock' the tent using simple Velcro. The pipe leading out from the commode (too much detail, you say?) entered the earth mysteriously, and I suspected there was no plumbing, but perhaps a compost pit. Curiously I investigated this entire operation, and realized that one was supposed to scoop the water right out of the running stream using the bucket so conveniently placed, and finish the 'operation'. I smiled at the ingenuity. A stream of a river running right through the tent! If it wasn't for the other settings inside the tent, I would have said it was beautiful. However, I lost a little of my humor when I touched the water with my feet. It was seven in the morning and the water was obviously freezing. I was freezing! As one can imagine, the experience was a bone chilling one. I walked back to our tent half-amused and half-frozen.

Rohtang had had a nastier effect on the bikes than it had on us. The mud had gotten into Karizma's shoe brakes and rendered it useless, had entered the FZ's clutch plates and destroyed them and surprisingly did nothing in comparison to the Pulsar. So we spent the first two hours of the day with the mechanic at Jispa. You'll find his shop overlooking a green, rectangular rice field that borders the river – great place to be a mechanic, if you ask me. The small shop is built using a local construction technique of stacking slates of chipped stones horizontally. It is beautiful to look at and quite strong, he tells me.

Once the bikes were fixed, we quickly covered the seven kms to Darcha and then the thirty-four kms to a place enigmatically named Zing-Zing Bar. We stopped at Zing-Zing Bar for a cup of tea, noticed that it was around 1 PM, and actually felt confident that we would reach Pang by nightfall. What arrogance!

From Zing-Zing Bar, you'll notice a gentle climb as you start up the slopes of Baralacha La, the first mountain pass since Rohtang, and the second on the Leh route. Baralacha La is about 4900 meters above sea level, and is gentle when compared to other mountain passes like Tanglang La and the mighty Khardung, but our motorcycles noticeably struggled.

In my pre-trip research, I had read a great deal about 'nallahs,' streams of fast moving snow-melt descending from the mountains that intersected roads and made life difficult for a biker. There are many nallahs that are easy to cross, and we'd already had some experience with them. These were so small and un-dangerous that they warranted no second thought.

We huffed and puffed to complete a high hairpin turn on what seemed like the last and the highest stretch of Baralacha, when we came face to face with a great river that had been let loose right in the middle of the road. I looked up to see where it was coming from – the barrage of water descended with unabashed velocity; twisting, turning, crashing and pounding the stones below into smooth pebbles as it smashed into the road, flooded and destroyed it completely and descended into the valley beyond. This torrent of water divided the road into two, and we were on one side of it, with motorcycles and bags and open jaws.

The sound of the water crashing down silenced everything else. The menacing water threw an arching spray that reached twenty feet in the air. We stopped our bikes on the banks of this river, and the irony that the banks of the river happened to be two sides of a highway did not escape me. On the other side, we spotted our friends from the landslide - the group of bikers from Maharashtra – waving at us, laughing at our stunned faces and indicating that we should cross quickly.

Technically, we couldn't have chosen a worse time to reach the nallah. At one in the afternoon, the midday sun was doing all it could to melt as much snow as possible turning the usually placid nallah into a torrent. It is always advisable to cross these streams early in the morning or late in the evening for the same reasons – the flow of water is lesser and hence the crossing is easier, and more importantly safer. But when we reached there, the gushing water had gathered enough force to push us and our motorcycles off the road and off the mountain.

I remember vividly the first time I set foot in that body of water. My toes went numb immediately, and even before my mind could register the shock, my legs started to scream. Goosebumps traveled up my spine and settled in the vicinity of my neck. It was a visceral, physical response. We had to enter the stream without shoes and socks on because they would take a long time to dry. The stream was more than knee-high. After much discussion we decided Moham would ride in with his Pulsar first, while 3 and I assisted on foot in case he got stuck. Another complication we had thankfully foreseen was the presence of large boulders and pebbles and stones, invisible in the rushing froth of the water.

The road had been washed away in the torrent long ago, and had been replaced with the terrain of the mountain. There was every chance Moham would get stuck halfway in, and then would be in serious danger of getting washed away, along with the bike.

With the planning complete, we hesitated briefly, the numbness of the arctic water still heavy upon the mind, until Moham decided to plunge in first with the bike. He handed us his shoes and bag, folded his jeans up to his thin, bony knees, and rode in. But halfway into the nallah, just as we had predicted and right where the torrent was strongest, he got stuck. He revved the engine, but we saw that the rear tire had lodged itself between two large, unmoving boulders.

Moham was in definite danger of losing the bike, if not himself to that force of nature. 3 and I threw ourselves into that cold, Stygian stream, our legs freezing and turning red. Each step we took over the sharp rocks and boulders and the smooth pebbles hurt twice, and our feet felt like chunks of painful ice. We were dazed at the sudden turn of events, dazed that Zing Zing-Bar could have been so placid, that Jispa could have been so tranquil, meditative even, and now suddenly the world had turned upside down in the rage of this frigid river. Adrenalin rushed into our veins and pushed us to do things we could not have otherwise done.

We splashed to the middle, as fast we could, to the bike and to Moham and steadied them both. In the brief respite our united strength gave us all, I looked up from the middle of the chaos and the torrent to see its source. Sun and ice winked back. Our legs by then were completely numb and dead. At the count of three, 3 and I lifted the motorcycle from behind with a great heave and released it from the boulders. Immediately it slipped and swept away sideways, fishtailing in the force of the water, but we grabbed the motorcycle from behind and Moham lifted it up again and straightened. The engine was taking in a little water, but still running. We needed to place the rear tire on a smoother surface.

Moham pushed the bike forward and suddenly a final boulder underneath gave in, the bike gripped and Moham roared forward, having found steady ground. We stayed with the bike and Moham until they reached the safety of the road on the other side.

Exhausted, we looked back at Sumanth on the other side, clicking away at us and at the ensuing madness. It hit us hard that we had only managed to take one motorcycle across. One bike down, two to go, along with four heavy bags. There was no other way but to go back through the river of ice. Swords and daggers knifed into us as we walked back in, me in the lead and 3 behind me, which was good because halfway into the stream I lost my footing and almost fell, but he steadied me.

In total, we crossed the nallah six times, each time dying and living with the sensation. Those moments are really alive in my mind because we were completely present in them, feeling every little random drop of cold water that crashed down on us, the scratches on our feet and legs, muscles frozen and responding unusually slow. I think in that one hour that we took to completely cross the nallah, it dawned on us that this was exactly why we had traveled five thousand kilometers from home - to walk on the path of adventure, to really stare at the harder aspects of nature in the face, to live slightly beyond the edge.

The crossing of that stream was a threshold; a defining moment in our journey that altered our perception of the experiences to come and shaped our memories of the entire trip. It became our climactic entry into the world of Ladakh and it was instrumental in re-igniting our wandering spirits.

We breathed in relief and recollected ourselves on the other side. The afternoon sun still beat down upon the snow and the river still raged, and we watched, bemused, a couple of young students from Delhi try to cross with their own bikes. The biker group from Maharashtra had helped us before continuing their journey, and we thought it was befitting to help these guys in return. Karma. So we jumped in a seventh time, more because we already missed the adrenalin and the cold of that stream than anything else, and helped them cross.

*

We started our slow climb to Baralacha, the view becoming increasingly distant and large. A deep valley opened up on one side of that mountain path. We crossed a few more streams that weren't too strong. Our pace became gradually slower and slower as we tried to keep up with Sumanth who was falling behind. It looked like something was wrong with his motorcycle; it was struggling to pull up the incline.

Right beneath a high hairpin turn where the road was parallel to the empty sky and the earth no longer visible, his bike gave a final groan and stopped. The lack of oxygen was palpable in the way it choked and struggled to ignite when we tried to kick start the motorcycle. Moham, who fancies that he is good at these things, set about trying all he knew to fix the motorcycle, which was imperative because without it we were going nowhere. For one brief minute, it came to life and we yelped in celebration, and Sumanth got on and rode it fifteen feet before the engine died for the last time.

The sight of a road slanting straight into the sky gives a certain elation that was sadly missing this time. We were high up on the mountains, on our way to Baralacha Pass, and eighty-five kilometers from the nearest town - Keylong. After forty-five minutes of all kinds of experiments with the engine, we contemplated returning to Keylong to get the motorcycle repaired. We also contemplated pushing it off the road and into the valley beyond and be done with it. The lack of oxygen and the beating it had taken on Rohtang had done something to the engine, and crossing the nallah must have been the last straw.

Whatever the reason, Sumanth's bike refused to budge another feet, horizontally or vertically. We had hoped someone would come along and help us with the bike, but in the hour since we had been there, not a single soul went by. The tranquility and the solitude and the serenity of Baralacha were astounding, but we couldn't focus enough to enjoy it.

Ninety minutes later a truck came inching down the hairpin turn above us, and as it took its time negotiating the curve, we almost laid down flat on the road in an attempt to stop the truck from passing by without at least listening to us. But it turned out just a wave of the hand was enough, and a thin and wiry Punjabi man stepped down. He had gathered that we were in trouble, he said, by the way we had stared at his truck with hungry eyes. He said he couldn't help us fix the bike, but he could transport it back to Keylong, where we could find a decent mechanic. But, he said, he had barely enough space for one bike and one person.

We looked at Sumanth, and Sumanth looked back at us balefully. It was a sad thing to do, an unthinkable thing to do, but in the toughest decision we had to take on that trip, we parted ways, suddenly, surprisingly, and without any premonition. We loaded the bike onto the back of the truck along with Sumanth, and watched sadly as he readied himself for what he later described as the three most uncomfortable hours of his life. We promised to wait for him in Leh, and he in turn promised to reach Leh as soon as he could.

Only three of us now – Moham, 3 and I. Saddened by the sudden turn of events, especially after the adrenalin-inducing high of Zing-Zing Bar and the nallah, we breached Baralacha pass and spotted the few tents of the seasonal village of Bharatpur in the dying light of the afternoon. The shadowy light and the sadness mingled and reached into me uncomfortably, like a drink of water too early in the morning.

This set of polar events added another piece of evidence to a theory that I had at that time, and still have, which I did not want to believe back then but in a certain way I believe in now; the theory that all things lead to their opposites, that all things are in a constant migration towards their opposite states. In my mind, this holds true for many things, and I consider part of a universal landscape of laws. At that time I did not want to believe in it because I was in a good place in my life, especially during the trip, which according to my theory meant that I would soon end up in a bad place, and because I believed that believing in something makes it true, and this I still believe. I went on and found enough evidence to believe in this theory, and now it is one of my core philosophies. This acceptance came to me only after I acknowledged that swinging between good and bad is also good, because wisdom is gathered this way, and because all knowledge is good in the end. It came to me only after I acknowledged that to be stuck in a constant state of good or bad is the only real negative, and the most important thing to imbibe is the absoluteness of change.

As we walk into one of the tents, I spot a tree. For a minute, let's consider this tree that is growing - surprisingly - at this altitude, and examine the idea of change.

How different is a tree from fall to fall, from spring to spring? Is it really a different tree when fall comes in and all its leaves slowly turn from green to yellow to gold to a crunchy brown? Is it really a different tree when in spring the leaves return in tiny, lime-yellow sprouts that grow into strong, green leaves? Is it a different tree now that all its branches spent a season brown, nude and bare? Is it really a different tree that stands watching the sky as seasons change?

No, it is the same tree.

But what is it in this tree that makes us believe that it is the same tree? It's position? If I move that tree one day to a different place, would it be a different tree?

No.

You come back home after years and years and the tree in your backyard has grown through the years and has doubled in size and it's fruiting now and it's canopy is as wide as the backyard, but you still know it's the same tree.

So then the question is - what is it in a tree that makes it the same tree?

The answer – Life, and the inescapable quality of change.

Let's now look at a stone. It does not shed with changing seasons. It does not grow with passing time. It does not change, and in not changing it does not gain from or lose to nature, and by not involving in a dialog with nature it remains lifeless. It is paradoxical, and a wonderful irony, that the only things that attain an unchanging identity are things that change form constantly, that somehow partake in the cyclic rhythm of nature. It is this underlying pulse we acknowledge when we recognize a tree.

The more I delve into these theories of mine, the more I realize that they themselves are not absolute, meaning a theory of mine that is true for me and may ring true with someone may not necessarily be true in their life. I am learning now that it is possible for different people to be governed by different laws of nature. That we as individuals carry a set of omens, a set of personal legends and laws that must not be broken. That is another theory of mine – okay, so I have a lot of theories. But that one leads me uncomfortably close to the discussions of fate and destiny, in which I don't completely believe in, and so perhaps that knowledge is blocked from me. I know, however - and I know this one for sure, absolutely – that all knowledge is shared with everyone. It's just a matter of time. I believe in what Walt Whitman said, 'All truth wait in all things, they neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it', and I wait for my knowledge to come.

At Baralacha pass, as in other places on this route, there is a small, travel-season community that lives in huts and tents. They provide exhausted travelers a place to stay and eat; a place to warm themselves against the increasingly freezing elements. At Baralacha-La, exhaustion hit us finally. We dragged our bags into a large tent and dropped them. I sat down and stared at Moham's face, at 3's face, and wondered how they had aged so suddenly, so quickly. What smiles we had were frozen and slow and only half-filled with energy. We still managed to smile at each other, the kind of silly smile you smile when you know you have been browbeaten relentlessly and all you can do is smile.

Baralacha has the uneasiness of grey, Scottish moors. The melancholy is not helped by the sight of Tibetan women, young and old, descending the rough mountain in the failing light to collect firewood from frail trees and water from the gushing river, and then return, their lungs out of breath, to wash dirty clothes and vessels in the chill of the gathering gloom. It is as if we have forgotten to inform them that the world has moved on; that they don't need to live like this; that they can, with conscious and intelligent decisions, improve their lot in life, and to give others near them hope.

I sit beside an old lady washing dishes behind the tent and speak with her in the soft tones demanded by the howling winds. She tells me her hands shiver in the night, involuntarily. It comes and goes, this affliction. Saying this, she dips her hands again in the arctic waters to continue washing the dishes. I wince. This is the only time of the year we have to earn enough money to get us through the year, she says. So we come up here, we find a suitable place and set up camp. And we try to earn enough to make it through the winter. This has been a good year. I wince again, watching her dip her hands into the frigid water. She smiles at me and says she is used to the cold. It's not the cold that bothers her, but staying away from her home hidden in the folds of the Zanskar range, and staying away from her two toddlers, who live with her sister when she is away, and at the end of every season when she returns to them she realizes she has missed a great chunk of their childhood.

After speaking with her I realize that I was arrogant in assuming that I could inform them to lead a better life; they already know. They know that the world has changed, that they can move to the plains and escape the mountains and escape the cold, but they also know that that would mean changing a way of life that has been passed down like an heirloom from one generation to another. It would mean breaking a bond with the mountain and the river; it would mean using taps and dishwashers instead of rivers and streams and I cannot argue which one is better – it is absolutely a matter of perspective and perhaps, conditioning. More importantly, it is a matter of the soul.

We ate a quiet supper, only talking to decide if we should spend the night there, at Bharatpur. The man who ran the place seemed intent on making us stay overnight. We looked around the tent, which was like all the other shop-slash-motel-slash-circus-sized tents we had seen in Ladakh – one corner dedicated to the shop section, where old ladies boiled tea and rice and cooked instant noodles, and sold cigarettes and toilet paper and soap and shampoo; the rest of the main tent dedicated to twelve to fifteen beds overwhelmed by layers and layers of thick, warm quilts that invite you to huddle and hibernate, so overwhelmed that you cannot separate the beds anymore, so that it looks like one giant semi-circular bed of patch-work colors. And then inside, into the 'bedroom' tent, boldly introduced by a cardboard cutout in the main tent, with an arrow and a jolly 'Joley'! Into the bedroom then, where there are more beds and more quilts and ropes tied from one end to another to hang clothes. It felt like sanctuary. The haphazardness, the lack of concrete and cement, the lack of a television blaring from a corner, it all felt like sanctuary.

We realized, as we slurped the hot, yummy water that was left behind after we had finished all the noodles, that the last time we had seen concrete was in Keylong, almost a hundred kilometers away. And it felt good, both the hot soup and the cement-lessness, and we tried to smile again. But the skin on our faces cracked and we stopped halfway, and then tried not to laugh out at the mangled expressions of pain on our faces.

Twilight on Baralacha was an apocalyptic scene. We huddled ourselves in more layers of clothes against a raging wind. The grey sky ended the twilight early, and night began as soon as we started our descent from Bharatpur. Riding in the darkness, I can never forget the strange feeling of being haunted through those hills. Nothing supernatural, but I felt as if I was being chased by memories and by the past. The twilight, the loss of a companion, the dull sound of splashing water from a nearby river and the echoing call of mountain birds returning home raised a strange sensation in me. It was not until we saw the first signs of civilization near Sarchu were these feelings quelled. The mind is as dangerous a place to get lost in as it is a wonderful thing to discover.

The thirty-five kilometers from Bharatpur to Sarchu we covered in two hours, which was more than what we had anticipated. But the darkness, the treacherous roads and the constant shift in altitude slowed us down, until we finally descended into a massive valley, and spotted the first of the tent camps spread sweeping across the dry valley. The tents glowed in the night and showed us the way. There is a check-post at the entrance of Sarchu where bikers need to register themselves, which I did for the three of us, while 3 and Moham looked for a tent to spend the night in. I came out of the tent to find them waiting for me – they had found a tent for a hundred rupees, by far the cheapest accommodation of the entire trip.

We skipped dinner and went straight to bed, three of us packed inside the tent. In our exhaustion we slept in the wrong direction, so that the wind that descended from the walls of the valley hit our heads directly for the rest of the night. It was an uncomfortable and a cold one. We didn't realize it yet, but the altitude was getting the better of us. Sarchu is a flat, flat land between two lines of high mountains on either side, and the cold wind sweeps down bouncing off the face of these mountains and meets in the middle. The tent was repeatedly whipped by that wind. Inside, we were tired, too tired to even speak, defeated by the day and the elements. But as we removed our shoes, the low strength of our voices under the yellow lamp of the tent gave warmth. And when we finally crawled into bed with our heads towards the wrong end of the tent, we fell asleep instantly, tired, exhausted and without dreams.

*

Xession: Illusions

Imagine you are sitting in a field of grass, green as far as the eye can see. All around you, you can see the circular ring of blue-grey horizon from where rises the massive bubble of sky. It is empty, clear and blue. But out of the corner of your eye you spot a single, large cloud interrupt the dawn-washed sky. As the cloud floats slowly into the center of your vision, it is changing shape. At first, you don't recognize the shape as anything but are mildly following the cloud as an object of interest. But with a start you realize, suddenly and surely, that the cloud is slowly forming your head, your face and your nose and etching out your astonished smile in fluffy, white cottony-marble.

*

I can see the face of my soul if I close my eyes. I can see it whirring, dancing like a dervish within the tiny, conical chambers of my spine. We are sitting under a large Banyan tree, ancient, wise, mystical, venerated. The earth is bare around the radius of its trunk, as if it cannot sustain any other life form apart from this enormous tree. She is at least three hundred years old; I am twenty three. Her branches have descended to become roots, and have started to become trees again in their own right. We can walk in, to the core of the tree, through the gaps in the roots and the branches, and within is a small stone-god, dusted yellow and red with turmeric and vermillion. There is an old lady in a brown cotton sari – the borders gold - circumambulating the tree, and her hands hold the coconut and flowers that she has brought for the tree in such a way that they form both a container and a salutation. Her efficiency is graceful. She has white flowers in her grey hair. It is clear she does this every day. The tree whispers to her.

We rode our motorcycles here, and have parked them behind the tree. They add a disturbing dash of color to the bare earth and the brown tree – a mix of steel and dark blue and KTM's orange and white. The Sun does not filter down to the earth, except here and there and barely, where the incessant limbs of the tree permit it. It's just the three of us, and the old lady \- Moham, 3 and I.

Blue skies today – the color of washed jeans. This bright, sunlit tree stands out darkly against the faded blue. The hill behind the tree itself lacks the clarity of contrast, blurred as it is by a thin veil of mist. Starchy sunlight, thin traffic, noises that echo off the face of the hill and a general air of afternoon melancholy lends to the atmosphere a lonely, subdued mood.

A photon sparked noisily away from the burning sun and sped towards my cornea. I follow its path, staring at its brilliant tail that trails behind like the tail of a comet.

Two hours later it is ten minutes.

As if we understand time anymore. As if we subscribe to that concept anymore. Everything is now. Here. Second-less. The future is the past and the present. I can feel the burn of neurons connecting in my brain. Each action of my every cell causes a ripple that moves ever so delicately every hair on my body. Now I feel the chill in the air. For the first time in a lifetime I sense everything. I am aware. I am aware of the sounds and the noise and the lights and the air, the sense of the exchange of breath in the disappearing dark of tree-shade. Immortals we are in this threatening moment. It seems we have pulled the understanding of all knowledge to our subconscious mind and have gained from an unlimited ken the understanding of the relationship of everything. Life is then clearly divided into moments of epic, cathedral-vast Zen, and moments of the mere, sheen-less life. Read my words twice, traveler, and savor the secrets of each word. There are two meanings to the lights and sounds and words of this universe.

Read my words twice.

*

Leh at Last

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

Anatole France

Day 7

Elevation: 11,562 ft.

Distance from Leh: 0 km.

Every morning that we wake up to has taken thirteen billion years to create. And Sarchu is truly a wonderful place to witness a freshly made morning. A tent-town set in a bowl of a valley, its beauty should be appreciated in the warmth and light of the Sun. This we did, as soon as we woke up. Standing outside the tent, I stared at the huge wall of rock that blocked the horizon and extended, unending, to my left and right. I turned around to see a mirror-image of the huge wall of rock running east to west. It reminded me of the gates of Mordor.

As the sun rose above the mountains, I walked towards one of the mountain walls, enjoying the heat of the sun on my face and looked back to see the wind moving all the tents in the same direction. The mix of warm sunlight and cool breeze lifted my spirits and I walked back smiling. Near the tents, I saw 3 and Moham already gearing up, chatting with another biker group we had met last night.

Conversations start easily here – 'Are you coming from Rohtang or heading towards it?' and 'We are coming from Leh; heading to Manali. We started in Srinagar and came through Kargil and Drass' and 'is this your first time here?' and 'Did you visit Tso-Moriri?' – Easy conversations. No strangers on the road.

Everywhere, people were starting to get up and mull around, calling for tea and breakfast. We picked up pace too, knowing that the target for the day was Leh and Leh was a relatively massive two hundred fifty kilometers away. There is no cellular network in Sarchu, or throughout most of the Manali-Leh route for that matter, so we couldn't get in touch with Sumanth. We ate a quick breakfast and hit the road, wondering where Sumanth had woken up that morning.

Sarchu is the last town, right at the edge of the imaginary line where Himachal Pradesh turns into Jammu & Kashmir, and the Lahaul valley ends. As we crossed the check-post to exit Sarchu, the policeman there smiled and stopped us. I had forgotten my helmet in his tent when I was signing our entry records last night, and he had come out to give it to me. We chatted for some time in Hindi with the man, who told us he had been posted there since November of last year, and it gets dreary some time. He told us he is from Rajasthan, so this cold feels unnatural to him. And he told us our friendship reminded him of his, which made him remind himself to return the helmet, which made us smile. We thanked the man and started.

We enter Jammu & Kashmir through its district of Ladakh, and already signs of change become apparent. This border between Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir is caused more by the change in geography than by any change in culture or religion or language. The elevation has changed the texture of the mountains and the land. Everything is the same dust-brown monochrome, except near the rivers, where there is a sudden burst of crystal blue and green, along with the twinkling colors of wild flowers. But mostly the road is skyward and the river is left behind, so your mind settles down to ponder the contrast of just two colors – sky-blue and dust-brown.

The elevation has also changed the wind, which is rougher now, and carries the dust with it. We are instantly thankful for our balaclavas. The roads themselves are filled with the same dust-brown dust, lifting and dancing in puffs as a bike cuts through, and sometimes rising and rising to form swirling dust devils. The lack of color and texture make common cause with the harsh winds to spread a blanket of melancholy. There are no unnecessary sounds here. The wind pipes down sometimes when there are gaps in its conversation with the mountains. And by now, the sound of the engine has become second nature - the mind doesn't listen to it anymore. In this increasing lack of sensory stimuli, I hold on to the silence and listen to it. I notice this first at the Gata Loops.

The Gata loops are a series of mountain switchbacks, twenty-one in total, which quickly take travelers up to more than fifteen thousand feet. The roads here turn a light shade of grey because of the sand. This sand is also an indication of what is to come at Morey Plains, but we don't know that yet. As we cross switchback after switchback, the panorama opens up in a stunning display of dull, bronze mountains with tufts of grass growing here and there, and views of elephant-skinned roads spread beneath us. The roads curve with the curving mountain, exploring it like the hands of a lover. We spot many off-road trails that cut a shorter path across the switchbacks, but they could only be navigated when returning in the opposite direction – our bikes do not have enough pull to challenge gravity at these heights. We did explore these off-road options when we returned to Gata on our way back.

Right at the top of the loops is a scenic view point and a well-placed gazebo. From there, all I see is the blue sky being devoured by the craggy teeth of mountain peaks, and a yawning valley between me and the mountains I seek. All I hear is a deep silence, created by the lack of disturbance, created by the awesome presence of the mountains, and accentuated periodically by the rush of sighing wind. The silence here is somehow enlarged; somehow manages to hold the mountains in thrall; holds me in thrall. This silence echoes, repeatedly, between the enormous halls formed by the titanic walls of these mountains. I can come up with no other explanation to the depth of this silence except that it must have been churned and magnified ten thousand times, ceaselessly, by these valleys in repetitive echoes of stillness.

We have two more mountain passes to conquer, and we go out to meet them. The first of these two is Naki-La, which we crossed without realizing, without fanfare. But Lachulung La, boasting an elevation of sixteen thousand four hundred feet, threatened to delay us further. As we neared the top, it became increasingly colder, and we saw patches of ice decorate the walls of Lachulung. We huddled deeper into our jackets. At the end of an immense stretch of road on the long, curving shoulder of the mountain, we spotted workers clearing an enormous landslide. Landslide number two. We are closer now to the Zanskar region and the Ladakh valley. We waited and watched large earth-movers operated by the military and the Border Road Organization (BRO) slowly clear the road. As we waited, more and more bikers joined us, and a few cars. The biker group from Maharashtra, who we thought were ahead of us, also came up behind us. As if we had met long lost friends, we got off the bikes to greet them, and they returned our enthusiasm. Eventually, after forty five minutes, a narrow path was cleared through the rubble for bikers to get through, and we made for this gap.

The top of Lachulung La is cold, lonely, grey, melancholic and windy. These are combinations of sensations I have never experienced simultaneously before. We are at sixteen thousand feet, higher than we have ever been before, our bodies feeling the effect of the lack of oxygen and the difference in pressure. There is a strange kind of lethargy that comes with this setting, a paralysis of action and thought. Fingers refuse to form a fist, legs refuse to move. And so we force ourselves to stop for a quick photo session in the gathering storm of grey. The scenery is the color of slate, and clouds like storm-chopped sea, but we are eager to begin our descent to escape the cold.

Life returns to the landscape. We begin to see tufts of grass and shrubs, and distant terraced farmlands far beneath, near the river. As we descend, warmth returns to our skin and bones, unfreezing us, and changing the mood. The roads are level now, and we can see solitary white-washed Chortens dot the landscape, looking like little soldiers braving the wind. There are shapes in the sand now, sculpted by the wind and water that is born in the winter and melts in the summer. The shapes are formations in the sand that look like pyramids, triangular and conical, with channels of snowmelt separating them. Closing in on Morey plains, we see these formations more and more, near the gorges formed by the river Sumkhel Longpa. In the bright afternoon Sun, these shapes stand upright, looking very much like Chortens themselves, except they are the color of sand.

Our entry into the plains is spectacular and sudden. One moment we think we are about to begin climbing another mountain, the next minute we realize that we haven't entered a mountain road, but actually a parched steppe elevated to the roof of mountains. The Morey plains consist of a single stretch of road that extends out towards Tanglang-La for forty odd kilometers. The road is straight; part concrete, part just sand the consistency of talcum powder, and a good place to bury your bike in if you don't need it anymore. That one road is broken in many places and is being rebuilt in places, so sometimes you make your own road, drawing fishtails in the sand as the bike struggles to grip. Oh, the sand! You could use it to powder a baby's bottom. While it is softer than any sand I've encountered before, riding on it is difficult, to say the least. The tires fail to grip the surface, and the bike constantly swivels, forming curves on the sand that look like snakeprints. We saw in Morey plains the opposite of Rohtang; there the motorcycles refuse to move because the quicksand mud won't let go, swallowing the tires whole; here they wouldn't hold still and maintain balance because the sand is too silky to support their weight. All Chortens and stupas and natural formations disappear once inside this place. These plains are an exploration into the ecosystem of the highest cold desert in the world. We enter a phantom land, a land where no one lives, where nothing stands as an identity of human presence or a sign of human existence. It is as if this world is content to live without our touch. The river comes to meet the road at one or two places right at the beginning of the plains, but for the rest of the journey across, you are alone with the sky and the wind and the breathing, whispering sand.

The sky here is enormous, undisturbed visually by trees or mountains, and you feel as if the window to heaven has been opened a little wider than ever before. The view is a hundred and eighty degree panorama of far, distant mountains, sloping hills covered in sand and rocks and scree, and the sky looks like an inverted bowl of blue porcelain. We try, and fail, to capture the enormousness of the place on our cameras. A camera cannot capture this grandeur, not in its original scale. Words just graze the surface of the true spirit of this place. You need eyes; human eyes attached to human minds to really witness and appreciate Morey plains. You need to be present to be dazed by it. It is a place where everything is larger than you are but you don't feel dwarfed by anything. On the contrary, you feel as large as that geography because your spirit expands to fill the space in between. Here, the recognition comes that this world is bigger than we imagine it to be. Here, the sky is larger than the earth. Here, you are no longer your body, but you are soul, and simply eyes; wide, expanding eyes, caught seemingly within a drop of water that falls flat on the ground and acquires a delicate, transparent, quivering, semi-spherical shape. From within this semi-spherical world you witness the earth stretch long and narrow and straight as all other directions are conquered by a liquid sky.

How do I describe to you the wonders of this place? Words fail me, and perhaps I fail my words. If you and I were eye to eye you would see in my eyes a fiery spark as I reminisce about the fast moving clouds in an ocean of sky. But writing is a one-dimensional art. If I were to paint a picture of this place and show it to you, in its colors and in its depth you would understand. If I were to sing a song of this place, in its lilting melody you would understand. But in the art of writing one tries to show what one sees, what one feels - with words; words that are interpreted differently by different experiences of those words. Therein lies both the great strength and a rare weakness of this art. There is a chance that something is lost in translation, but there is an equal and comforting chance that something is also gained. Something is always gained.

We cross Morey plains in complete silence, lost in observation, and reception. A traveler must have a greater capacity for silence, to meet silence with silence, to be able to descend into silence. In this state, all he is, or all he should be, is an observer. This is his penance. He must attune to a mental silence, so that his prejudices do not taint his observations. He must attune to a physical silence, so that his words do not stop him from listening. The best of things do not ask us to sacrifice - they give without needing, without asking. If one feels silence is a sacrifice, it is not; for a traveler, it is an investment. This silence will give him more words, more thoughts and more creativity than is possible with speech. On a journey, words are important, but not as much as the lack of words.

On journeys like these you will understand how easy it is to slip into meditation. The repetitive refrains of the engine, the echoing mountains, dust devils rising and falling like great desert djinns, an endless road of sand and the thinking mind all conspire to lead you deeper into the dark of your mind; you will understand how quickly a journey into the wilderness transforms into a journey into the mind. You will understand zazen. You will allow ideas and thoughts to rise like foam from churning sea, and you will allow them to return again into this mysterious sea, because you are not looking to answer questions about the foam, but you are seeking to find out more about the sea, and what holds the sea.

And all of this, this entire process of slipping into an unplanned meditation, becomes second-nature; subconscious. Out there alone in the rarefied altitudes of mind and mountains, you will realize that the yearnings for the exploration of the subconscious comes from within the subconscious. More and more you will seek them out, these terrifying, midnight roads, these unconscious submissions to silence, and realize that silence is the prayer of the spiritual. And you will befriend silence.

We carried the silence of Morey plains in our hearts and on our lips as we breached the mighty Tanglang La. At seventeen thousand five hundred feet above sea level, some say it is the third highest motor-able road in the world, after Khardung La and Chang La. The mountain pass was frosty and bleak. It was three in the afternoon, and the noon sun hidden behind murky clouds cast a somber shadow upon us. We spent only a few minutes there – the cold, sharp breeze and the grey tone of the afternoon provoked a deep sadness that reminded us of Lachulung. The exhaustion caused by oxygen depletion did not help either, and we descended Tang-Lang La with great unease. But Tanglang La had the some of the most enchanting mountain roads we had seen. The mountains are so large that we could see and follow the one single road around the curve of their shoulders, so that a biker at the end of the road on the opposite face of the mountain would appear miniscule in the vast distance to the biker at the beginning of the road, but still visible in the endless length of that road. The echo of the engines crash into each other in the halls of the mountains, and it is a sound that I still dream to; the depth of each valley is marked in the eye of my mind, the height of each mountain; the color, the hue, the way they pierced the sky.

Descending rapidly from the heights of Tanglang Pass, we rushed with momentum of the descent to Rumptse, still about hundred kilometers from Leh. Our spirits rose with the slow increase in greenery. Somewhere along this route, we caught up with a river, and followed its directions into a deep gorge, where the road ran parallel to it, and the walls of the gorge rose high on both sides, casting a glorious gloom. The strip of blue sky trapped between the lips of the gorge itself looked like a river, and the two rivers reflected each other, just as the two walls did. The walls were strangely formed, like slices of cake that had fallen on top of each other. And these walls of sedimentary rock changed in color with distance, slowly transitioning from hues of blue and pink to green and lavender and black and purple. Through this gorge the three motorcycles sped, following the road and the parallel rivers of earth and sky.

We stopped in the middle somewhere, and listened to the sounds. The gurgling of the river is magnified by the walls of crumbling rock, and here and there small caves can be seen into which streams of the river disappear. In the constant half-light, strange shrubs of brownish plants grow through crevices in the rocks. Looking up we could see a few trees peeking into the gorge, as if wondering what happens here down below. I searched for stones of the same color as the walls of the gorge, and found many such examples.

As my faith changes shape and becomes closer to nature, I find I am attracted to some ideas of animism. Walking in the half-dark of the gorge, searching for uniquely colored stones, I realize that I have begun to believe in the power of amulets. I believe in their ability to act as capacitors, as time machines and as teleportation devices. I collect stones from hills and sand from beaches, driftwood from the seas and strange-looking pieces of wood from forests. I have a large collection of sea shells. I collect trinkets that represent my relationship with people, to recall in repose moments I cherished with them. I charge stones and crystals and earth-bound things with energy, in moments where I find myself with an abundance of energy. So I have a piece of thick, red twine that was part of a birthday present, a hairband from the night she let her hair down, a letter full of love that is not a love letter, and a fingerprint on a napkin. The relationships may have ended, but through these tiny things I can connect instantly to my memory of that person, and when I do, folders open up inside my mind that transport me back to places I have been with or memories I have created with that person. They act as time machines and portkeys, as mnemonics for memories. They have the power to spark old emotions that I assumed were forgotten but still lie hidden beneath layers of denial or routine. I can touch a lavender seashell and return to a beach on the Arabian Sea, and relive moments of that journey. I can touch a revolver-shaped piece of wood and experience again the night and the campfire of Tadiyandamol. Or I can touch these talismans of power and absorb from them pockets of energy that I had stored in them during moments of overwhelming beauty and positivity. You can't help but believe in the power of amulets when the mind is bent by the will of these little things filled with disconnected pieces of yourself. You come to recognize them as fragments of your mind. Just the simple act of attributing, of attaching a living memory of your mind to a non-living entity gives it a strange, unspoken form of life, and an undeniable strength. I find more and more that this practice of personifying elements of nature with pieces of your soul is an important one. When I bring them back home, I also bring a piece of myself back home. And when I do return with my amulets, not only do I return with stolen pieces of a journey, but I also open up little wormholes to another time, energy and space. When I take something from a scene and make it my own I fuse that moment with me forever. I transfer the contents of precious seconds into these keepsakes, thereby emptying parts of my soul into them. Don't you see then how perfectly obvious it is for these things to respond to me? They are chinks of my soul. With these stones and shells I share a language and a kinship.

It occurs to me now, here in this half-lit canyon that a stone also is in contact with nature. And by that leap of thought I have to agree that everything inside nature is in contact with nature, is in a dialogue with nature. Everything that exists is within this infinite sphere of nature, and therefore everything is in some way in touch with it. And so my realization at Baralacha pass was only half complete. Non- living entities also change, also lose to and gain from nature, and in so doing attain an unchanging identity. Everything that changes, remains. We just don't recognize these changes, because they are slower, and occur on massive geographic-scale. And if this is the case, then there is nothing that is 'extra-nature'. Nothing exists that is _super_ natural; _para_ normal. Nothing exists that is not communicating in some way with nature. The thought comes that perhaps we need a new definition of what is alive; that something runs through everything in nature that gives everything an un-defined form of life. This needs discovery.

*

After the rush of the last two days, to find ourselves slightly ahead of schedule was relaxing. We could take a breather, and we did so in a tiny hotel in Rumptse. When we stopped for a late lunch, curious children gathered around the bikes and I bent to shake hands with one kid. He shyly held out his hand and Moham snapped a picture of us. Inside the hotel, we sat down and asked for the usual, dal-chaval. A large, ragged dog watched us with one eye, and deciding we were good sports, got up from his place in the sun to sit down right next to me.

I looked down at the dog and saw that his fur was unwashed and flea-bitten. Large fleas were making colonies on the poor dog's back. It barked a booming bark and I immediately felt a kinship, the kind of kinship you sometimes feel when you meet a person for the first time and you know nothing about them, but you still like them instantly. I bent down to scratch his neck, and he settled into a drooly slumber.

After lunch, as we prepared to leave, the boy I had shook hands with came to us and said, 'Joley'! Joley is a Ladakhi word that can mean 'hello' or 'welcome' or 'good day' or 'good luck' and you will often find bikers and locals greeting each other this way. The dog's name too, was Joley. I like to imagine he is still asleep under the tables of the restaurant at Rumptse, letting the battalion of fleas eat into him, waking up only to see which new traveler had walked in, and then walking over to them and sleeping under their table, just for company and just because he could.

We had noticed that the size of the animals increased with the altitude. Dogs and cows and goats were bigger than average, but some of the birds we saw were enormous. And what we thought were crows turned out to be a type of yellow-beaked crow-black birds that seemed to enjoy to swooping down on dogs to scare them out of their furs.

From Rumptse to Upshi and beyond, the road improves drastically. As we approached Upshi, we approached civilization, and we met for the first time the perennial, powerful Indus. Many etymologies of India lead back to this river – the names of language and country, of race and culture, of religion and geography, all stem from the Indus like her many tributaries. It gushed along the highway and accompanied us to Karu.

At Karu, large trucks were parked on both sides of the road, right outside giant military establishments. Karu is a military town, and is well equipped. We found our cell phones working again. Without stopping, we tried to reach Sumanth on his cell phone, but could not connect to him – it looked like he was still out of network range. It was also possible he was already riding back towards us, and we prayed this was true.

From Karu to Leh is a beautiful stretch of dark tarmac, bordered by pebbles painted patriotically in white and orange and green. Here and there are other patriotic elements – the Indian flag painted on rocks and hills, the statue of Mother India outside a military camp and 'Jai Hind' picked out in white stones on the face of a sun-burned hill. From the highway, with the sun setting in front of us, we could see a line of mountains recede into the horizon, each mountain a slightly lesser shade of blue-grey. At sunset we reached Leh. In the background of the setting sun splashed all over the dark road, we stopped at the entrance to Leh, where a signboard spelled out the words 'Welcome to Leh'. We took a picture in front of that signboard, Moham, 3 and I, and rode into the long-imagined city.

*

The Anatomy of Mountains

I have always had a theory that people who live close to mountains and hills are much more humane than those who don't. I feel they are shaped by a mountain, by her largeness and largesse, by her ability to treat with the sky and earth with ease; by her generosity in turning clouds into rivers that feed millions; by her richness, her deciduousness; and by her ability to stare at everything around her, eyeless, endless. I have always had a theory that all good things are born near mountains. Who would have thought that the Chenab, one of the five famous rivers of Punjab, starts off as ice on top of Baralacha, then melts into two streams, one flowing east and one flowing west, and then turning and twisting and calculating to meet again at Tandi to form the Chandrabhaga River, which then enters Punjab to become the Chenab. Humanity needs something to rise and rise and meet the clouds halfway to bring down the rivers they carry.

You cannot see a mountain and not know, in your bones, that she is alive. That she is watching you. A mountain is the personification of ambiguity and therefore allows us each a different interpretation of her form and purpose. And when you stare at a mountain looming over you, you unconsciously project the entirety of your self – your thoughts, your ideas, your characteristics, your deeds; everything that defines you – you project it all on the enormous mountain face. And without knowing, you look back at yourself and begin a long overdue introspection. Mountains watch us as we approach them. They can look at us, and looking thus, they can stare into the very center of our souls, instantly knowing the deeds of the past and your present morality. That's why I feel that one may visit a temple-town and not come back changed by the pilgrimage, but one cannot visit the sea or a mountain and come back unaffected. It is the vastness of these beings, you see. The vastness changes us. They give us an indication of how a life of immensity, of an expansive spirit of generosity, can be lead.

Mountains elevate us. They allow us to climb their bodies and look down upon the more clarified view of the landscape beneath. They allow us to gain a perspective of the land, of lower altitudes, of lower attitudes. Climbing a mountain is symbolic; the idea is to climb to the peaks of yourself. Mountains challenge us. They ask of us but these questions - how high can you go? How much can you see? How far? They say to us as we climb them slowly, that if there is but one purpose to life, then it must be in the attempt of discovering the lay of the land by climbing to a higher elevation.

*

Magnetic Hill

Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of the living.

Miriam Beard

Day 9

Elevation: 11,000 ft.

Distance from Leh: 30 km.

We slept in the confines of Irfan Guest House that night. We had been provided an enormous suite, with two large bedrooms and two bathrooms and four beds. One bedroom overlooked a narrow, cobbled street that led to the guest house, and from that window we could peep into the kitchen of a rooftop restaurant called Chopsticks. The street was well used, and we saw tourists of a thousand kind pound the grey cobblestone.

The narrow street began as a major road on the tourist map, with modern restaurants and hotels and Tibetan shops selling serene Buddha statues and old bells and new bells that were made to look like old bells. A canal with running water followed this road, until the road met a café, and they decided to part ways, and the canal continued straight beyond the café, and the road became a path and turned left and narrow.

The café was always filled with the sort of people you would want to see in a café in Leh, or a café anywhere for that matter. Six or seven customers sat, in various shades of gender and color and clothing and culture, and smoke rose from them like from incense in a temple. From small, dirty glasses they drank spicy lemon tea that the café was famous for. And each pursued his art. One held a guitar the color of her auburn hair in her hands and touched the strings tenderly, in rhythm with some great song that filled only her; that only she could hear with her eyes closed, and the sound of her song made the music in the café. Another held a well-used pencil suspended an inch above his eye, its graphite edge reflected on the soft, semi-circular dome of his glistening eye, a threadbare diary open on the table in front of him next to a drained glass, empty except for four pips of lemon. The fingers of his other hand disappeared in his wiry, thick black hair, tugging at his scalp in soft frustration.

People on the street shopping for new bells that looked like old bells would stop and turn and wander into the café, looking for the source of the music, enchanted. They would walk in, innocent and curious, and find themselves being plied by the owner with glasses of hot lemon tea, shining like molten amber through dirty glasses, and find themselves diverted from art to art. Brilliant evenings were spent here, ice-sketched vignette-nights, shaded in by the pencil of a mysterious god. And the artists would ask themselves - What causes art? What causes our humanity to use a medium, any medium, to discover divinity? To reveal divinity piece by piece? One day perhaps all the pieces of the puzzle will be derived from the playful mocking of nature, and then we will sit together in a large circle, you and I included, in the clearing of a dark forest, around a crackling orange fire, and piece together the entire image of god. And the pieces will come together, slowly, slowly; slowly revealing to the gathered curious, a large crackling orange bonfire in the clearing of a dark forest, surrounded by a large circle of you and I and other many adventurers. We will see our own backs, and then realize that art comes from the gentle friction of nature and humanity, because in that friction, god is rubbing off on us. We have been, we are, and we will forever imbibe divinity into humanity. How else are we to evolve? In every touching of nature's various snow-laden branches, a little snow-dust must always fall on our shoulders.

That night, after dinner, 3 and I slowly walked out of the café, and back to the guest house, and found Moham fast asleep in the large bed of the main bedroom. We quickly fell asleep too, wondering with our last thoughts where Sumanth was right then and what tomorrow was going to bring. Somewhere in the night the guitar still sang.

We woke up late the next day, and dilly-dallied in the guest house, eating a massive, open-air breakfast in its courtyard. The Leh sun was bright and cool, and each breath of air filtered through its radiant glory before entering our lungs. But the city awaited discovery, and we leapt out of our chairs after breakfast and went to visit our motorcycles. In the clear sunlight it became apparent that they needed some pampering. In places like Leh, which are junctions of nowhere, talent with motorcycles can quickly gain you notoriety, and we found out that the best mechanic in the city was swimming in ill-treated motorcycles, and so we soon found for ourselves the second-best mechanic in town. A jovial, energetic man, he kept us entertained with stories of travelers and foreigners and locals, and the strange and sometimes complex situations that develop when you throw them all in. The motorcycles had taken quite a beating, and sand from Morey plains was found canoodling with the mud from Rohtang pass. The repairs took the better half of the day, and we spent this time arranging permits to visit Khardung-La, Pangong-Tso and Diskit.

Around 3 in the afternoon, Moham's cellphone rang, and Sumanth's voice leapt out of the speakers. He was in Leh! We hurried to meet him at the entrance of the city, and when we did, a portion of enthusiasm that we had lost on that winding road on Baralacha returned. We took him back to Irfan guest house and ate a hearty lunch, and recognizing that the day was still young and the motorcycles healthy again, decided to go on a fast ride to Magnetic Hill.

Magnetic Hill is so called because of an unusual phenomenon. At a certain spot, the road begins to slant upwards visibly. That spot on the road is where the phenomenon occurs and is marked by yellow boxes. If you were to stop your bike or car over these boxes and turn off the engine and release the brakes, you'd be surprised to see the vehicles move slowly up the slope off their own accord. In a sense, they defy gravity. Some explanations have been given for this phenomenon, ranging from the paranormal to the scientific. But we wanted to see for ourselves.

The road to Magnetic Hill is also the road to Kargil and, from there, to Srinagar, and is a national highway. There exists a specie of Ladakh biker that modifies our route, and instead of returning to Delhi via Manali, he goes on to meet Kargil, then Srinagar, then Dalhousie, then MacLeodganj and then completes an enormous, two thousand kilometer long circle, filled with mountains and mist, at Mandi.

Directly north-west of Leh and smooth enough to land an airplane on, the road to Magnetic Hill hugs the mountain edge. That evening, the black tarmac stood in stark contrast against the unending carpets of sand. The ride to Magnetic Hill turned out to be one of the most scenic of the trip, although we witnessed a different kind of scenery. Distances hold a different meaning here. Wherever a mountain doesn't grow the emptiness allows a vista of faraway sands. There is something in the sand that pulls the eye forward and farther. We could see the skyline of Leh, drifting in the heat haze like a mirage in the desert sand. We could see the green snake of water-soaked land, evidence of Indus. We could see hills upon hills, and mountains behind mountains, disappearing behind each other in reducing intensities of grey. On sharp, tight curves of the road where the land descended suddenly, the eye still held on to the blue of the sky, and only with the sudden drop, would recognize the color of the sand, and through that the presence of land, far beneath. The sun seemed to explode from behind every hill, and glinted off the dark roads of the highway. The air, cooled by our speed, played with our hair in gratitude.

In the middle of nowhere, where the road begins to slope upwards and disappears behind a sand- colored hill, a sign boldly proclaimed we had reached Magnetic Hill and the exact location of the infamous phenomenon. On the neat blackboard of the road, three square, yellow boxes had been painted. The sign informed us that we had to turn the engine off and park our motorcycles within the boxes, and wait as the vehicles magically refused to listen to gravity and move uphill without the use of the engine. So we lined up the three motorcycles over the three boxes, switched the engines off, and in the sudden silence interrupted by nothing and no one, the four of us waited and watched with bated breath.

Nothing happened. The bikes did not move an inch, and did not roll up the hill as was expected. Silence hung. Somewhere nearby, a crow cawed. We stared at the road, and then at each other and then burst into shouts of dismay and annoyance. We later learned from the locals that the boxes are a little off, and the phenomenon can be witnessed by parking a few feet beyond the markers. But it was a bright evening, and we were all alone but for each other. And that gave us a license to drop the act of age and responsibility we carry so well in society and among people, and so we parked the bikes and dropped twenty years. The only thing to play with, to become a child with, was the signboard that had the word "Magnetic" on it. So we climbed it, swung on it, acted as if the board itself was magnetic, and stuck to it in strange shapes of limb and facial expressions. We played in the sand, rolled in the sand, tried to make castles in the sand, and tried to make snowballs with the sand. Exhausted, we sat down to watch the sun set behind the far city of Leh, a steel-colored drop of paint in an ocean of sand and stone. The evening ended there, but I will forever recall this time with fondness. One is not often allowed the magic of becoming six years old.

*

The Anatomy of Sky

We are blazing through one hairpin turn after another, burning through the switchbacks, the wind screaming through hair and limbs and bandanas, and everything around us disappears in a blur, except the blue, blue sky. The blueness is disturbed by bright, white, sun-lit clouds, hanging on to see if something new happens. Here and there the blue is also disturbed by the dark shapes of mocking birds as they swoop past us, flying from valley to mountain and switchback to switchback, not needing to heed to a road like we must. With envy, I stare at the sky.

What is it in the sky that makes us think of the infinite; of ways to immerse our deepest selves with that infinite? What is it in the sky that pulls at the strings of that deep something inside us, and asks us to somehow, somehow leave behind our finite physicality and dissolve completely in the mystery? What makes us yearn to somehow merge with it? Why does humanity seek, generation after generation, oneness? Oneness with what? What is out there that we seek so willfully within ourselves? What is it that the sky is hiding that we think we see when we're not watching but only sensing?

Questions, questions.

Descending from the heights of Magnetic hill, I see a storm crackling faraway in the evening sky, enveloping distant grey-blue mountains. It is against the Sun, so it's still bright here as we descend, but the storm is throwing a veil of shadow quickly across the eastern sky. I see the lightning and wait for the thunder. I wait and wait and my wait stretches into thought, and it becomes difficult to agree with the fact that in some time and space that my senses don't yet understand, the thunder and lightning happened at the same instant. How is it that one event can cause such fractured reactions in our senses? We see before we hear. Shouldn't this give us a hint of the fragility of our senses, of their susceptibility to the tricks of nature? Shouldn't this tell us something about the way nature works - that somehow all natural beings - things that are alive in all the senses of the word - communicate with each other, recognize each other and acknowledge each other using just one sense - presence? That in the mere whisper of clouds touching clouds the twins thunder and lightning are born but we are informed almost casually, as if in afterthought; and beams of light from the Sun hit the Earth and turn heat into moisture into water into grey, pregnant clouds? Shouldn't this tell us something about nature's sensory network, how much more complex and simpler it is than that of man's? Shouldn't it tell us, that while our senses look at nature's elements and divide them for understanding, nature seems capable of understanding the elements in their evanescence? Most importantly, shouldn't it tell us how flimsy the mirage of reality is that is being built around our ears, second by second, by our weak senses?

The human sensory system amazes me, both in its strengths and in its weaknesses. Perhaps this is why I delve sometimes into the world of psychedelics – to explore the limits of my senses and to play with them. What amazes me, and what I often think about, is that human beings have been using psychedelics and hallucinogens since the beginning of civilization, although it is only natural, but no less extraordinary, that we've been having psychedelic experiences for such a long time – civilizations were born in the nurturing heart of nature where most natural psychedelic substances were and are found. We have been eager to modify and alter our senses using any method available to us, long enough to allow us to see through the gaps in nature. If our senses allow us to describe the world, then stretching our senses allow us a different description of the same world; and all descriptions are necessary in order to come to a greater understanding.

Modern humans have the advantage of historic and anecdotal knowledge to better understand the altered condition of the mind during a psychedelic experience. Even then, we don't quite understand them completely. But imagine, and this is what amazes me, the reaction of the first human being who happened to drink the potent tea made from the roots of Ayahuasca, or chewed on a Peyote cactus or a Psilocybin mushroom. He would have had no one to guide him through the strange and mind-bending visualizations and emotions, the effect of time slowing down, the out of body experience. His primitive mind must have grappled to make sense of such a trance and may even have come up with the first theories of how another world exists just beyond the one we see - a strange world, a spirit world, a world hard to define physically, as floating, as untethered and as ethereal as the mind, because this world is an aspect of the mind. He must have gone to sleep dumbstruck, this brother ten thousand years separated, and right at the edge of the last moment of his experience, he may have felt that he had peeled back a layer of an unknown world and, for the briefest of seconds, stared at the face of something incomprehensible. It is then easy to imagine how he may have come up with the first imaginations of god, His first definition and first identity – primitive, fearsome, awe-inspiring.

But do not misunderstand me. I am not trying to imply that the idea or concept of god is a byproduct of a psychedelic experience, but only trying to suggest that these natural chemicals may have been a medium for us to silence the chatter of the mind long enough to hear the softly tinkling anklets of god for the first time, to keep open the eye of mind long enough to discern a pattern among the chaos of jungle-living, to cleanse for a minute second our doors of perception to witness the unification of the un-ending diversity of life. We must have, for the first time, felt the soft touch of a great and mystic energy, bubbling and flowing in everyone and everything.

We have to start by agreeing with ourselves that we have another sense we do not openly acknowledge. There is something within us that is able to see the immaterial, the non-physical and the invisible. And this sense drives our thoughts and cravings of the eternal. What logic within us drives this? What dreams? Is it something in our religion? Or is it something in our spirit? What is the seat of this sense? How did humanity acquire it, learn to use it, learn to hone it? Is religion the seat of this sense? Is this where it was born? It cannot be - not everyone has religion; not everyone subscribes to a written faith. Then we must find something that is common in all, because this sense and its symptoms are common in all. Some don't accept it; some avoid the truth of it by not heeding its call. But everyone is drawn to the sky within as they are to the sky outside, at least once in their lifetime. What then is common to all?

The spirit, or the soul - the one thing that all humanity shares equally. And we are yet to find physical evidence of it. We have seven billion witnesses but no evidence - another proof that the universe enjoys dealing in paradoxes and ironies. We have no evidence of the infinite, or of its sensing soul. There is only the feeling, and the fear, of their existence.

It seems to me that it was somehow easier for us to believe in these things before, that humanity had a certain innocence that could believe in the magic of the soul. In the last century, we lost that innocence. Civilizations met each other and did not know how to greet each other. The world became a smaller place and foots were crushed. The last hundred years were humanity's teenage years, the years of rebellion and discovery. Everybody grew up. Life on earth slowly entered the more stable twenties. We are a more careful people now. We are more tolerant. We respect other cultures and other faiths. We respect rights. We seem to have swallowed the pain of two world wars and the thousand, thousand battles, and we seem to have gained some sense of letting go. We have gained a certain kind of kindness. If some good were to come out of the deaths of sixty million people, then it must be this - that humanity is easier with kindness. We are more inclined to give it away. So now there is a freedom in the air that allows us to study the infinite. And this time the freedom is global. It is no longer for the East to be mysterious and the West to be capricious. Worlds are mingling. And when worlds mingle, new brave ideas are born. Something good will come of this. Perhaps we will regain the innocence that believes.

When alone with these thoughts on a silent beach, with the entire panorama of night sky watching you watch it, you can't help but wonder - if the soul does exist, what is it made of? The ocean replies that perhaps the soul is nothing but an emergent quality of the interaction of neurons firing in the brain \- an epiphenomenon; that the soul is removed when the mind is removed, that the soul dies when the brain dies; that the soul is a delicate perfume, formed in the careful mix of identity, emotions, experiences, perspective, knowledge and wisdom; that the soul is the rainbow that is formed when the light of this world hits the prism of the mind.

And the velvet blanket of night replies that perhaps the soul is made of the same thing the sky is made of, the stars are made of - hence the endless attraction, hence the mysterious magnetism. The soul seeks to return to where it was born. It seeks completion, perfection, saturation. It seeks dissolution in a universe of division. That's why we bond. That's why we have families and friends, groups and teams, villages and cities, civilizations and cultures. We must mingle because we must somehow remain in touch with another soul, for every soul is a constant reminder of home, of sky. Here humanity is torn: between an earth-bound body and a flightless soul. That's why we share lives and share stories. That's why we kiss, that's why we make love - to be inside another person, inside enough for one soul to touch another; to find one moment of contact, one moment of flight and weightlessness in the tornado-chaos of absolute gravity. When you kiss a person, you seek the soul of that person. No longer is your body under the commands of your heart and mind. No, that kiss was sought by your soul yearning for the reassuring touch of another. It is no longer something physical – it's just two souls seeking communion.

*

This Way of Life

The typical human life seems to be quite unplanned, undirected, unlived and unsavored. Only those who consciously think about the adventure of living as a matter of making choices among options, which they have found for themselves, ever establish real self-control and live their lives fully.

Karl Albrecht

We woke up early the next morning, washing away the dust and sand of Magnetic Hill in chilly, shivering showers. We had decided to give the bikes a much need rest-day, and had booked a taxi to take us to Pangong-Tso and back. Pangong-Tso, meaning Pangong 'lake', is a 134 kilometer long body of blue, blue water. India shares almost half of it with Tibet, but I doubt if the lake knows. Tucked away beyond Chang La, a mountain pass seventeen-and-a-half thousand feet above the sea, the lake is surrounded by a series of blue-hued mountains, and I don't know if the lake steals its color from the mountains or the sky, but throughout the day, it changes into different shades of blue, from cobalt to chalk to turquoise to azure.

The way to Pangong-Tso is mountainous and desert-like, with thin, soft, white sand flying in the wind. On the climb to Chang-La I could see a river running far beneath, dragging with it bursts of lush greenery right across the glowering sand. Whenever we leveled with the earth, we saw endless plains of dull-green grass running into the horizon, or into more mountains. On just such a plain we saw hordes of wild horses running wild and spirited, the wind catching in their manes. To the eye, there is here a hint of the steppes – the endless expanse, the horses, the Yaks and the sea of whispering grass.

As we approached the summit of Chang pass, we saw a taxi parked to the side of the narrow road, and the driver underneath it was trying to fix a flat tire. A tall girl dressed in colorful local attire was standing and watching the sun, and turned to look as our taxi passed by. Involuntarily, I waved at her, and involuntarily she burst into a smile. The guys filled the van with catcalls which thankfully, she could not hear. But there is something about her genuine smile that sticks with me, and so I mention it. Perhaps it is the fact that all we could share was a smile, and yet it is somehow enough.

At the top of the pass, there is a small shop that serves tea, and a number of boards that proclaim that we stand on the second highest motorable road in the world. We stopped at the summit of the pass to take a few pictures, and ran into our friends from Maharashtra. They were returning to Leh, having spent a night on the banks of Pangong. When they began to describe the beauty of the lake, we couldn't wait any longer for our cups of tea to arrive, and we dropped the order to rush back to the waiting cab.

The road to Pangong is an undulating song, lilting with some ease and some indefinable melody, taking us up and up to visit the sky and then bringing us back safely down to earth. There is a restlessness about the road that we are attracted to - it reminds us of our own. Inside the taxi, there is a thick silence while we watch the mountains fly past. Even our thoughts lie mute.

Where the road meets the earth again, it comes in contact with a gushing, powerful river. It's pure, crystal waters allow us a glimpse of the riverbed and in the dappled play of sun and water we see hundreds of fishes swimming with and against the tide. The scent of wild flowers fills the valley, and we delay our journey to be there in the warmth of sun, the gurgling of river and the buzzing of bees. It is a bright day, and the sun shatters a million times over the dance of the river, and shards of light dazzle the eye continuously.

Walking around, we run into a family of Marmots emerging from holes in the ground, watching us with curiosity. We approach them gingerly, filled with equal, and perhaps, the same curiosity. They hop up onto the ground, in full view now, and sit on their haunches, their hands cupped in front of them, eight or nine in total. The driver of the taxi, also a local guide, warns us not to get too close to them – Marmots have been known to take a swipe at humans within reach. Two of the marmots start kissing each other furiously and begin to make out wildly. One of the marmots, however, loses interest in us, and walks away. Pausing a little distance from us, he sits down to stare at the late-morning Sun. For many minutes he does not move a muscle, and looks almost serene in his marmot-meditation.

Clearly, it is time for us to leave.

Our first glimpse of Pangong-Tso is through the gap of two distant mountains, a slash of blue on sand. We cheer in the van, and the driver picks up speed, as excited as we are. He tells us he is forty years old, but we don't believe him - he looks extremely young for forty. He also tells us that people often find garnet and turquoise stones near the lake, which we are more inclined to believe, or want to believe. Finally, after four long hours the taxi descends and rolls to a stop on the sandy bank of the lake. A few tourists and locals and tents are scattered here and there, adding a distraction of color and movement to the unmoving scene.

Pangong-Tso that day was as serene as that marmot in meditation. The lake shivered at the slightest touch of the wind, and gasps of mist escaped her at the merest whisper. Lovers would know how that happens. Its surface reflected the slow moving clouds and the unmoving mountains, and seemed to drink their essence to change its color. A group of birds went flying by, low over the uncut surface of the lake, skimming the water with the ends of their legs scissoring the cold surface with their beaks.

There are a few tents a little distance from the lake, and a souvenir shop. A large hill behind the tents looms suddenly, and on the surface of the hill, almost near the top, the words 'GARNET HILL' are picked out in large, white stones. The tents are restaurants, and we marched up to them for a quick lunch before we could submit to a deeper exploration of the lake.

As we ate, we watched the lake, and the sandbar that extends out into it. Nameless, joyous mountain birds would swoop down on the lake and would scissor the surface with their beaks, and then would retreat into mountains. To me, it is always a surprise, an ever-present awe, an impossible possibility that there are beings that fly. I stare endlessly at the sky and the birds that fly, and the way they manipulate the wind with their wings to gain altitude. To me, the ability to fly is synonymous to a freedom that is missing from the earth. It is an instantaneous escape; an immediate overview. This has been an old thought in me, and I fish out my cellphone to read a passage I had written down long ago which evoke similar emotions –

I am sitting under the hot sun, waiting for my cab to pick me up, and I notice the chaos on the street. Buses, cars, motorcycles are all plying on the road, chugging out choking grey monoxide, kicking up the dust again and again before it has time to settle. Men, women and children walk, talk, run and shout, seemingly going somewhere in a hurry. Vendors scream down the ears of prospective customers. Dogs chase each other around, not acknowledging the vehicles as potential death traps. To the keen mind, there is a bubble of calm hidden in this chaos somewhere... for the mind that can bring itself out of this sweltering heat of sun and sound. The escape is in the ability to look at the scene as if from above. But we are all trapped, including me, in routine, and in the first film of life that cleverly keeps a grip on our frontal lobes like the tentacles of an octopus, and we have to wonder - how far are we from serenity?

But then I look up. Far above, in the white hot sky with thin strips of blue, two tiny birds soar.

*

*

And all the names of the tribes, the nomads of faith who walked in the monotone of the desert and saw brightness and faith and color. The way a stone or found metal box or bone can become loved and turn eternal in a prayer...We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

Michael Ondaatje

After lunch, I walked towards the lake, and when I reached it I could see through the water into the pebble-filled bed. The water was transparent, as clear and pure and cool as the air at sixteen-thousand feet. Tiny, tiny waves gently lapped at the shore. I started walking along the shoreline, exploring its lengths and curves, collecting smooth pebbles of different shapes and color.

Where the shore meets the descending ridge of a hill, a narrow trail breaks away from the lake and climbs up. It weaves along for some time on the rock-strewn hill before going over the ridge. And there near the top I saw an ancient man, walking his herd of five scraggly sheep and one yak. He was dressed in rough garments, made from the skin of assorted animals and held together by a thick, dirty rope around the waist. He himself was dusty, and as barefoot as his herd. On his back he carried a bundle of wood. With his right hand he gripped a thick stick for support, and with the other he frequently adjusted the rope that held his attire. Curious, I increased my pace to reach him. As I approached, I could see that his face was tough and lined, weathered like old leather, and a grizzly white beard grew from his chin in small tufts. Hearing my labored breathing, he turned around, and I paused, suddenly apprehensive. His eyes were fire. They pierced at me for a brief second with a glance that cut the distance between us. In that shared glance he seemed to allow me an explanation of his life. But quickly the old man turned away and disappeared over the ridge. Hesitantly, I followed until I came to a halt at a small security post, beyond which travelers were not allowed, but beyond which I could see the old man ambling away.

The height of the ridge offered an overview of the lake and the surrounding hills and mountains. I could see the greater shape of the lake, and had the sudden sense of the imaginary boundary that hovers somewhere over the middle of the lake that divides it into two; between India and Tibet.

To a small bank made by the separation of lake and hill, I saw the man descend. His yak followed without argument, a slow, patient and rumbling creature of wool and warmth. There, leaning against the face of the hill, was a small, wooden hut. Looking at the old man walk slowly down, patiently herding his wayward sheep, I wondered if he was affected by the idea of nationality, seeing that he was living at the edge of two countries. Did he even think that far? I wondered if the idea of nations entered his daily routine or affected where he would find his next meal from. When he reached the hut, he pushed the flimsy door open, and sheep and yak and man rushed into its warmth.

In time, smoke began to rise from an opening in the hut, and I imagined man and beast settling in for the evening in the warmth of a wood-fuelled fire. What will he eat tonight? What serves as his dinner? Perhaps a cup of yak milk. But there are other questions, like does he question his existence, the way we question ours so often? And in his questioning, does he ask what the meaning of life is, and what is the purpose of his life? Does he ask himself if there are other ways of living?

I have never asked myself that question.

I returned to my friends and saw them wading into the lake. I joined them quickly, shivering as the waters of the lake rose higher and higher up my legs. A little distance away from where I stood knee- deep in the lake, a duck, or a bird that looked like a duck, floated calmly. It would, from time to time, dip its head underwater, and would come out to swallow something. In the hours that were swallowed by our play at the lake the Sun had traveled west and had begun to set behind the mountains near Pangong-Tso, and the driver hollered at us that it was time to leave. Drying ourselves, we looked back at the lake, and noticed in astonishment that the orange-lavender hue of the setting sun had suffused the lake with a new color.

Night is falling, and inside the taxi, we have become kids again. Moham is trying to catch a mosquito that is trapped in the van, unable to find its way to the windows, and is buzzing around complaining. The guys are razzing me about the girl we saw in the morning and another girl back home, and are trying to trap me into marrying her. Our unshod feet hang from the windows, reveling in the cool air of the night. And as there is nothing to do but talk or sleep, we do both. Stories from trips and escapades and high school are repeated, and they cause a great ruckus in the van. The driver is listening to local songs on the radio that all sound the same to me, and surely are all woven with one single tune and instrument. I am worried those songs will put him in a deep stupor and he will run us off the hill. We are descending slowly though, and there are no lights except that of the taxi. Outside, all is darkness. The stars dimly pierce through the thin fabric of the night sky and, far below in the valley beneath, we see lights from small hamlets and villages respond to them. Until we reached Leh, nothing moved except us.

Inside the van, stretched in the backseat, staring up at the stars from one window while legs dangled from the other, I asked myself that question for the first time, but not the last. Are there other ways to live a life? The sight of the old man and the image of a non-existent boundary over the lake have made me wistful. Both striking realizations are working in parallel in my mind, digging towards a truth I don't yet see. And both realizations seem to be speaking with each other and helping each other gather steam. What these parallel voices seek is unclear to me now, but I know it will come to me slowly. This has happened before – I've been split into two voices before - but wandering helps me unite my two voices.

The realization that there are other ways of living life makes me question mine, and I realize there are things like patriotism that I cannot relate to anymore, because my patriotism towards my country is someone else's idea. Again the thought comes, more powerful, more persistent and stronger, that these few boundaries that we call our nation are illusions. They are transitory – In 1946, India's boundaries included Pakistan and Bangladesh. In 1947, Pakistan separated to become an individual country. In 1971, Bangladesh separated from Pakistan to become independent. What has changed but ideas – a way of thinking in the minds of its peoples? Are those people who live now in Pakistan and Bangladesh any different, any more or any less, because they are no longer included within an imaginary definition of India? This doesn't sit well. Borders are, at the very best, metadata. Borders are drawn there where the strength of an idea begins to fade, and there where the strength of another idea takes charge. Borders between two nations are a semi-physical expression of the boundaries between their two ideologies. And so are borders between two religions.

Distances and mountains have never been the issue; men and women have always found ways to conquer them. To strip and divide the wholeness of the planet into states and countries for administrative purposes seems logical, but to do so to divide its peoples is not, and we must find ways in the coming century to do away with these concepts and begin the long march towards a united planet.

The more I travel, the more I am affected by the vast geography of our endless planet. I spend half my time gazing at the extravagant sceneries of this world – From the great stretches of the icy Andes to the great swathes of the Sahara sands, from the enchanting mystery of the Canadian north to the range and diversity of the islands of New Zealand. These are places I have already visited in my mind. My body awaits its turn, impatiently. And the more I witness the encircling infinity of our planet, the more I wonder why humanity decided to divided itself on the notion of nations; why we insist on belonging to cities and states and countries instead of belonging to an entire planet. _Why not belong to something larger?_ The planet is bigger than us. Earth is an extravagance of the sky, a concentration of space. It wasn't born with countries. But we can't see that - all those dark lines so neatly drawn between each country - they seem natural to us. Have you ever seen a globe without borders? You must do this. Go to Google Earth and uncheck the 'show borders' option. You'll see how India melts into Afghanistan and Pakistan and stretches into Iran. You'll see how China and Mongolia melt into Russia. You will see how Asia is formed. You'll see her shape - from ocean to ocean, coast to coast, bordered by the country of the Sea, and undivided by borders – undivided by a mere _attitude of humanity_.

When I expressed similar thoughts to a friend he was surprised, and asked me if I wasn't proud of my country. Proud of what - of her ten thousand year old heritage, of her geographical and social diversity, of her economic and intellectual prowess, of her bountiful lands, of her rivers and mountains? Of course I am. But then, by extension of the very same idea - in the same breath - I am proud of Earth. Am I not proud of India's humanity, of her collective struggle against the odds she faced and still faces and her shocking, passionate zeal to succeed? Of course I am. But by extension of that very sense I am proud of Earth's humanity that has struggled and fought and succeeded against a greater collective evil. When you ask me to be patriotic towards India, when you ask me to even remain enamored by this idea of fracture, you ask me to remain enthralled to a small portion of the Earth. And that I cannot do. There is a growing feeling that it is no longer enough for me to be a citizen of a country. To be a traveler is to know the difference between one's country and one's home, and I am no longer satisfied in calling myself a citizen of a country. There is a growing feeling that perhaps it is time for countries to lose their shapes. This immense geography, once part of the spinning Sun, calls upon me, and I must answer its call as a citizen of the world.

This is why everyone must travel. Everyone must get up and get away from their routine and explore this world, this home we share with so many life forms. They should go out and really observe people and their culture, their food, their music, their language, their art. They should observe their way of life. The realization that there exists another way of life is nothing short of an epiphany. You suddenly realize you have not chosen to live the life you live, but over years and years of conditioning you have been forced by society to pursue a certain predefined path, a mechanized path. And maybe you are happy with it, but maybe you are not. But only the realization that another way of life exists will make you question your own, and perhaps that is the way to a more complete form of happiness. Question everything. You will see things in a new light, and you may decide to make some changes, or you may not. Either way, the most important effect of travel upon our psyche is the perspectives it changes; the prejudices it shatters; the elevation it causes. In all change there is the possibility of revelation, and for this we must travel – for the revelation of thoughts and for the elevation of thought, and simply because the higher we go, the more we will see.

This is why everyone must travel. Travel is destruction. It is a destruction of the traveler, of his senses, of his sensibilities, of his routine, of his perceptions, of his prejudices. To travel is to permit the deconstruction of your soul. Traveling is important because it is important to destroy yourself from time to time. Because sometimes you have to destroy yourself to redeem yourself. Because sometimes you need to mine through the tunnels of your psyche and find the foundations, and then light a stick of dynamite at a weak spot and watch yourself crumble as the explosion rocks you to pieces. Then through the billowing black smoke and the acrid smell of your own burning filth you pick up the nuggets of gold that has always been the true you. And you wonder to yourself how you let this happen - how did you let a mine appear where there once was only gold? And as you walk out of the depths of your psyche holding pieces of yourself with care, you promise to never let it happen again. And perhaps you live by that promise, and perhaps you don't. But because of this one experience there will be more of you than before.

*

Khardung-La

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you are no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow.

Robert M. Pirsig

Day 10

Elevation: 17,582 ft.

Distance from Leh: 40 km.

Mornings in Leh seem to wear a frail shawl of mist. The mist hangs around the ankles of apple trees, just above the reach of dew-drunk grass, and slowly moves in the direction the cool, morning breeze suggests. The freshness in the air fills the lungs like frigid water, and the cold air comes out condensed, and mist disappears into mist again with unspoken joy. And in this way my lungs speak with ankles of trees.

Forty kilometers from Leh the road runs - boundless, heedless, higher and higher, scraping the ceilings of the ability of man and machine, until it reaches gasping, eighteen thousand eight hundred feet above the sea. To reach the top of Khardung La is the icing on the cake, the crowning achievement, the final destination of the Ladakh biker. There is something about the highest and the deepest and the farthest that the human imagination gravitates towards, and Khardung-La evokes a curiosity soaked in magnetism.

We woke up early to ride with the rising sun and to ride in the evaporating morning fog. On the outskirts of Leh, the modernity disappears and unblocks from view the hard, rock-strewn hills and scree-filled mountains, and the nomadic sands. Villages rise from the sands, and monasteries spring from mountain tops. The villages look distinctly Afghani to my eye, and are all of one color in their use of hard, weather-beaten leather for their tents. But the monasteries ooze color, and catch the eye unexpectedly in its observation of the contrast of sky and sand. There are blue, yellow, pink, white, green, red prayer flags, and orange-robed priests that animate the stone-faced monasteries. Beyond the last color-drained village the craggy, sandy path rises suddenly, and with stones and rocks and pebbles, forms quietly a gentle road. We meet here the sky again.

An hour later we reached, and were instantly sent scurrying deeper into our jackets by the driving cold of the place. Another snow-dressed mountain overlooked Khardung La, and I walked up the mountain pass as high as it could take me. The landscape beneath is Nubra Valley – a cold desert devoid of any vegetation except where the Shyok River makes its presence felt. Rolling, moving sand dunes shining in the early morning light fill the valley, and large Bactrian camels gently roam the land. The wool for Pashmina shawls comes from goats that graze this valley.

This is a spiritual moment. Khardung La is a culmination of our efforts of the past few months – the physical result of our collective mental energies. It is an indication of the power we yield in the way we can alter our very material realities through the modification of the very ethereal arrangements of our minds. Every road I have been on in this long and distant journey has influenced my mind, and therefore has had some measure of pressure on my shifting reality.

I look around the emptiness of the place – the constant whistle of the uncomfortable wind, the dry desert earth, and the mountains of piling snow - and I realize life is alive and well even at this altitude, even in this deprivation. If it wasn't for the brightness of the Sun, it would have been a desolate place. The sun had, by this time, edged over the horizon to begin his long watch over this half of the world, but the opposing sky in the west was ominous and dark, and spoke of distant rain.

Sunrise and sunset are indistinguishable at certain moments of their animation. The color of the sun, the clarity and definition of its sphere, the way the eye is allowed now, permitted now, to move over the surface of that star without being burnt, and in this way allowed to gain a sense of its shape; the color of the suffused sky, the way it soaks up a range of colors like a blotting paper soaks up ink. There is this one breath of a moment when they are equal – sunrise and sunset. In that whisper of a second, day and night are undone because their beginnings are undone. Time is undone. But then that moment passes, and if the sun is rising then there is a glow in the cheeks of the sky as if it is suddenly shy, and if the sun is setting then the sky gains a depth that tends towards darkness. At sunset, the Sun is the releaser of night. By its disappearance, a million other stars are allowed to rain down. At sunrise, it captures again what it has released. But really, at the end of all flights of imaginations, there is a simpler definition of the sun. The Sun is simply energy. All other attributes we attach to the Sun are romantic calculations of our psyche. And that is why it is god – for being one thing and being able to sustain so many.

At nearly 18400 feet, this was the closest I'd ever be to the Sun, for now. My eyes are closed in its warmth, and in the way the cold wind enters my lungs, I realize that with every breath I take, a little sky enters me. With every shivering exhale, I give back a little of my earthness. The more of myself I give away, the more sky I become. But then the realization comes with a slow, wistful smile - I do not own my earthness. I am paying for a gift with a gift.

*

The Anatomy of God

Standing there, breathing the cold air of that high mountain pass, I understood with a clarity that I know comes rarely in life. I understood the science of clouds. I understood their art. I began to understand the anatomy of the elements of nature and by this understanding, I understood nature. It became suddenly clear to me shivering in the cold breath of the snow, that of all the myriad forms of life that rely on nature for survival, we are the only beings that take time to sit back and appreciate it. We are the only beings who are grateful for it. Perhaps, we are blessed in this. Perhaps, we are blessed due to this.

Descending the wild shoulders of Khardung-La, 3 and I raced Sumanth back to Leh, while Moham followed slowly, enjoying the sheer presence of nature. To the left was the mountain face, and to the right the open air, clear as water in a blue, blue pool. There are mountains around me and skies around me, and I am sinking into a discussion with myself that I have postponed for some time now. This is a good place and a good time to have that talk. I am going to try and define something that I believe to be essentially indefinable.

Our explanations of the deities we believe in have, over many millennia, become metaphorical and symbolic. We fictionalized and embellished and watered down the nature of gods so that everyone could understand them. This was our way of gaining an understanding – equating the cosmic concept of god to local parallels of daily life that are easier to grasp. But by doing so we diluted the essence of god. And through this practice, we have slowly come to believe in the diluted version, rather than his or her complete essence. And to believe is to see, so now when we are asked to imagine god, we can only come up with a diluted, thinned-out image. So gods became human, and gained a human form, and through this we made god in our image, and not the other way round.

To truly understand the anatomy of god, we must remove ourselves from the lazy position of trying to understand the nature and form of god by simplifying him. We must begin by understanding that he is more than the sum of his parts. We cannot define him only by defining his constituent elements. We must look him completely in the eye, and pause to ask – What is god?

Imagine a static universe - a universe without energy. What would it look like? Black and dark, an unmoving expanse of stale, empty space. Listless. Dead. Useless. Something that I cannot imagine would create any value to anything or anyone; this is true death – an existence that creates no value. This is a universe without energy – nothing can be born here or live here because there is no energy here that can sustain it.

How different it is from a universe brimming with energy. We know because we inhabit one. Our universe is an energy-packed entity that still continues to expand outwards, even after thirteen billion years. And in these years the universe has expanded to create a mind-blowing array of things – things like hydrogen and carbon, oxygen and helium, stars and supernova and light-years long color-drenched clouds of hanging nebulae, and heavier elements that gravitated towards each other and formed asteroids and comets and moons and planets. And then the slightest modification of hydrogen - the fuel that ignites stars - mixed with oxygen in the safe environs of a planet and formed water. Do you see now that alchemy exists; how fire becomes water? From water came the simplicity of single-celled life, and this simplicity danced with other simple life to form complexity. And then came enormous dinosaurs and three thousand year old Redwood trees and tortoises who wanted to move as slowly as possible so they grew a thick shell to protect themselves.

What are all these things? In a universe of energy these are pockets of energy. Isn't a tree, a tree-shaped pocket of energy, and a child, a child-shaped pocket of energy? How quickly they decompose and lose form when no energy remains to maintain their shape. Every blade of green grass is a visible expression of the invisible energy that is thrumming through the invisible veins of our universe. Isn't everything a slight modification, an alteration of that one single energy?

There is something in this wide universe of ours that flows secretly through all of us and all things. This is the source of all miracles and the reason for all miracles. This is the cause of intuition and strange bouts of telepathy. This is what listens to mankind's infinite prayers and answers them. This is what grants justice to the unjust and just alike. Because it flows through everything it is everywhere every time. It is Omnipresent. Because it is everywhere every time it is witness to everything. It is Omniscient. Because it is in everything, it is indestructible. It is Omnipotent. And this thing that flows through me like some strange, satisfying, honeyed liquid flows through you and the tree outside my window and this pen and the gap between my hand and fingers as I write this.

This is energy. And energy is one half of the anatomy of god.

By very definition, god should be left undefined, because in the solidity of a definition he stops existing. He is more than a mere assemblage of words and characters and ideas. He is more than every definition of him and he is more than this definition of him. Definition is limitation. It is strange how in the way we define the infinite - we confine it, right down to when we label the infinite with words like 'infinity'. Can we ever define infinity? Can we ever define divinity? I can write ten thousand words and still fall short, and so as a writer I will always fail, and I will always succeed, because every word that has ever been written is an uncovering of the mystery, but it is always only a partial discovery. If perhaps the seven-billion-strong humanity takes up the mantle of defining divinity, through their stories and their art, and their memories and their craft, they will fail and they will succeed. We will come up with many definitions of divinity – as is visible already - but we will never come up with a complete one. For how can we see and define divinity when we are part of that divinity? We are too close, we are too close. We are one magnificent expression of a great, mystic being that is so happily in love with itself that in the birth of every blade of grass it defines itself; in the greenness of leaves and in the blueness of eyes it resounds. We can immerse ourselves in our mutating, ever-shifting perspective caused by our expanding experiences and stitch together an understanding of god. It is clear now that god is found easily in the abyss and the apsis, in the nadir and the zenith of every subject. All that is required is to swim deep enough or fly high enough. It is clear now that the Formless is given shape in the mind, and thereby definition, through the rigorous exercises of exploration, intoxication and meditation. But all these definitions and explanations are limited by our perspective, because the information that we gain is being channeled through the limited bandwidth of our perspective. And so again, only a partial image is gained. If this is the case, if this limitation is caused by our narrow perspective, then in order to gain a complete picture of god, we must examine him with complete 'un-perspective' - a vacuum of judgment, prejudice, experience, knowledge and wisdom, so that we project nothing of our 'self' on to the delicate membrane of this universe.

*

The Anatomy of Rain

That evening, just as the sun began to descend over the stone-grey mountains, storm clouds started to gather. The darkness that followed was immediate, and would last all night. There is a soft and re- assuring regularity to all rains, and they all begin with an almost imperceptible change in the way the wind blows. Having ridden at a single stretch all the way from the heights of Khardung La, we had successfully set up camp in the Jurassic valley of Morey Plains, about a thousand meters from the broken road and another thousand from the mountain face. When we finished lodging the last of the tent pegs firmly into the ground, we noticed the clouds. The tent flaps that were quiet until now whipped in the sudden breeze as it picked up speed and a new direction.

'Rain?' 3 asked, looking at me.

'Looks like it,' I said, following the line of clouds with my finger. 'We need a fire soon.'

The change in wind is followed by the slightest scent of wet mud. It is a sign that the heavens have opened somewhere nearby. Moham picked up this scent first. He pointed to his nose, smiled expectantly and said, 'It's raining nearby; just beyond those hills, I think. Let's get the raincoats out; we can sit in the rain.'

In the city, where the angry beauty of nature is hidden behind concrete interruptions, it is hard to appreciate the many ingredients of a good, rollicking thunder storm. But out here in the plains, we were allowed to witness a three-dimensional show. Enormous cloud formations, miles high and wide, looked and clashed like Titans from a mythical age, rolling in like monolithic spaceships and devouring the sky. They moved at great pace, and displayed an almost occult range of color in that spectrum between black and grey. The sound of faraway thunder seeps into the earth, thrumming through the ground and reaching the mind through the feet.

Once it was lit, we sat around the pleasantly crackling campfire, enjoying the glowing, dying orange light of the translucent evening sun, spread neatly and evenly over the entire sky by the porous clouds. By this time the army of clouds had conquered the sky from horizon to horizon, and we couldn't see a single patch of blue between the mountains that shielded the plains. Amidst our small talk, thunder rumbled, closer and closer, until we saw a single streak of lightning split the gathering darkness for the briefest second.

'We are in for a wild night, boys!' I said, shouting over the ensuing drum-roll of thunder.

The first drop of rain falls with hesitation, almost as if it is too shy to kiss the earth. It travels slowly down and falls unseen. But they quickly gather courage, those tiny drops, and begin to fall thick and fast upon us. The fire sputters and sparks but stays strong, and we move closer to it to warm ourselves in the increasing chill.

It is in the nature of things to be shaped relentlessly by sound, and I don't know how this booming storm will change me. Within me I notice the spark of a strange turmoil that identifies with the enormous grey clouds whipped into torment by tornado winds. It is an indescribable mix of melancholy, pain and the romance of rain, invoked and stoked by the scent of the earth. It is the same feeling you get when you hear two opposing octaves resonate with each other. You can't see it, but you cannot but feel certain that in some dimension the two sounds dance together. Rains are instruments of resonance, matching your frequency with that of the rain and with that of other's. Slowly, slowly, the fire and the orange glow resonate with the dissipating darkness; the insects of the land march towards the fire; slowly we nestle deeper into our coats, closer to the fire and closer to each other, and slowly we learn to speak in silence. Within the rain, the entire world is enveloped in a bubble of resonance where everything is on the same frequency, where nothing speaks, where everything listens. The insistent sound of raindrops hitting the earth, the gurgle of water as it collects and runs down channels off the mountain face, and the ethereal mix of rushing wind and thunder is too precious, too spiritual to disturb, especially when you are alone in an enormous sandy valley, with three good friends and a storm, a fire, a tent and a bike. It seems almost perverse to talk, to enforce my identity in front of nature's majesty, to ask for more.

*

A feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain,

And resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain.

H.W. Longfellow

*

Catharsis

The only journey is the one within.

Rainer Maria Rilke

How does one prepare to die?

It is one thing to prepare for it when you know that death is imminent. But how do you prepare to die when you've lost yourself so completely in the daily living of life that you begin to believe in your own immortality. There is no way to prepare for death. No one can teach you how to die, and no one living can share your pain. You just have to hope that when the time comes you'll know what to do. But we don't know if we learn what to do in that final, final moment, because we cannot really think that far, and those who know this reality are far and dead. It's a secret you carry to your grave.

And it looks like my time has come to learn that secret. Blood that was pumping with energy within me is now collecting in dark corners of my body forming shallow pools. My lungs breathe not with a will to live but with the view of avoiding pain and death; gingerly. There are moments where I have to struggle to breath. There are moments of suffocation, and of absolute terror. I know I hang on by a flimsy thread, barely an hour away from death.

What use is an hour?

It is difficult to prepare for the experience of your death. But you can definitely do enough in your life to make sure you have a comforting bed in which to die, surrounded by family and friends. I had always thought that my death would be an event, that the loss of my conscience would be cause for grief, for bereavement. I had hoped that my final words would be written down and quoted with reverence, and I'd be asked to choose an epitaph. But you can only do so much. The rest is up to the strange dances of fate.

And it is because of those very same dances of fate that I found myself staring glassy eyed at the bare green hospital wall, as undecorated as my life, fifteen minutes of my last hour lost. I had expected so much of myself, had dreamed so many dreams - what happens to potential wasted? Will it escape from my useless body and become a star again, giving light and energy to some part of the universe? Or will it die with me, cursing me to hell for wasting it, for causing it to die a needless death, to live a useless life?

My breathing is shallower now and I begin to drift in and out of consciousness. But I snap my eyes open – I don't want to die in my sleep, unconscious of the experience. No! I want my brain to feel, feel everything up to the very last fight for oxygen. In that pristine space after my last breath is spent and before my consciousness is lost, in the vacuum of that space I will be privy to a very secret knowledge - knowledge that can't be shared because it cannot be shared. I want to know what I am thinking of in those seconds, in that most personal of experience; a brief, sacred chasm.

A sudden beep on a monitor brings me out of my reverie. I crane my neck to see what's happening but I can't turn that way. But I know something is dreadfully wrong for my heart feels funny - as if it is pumping air instead of blood. I can feel its loss of strength, its feeble beats. I am unable to raise my hands, and I cannot move my legs. I am pulling hard on my lungs for air, but I am hardly getting any. Twenty-two minutes after I thought I had an hour to live, I begin to die. As soon as I think of this, I tell myself – I began to die the moment I was born – and manage to chuckle at my own joke. But there is in me an air bubble of clarity that tells me such profound/silly thoughts are starting to rule my brain as it begins to lose composure. So I keep my eyes peeled open, staring into the white light shining down at me from a bulb, focusing on the million raging thoughts of my confused mind. It is increasingly focused on the present; I can see the second hand move ever so slowly across the face of the clock on the wall as I struggle for each gasp of air. Every second is an eternity. I am trying to listen to the silence, mentally recording the experience. I would have preferred to write all of this - I tend to understand things better when I write them down.

An echoing fear grips me suddenly as a thought comes floating by – If I die now, what is it that my spirit has been trained for? Have all the years of living and fighting and creating and breathing been of any use at all? Or will I have to learn in death, the very same way we learn in life – in retrospect and hindsight - that this struggle has been pointless? That this joy has been pointless? That can't be right.

But knowing that death is near, I am giving up on my body and I am receding into a space of my mind that I have never accessed before. This territory feels new and strange, but not uncomfortable. There is a nostalgia I attach to this place, as if I have been here before.

Increasingly, my lungs are giving in, my heart is unresponsive and my final breath is only a few breaths away. I want to die well, mentally at least. It is a hard thing to do, to die alone. I can feel my very thoughts shaking. Shivering and nervous, I try and steer my thoughts towards god, towards energy and compassion. And then, unable to hold on any longer, I let go of my thoughts too. I take one final, shuddering breath. My hands grip the bed railing fiercely – the last of my energy.

I exhale.

I exhale into a total and bloodcurdling void. I exhale into a space from which I know I cannot return, from where I will not return. In that frightening moment I realize there is nothing beyond but vacuum...

.

.

.

...My mind explodes into a million scenes of what I am. My identity explodes outward as the last semblance of an unknown gravity that held it all together escapes. I am Rohit - infant, child, boy, writer, singer, man, lover, love, kiss, mystery, dichotomy, energy, human, god. I am breaking down, disintegrating into images and experiences. I am not a physical body, but I am in fact those myriad experiences and encounters that have shaped me. Here, at the edge of everything known to me, I realize I am nothing but a biased record of every experience since my birth. I am indeed memory in living form. Here, at the end of everything known to me, I realize that all life fluctuates between creating memories and becoming one. I am nothing but pictures that are flashing past me quickly now – a school yard with railway tracks, flag pole, concrete stage with grey banners, large balcony in a beloved apartment, chewing an eraser, pencil with teeth marks, black square hats raining down, lips coming closer and closer and closer, drop of crystal tear on dark eyelash, leaf, first miracle, first letter, first poem, first friend, best friend, mother, sister, brother, drunken night, words, scar, huge fight, disgust, anger, love, anger, love, fear, love, rain, rain drops, hospital room, green wall, clock ticking, second-hand ticking, one more second, one more second, one more second, one more sec...

*
The Anatomy of Death

To speak from beyond death is difficult as language is an extremely weak carrier of cognitive and intuitive understanding. The many rules of the many languages are intended to separate beings from beings, not with an intent to do harm, but simply because such separation spawns clearer understanding of the subject matter under discussion. However, the end of human life, the end of a conscious mind, is the beginning of the study and the recognition of a vast consciousness. To call this consciousness a 'super-consciousness' would be to attribute degrees to something that is everything, and here we encounter something known as the platform problem. The very state of 'being' beyond death is difficult to explain because its explanation needs this state of being to be separated from what it is – the vast, infinite multiverse, living and breathing in ways unimagined.

It is better then, to gain a mental picture of what exactly exists beyond human consciousness. Terms such as 'I' and 'you' have no meaning, as everything just... is. Those terms can only come into existence if boundaries are drawn, separating something from something else. Whether this separation is necessary or important does not matter currently. What matters is the attempt to understand what happens beyond death.

The separation of life and death is a boundary that has been drawn a bit too rashly. Considerable amount of time should have been spent researching these 'mental' states before determining if they are different or not. In truth, they are different, but in very minor ways. But it is easy and justified to compartmentalize thus so that the understanding of these two mental states is allowed. The separation of a consciousness from a consciousness begins at the miraculous instant of birth – when a child is born. The child's highly powerful mind begins to gather data immediately in order to make sense of her new surroundings. As she gathers data, she forms intelligence, then emotions and ego, and then an identity. Her genetic curiosity, her basic need to be in touch with her environment, drives the child to seek out more data, and the more she grapples with her environment, the stronger her identity becomes.

But this separation of subject and environment is merely a perception, a way of seeing things. In actuality, the data the child gathers is as much a part of the environment as the child. The perceptive difference is merely an illusion, a defense mechanism, a way of understanding the world. It is difficult to understand a subject unless separated from the subject. By the same logic, it is difficult to explain a subject while being merged within the subject. This separation is required to gain perspective.

Life is the beginning of such a separation – the gradual creation of an ego and an identity enables the child to dwell deeper into the nature of her surrounding, studying its deepest secrets, not knowing that she too is just such a secret. Death is another beginning – to study the result of the separation, so the subject can be studied in its entirety, from within and without. It would seem that this cyclical process of life and death is an industrial production line running to ensure delivery of datasets that speak volumes in uncovering the mysteries of the universe.

So much has been discussed until now about the secrets of absolute existence that a deep noise of discomfort is reverberating across the cosmos.

I... hope you understand that my usage of an identity to describe to you what lies beyond death is causing this disturbance. You must appreciate this – I have had to tear myself from the fabric of 'being', have had to create a minor ego again, an identity again, to give out the descriptions that I have given above. Usually, all there is is a silent understanding and silent reflection.

I am making noise.

Darkness washes over me and darkness creeps in. This feels like the inside of a great eye-lid. No more beating heart. No more rushing blood. No longer creaking bones and the effort of muscles. I recede into the mind of the universe. But here too, things are different and strange. I cannot find my name, or the place where I had kept my name. I have no memory of memory. I search for boundaries, for those indefinable walls due to which my identity used to take shape. Only the deepest, the most remote core of my nature is alive still, the thing that gives me awareness, the thing that allows me to recognize myself, separate myself. In this separation, a little of me exists, and that gives me voice.

I don't remember dying. I remember being alive in the throes of death, and I remember this, here, now. Unalive. There is no memory of death. There cannot be. It is too minute a moment.

I'd rather swim and merge and lose myself in this vastness. More and more this place looks like the inside of a mind - dark, cloudy, shapeless, floating; without any solidity. I have memories of this place. But something yet keeps me awake, keeps me from becoming. Something in me does not sleep; does not melt into the darkness and become. I wander about in this half-alive state, searching for meaning. Everywhere is the ink of darkness. There is only a faraway memory of the fact that I am me; the fact that I am an identity. I feel effortless, light and airy. I don't know if this lightness of being is because of my own weightlessness or because of the lack of gravity.

Strange things are happening in this darkness. I feel like a blind dolphin swimming in an ocean of black ink, repeatedly breaking the surface of the ocean and then submerging again. Each time I break the surface, I become conscious of a tiny existence, a separation that still gives me an identity. And when I enter the blackness, all memory, all understanding, all separation and perceptions are gone. Submerged, I am the black, expanding universe.

Every time I surface, there is an identity I connect to, as if from a past memory. But when I am inside and deep and lost and no longer 'I' or 'me' or 'us' or 'we', there is an immensity that is contained; an infinity that is measurable, because I am the infinite and the boundaries of the infinite. I don't know if that makes sense.

Every time I surface, a rushing light comes in and blinds me from my blindness. As the white splash slowly fades, I find myself inserted into a memory from my life. The first time this happened, I was taken aback, surprised that I was alive again so quickly, so fast, so speedily returned from death to life, until I found myself staring at myself, and realized I had been dropped into a scene from my life.

One by one the scenes roll past. I am sinking into memories that were once mine. It is clear now that something has kept an eye on me, has kept watch over me. It has recorded all memories – memories that caused the soul to erupt with joy, memories of laughter, of friendship and love; memories of sadness, of betrayal and hate; pain and tears; darkness and fears; courage and strength; intelligence and art; memories of childhood; of shyness, of the fear of being misunderstood, of the torment of the memory of being misunderstood. I am a hurricane now, a typhoon of emotions, whipped into frenzy by the memories that stand naked and stark in front of me. They have never been so clear. Some saving grace that has died with me was able to blur these memories before, was able to soften their blow. But now they take revenge for not visiting them often. Now they fall upon me like packs of hungry hyenas, like a hundred babies kissing my cheeks – the ravaging pain and the soft pleasure of what my memories were made of fall upon me like a redeeming rain.

With each passing memory, I feel lighter; almost buoyant. I may even graduate from swimming to flying. I see what this is now – I see what death is. I understand now that death is life on pause. Death is where life is allowed to sink in. This is a process of decomposition. I am being deconstructed.

Deeper and deeper into the darkness I dive with each passing memory, so that the return to consciousness seems farther and farther apart. When I surface, I enter another brief episode of my life and cleanse the effect it has had on my soul, for I have figured out that is what this entire process is all about - cleansing. Many times I return, every time an increasing struggle to come back. Every time I surface, I gasp and inhale a fresh breath of identity.

I plunge into the darkness, and violently surface again. I know, somehow, that this is the last time. After this, 'I' will disappear like frail wisps of mist. And this time, I am not watching the vision, I am inside it.

I am asleep in an armchair. I am fourteen. It is a lazy, summer afternoon. Something happens that wakes me up and I jerk upright, staring at the room with wild eyes. Slowly, it dawns on me that I am in my aunt's house, in the hall, spending the summer vacations, and as I glance around at the room and at each piece of furniture, this realization is accepted. But this recognition triggers a flash - the world is awash in blinding, white light - and when the flash goes away a second later all the furniture has disappeared from the room. Rising from the chair, I can see the bare walls, paint peeling from some of them, the scribbles of children on some other. The recognition of walls triggers another flash, and an instant later they too disappear, leaving me suddenly staring at the world outside. My senses explode as the world outside comes rushing in.

I can see the swaying trees and I can hear the rustling leaves; I can see the bright red drops in my line of sight that are the red flowers of the Jacaranda tree. The afternoon air is heavy with heat and the scent of scores of trees. The road is empty except for the silent houses and the distant sound of a drill at a construction site. I am cognizant of the fact that I am absorbing everything that the senses can feel, and this worries me, and I don't know why. But as soon as I think of the trees and the houses, there is another brilliant flash, and the trees disappear, the slight breeze disappears, the road, the houses, the distant sound of the drill, the washed afternoon light, they all disappear. The world suddenly empties, and I find myself staring at solid ground, with a blue sky and clouds and a bright orange sun. The road is gone now, leaving the ground empty and rectangular and the foliage around the road still following its previous demarcation. I stare hard at the ground, knowing - deep in my gut - what is about to happen. A flash later, the ground beneath me falls away, the bright blue sky disappears, the clouds disappear and a sudden blackness descends. I whirl around and spot the Sun, and realize I am in space. I turn back to see where the planet was a minute ago, and can only see the blackness of space. Slowly, as my eyes adjust, I can make out millions and millions of tiny pricks of lights. Stars! I turn my gaze to the Sun, and a flash later, the Sun disappears and the stars are gone. I look out now at the complete, engulfing darkness. I am in a universe of black ink, moving sightlessly, with only the sensations of my body to give me the minutest of reference. I realize that the onset of every diminution is indicated by a flash, and this realization causes another flash. I whirl around in my blindness to see what else has gone away forever, but cannot sense the lack of anything immediately, until I realize that the flashes themselves have disappeared. Anything I acknowledge disappears. I bob around in this black ocean, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, but feeling only some semblance of a body. I am trying hard not to think about it, but, without a flash this time, my body disappears.

Now I am only thought. The darkness is so solid and complete, I don't know if I am still in the vision or if I've slipped back into the universe-mind. Darkness washes over me and darkness creeps in. This feels like the inside of an eyelid. This thought causes another subtraction, and the darkness disappears. It is no longer darkness; it is just blackness - a blackness that occurs because of the lack of the concept of light, not because of a mere lack of light. Light does not exist anymore.

But blackness is still something. Space, infinite or finite, is still something. As soon as these thoughts occur, the blackness is replaced by whatever it is that can replace blackness. Emptiness. Sheer, vast, emptiness - a vacuum so total that dimensions and measurements have no meaning because they do not exist. The last bits of me are floating in an empty vacuum of nothingness.

With deep fear I realize that I can still think - that 'I' exist.

...

No flash, no identity, and nothing exist anymore. Not the kind of 'nothing' that exists in the vacuum of space, but the kind of 'nothing' that could have existed if nothing was ever created. Ever. There are no words to describe this lack of the very fabric of space-time, this total negation of everything, to the point where the very speech of it would be in opposition of the idea. There is no space here even for a thought to squeeze in. Subtract Space from thoughts, subtract Time, and understand. Space and Time are concepts that exploded into existence at the moment of creation. But what before that - What existed before existence itself? A pure form of nothing. The three dimensions did not exist, nor Space, nor Time, nor God. This is a terrifying un-reality, the un-existence of reality itself. This is an idea that lives right at the very edge of thought and cannot be expressed by language. This is the Absolute Nothing.

*

Gestation

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

William Blake

The entire universe died when he died; with him died all theory and science and law and morals; with him died religion and god and mythology and history; with him died memory and love and life and death; with him died meaning; with him died everything that he ever learnt and the possibility of discovery.

Beyond the gloves of identity, everything exists in a state of non-existence. There are no shapes in this one-dimensional world because shapes are an indication of identity and location and multi- dimensionality. This plane is everywhere, flowing through everything that exists like a dark, moving energy. It is a living, breathing host. Everything looks back at itself and ponders through the ages. Everything is in a state of constant self-observation. Everything is in the state of absolute Zazen.

This is the place for gestation, where thoughts are born from a sea of emptiness, the source of all creation. Time does not exist here, nor does Space. This is where the music falls to when it disappears between two notes of sound. This is that state of being where one becomes everything at once; a state where boundaries do not exist, where nothing moves as it has nowhere to move towards. All things are united here and there is no separation. If there is anything that is separate, then it does not have access to this state. This is a universe of black sleep, without dreams and without the thought of waking up.

Darkness reigns.

And darkness must create.

*

Rebirth

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

A rain of darkness fell, a rain of photons; a rain of water, of ice, of leaves and of wind; a rain of clouds and mist; a rain of thunder fell, and of lightning; a rain of sin and a rain of redemption.

They fell upon an inkling of thought. It all begins with an inkling.

It begins with an inkling, with a turmoil that seeks expression, with a turmoil that seeks perfection. It begins in the same way all art begins – with a feeling of discontent and restlessness. Somewhere somehow a spark appears that questions the state of non-existence. It has no agenda, it has no need to do so, and it has no idea that it is doing so, until it feels an undercurrent of a strange vibration and a tiny noise that starts the slide.

This noise begins to build up in an increasing crescendo. First vibration, then sound, and then light appear. At the end of an unending tunnel in this one-dimensional space, a slash of light rips through the darkness and begins to immediately attract. With these elements, concepts begin to appear in a vacuum of concepts, a state that needed none and wanted none - concepts of gravity, attraction, light, sound and vibration. They will disappear as soon as the light dies. But their shadows will remain, causing future sparks of inklings.

A sudden lurch in a place that abhors abrupt movements makes the inkling take notice. The darkness is somehow moving, forming an indistinct shape. Time is asleep here; all of this may have happened in a second or in a million years. But slowly, the strange dark shapeless shapes begin to funnel into the light. Like a black hole sucking all the light, this light attracts and pulls towards itself all the darkness. The inkling begins to fall inescapably towards the light. As it falls, it begins to hear noises and sounds from a distant world. They are the sounds of a different universe, of a three-dimensional world. Falling quickly now the inkling is ripped and torn from the very fabric of the one-dimensional world of non-existence.

This inkling is the soul.

The first experience of the soul is curiosity, which gives way to a rush of pain. But it has no way yet to express this pain. Voiceless and ravaged, the soul seeks, with a knowledge that comes from an unknown source - perhaps from repetition - the light.

But voices now, jumbled, muffled, confused, scared. The universe fills with light, mayhem and sound. All around the soul the dark, smoky clouds of non-existence are roiled and thrashed and whipped by the turmoil created by the gravity of light.

At the meeting of darkness and light, the two universes collide. For one brief moment the soul exists simultaneously in two states. Shredded, empty, shuddering, it is forced to swallow without the benefit of the ability to express, the sudden knowledge of the terrifying beauty of all reality. Only in that moment of suspended animation, the soul knows everything there is to know. For that one eternal moment, it is privy to all wisdom and to all immensity.

But another brief millennia passes or a second passes and the soul is sucked into the blinding white light and erupts suddenly into a world of solidity and noise and chaos and an uncomfortable lack of buoyancy, and at the shockwave of sudden, heavy existence, it gasps and breaths in a lungful of air and finally finding voice in its lungs I started to scream and I started to kick and I started to cry. And then I started to forget.

I cried because I realized immediately, with a terrifying surety, that all the awareness of the past infinity were receding from me like a dream in the morning, disappearing fast into the mists of grey memory. I cried because this is what I had asked for, this is what I had always wanted – the ability to express the things infinite, but in the process of gaining this ability, I was losing the sacred knowledge. I cried because I wanted to express, to seek perfection in my expression after millions of years of non-expression, of mute imprisonment. I cried because this is the sadness of life – the unawareness of the awareness.

Strangers looked down on me, smiling and laughing and crying. I stopped crying as the memories faded completely and I couldn't recall what it was I was crying for. Someone turned me around to cut the umbilical cord that had wrapped itself around my neck, squeezing my throat and choking my breath, and my eyes fell on the green wall of the hospital and the clock and the second hand, and I saw once again the second hand ticking, one more second, one more second, one more second, and that triggered something in me and the memories rushed back in a great cyclic link between life and death and existence and non-existence and then re-birth.

And I smiled.

*

Nights

For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance.

Mignon McLaughlin.

*

I woke up with that smile.

I woke up with those dozen strange wisdoms.

I woke up with my eyes closed to the sights and sounds of Morey Plains, to the day after a night of rain, to a dream after a night of realities.

I kept my eyes shut. I was fearful that opening my eyes would release this unlimited comprehension I had gained in a single night. I don't know what I had done to receive these insights, and I wasn't going to let them slip from memory. I recalled the night.

An hour later, I stumbled out of the tent to find my friends running around the empty, stone-strewn, Martian landscape playing football with a ball they had made by cocooning a pebble inside a few dirty t- shirts. The laughter and the sounds of their boyish gameplay echoed from somber mountain to somber mountain, but drenched in their laughter they no longer looked somber. A great joy rose within me, the kind of joy that erupts from the beautiful satisfaction of a hard day's work and a good night's sleep. I got the feeling that I could see my friends from far away, tiny specks in an enormous valley. Four large stones acted as goal posts on each end, and they'd chosen, with or without intention I do not know, a place that was half land, half sand. It was a challenge to run and play and maneuver the already shapeless ball in the sands, so you had to gain momentum while on hard ground. I ran to join them, now two to each side, and we played the game and lost track of time until it became too hot to play. We returned to camp and spent the next two hours packing and preparing for the ride ahead.

It was dark before we began our ride out of Morey plains, and we began with apprehension. The journey back to Pang from the quagmire sands of Morey plains was conducted under the starlight symphony of the Milky Way. We could see her backbone stretch from horizon to horizon – a dark river of mystery separating two banks scattered with diamonds; what Carl Sagan describes as the 'backbone of night'. Under this great awning we rode. While the heavens drank in the lights, the earth descended into darkness, and one could see, if one was far away and had the perspective, three beams of yellow light bobbing up and down the sea of sand, piercing the darkness. We undertook this journey with a patient measure, knowing we were out in the elements and out of our own. But we were also patient because nature was, and so were the grey, dim mountains in the distance, the bright-eyed stars, and the captivating galaxy. It is the least we can do but be spellbound by the sight of the Milky Way.

The light of a million suns fell upon our eyes and entered the fragile nature of our minds, vibrating us to the tune of some unheard song. It is hard not to wonder what conscious being looks back at our own sun in the night of its days, and looking thus, perhaps chances to glance at the Earth in the vicinity of the Sun. What is the possibility that two conscious beings, looking out at the vast emptiness of space scattered by pockets of spherical fire, have by sheer grace, glanced into each other's eyes?

Closer to Earth, the sands approached and regularly threw us off our bikes. There is a fractured road that one uses to get out of Morey Plains, but we had lost it in the night, and were riding blind. Many times the sand swallowed us, and many times we had to get off the bikes to help each other. The forty kilometers through the plains to Pang took us over two hours, but they were two hours spent in the light of the galaxy. This was an unexpected gift, as all gifts are. There is something primitive in the witnessing of stars that root us again to the earth of our combined human nature. It takes us back to a more innocent time, when we would ponder the meaning of the night sky and those pin pricks of light. There is so much we know now that we cannot return to that past, except by imagination. But there is so much still we do not know, and so we will continue to be enraptured. Space and sky and stars will forever feed our imaginations, and keep us trapped in awe. And all of this is nature. Nature is the deep seductress. Nature is sex. Everything exists because of the coming together of two separate beings; _because of the increasing absence of distance_. And nature is everything. Nature conspires and collaborates with every element in her command to seduce us, to overpower us, to overwhelm us. The only thing a traveler can do is submit, succumb, and surrender. Can we ever fully fathom the magnificent calculations nature undertakes to reveal its splendid beauty to us? The diffraction of sunlight by the atmosphere that causes the blueness of the day sky; the thickness of the air that causes the susurrating blue-grey of distant mountains; the slow shredding of earth that causes mountains and hills, and the shapes of mountains and hills; the algorithms in the shapes of trees; the ebb and flow of waves caused by the ebb and flow of the moon. Can we ever really fathom how the Sun plays with a million tiny drops of rain from a hundred and fifty million miles away to splash that perfect arc of a rainbow on the screen of sky? What infinite mathematician sits down every day to draw these paintings?

*

Night turned to night and day became day. Our final few days are a rush and a blur. I remember only the nights.

That night, after crossing Morey Plains, we slept in a tent in Pang, where Moham was sure he would die because of the cold and that when the morning comes, we would find him frozen. But I remember waking up to the sound of women laughing, and when we exited the tent, found two young women smoking a chillum at seven in the morning with an older man. When we sat down, they offered the chillum to us, but we declined. But the older man insisted, and told us he got this "stuff" – which was Hashish - from a rave that was being held again the next night; that the party was at Kasol and that we should check it out. Moham came out an hour later, surprised that he was still alive, and with that surprise came mirth, and he couldn't stop laughing as he shared his night with us.

The journey back is always shorter. Roads that were strange to us before now acknowledge us. People we have met on the road greet us, recognize us. We know what roads lie ahead, and the knowledge of what is to come makes time flow faster. Before long we were at the top of the Gata Loops, freezing in the arctic wind, looking down upon a tortured landscape, descending using the alternate 'off-road' roads. Gravity is stronger going down, and we slipped and fell many times trying to navigate these roads. Gata loops has decent tar roads, but these side-roads that cut corners on hairpin turns were made of that layer of the mountain that appears when the surface is peeled back by constant use.

Shepherds would use these trails to manage their wayward flocks, but now it became an option for the adventurous. As we rode these roads, the descending sun lengthened our shadows and threw them on the faces of mountains. Snow-white peaks turned orange and gold and birds returned home in sunlight the color of autumn leaves. We quickly crossed Sarchu and Baralacha La, and found ourselves, again in the afternoon, facing the nallah at Zing-Zing Bar. That river-upon-the-highway, if it was possible, had gathered even more ferocity. When we stopped to investigate and re-plan, we saw about a dozen army men, assisting workers of the BRO (Border Roads Organization), to help lay a metal, make-shift Bridge over the nallah. When we inquired, they told us that the bridge would be complete in two days. We would be one of the last to traverse the nallah on foot. The excitement of that knowledge – of knowing that the next time we would not be allowed to experience the bone carving cold of that river – turned this last opportunity into a luxury, and so we dipped into the nallah with enthusiasm. Forty five minutes later, we had all crossed over with the motorcycles and luggage, and spent the next fifteen minutes drying off and hoping that some inexperienced biker would come along who'd ask us for help and we would secretly exult at another chance of swimming in ice. But no one came, so we said goodbye to the nallah, turned around and headed towards Zing-Zing Bar and Darcha.

Later that evening, we found ourselves at the foothills of Rohtang, staring at rain-darkened clouds that threatened with electricity every few seconds. At the exact moment we reached the safety of Khoksar, the rains broke upon the landscape of towering mountains and sloping hills, and covered the land in a deluge of melting earth. We could see clouds break apart after hitting the peaks of distant mountains, and then form again in different shapes on the other side.

We wanted to be in Manali that night, and were hoping to cross the pass before the rains began. But it would have to be tomorrow. So we spent the night in Khoksar, where Moham and I competed to eat as many rotis as we could, and ended up eating nine each. After the uncomfortable night at Pang, Khoksar was a mother's lap in comparison. We slept heavily in the cold, pure air, with the sound of thunder rumbling in the background, and I do not now recall waking up.

If it took us four hours to cross Rohtang Pass the first time around, it took us only forty five minutes on the return leg. The roads were slushier because of the rain the previous night, but the overall descending angle of the road perhaps made it easier. There was also, lesser traffic. Even so, we reached Manali late in the evening. We returned to the HPTDC guest house and received the same room again. After quick, hot, warming showers, we returned to the room to discuss plans for the evening. Manali that night was all about Kasol. All four of us wanted to go, as we had never been to a rave before, and the idea piqued our curiosity. But I wasn't feeling well enough to go to Kasol in that weather and Sumanth decided to stay back with me.

Moham and 3 rode to Kasol in the thick fog of that night, a round trip of a hundred and fifty kilometers, and returned in the early hours of dawn to tell us a riveting tale. They had gotten lost near Kasol, had to park their motorcycle to trek up a hill, through a forest, and in the middle of the forest they had found a clearing. They were navigating by following the lights of a village that they could see through the gaps in the leaves. At the end of the clearing, they ran into a rope bridge, hanging dangerously low at the center, over the monstrous raging of a powerful river. Looking at each other, they gingerly stepped onto the bridge, testing it. Just as they reached the middle of the bridge, the distant lights of the village that were guiding them suddenly disappeared; a power cut.

Moham and 3 groaned. Night returned swiftly. The sounds of the forest began to creep up on them over the sound of the river. In the middle of the bridge they waited, trying to make small talk, friendship slowly strengthening, as they watched the foam of the river disappear under their feet, as swift as the night.

Deciding it was best to keep moving forward, Moham turned on a torch he had brought with him and walked forward. But before he could take another step, he yelped, and found that he was about to step on a group of eerie-white scorpions. Gingerly stepping over them, they relaxed for the briefest second, before discovering, under the white light of the torch, that the entire bridge was infested with hundreds of those tiny scorpions. They were running around on the footboards, on the ropes and on the railings of the bridge, the same railings they had used as support to come this far across the bridge. Struggling in the half light, they crossed the bridge carefully, walking single-form right down the middle of the bridge, avoiding the now sleep-disturbed, agitated scorpions. Ten nervous minutes later, the power came back on, and they walked out the forest and right into the village.

When they asked about the rave, the lone gunman – yes – the lone gunman pointed them towards a large hut. When I asked them why, of all the people in the village, did they decide to ask the gunman for directions, 3 replied that he was the only person in sight. The village was deserted. When they entered the hut, a dull, orange light from a zero-watt bulb greeted them, and a tall man appeared and asked them to wait at a cozy divan.

Reclining in the divan, 3 and Moham wondered what they had gotten themselves into. But they didn't have a lot of time to ponder, as the man re-appeared and asked them to follow him. Rising slowly, unsure of what awaited them, they followed the man into another dark room, and then through another door, where the increasing crescendo of bad trance music calmed their minds. This was a rave. One more door later, their excitement fell another notch when they found eleven to fifteen men – of an assorted collection of nationalities - dancing to the music in a half-lit, half-trashed dance floor. Smoke from marijuana and hashish and cigarettes hung around, looking equally disappointed with the entire affair.

All they could think about was having to walk back over that scorpion-infested bridge.

From Manali we did an overnighter to reach Chandigarh in the wee hours of the morning. But we first had to get through the ghat sections of Mandi. The roads of Mandi ghat were twists and were tempest. The rain and the night and the final slice of moon had made the night and the road dark and slippery. With the rain as our host we had started our ride back to the plains, and had found ourselves repeatedly lost in its haze. The hot road steamed in the cooling rain and the steam rose to meet the clouds. 3 and I rode on this wild road uninterrupted except for the constant flow of trucks; endless chains of iron and steel floating on rubber wheels, manned by mindfulness and mindlessness alike. We needed to reach Chandigarh by sunrise, but the continuous barrage of trucks was not helping our cause. Moham was leading the charge, overtaking truck after truck in sinful display of poetic motorcycle riding. He swept between trucks effortlessly in a free fall fluidity that seemed to lend the concrete road the fluency of water. Moham defined ghat-riding that night. He would signal to 3 and I, who were right behind him, and warn us of any trucks hidden from our sight, and we would pass the signal along to Sumanth amidst blind, dark curves.

At 1 AM, halfway down the ghats, 3 and I stopped to catch our breath and wait for Moham and Sumanth at a tea shop, along with at least thirty truckers. Sumanth joined us five minutes later, but Moham was nowhere to be found. After waiting for nearly half an hour, we started again, cutting through legions of trucks until the mountains and the hills were left behind, and the heat informed us that we were in the plains again. We found Moham waiting for us outside Chandigarh, smiling and extremely happy with himself. After a two- hour power nap on the side of the road, we fell in again with the highway and reached Delhi around 4 pm.

*

Tonight is the flight back to Bangalore. We want to go see the Taj Mahal, but we are short on money and time. Depression hangs in the tepid air of the hotel room, so we open the balcony door to let in some fresh gasps of wind, but all that comes in through the door is the humidity of summer night and the dull cacophony of the streets of Delhi below. The room is near Nizamuddin railway station, and the throng of humanity below are either arriving or leaving, some of them in a hurry, some of them hurried. Something is taken away from the romance of travel by hurrying. Something is taken away from life by hurrying. It is a sign of not being present, of being too busy to notice things that should be noticed. It is a sign of the mechanical, and not the organic. You don't see nature hurry, or change its pace. I haven't heard a tree complain to its branches that it needs them to bear fruits by the end of day. Nature has no deadlines to meet, and that is how it should be.

I am standing on the balcony, swatting at the attacking mosquitoes, looking down at the heads of the migrating mass of people, all moving, shoving, pushing, climbing, overtaking - to get to another place. Anywhere but here. I am the same, I tell myself. I also have to constantly move. I also have to constantly change. There is a calming solace in change. It tells me that one day we will all disappear like smoke into clouds; that all that exists is here and now, and the only time that we have some measure of control over is the present. Each empty second is already too far away. And so are the seconds you've made full by simply being aware. It tells me that the more we are aware of each moment, the more we are aware of its tender fragility.

An hour later, our bikes are on the platform, waiting to be shipped back to Bangalore. As we roll them up one by one onto the train and tuck them in, we know in that moment that this is the end. The train rolls away and with it our motorcycles, and with them go the days of the trip. These very days will never return, except flicker to life momentarily in the sharing of memories and in the photographs we've taken. _These days are, forever, in hibernation_. These days will now forever be used to invoke laughter, wistfulness, energy, memory, wanderlust, awe, nostalgia. And because we've filled this last fortnight with pockets of our traveling spirit, we can reach out to them in thought and memory and visit them. We are allowed this license to the past because we marked its presence with our presence.

And so I am content as the train disappears around the bend. I realize there and then that there indeed is such a thing as destiny. I am not saying that this trip was destined - but by undertaking this trip we did what was not destined, and thereby used our force of will over the natural flow of time. Destiny and fate do exist, and I find they happen at the absence of will and effort; at the absence of dreaming and planning. Something has to happen - your story must go on! And if you don't take over and drive your life in the direction of your choosing, nature's autopilot will kick in.

We catch a taxi from the station to the airport, and spend the time we have remaining watching massive white airplanes touchdown with unexpected gentleness and take-off with necessary anger. It is a time without any rushing agenda, and so we spend it exploring the airport, and exploring our friendship within this new context. Someday we hope to fly to the world, to all those faraway lands and fulfill these dreams recurring, and this is a good education.

Night is falling outside, and everywhere the night enters lights begin coming to life. We are back in the heart of civilization, and we all feel a little lost, as if the world has changed since we began our trip; as if the world has moved on, and we have been left behind - in the span of fifteen days. There is only the consolation of each other. And as we adjust again to the realities of coffee and too-expensive sandwiches, we realize through our conversations that it is not the world that has changed, but we. We are all a little different because of these past days of adventure, and the only people who recognize us now are the four of us. We are different, but equally so. Something that does not need to be explained has changed, has appeared in all of us, has grown within us. Something has modified our perspective, and now we see the world through lenses smudged, perhaps even repaired, by wanderlust.

Our flight is late, but we eventually take off, and land into a cold Bangalore night two hours later. We are still travel-inked, and so the four of us play around with the luggage trolleys in the resounding midnight-emptiness of the airport, while we wait for Suhas, who has agreed to pick us up. He is the first person we will meet from the gang, and we know he can tell.

When we meet, Suhas tells us that a plan to meet up at Manoj's room was already afoot but Manoj had gone out in the evening and hadn't returned. As we cut through the sleepy lanes of Shivajinagar, I take out my cellphone to call him, when suddenly there is a honk near Suhas' car. We all turn to see Manoj on his bike, waving at us, completely taking us by surprise. Inside the car, with windows rolled up, we are laughing and surprised at this unexpected rendezvous. He can't hear us, but he is nodding, and he follows us to his room.

Within all of us is a rising feeling of something having come to an end, and the crescendo of something about to begin. This we cannot let go of. This we are unable to mask. We don't even try to seek an understanding of this feeling. All we do is talk. And the warmth of our friendship is displayed in the fact that our conversations don't have a linear, formal flow. We begin where we left off, without any need for re-introduction, for formalities and for how-are-yous. We begin where we left off. We don't say goodbye either, which, in a world of endings is a precious thing. It is clear more and more that we are in the middle of an endless conversation.

This is the last night of the trip. We hadn't planned to be here at Manoj's house, but at the airport it felt like the logical thing to do. Suhas was supposed to have returned to Mysore that evening, but had stayed back because of an hour's work, and when we had called him up from the airport he was just about to go to sleep. Manoj had cut his date short in order to meet us, and was on his way back home when we ran into him in the streets of Shivajinagar. We were all there either by chance, or by force of will – something had brought us all together. We discussed these minor miracles over weed, as one does, and thought deeply of them, and thought nothing of them. After all, we had been friends for close to a decade now, and a little telepathy is logical and permitted. With such things in mind, we climbed to the terrace of Manoj's house, creeping past wicker chairs and empty one-roomed apartments, the night wind whispering through the thin, long leaves of the lone coconut tree. From the edge of terrace, we could see the Hanuman temple standing in silence far below. The darkness there was dispersed by the presence of a solitary lamp, flickering in the wind, making shadows dance. By and by the moon ascended and increased with its height the silence of the night. Suhas, Moham and Sumanth fell asleep, leaving 3 and Manoj and me deep in conversation.

There is a certain smell that is carried by the winds of the night; a reminder of faraway lakes and summer breeze and the salt of sea. It promises adventure, and mad, unrequited love, and promises to hold you afloat if you dare to step off the edge of the roof to try to fly. This we tried to do. As we looked over the edge at the ground far beneath, the air promised the buoyancy of the sea. This we had to do. Manoj and 3 promised that they had done this before; tasted electricity before. With confidence in their experience, I climbed up the thin wall that separated roof from ground and people from a sixty feet fall. They held me from behind, and I stood to my full height on the edge of a two-inch thin wall, staring into the eastern sky watching very early birds or very late birds flying into a dim glow, glorying in the feeling of flight, relishing the fear of falling and the fear of height, with nothing to stop me from falling sixty feet to a hard earth far below.

I descended a full minute later, giddy with adrenalin, to find 3 and Manoj rolling on the rough, cemented-floor of the terrace laughing, revealing to me between gasps of shuddering breaths that they had never done anything like that before, and that they had lied to me to make me do it. The idiots. After Manoj and 3 took turns climbing the wall to experience what I had experienced, we woke everybody up and went back to the room. It was near dawn and I could see the glow in the east increase in intensity as we descended the stairs. Inside the room, we fell asleep wherever we could find place. Right at the blurry edge of wakefulness and sleep, my phone buzzed. With bleary eyes I opened the message. It simply said – Happy Friendship Day. I nudged 3, who grumbled and opened his eyes. I showed him the message in my phone; he read the message, closed his eyes and smiled. And in the light of day the night made sense, and we fell asleep on the first Sunday in August.

*

The Anatomy of Words

Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words to change people's consciousness.

Alan Moore

As a writer, you cut open your chest, grab your beating heart with your own raw hands, pull it out and squeeze it dry, until all the dark, black-red, dirty, unfiltered blood, tainted by your thoughts and your actions and your deeds collects in a cup, and you dip your pen in that blood and wait for the words to form. There is no other way. There must be no other way.

There is no other ink.

Writing is a strange art. Letters and words and sentences are the building blocks of this art. But more than words, the impact of the meaning of the word on the reader's mind has a greater influence on the art. There is very little writers can do to affect the interpretation. Yes, we can be more descriptive, more detailed, more explanatory, but in the attempt of this we have to make sure we fall in line with some mental rules of this art. We have to fall in line with an underlying rhythm that stipulates how much is enough. Misunderstandings then will occur. But the true gift of a writer lies in achieving a balance of these two elements – meaning and rhythm. The true gift of a writer lies in the realization that in every sentence there is an opportunity for balance.

In every sentence there is an opportunity for poetry.

The intricate fabric of this art form gives it the powers of unspoken energies. Its modular structure is a greater vehicle for visiting the secret deviations of the mind. It is the sole domain of this art to explore all limits of human imagination. To explore exaggerations. To explore reality. To explore. This is why literature exists. This is the art form that allows a description of other art forms. While a poem can be written with a painting in mind, thereby adding to the total enigma of the painting and the poem, no painting can be drawn that can accurately represent the various nuances of an intricate poem.

This is also an all-encompassing art form. It derives its various flavors from the complex influences of other arts – It takes from music rhythm and meter, from painting depth and color, from poetry structure and subtlety. It is a receptive art form and thrives in the presence of other arts.

Words are for writers what shades of color and paint are for painters. Writers insert colors directly into the minds of the reader using words. A writer's canvas is the universe of the reader's mind. We use words and sentences, pauses and punctuations, to shape the neural network of the reader in the same way our own neural network have been shaped, so that the same effect is released upon the landscape of both minds. In the writing of our tales, we relive them, and recall the scenes in different levels of detail and blur, and then try and translate the same imagery into the mind of the reader. And through this alternating current of detail and blur of memory, a fluid mix of subtlety and exaggeration is infused into our tales. The story, when relived, becomes larger than it was in life. Words give them this power.

Words, before they are released, seem to hold court in a dimension of thrall. All words seem suspended in mid-air waiting for the reader to come along and pull them down on one of many sides, based on the reader's interpretation of them. And because of this, we are careful with our words, knowing them to contain strange powers. They have the power to alter and change, mold and shape, inspire and encourage. And they have the opposite powers, sometimes demonic, and can cause chaos and pain where only tranquility existed. And words have the kind benediction of communication. By stringing them together, we form sentences that allow us to express the deepest sentiments of our minds. They allow us to share a snapshot of the current structure of our minds with the reader far away in the light-year distances of neural space. This distance is defeated by words.

Distance is defeated by words.

Words are shadows of action. They lie on one end of that strange spectrum that contains countless uncertainties before solidifying finally into action. They are precursors to action. And then there are precursors to words that are more powerful. If words could be dissected like atoms, within you would discover a constellation of thoughts circumambulating the vibrant nucleus of imagination. This is the foundation upon which all writers begin their journeys - imagination. Imagination is the cloth of dreams. It is a sacred space – a laboratory of wild ideas and strange thoughts allowed to mix in the vacuum of rationality, morality and mortality. Only here is all impossibility possible. Only here is everything within reach, within grasp. This is a lawless land, a space that permits all excursions against all rules of the mind. This is the cradle of dreams.

But what appears if we could split imagination and take a look inside?

The restless energy of expression – the Higgs-Boson of the anatomy of words. A desire for expression is the fuel of the writer. The more it is confined, the more it breaks out, taking newer and stranger forms. All waves and gentle swells that appear on the climatic ocean of the mind are caused by the gravity of this energy. Without it, no art can exist.

And deeper yet in the anatomy of this art lies an unnamed entity of silence. It is this we seek to tap. All things tend towards their opposites, and so an avalanche of words appears only after drenching the mind in a rain of this silence. I am able, in my mind, to quantify this silence, but I am unable to qualify it. I can tell you how much of this silence exists, but I cannot tell you what it does, or what its characteristics are. It does not let me grapple with it. I believe the reason for this is because this silence is the end. It is not made up of anything – it is not, for example, a flock of imaginations that form a thought; it is not a collection of thoughts that form a word; it is not an entity that is made of something. I cannot split it into two to survey what it is made of. It is made only of itself. And since it is not made of anything but itself, it has no quality to speak of. It has no features and characteristics. It has no nature. Being nature-less, it provides an unexplainable unperspective, a point of view that is just eye, disconnected from a judging mind. The recognition of rhythm and pause, the importance of punctuation and hesitation, the calculation of meter, are all derivations of this silence.

*

Epilogue

Be in touch with all reality. Know that there is no god. Know that there is nothing but god. Know that the slow clouds above you keep pace with you. Know that all the things in nature are worthy of worship, and every one of them can grant you a different form of energy. Believe in the beauty and the balance of nature - your belief and nature will make common cause and form a force field of protection around you. Nature is god, everything is god, therefore, respect everything. There is no bias, in total faith there can be no bias. In such magnificent creation, can there be such a thing that is less than creation? Know then, that all things are equal. All things are necessary. All things are trying to attain some alignment. Everything is fighting for balance, and in the turbulence of this fight everything remains slightly out of balance.

Recognize this, and stand your ground.

Balance yourself.

There was a secret reason for undertaking this trip, one that was so close to my heart and so deep within my subconscious mind that I forgot about it in my waking moments. I had a nomadic childhood, both in terms of how much my parents moved around the country and how much I moved within my wild imaginations. And my earliest memory is of me looking at photographs of faraway mountains and sinking into them. That kid is who I am, deep within the tension and the turmoil on the surface. They say you must remember who you are before you begin to write. It centers you, and you write from your core. But what I am is many things. Which one do I hold on to? There are too many mes in me. I love balance and dualities, paradoxes and ironies – I love symmetry \- and so I notice them. But the more I notice them, the more they act on me and fuel my two sides. Which one do I listen to? Each one of me argues an opposite view, and I stand and listen to the raging dialog that wreaks havoc inside me. Am I the storm? Am I the constellation of mes? Or am I the listener? I must be - I've always heard. But I've fallen in love with my own voice, and there is no greater sin for a listener and greater risk for a writer.

I tire sometimes; my feet drag heavily and my legs bleed over the sharp edge of knife-blade that I walk on, always divided, balancing two opposing sides of me. Some nights there are two voices inside me. Two opinions always. It is exhausting to live this way - with two thoughts and two ideologies and two laws and two morals. It is exhausting to live with two of my selves, and therefore, by extension, to live with only half of myself. I know how to want someone with only half of myself. I know how poisonous it is to the whole. This I am scared to admit. This I am scared to voice out loud. Because there is a deep cave in the oceans of my mind where I know all purpose and reason and secrets and rules lie hidden, and from there comes a thought that tells me that all my poisons and demons are born from this head-splitting duality, and these are the beings that teach me to write. And I don't want to not write.

My earliest memory is of me sitting on the sofa in my aunt's house on a humid Chennai evening, resting an Indian Railways catalogue against my knees, and looking at the pictures of faraway, monochrome places with magical names like Nainital and Darjeeling and Sonamarg. The catalogue hinted at ways of reaching them, hinted at their proximity and their distance in kilometers and in days, and in the number of trains one would have to change. The photographs hinted at the idea of standing there, at the foothill a of nameless, snow-capped mountain; they hinted at the ease and the possibility and hinted, at the way I could reach out through the photograph and touch the mountain; and I remember a profound sadness filling me, capturing me, silencing all thought and reason, and I remember sobbing, silently, uncontrollably; thick drops of tears smudging the ink and the mountains and the numbers, because I couldn't see any way in which it was possible for me to stand in front of the mountain; I was too small to move to something so enormous. I couldn't see how it was normal, how it wasn't an absolute punishment, a suffocation and strangulation, that it was possible for something as beautiful as that mountain to exist at the same simultaneous moment of my existence so far away from it. I couldn't understand, couldn't wrap my head around how something could exist without me being present in front of it; that something could exist without me.

The turmoil of the two 'mes' suddenly dies when I think back to this moment, because this is where I was, and this is where I am. This is where the two of me were born, in the inescapable vacuum of being separate from something. I cried that day not because I wanted to see that mountain, but at the terrifying shock that I _wasn't_ that mountain. When did we separate and move so far away from each other?

I carry this moment with me like a talisman. This memory is my anchor. There are moments of insanity over stark nights and days when my insides are divided and are shred into two and I don't know which way to turn to, and I cure these flirtations with madness with my talisman. Insanity seduces me, and I am scared to write those words down and allow them to form a sentence, but there it is. And now that I've said it and written it perhaps they will come back to haunt me; or perhaps, in this release they will stop haunting me. But for now, I am me, and there are no opposing voices. I still carry the pain of that separation with me, and on long winter afternoons I stare at the gathering clouds, and I wish I could sprout wings and fly to them, fly through them, and lose myself in clouds and clouds so the earth is not visible anymore and perhaps then I will feel united again with these beings; these beings I feel a kinship with. In the silence of deep woods, with birdsong rising and falling in echoes, in the presence and the gravity of a mountain, in the vastness of the sea, in the illusions of mist, in the playful games of clouds, in the music of thunder, in the evanescence of lightning, in the poetry of rain, all pain and memory and people and moments disappear. I forget who or what I am. I cannot merge into the cold rock wall of a mountain, not yet, but to be in the radius of its presence is a shuddering comfort. This is why I travel.

There was another reason for undertaking the trip. It was an instinctual, primal motive – a deep-seated, singularly-human desire to discover the purpose - of life. And the answer I've found to this question is that there is no single answer – there is no single explanation that will answer the myriad questions that the many permutations of human consciousness generate. However, a new clarity is rising. What is absolutely clear is that the purpose of life is not in the mere and the routine, in the instincts of survival and reproduction, in the blind following of the impulses of nature. The real purpose is to find a way to become immortal through the instincts that are one step above the ones driven by nature – instincts like art, love and compassion, care, curiosity and laughter, play, intelligence and adventure. The purpose is to live life increasingly awake to every moment, to forever learn, to travel, to change, to evolve, to unlearn things taught by nature that are no longer relevant to the nature of today, to forever remain curious, to thirst for knowledge, to feel and to breathe, and to most importantly live an immortal life before dying a mortal death. To live on in the hearts of men and women in an elemental state – to know that beyond death I will no longer be me, but perhaps I'll be a memory, a moment played out behind closed eyes, an emotion swimming in the blood of a person, or a lingering kiss; in other words – To be without being, to exist without existing.

My final reason for undertaking this journey – for undertaking any journey – is to exist enthralled in that fragile state between being and becoming. I am in love with journeying, with the idea of travel, with discoveries I make in the physical and the mental realms. I travel to remain motionless – to observe everything as it whizzes past. I travel to arrive finally, at myself.

All these experiences - all the dusty miles and the rainy nights and campfires and journeys, all the sadness and joy of moments and family, friends and lovers, all loss and gain - these are forces that teach us to live with intensity. To live with intensity. To live life blooded with passion. More and more I feel certain that we are here to learn to live this way, because we need to understand what it is to live with such concentration. More and more I feel certain that this is the purpose of the soul - learning and unlearning - because each of us, in our experience of life on earth, are tiny mirrors that reflect this knowledge back to some mysterious entity that we all connect to so that it can piece together an understanding of all existence.

Nothing in the universe will deny you your cry for a better life. Nothing in the universe will ignore it. When you look up from the depths of your sorrow and scream for a rope to be sent down, a ladder shall descend that ascends to touch the light of stars. This hope is the very essence of humanity. It comes rushing from the recognition of the soul that things could be better, that you deserve better, that you yourself could be better – a better singer, a better doctor, a better accountant, a better person. What use is a life that does not crave perfection? Are we allowed to be human and listless? No! This gift of life, this cognition of consciousness and conscience should not be squandered in the maddening rush that life has become which blinds us from those recognitions. We are children souls playing a game of curiosity looking for clues in the perfection of our backyard universe, piecing them together like a jigsaw puzzle hoping to stumble upon a mystic god. This pursuit, this singular effort to connect our most sacred being with something beyond and infinite, is the pursuit of microseconds of absolute perfection that we blessedly experience in the practice of art. Art is the divinity in man. It seeks only perfection. And perfection is the art in divinity. Art is the slow uncovering of seconds from seconds until that one second is revealed where you find yourself eyes closed but face-to-face with the entire multiverse, with the whole of creation staring back at you, and you resonate with it for that one precious moment like the notes of a guitar that fall upon each other like waves fall upon waves, indistinctly separate, indistinctly singular.

This massive understanding fills my presence these days. It defines everything that makes me. It is an intuitive understanding that comes from staring at mountains. It comes from destroying your old self and piecing it back together, leaving behind things you don't like about yourself. It comes from liking yourself. It comes from the long and un-ending journey of discovering yourself. I tell myself, more and more, that there is an unending depth to us and we'll find that out as soon as we begin to scratch the surface of our being. I tell myself never to come to the conclusion that I know myself completely. We are as vast as the multiverse, and the great gift of life is that we are given time first to become friends with ourselves, and then allowed to explore our own enigma and our depths. This exploration gives us beauty, gives us strength, gives us intuition.

All of this has been about me – this entire book. It has been about me discovering myself, and you've listened patiently, for which I am grateful. My words have been directions to my soul. Each paragraph is a landmark to the space my soul inhabits. Slowly, with enough words, I will arrive there where my soul resides. My intention has been to draw you a map to my soul, because this has also been about you; because in the way words fall upon words, you would have encountered some words and some paragraphs that may have evoked in you a sense of familiarity. You would have felt a pang of nostalgia as you realized that you have seen some roads and some landmarks in this map. You may have felt a familiarity of both thought and feeling, in which you must have nodded enthusiastically as you realized you have been through the same terrifying vertigo I have been through, that you have thought about things that way I think about things. You may have said to yourself – I've been this way before! That familiarity, that nostalgia that sparked in you in that moment of empathy, is an indication of the proximity of your own soul. Search nearby, and you will find it. We – you and I – are closer now than before we started.

Rohit Karthik Nalluri

Mysore

05.01.2014

*

If you've enjoyed this book and the feelings it generates within you, please share that feeling with your friends and family; please - tell them about this book. Also, if you can, kindly take a moment more to leave a review of the book on your favorite e-store, or the site you purchased this book from. You can also drop me an email to continue this conversation.

Thank you.

Rohit Karthik Nalluri

Connect with the Author

Thank you for reading The Anatomy of Journey. I really hope you enjoyed it. If you want to say 'hi', drop me a note about the book, or plan a road trip with me, here are my social media co-ordinates:

Visit me on my website: http://www.rohitnalluri.com

Befriend me on Facebook: <https://www.facebook.com/rohit.nalluri>

Follow me on Twitter: <https://twitter.com/Rohit_Nalluri>

Hangout with me on Google+: <https://plus.google.com/+RohitNalluriMultiverse>

Favorite my Smashwords author page: <http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/RohitKNalluri>

*

About the Author

Rohit Karthik Nalluri is an author and poet residing in Mysore, India. His upbringing in various states of India provides him a unique perspective and insight into the many cultures of the country, an ability with languages and an unquenchable wanderlust. When he is not writing, he is reading, riding, traveling, singing in the shower or smelling the pages of old books. In the year since he published this book, he has diversified into designing and creating his own 3D Printer, videos of which you can see on his website. When he is not doing any of these things, he is (reluctantly) working in the IT industry. He has worked with companies like IBM, Sony and Wipro.

Other works by the Author

_A Rain of Songs_ [A collection of poems]

_Manifestations_ [A collection of short stories]

_In Contemplation_ [A collection of Haiku]

Upcoming Novels:

The Foot of the Centaur series:

Foot of the Centaur I: Seven Wonders

