A landslide, somewhere above Gulmarg in India.
One minute, we were moving. The next, a queue of cars stretching back further than anyone could see, engines off, nobody in a particular hurry to explain anything. My mother produced bread and butter from somewhere. We ate it in the car.
A soldier stood on the cliff face above us, rifle across his chest, and controlled the entire queue with one hand. Forward. Stop. Forward. Stop. He had the unhurried authority of someone who understood that nothing on this road happened quickly.
We waited for hours.
I had no phone signal. I was 18, three days into a trip through Kashmir and Ladakh with my family, and I had approximately forty things I needed to urgently text my friends about. The soldier alone was worth at least three messages. The landslide was worth five. Instead, I sat in the back seat and watched the mountain.
By the time the road opened, it was already dark.
We pushed on to Drass, the coldest inhabited place in India, arriving well after midnight. One dhaba was still open, with green walls, dim lighting, and full of strangers who had all been stuck on the same road. We ordered rajma chawal. It wasn’t very good. It was hot, and we were starving, which settled the matter.
My father made a few phone calls, and a last-minute room materialised in Kargil.
This requires some context. Kargil, to anyone who grew up in Delhi in the late nineties, means one thing. The war was in 1999 when I was nine. The name had lived in my memory as a place of an entirely different kind, not a town where you simply checked into a motel and slept on floor mattresses. And yet there we were.
The motel was dark and a little eerie, which felt appropriate.
I still had no signal.
The next morning was crisp and completely clear. The motel served bread and butter for breakfast. I remember enjoying it enormously, which surprised me given that I’d eaten the same thing in a stationary car the day before under considerably less pleasant circumstances. Context, it turns out, changes everything.
Outside, people were simply getting on with their morning in a remote mountain town that had no interest in its own mythology. After breakfast, we drove on towards Leh. The landscape, which had already been doing its best, somehow got more dramatic after Kargil.
I never did text my friends about any of it. By the time I had signal again, three days later, the story felt too large for a message. Some things apparently need to be told slowly, in the right order, to people who have time to listen.
I’m still working on that.
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