Ladakh Diary

Ladakh, in Jammu and Kashmir, is just 90 minutes by air from Delhi, but physically and topographically it seems more than a world away. The flight to Leh crosses slender green valleys separated by miles and miles of uninhabitable brown desert mountains. It almost seems as if human life has sprung up autonomously in the valleys, each isolated from the other, for migrations across such terrain seem daunting even to the modern imagination. Yet, tea came from China, and polo from Baltistan. Buddhism went to Tibet and returned, elaborated and transformed, while Western Ladakh borrowed Islam from Central Asia. Caravans of cosmopolitan traders crossed from Central Asia to China, travelling for days and months, through narrow precipitous passes and braving the dangers of night and snow.

How tedious travel must have been, I thought. Yet, when we got off the plane and started driving through the mountains, I realised I would never again be able to think of brown as a boring colour. Each range, each hill is of a different shade—flecked with dark purple, striated by wandering winds, bare rock adorned with little bunches of bright flowers that seem to assert some fine point about survival. Gigantic sand dunes have been planed into smooth patterns, and bleak mountains have been cast up violently by the collision of continental plates. Amidst all these windswept forms are the roads maintained by the Border Roads Organisation, with their cheerful yellow signboards every hundred yards, which bear such cryptic legends like, "Himank cares, where Eagles dare", "Yes, U R Right. It is Himank at your service" and "Don't be a Gamma in the land of Lama", this last being a warning against rash driving.