The Sky Was All Mine

With barely four hours of sleep, I was awake by five in the morning. The weather forecast said it was snowing already. There were no signs of it yet. I held onto the hope anyway and opened the door expecting to find snow-covered peaks.

What I found instead was darkness.

The sun looked like it would bunk the first few hours. I had forgotten to check the sunrise timings, which I usually remember to do. The property was completely still, except for the Parvati below, flowing through the dark at its own pace. I stepped out to check on the dogs. They were locked in for the night, sleeping unbothered, which felt both reasonable and slightly unfair.

I did not feel like going back to sleep. Naviin wasn't up yet, so I pulled on my jacket and shoes, shut the door behind me, and stepped out for a walk within the property. Though it was tempting, I had no intention of climbing over a locked gate at five in the morning and alarming anyone. But inside the grounds, the sky was all mine.

Without the interference of light pollution, the stars were out in full. That view never becomes ordinary. I opened the sky tracker app and tried to identify a few constellations, moving slowly around the grounds, trying to let the silence of the place settle into me. It almost worked.

Almost, because my mind had other ideas. Sometimes an energy mismatch happens to me in very still places. The calmness outside does something to the chaos inside, untangles it slowly, and in the process it releases more energy than it absorbs. I was buzzing quietly in the dark, which felt like an accurate summary of my relationship with stillness.

I set up a time-lapse to catch the sunrise and, in the process of doing so, managed to wake Naviin. Not entirely intentionally. He joined me immediately, which is one of his likable qualities.

We had arrived the previous morning at exactly the moment the light was hitting the peaks for the first time that day. By then we had caught only the tail end of it. That morning we got all of it.

We witnessed the full sequence: the deep blue of the sky before dawn, the first ray of golden light, the slow burn of colour moving down from the peaks, the valley coming into focus. Minute by minute, the world assembled itself in front of us.

The staff let the dogs out when the sun was fully up. We played with them for a while, which felt like the right way to begin a day, and then went in to get ready. The plan was Tosh.

Tosh is 20 km away from Kasol, at the far end of the Parvati Valley, usually said to be the last village before the mountains close in entirely. There are no motorable roads beyond a certain point, after which the only way in is on foot. We hired a car and driver to take us as far as the road would allow. The Tamil couple from the neighbouring hut had the same plan and we actually started off together, ending up in two separate cars headed in the same direction. I wondered how they were going to manage the trek with their little one, but said nothing.

We passed through a reservoir near a dam, a deep aqua green that did not look entirely real. It was a colour that we would all associate with edited pictures and then feel amazed when seeing it in person. The mountains rose behind it and the whole scene in the morning light looked unreasonably beautiful.

'The place is Barshaini,' said the driver. We urged him to stop with the enthusiasm of children spotting something shiny from a car window. He pulled over and we jumped out before he had fully stopped, with the Insta 360 already in hand. The car was waiting, the road was busy, and we had maybe ten minutes before the next obligation. We spent those ten minutes trying to do three things simultaneously. Take in the view properly, document it adequately, and not feel guilty about the driver sitting idle on a main road. None of them were done properly. I wished we could have stayed a little longer.

There was a small group of trekkers gathered near the water, adjusting their packs and checking their laces. We asked the driver about it. That, he said, was the start point of the Kheerganga trek.

Kheerganga had been on my list for longer than I could remember. The trail that people come back from talking about for years. We were not doing it this time. Our itinerary was already full. But standing at that point and watching those trekkers disappear into the tree line, I filed it away carefully. This trip, I had already decided, was the reconnaissance. I was learning it all then. The geography, the routes, the distances, the landscape, so that when I came back, none of it would be unfamiliar.

The mountains were already making plans for me. I was simply taking notes.