Written at Reckong Peo, the evening before the bus to Tabo — the same journey later described in A Letter from Tabo, Spiti.
Time and again, of all the trips I’ve undertaken these past years, the ones where I travelled alone and let time and place decide my footsteps have left the deepest impression on my mind. They’ve given me very beautiful experiences and could, in fact, as I sometimes see it now, have given me a clear purpose in life.
These small walks into the mountains first started as a way to escape the world of society — the society that filled my head with a severity of wanting to do something, to become something, to bathe in the feeling of success. When some happiness did come in my academic life, it was quickly overshadowed by what I still wasn’t, by the sense that the win or the accolade wasn’t good enough. You need hundreds of things to feel good about yourself, but only one to make you feel bad. I also felt I had spent too much time at home, caressed by the same thoughts about how the world works as my parents held. I needed to pour water on my own thoughts and ideas, give them light and fire. That could never happen sitting at home, living the life of a treadmill.
I filled my bag with some books, maps and clothes and took a bus that could carry me as far as possible from Delhi, straight to the mountains. The journey lasted 22 hours. At first I was wide awake, watching the topography and climate change around me — the bottlenecks and lights of choking Delhi giving way to the warm, dry plains of North India, then the ascent, slight at first, bringing coolness and the tingling lights of dams and industry. When I woke later and felt the ache in my shoulders, I knew we were zig-zagging our way up. The air filled with the moistness of grass — I could almost eat it. By the time I reached Reckong Peo, my destination, I was glad of a proper walk, but my mind still felt half-dead, still moving with the bus, staring out with an expressionless face, the world whizzing past — the more the pictures changed outside, the more it bent inward, lost in small, deformed thoughts too insignificant to coalesce into anything of substance.
I had been to Reckong Peo some nine months before. Peo, as it’s called, along with Kalpa a little higher up, is a beautiful place to look at the pinnacles of numerous mountains and be lost in wonder. Time passes slowly when you stare at its grey-black features, drifting from one part to another, watching the clouds pass through. Sometimes you find yourself imagining walking the ridge line, step by step, finally pushing yourself to the summit and feeling an entire mountain beneath you.
It’s hard to wake yourself from daydreams of climbing mountains, so you have to get down to actually doing it as soon as possible. I made a small start and decided to go to a monastery near the top of Peo. The evening was setting in, the reds in the sky long gone. Both the tall golden statue of the Buddha in the monastery and I looked deep into the sky, once again captivated by the icing of the pyramidal peaks, now being enclosed in black cloud. The colours of the prayer halls faded too, until only the blue-black sky remained, with silhouettes of arches and shapes. You’ve got a terrific view, I told the Buddha, though I feel for you, seeing all this grandeur day in and out and never being able to move, to walk, to see the view over the next big hill. But then again, I told myself — maybe he has already seen everything.
Sitting on the bed that night, engrossed in maps of Kinnaur and Spiti, I felt it — what it means to see the maps while sitting amid the mountain ranges themselves. Here I was, seeing everything from far above: the mountains, the trails, the rivers and streams, villages and bridges. Distances seem achievable and paths defined; it gives you a degree of control, to some extent. And yet the world outside — this domain of nature and of hearty men — is full of countless possibilities, places separated by millions of steps of patience and courage.
Before going to bed, I had a plan for the next day: take the morning bus to Tabo.