A shared taxi with locals, including lamas, from Leh to Padum in Zanskar, and then a few days spent wandering around on a mountain bike that we took on rent from Padum—this allowed us to cover Zanskar almost end to end, visiting everything from famous monasteries to nondescript, forlorn places away from the hubbub of tourism.
In Padum, I remember a special face.
The face of an old woman, a Western tourist.
One day, as we were walking in Padum, I saw a frail-looking, very old woman approaching us. She had a wrinkled face but an energetic walk. She asked us the way to the Ladakh Tourism guest house, which allows tourists to stay whenever there are vacant rooms.
She made a big impression on me because she looked over eighty years of age.
My brother and I talked about the free spirit of Western people in exploring the world till old age. The body may grow old, but not necessarily the spirit of wandering, the spirit of wonderment, the desire to explore new things.
Then the episode was forgotten.
After all, when you travel, you come across so many tourists.
We came back to Leh.
And the very same day that we returned, while walking around in the evening, we came across a timetable displayed in front of the bus stand.
There it was.
The bus to Pangong was leaving at eight the next morning.
Instantly, our eyes glinted.
A bus gives you a very different experience of travelling with a larger group of people. It becomes quite a lot of fun because, away from your particular circumstances and identities, when a group of dozens of people comes together, the journey itself becomes an exercise in learning about other people.
And when all of you are looking at the same destination as a unit, the destination itself acquires a different perspective.
It acquires a different meaning altogether.
That reminded me of one particular bus journey from one of our earlier trips to Ladakh—a journey from Leh to Pangong.
A Bus Full of Characters
That bus was full of characters.
There was this very tall and fair, almost Spanish-looking boy from Maharashtra. He was actually from Pune and worked in the software industry.
He looked almost like a foreigner.
A very gentle guy.
Then there was a doctoral student from JNU. The girl was travelling alone and looked pleasantly desperate to get into networking mode, to talk to people.
She possibly wanted some company.
That is always acceptable and understandable.
Then there was this short fellow from Maharashtra, slightly cross-eyed but so full of humour that I could devote a few chapters to him.
There was Jishnu, a boy from Kerala, dark, with such an odd-beat beauty in the make and shape of his face that he stood out.
You would not forget him if you happened to see him even once.
And then there was this Bangladeshi gentleman travelling with his friend. He was connected with the travel industry, but he seemed to be enjoying each and every bit of the journey like an ordinary traveller discovering everything afresh.
I remember that bus journey from Leh to Pangong vividly precisely because we were travelling as a group.
Our Bangladeshi friend would repeatedly insist with the driver and helper:
“Please allow me to sit on the front seat.”
There were minor squabbles among passengers to grab the front seats because from there you could have a clear view through the windscreen of everything unfolding beautifully before you.
Our Bangladeshi friend was really, really friendly by nature.
When we finally reached Pangong, almost all of us happened to take accommodation near the beautiful lake, either on one side of the narrow road or the other.
By evening, when we gathered together, it was almost like a friendly get-together.
Some were having rum.
Some were taking beer.
And then it became dark.
Under the Akash Ganga
At night, the sky seemed so nearby.
The stars glittered so clearly.
The Milky Way was so vivid that it appeared as if you could simply raise your hand and touch it.
Such unpolluted skies are almost unbelievable when you come from the haze and dust of the plains below.
The stars had their full smile.
So we proposed to the group:
“Let us walk down the road in the darkness and enjoy a walk under this open vault of the sky, glittering with new smiles and a full Milky Way—what we call Akash Ganga in Hindi.”
They agreed.
Now my brother is very mischievous.
As we walked, he started telling everybody about snow leopards.
How a snow leopard crawls stealthily.
How silently it approaches.
How it can attack.
And much to our surprise—and later our laughter—we found that, one after another, members of our group simply kept slipping away.
They went back to the safety of their rooms.
Eventually, there came a point when only we two brothers and the two Bangladeshis were left outside.
Then we started laughing.
Everybody had escaped the moment my brother started talking about snow leopards.
When we came back, we found our short, slightly cross-eyed Maharashtrian friend, with that beautiful mischievous look, thoroughly enjoying life.
He was tipsy.
We asked him:
“Why did you slip away without even telling us?”
His reply was wonderful.
“On the one hand, you are talking about snow leopards. And then, who knows? You guys are from Haryana. We know what type of mischiefs you are into. Later you might have said, ‘Now, after this walk, let us try to cross this big lake running into dozens of kilometres. Let us try to reach the other side!’”
So, he said, they thought it better to avoid that eventuality.
They saved themselves from the snow leopards and also from getting frozen and drowned in the icy waters of the lake, which is almost as big as a little sea.
We had a good laugh about it.
Little Stories Within the Journey
The JNU scholar looked very much in need of company, and I am quite sure she had developed a big crush on our Spanish-looking, tall Pune boy from the software industry.
She kept hovering around him.
That also added a beautiful cuteness to that peaceful time on the shores of Pangong Lake.
And something else added to the beauty.
There was very little artificial light around the homestays and restaurants along Pangong Lake.
So you had darkness.
And in that darkness, the sky smiled its brightest smile that you could ever see.
We enjoyed it thoroughly.
The next day, the same bus started back towards Leh, and the return journey was equally enjoyable.
This time our Bangladeshi friend was lucky.
He managed to occupy the front seat.
And he was so happy, almost clapping like a child.
But this cheerful man had a story.
A story of pain and suffering.
He had shared it with us while we were having dinner at the homestay.
He said that he was enjoying life now, but this enjoyment had come after paying a big price.
His wife had suffered from a very rare disorder.
He had served her and taken care of her through her long illness. He told us that although his religion permitted him another marriage, he chose instead to remain beside his wife.
He gave her the costliest medical treatment he could possibly arrange in Bangladesh. He took her to foreign countries. He spent a great deal of money trying to find treatment for her.
And after twenty-five years of suffering, she passed away.
I could see that pain on his face.
And now I felt that perhaps he was somehow trying to move beyond that painful past by immersing himself in the vastness of Ladakh.
He was enjoying each and every moment.
He was a very friendly, sociable person, taking photographs with us so that he could carry the sweet memories back home.
Even now, he occasionally sends us WhatsApp messages.
He is always trying to come back to Ladakh, although at one point tensions in relations between Bangladesh and India made obtaining a visa difficult for him.
And I thought: common people ultimately end up losing whenever there is friction between countries and larger powers.
He is a simple common man.
He just wants to enjoy Ladakh.
Looking at him so happy, I kept thinking: this man has suffered so much while taking care of his wife, and now he is enjoying life.
Credit goes to Ladakh.
Perhaps here he feels free and liberated from some of the tentacles and entanglements of life.
His friend was equally graceful, though much more silent in comparison.
Dancing in the Snow
On the journey back, another beautiful memory still tingles my nervous system.
There was snowfall at one of the high passes.
It was overcast, and as we climbed high into the mountains, snow began falling.
We got down.
The JNU girl—who knows, perhaps she too was carrying her own share of pain, perhaps even some love story gone wrong—was suddenly so happy.
She started dancing in the snow.
In fact, all of us had a little dance there, shouting out our share of joy.
That is the beauty of enjoying travel as a group.
Most of us will possibly never meet again in life.
But those memories stay.
They make a certain permanent space within you, and they never fail to bring a smile to your face whenever you recall them.
Jishnu
From the same journey, I remember Jishnu from Kerala.
Silent and aloof.
The carrier of a beautifully strange persona that made him stand out even in a crowd.
He had a flashy white smile on his pitch-dark face.
His face was cut in such a unique way that it gave him his own unorthodox beauty.
If you look at a fellow human being as something unique in himself, Jishnu was that.
He was travelling alone and on a tight budget.
He had been staying at the homestay of a friend near Manali, doing some graphic-design work for him in exchange for his stay.
He too was crazily in love with Ladakh.
He wanted to see more and more of it.
So, to help him save his budget, we allowed him to stay in our room on a spare mattress in Leh.
He stayed with us for two or three days and contributed whatever little amount he could afford.
But that was simply a kind of help to a fellow journeyman.
I remember him accompanying us to Shey Palace and other monasteries.
At Shey, the three of us—my brother, Jishnu and I—climbed the little hill.
Beyond the palace, if you are cautious enough, you can move along a ridge. It is a steep hillside with boulders, so you have to be careful.
We reached an old, partly abandoned structure where there were numerous prayer flags and prayer strings.
It appeared to be a place where Ladakhis, perhaps going back to their royal times, had performed ritual ceremonies, and where rituals are still performed on special occasions.
The three of us went there and sat inside that crumbling structure high on the hill.
It was a very strange experience.
We could see remnants of ceremonies—incense, burnt material and other offerings.
Sitting there, I explained my own feeling that such a place can act almost like an open portal because its sanctity has been maintained through ritual and devotion over a long period.
If we maintain ourselves in a state of openness, I feel such a place can help us.
So we meditated there.
These are the memories we carry when we tag along with fellow travellers sometimes.
It is not necessary all the time.
We need our personal space as well.
Then you take the bike and go off on your own.
But travelling as a group creates a completely different type of environment.
Pangong — The Liquid Jewel
And Pangong Lake itself is a completely unique experience.
It is a liquid jewel that keeps changing its colours throughout the day according to the play of clouds and sunbeams across its waters.
It looks like something straight out of the heavens that we imagine.
Whenever we visit, we like staying at Sasoma Homestay.
It is run by three generations of women.
The eldest is an old woman of around eighty.
Then there is her daughter.
And then her granddaughter.
All three women take care of the homestay together.
During the tourist season they are extremely busy, and over the years I have seen their establishment getting new additions.
I am happy that they have made some money.
During the season, the cost of boarding and lodging varies according to demand, and the stay generally includes dinner and breakfast the next morning because most tourists spend only a single night there.
Their dining hall is lovely.
It is carpeted in Tibetan Buddhist style, with low tables and sitting platforms around it.
And all three generations of women work expertly together to serve the food.
It is simple food.
Chapati.
Rice.
Dal.
And for breakfast, bread and omelette.
But it is served with so much love.
The old woman keeps spinning her handheld prayer wheel.
Once I asked her daughter why she continued turning it while we were eating.
“She is praying for you while you eat,” her daughter explained. “She is praying to her gods that whatever you eat here should be good for your system.”
That is the loving-kindness contained within these little rituals.
A Bag of Garbage
Whenever I stay there, I take long solitary walks along the shores of Pangong Lake, marvelling at its changing shapes and colours, looking towards the lofty mountains and the snow-capped peaks in the distance.
But unfortunately, some careless tourists litter the banks of Pangong.
To me, Pangong is a goddess.
A living shrine.
So during one of my walks, I kept collecting garbage—empty cans, wrappers, bottles and other trash.
Eventually, I had a big bag full of it.
When I arrived back at the homestay carrying the bag, the old woman's daughter looked at me.
“Where have you picked all this from?”
“I have cleared the source of your revenue,” I told her. “The beautiful lake that gives you your bread and butter.”
For a moment, she seemed unsure where I should put it.
But then the old woman came forward smiling.
She walked ahead of me and guided me towards a large garbage bin where they kept their waste.
Still smiling, she opened it.
And I poured everything inside.
I remember that little moment clearly.
Padma
The old woman's granddaughter is Padma, a lovely young Ladakhi woman.
Once I asked her about her education.
She replied:
“I am doing my graduation from Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi.”
I was so surprised.
It was quite unexpected.
Here was a girl from such a far-off corner of India, close to the borderlands, growing up beside Pangong Lake, and she was receiving a modern education at a premier college in Delhi.
During her summer break, she travels back home.
And then this modern college-going girl joins her mother and grandmother in managing the family homestay, serving travellers arriving from different parts of the world.
Three generations of women under one roof.
The grandmother spinning her prayer wheel.
The mother running the household and homestay.
And the granddaughter moving between Pangong and a premier college in Delhi.
Perhaps that too is Ladakh—the ancient and the modern sitting at the same low dining table.
Walking along Pangong Lake itself is another chapter.
That deserves a full, completely separate narration.
For now, what stays with me from these journeys is the beauty of travelling with other people.
A busload of strangers comes together.
For a day or two, everybody forgets his or her separate world.
Someone falls in love, or perhaps merely develops a little crush.
Someone tells jokes.
Someone is carrying twenty-five years of pain behind a smiling face.
Someone dances in falling snow.
Someone is travelling on almost no money.
Someone wants the front seat like a delighted child.
And someone frightens everybody by talking about snow leopards in the darkness.
Then the journey ends.
Everybody moves away.
Most will possibly never meet again.
But strangely, they do not completely leave you.
Years later, when you remember that bus, that dark sky, the Akash Ganga, the laughter, the snow, the lake and those faces, they all come travelling back.
Perhaps that is one of the gifts of travelling together.
For a few hours or a few days, complete strangers become part of your story.
And then they remain there.
Coming back again to this year's bus journey from Leh to Pangong.
The bus was waiting in the bus-stand yard. Travellers were slowly arriving.
And surprise of surprises, I saw the old woman again—the majestic carrier of so many wrinkles on a thin face, a frail woman but robust in spirit, walking with pride.
It was the same woman I had seen a few days earlier in Padum, looking for the Ladakh Tourism guest house.
She boarded the bus and took her seat.
Then came a young woman, light brown in complexion and of Latin American appearance. I would later come to know that she was from Mexico.
She boarded the bus and occupied one of the two-passenger seats to the left. We were sitting on the three-passenger seats to the right.
She shared her seat with a shy young man, perhaps between twenty-five and thirty. He worked in an automobile showroom and had told a sweet little lie to his parents—that he was going to Vaishno Devi.
Instead, he had come to Ladakh.
These days there are so many Instagram reels and social-media posts about people visiting Ladakh, and he too had been bitten by the bug. He had four or five days to explore the place.
As the bus started, he nervously and hesitatingly began building up a conversation with the Mexican woman.
She was full of confidence, as people generally become after having been on their own and travelling for years.
It was a tentative conversation.
Smatterings of it kept falling into my ears because, as a writer, I listen to what people are saying.
It gives me a lot of fodder for my write-ups.
There was another girl in her early twenties, a student of psychology studying in the direction of clinical practice. She was as much overweight as she was radiant with happiness, joy and giggliness.
She was extremely extroverted, completely unmindful of the typical standardized expectations regarding a woman's body, weight, shape and size.
She simply did not bother.
I had rarely seen a young woman carrying such confidence. She had a girlish face, and although her body did not conform to the standard beauty statistics of a typical woman, she carried herself with ease, confidence and the majesty of youth.
Very talkative.
Very bubbly.
And she would talk a lot to us during the journey.
Nora
As the bus proceeded, I started talking to the old woman sitting towards the back.
I learned that her name was Nora.
She was from Spain.
I told her that I had seen her a few days earlier in Padum when she was looking for accommodation at a government-run guest house.
She had already been enjoying India for more than two months. Earlier she had been in Kashmir and a few other places, and now she was exploring Ladakh.
A woman of undying spirit in her late seventies.
With her excited, wrinkled, almost girlish face, she talked with enthusiasm and curiosity.
She had maintained that curiosity.
She had retained that sense of wonder about life.
And perhaps that was what made her continue pursuing her dreams even at this age, travelling completely on her own.
She told me that a few days earlier she had participated in a guided hiking trail of moderate intensity. Due to bad weather, she somehow lost the trail and became separated from the other members of the trekking group.
It was rapidly getting dark.
Then, she said, she slipped and went rolling down a little slope.
She almost injured herself, but thankfully there was no serious injury.
And then she cackled with laughter while telling me that getting lost had almost become a way of finding herself in a completely new setup.
She walked for some distance and eventually reached a little hamlet with a small monastery.
The lamas welcomed her and gave her full hospitality.
She rested there.
She became an unexpected but much-welcomed guest.
And she had another story to carry with her.
We Are All Carrying Stories
All of us are carrying big stories with us.
They may or may not appear big in the eyes of others, but yes, we are the majestic carriers of our little individual stories.
Nora certainly had many.
She had spent a considerable period of her life in Qatar and told me about her experiences there, including her association with work devoted to the education of girls.
Then came stories of her journeys.
Armenia.
Azerbaijan.
Latin American countries.
So many places.
So many stories.
And she was so happy that I was listening to her seriously.
At one point she told me something beautiful.
She said she had thought that she would feel joyful after reaching Pangong. But now the journey itself had become joyful because she had found such a patient listener—someone willing to listen to her stories and also share his own.
We had spiritual discussions as well.
Whenever the bus halted, sometimes the conversation moved into more serious areas—enlightenment and other subjects that are expected to arise in the mind of somebody entering the later phases of life.
She was very happy.
Around us, meanwhile, the little world inside the bus continued evolving.
The bubbly psychology student had started talking to my brother.
The shy young man from the automobile company was slowly shedding his shyness and speaking with greater freedom to the Mexican girl.
During one stop, I saw him taking her photograph beside a stream.
She looked really happy.
It was turning into a lovely journey.
Back at Sasoma
After reaching Pangong, I found that the old woman who runs Sasoma Homestay, where we generally stay, was not there this year.
She had gone to visit her other son in a nearby village.
But she was quite healthy.
That itself was reassuring.
Over the years, these people have become part of our journeys. We have stayed at their place repeatedly, and naturally that creates a little nick in your heart.
You begin to care about them, especially when you return.
So I was quite happy to know that Dadi Ma—as we call her—was still there and healthy.
The family also seemed to have made some money because there were visible improvements in the homestay.
I complimented them.
And I joked that no wonder they had increased the price per night by a few hundred rupees—they had to recover all the investment they had made.
They are simple people.
These simple people do not always have the logical, shrewd and clever counterarguments with which we people from the plains so quickly defend our interests.
They would simply smile shyly.
That is their reaction.
Perhaps the simplest way a person can react.
Everybody Finds His Own Pangong
The other passengers scattered around according to their budgets.
They searched for accommodation in nearby places.
Nora and the Mexican girl decided to share accommodation nearby.
Our chubby, smart, suave and extraordinarily confident young psychology student was running around with her backpack, searching for that most suitable combination—the best possible place at the cheapest possible rate.
She was so confident that at one point I saw her standing beside the road making the sign for a lift.
A biker stopped.
Within seconds, I saw her sitting pillion behind him and disappearing down the road.
I thought she would now be enjoying herself somewhere with a biking group around the lake. There are many homestays, campsites, huts and cabins scattered around.
In the evening, as we walked along the banks of Pangong Lake, we saw Nora and the Mexican girl.
They were sitting on stones along the shore, splashing water and enjoying themselves.
We thought it better not to disturb them.
They needed their privacy.
And we wanted to treasure our own moments too.
So we simply took a little circuit around them and proceeded farther.
We walked along that beautiful path with the musicality of waves hitting the shore in the background.
Changing colours.
Changing cloud shapes.
Changing hillsides.
And even the colours of those hillsides changing continuously with the changing slant of the sun's rays.
It was quite beautiful.
The Cosmic Canvas
And at night—obviously—the wonder of wonders.
The stars seemed to twinkle so nearby that you felt you could simply stand on your toes and touch them.
Such pristine darkness.
Such pure smiles of stars.
And the Milky Way—so bright, so defined, so distinct.
A beautiful painting on the cosmic canvas.
A lovely sight.
You could simply continue looking at it for hours.
It has that kind of beauty.
And Everybody Gathers Again
On the journey back, the Mexican girl boarded the bus.
Nora stayed behind.
She wanted to spend a few more days around Pangong.
Our automobile-sector young man now seemed almost in love with the Mexican girl, as could perhaps be expected.
There is sometimes this funny expectation among Indian men that when a Western woman talks freely to them, perhaps there is immediately the possibility of friendship, a relationship, or at least an affair.
That's quite funny.
But that's how it sometimes is.
I was wondering what had happened to our bubbly psychology student.
I thought she must still be happily travelling with the biker group because I had last seen her speeding away as a pillion rider.
But after the bus had travelled perhaps ten kilometres, just where the lodgings and accommodations on that side of Pangong begin to thin out, I saw a figure standing in the distance.
An arm went up.
The figure was signalling the bus to stop.
And the entire bus cackled with laughter.
Here she was!
She had reappeared just as suddenly as she had disappeared.
She climbed aboard and immediately resumed her usual chirpy talkativeness and confidence.
And that would continue all the way.
The Forgotten Camera
A few kilometres farther on, perhaps twenty kilometres from where we had started, there was suddenly panic on one of the seats.
A young couple appeared to be completely out of their wits.
They started questioning each other.
It soon became clear that they had lost something.
Their expensive camera.
They had apparently left it behind at the homestay.
The young man was using excited and troubled words.
And the girl was giving him daggers through her eyes, almost as though saying:
“You just have your say here. I will take this up with you later.”
There was no other option.
They asked the driver to stop the bus.
Immediately they got down, almost in panic, quarrelling and accusing each other of being careless.
I thought somebody would obviously give them a lift back towards their homestay.
Everybody laughed.
Perhaps they were simply destined to stay at Pangong for another day or two.
The next bus would not leave immediately. Or, if they were lucky, perhaps they would find a shared taxi.
In any case, such incidents bring another element of uncertainty and excitement into these journeys.
And I hoped that by having their trip unexpectedly delayed, perhaps they would get some extra time to enjoy the beauty of Pangong Lake.
I was also quite confident, from my own experience of Ladakhi people, that they would find their camera exactly where they had left it.
So perhaps a forgotten camera would merely give them another little extension of Pangong.
These are the little, little beautiful takeaways from a bus journey.
The Mexican Architect
Among the characters, Nora particularly stood out—the old woman with a young girl's spirit.
But the Mexican woman had her own story too.
She was an architect from Mexico.
When she set out to explore India, her parents had expressed some anxiety regarding her safety.
But she told me that during her travels she had not come across even a single instance in which she personally felt unsafe or threatened.
And then she used a very interesting expression.
Perhaps because she was an architect, the metaphor came naturally to her.
“I have been refabricated,” she said.
She felt that the journey had amplified her by several notches.
It had given her a new dimension from which to look at things.
And she had experienced Ladakh quite extensively.
She had joined a cycling group from Manali and cycled all the way from Manali to Leh, covering hundreds of kilometres through extraordinarily difficult terrain.
Imagine pedalling your way across some of the world's highest motorable mountain passes, confronting cold, high altitude, lack of oxygen and the sheer physical strain of cycling through such a landscape.
I am one hundred percent sure that she enjoyed every bit of it.
Because such a journey gives you a completely different perspective from which to look at the raw beauty of nature.
You are in awe of it.
Side by side, you are intimidated by it.
Sometimes you feel like worshipping it.
And during the toughest phases, perhaps you feel like complaining to it—sweetly, as you complain to your mother.
Yet at every step you are so alert, so aware and so open.
Your sensory perception seems to be at its peak in feeling reality.
You are taking very big doses of reality while putting your body through such strenuous exercise in such difficult conditions, but upon a canvas as beautiful as Ladakh.
She seemed completely happy.
She appeared to have enjoyed it thoroughly.
What Ladakh Does to People
Perhaps this is what Ladakh does to people.
It gives them an amplification.
It allows them, at least for a while, to rise to a higher frequency from where they can look down upon their normal lives from a clearer perspective—with sharpened vision, with more wisdom, with more knowledge.
And the more you travel through Ladakh, the more you come across such people.
Seekers of their larger selves.
People whom you find wandering around Ladakh apparently looking at mountains, rivers, monasteries and lakes, but perhaps searching for something bigger within themselves.
A bigger dimension.
These are special people in themselves, searching for something larger.
And Ladakh provides them an open platform.
An open canvas.
A place upon which they can paint the picture of their own reality.
Ladakhi rainbows after a brief shower on Hunder sand dunes
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