Lahul Spiti Valley

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The sky wavers between sunny and gloaming. The light is a dull clang, old, an echo of light from some forgotten time which still tarries here. Except for the electricity lines you would hardly believe that you in the present 21st Century, remove these silent sentinels from the landscape and you could be anywhere in the sixth to seventh century.

I feel Time enveloping me, taking me back to a place where it stood still unwilling to leave...

There is a haunting quality to the landscape. The Road through the passes is dotted by chortens and sometimes you see by the roadside the Speaking Stones of Spiti . Small Villages & Thousand year old Monastery Towns , or past stony clapboard cottages boarded up awaiting visitors that will never come

In the distance perched on a hill another monastery with stupendous views across the valley floor.

All of them keep their memories to themselves, as you whiz past. Here they have stood long before you and will remain but you will pass away. The air laced with wood smoke, and small butter lamps lit in small houses. I breathe it all in, savour it and hide it in my memory so I can come back whenever I wish.

Atop on my Aerie I pan my vision to the valley below...Far below, the valley spans out in a sweep across the plain below here and there filled with flowers, the wind wafts up to me & pulls the heavy scent of Azalea's into the air, the fragrance drowns, sweet purple, in piercing blue.

The sweetness drowns with a sound of the river beyond.

The river modest knife of history, carving its blade deeper into the earth, rusty blood seeping through the cracked face of the landscape. A fine mesh of colors. Ocher Lichen, Rust, Grays and the awesome vaulted dome above.

On the Way to Manirang Lahul Valley

Nay I can't ask for more.....Its perfection & it leaves me spellbound, Ecstatic.

The leaves of the trees , a million hands exuding energy,

The cold room, the smell of wooden sills and floors slowly being heated in a tepid sun as they have done for centuries in this place.

Looking out at the dry hills so bright, the eye manufactures shadows. Gradations of shades, ice topped hills surround fresh water lakes which reflect shades of turquoise and vivid blues and totally astound . The water reflects the sky and one can forget which side is up and down, the horizion on the sky melt into each other.

If I could draw, I'd hold a square of paper up to this view from yonder window and let the landscape burn into it.

Seep into it like a grasp leaving its stain...

Photosensitive paper turning dark with desire for a place no one will ever apprehend except you & me..

For the past couple of weeks I have missed you..... I wish you were alongside me here . This place has a rugged beauty not unlike Ladakh nowhere else do mountains attain different shades according to the light of the day. I could watch such mountains forever as they dress themselves up in a panoply of vivid hues.

I am sure you would have soaked in the experience as I have.

As I leave I take away the smell of the room again fated to be long closed, the hills and monasteries, the people and the places are all in me. The hills dissolve as I look back ; From the open door, the wafting fumes of scorched grass which is not unlike the acrid smell of all my burned poetry for you.... but the loss I feel is that of one who has already passed the point of apprehension.

Like writing to a man who no longer wishes to be found.

So its sayonara for now, look not for me ....Until the plums bending that branch, the weight of the shadow separating one leaf from another, presses that place into you.

- Until the hills burns your eyes, until you give in.

- Until a seam of density that that separates leaf from air/ is not a gap but a seal.

- A seal to my solitude in this vast expanse.

- Until the beautiful buzzing of the bees wakes me.

Seldom do you visit places which seem to feel like home, places which appeal to your soul and the desire is almost overwhelming to remain forever. This is one such place cut off from the whole world, one of the most sparsely populated region in our overfilled country, which exists out of time and bereft of reason. A place I could easily call home. But for now the road beckons to other places but where shall I find such splendor & such a feeling of peace I don't know.

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The Great Wave Off Kanagawa

(Fugaku sanjurokkei: Kanagawaoki namiura).

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)

Woodblock print from Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Fuji, Edo period.

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I can look and stare at this particular wave for hours together (in fact I have done so many a time) but it is a curious fact that I always end up thinking of the fate of the fishermen & their boats in the aftermath of the wave.... Their end is almost assured.. It fills me with meloncholy just gazing at death like that. How utterly poweless human beings are against the power of Nature when it unleashes its force.

Everytime I look at this print of this amazing wood block, I half expect the wave to crash down in all its maelovalent fury and swamp the 3 boats floundering in the raging sea.

The wave looks almost alive to me full of the untold power , you can almost see the latent energy captured in the frothing wavelets their edges poised like talons just waiting to engulf the helpless fishermen & their boats. . The wave looks looks all the more ferocious as it dwarfs Fuji - San (Mt. Fuji) reducing it to a mere hill.

I am as always in awe of this moment of arrested motion that the artist has succeeded in communicating through his work. The fall of the swamping wave looks inevitable . A brief moment in time captured beautifully poised as it seems on the edge of disaster.

Hokusai was a master of the "ukiyo - e" (pictures of the floating world) and left a formidable legacy of more than 30,000 examples of his works. Among them his 13 volume sketchbook MANGA (Random Sketches) as well as the series of block prints colectively known as THE THIRTY VIEWS OF Mt. FUJI from which series this print is taken.

Hokusai's over 30,000 works, including silk paintings, woodblock prints, picture books, manga, travel illustrations, erotic illustrations, paintings, and sketches. Some of his paintings were public spectacles which measured over 200 sq. meters (2,000 sq. feet.) He didn't care much for being sensible or social respect; he signed one of his last works as "The Art-Crazy Old Man". In his 89 years, Hokusai changed his name some thirty times (Hokusai wasn't his real name) and lived in at least ninety homes.

His work deeply impressed even Western Impressionists like Van Gogh, Degas, Monet among others he was one oriental artist who bridged the gap to western artists...

Hokusai must be imagined as a person who was completely obsessed by producing ukiyo-e prints. He lived for nothing else. He usually got up early in the morning and worked until after sunset. The art name Gakyo-rojin, which he used from 1834-1849 means old man mad with painting.

And this is what he wrote about himself in his autobiography. It is the quintessence of his art philosophy:

"From the age of five I have had a mania for sketching the forms of things. From about the age of fifty I produced a number of designs, yet of all I drew prior to the age of seventy there is truly nothing of great note. At the age of seventy-two I finally apprehended something of the true quality of birds, animals, insects, fish and of the vital nature of grasses and trees. Therefore, at eighty I shall have made some progress, at ninety I shall have penetrated even further the deeper meaning of things, at one hundred I shall have become truly marvelous, and at one hundred and ten, each dot, each line shall surely possess a life of its own. I only beg that gentlemen of sufficiently long life take care to note the truth of my words."

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Fruity- sweet and sticky - Thin bare twigs tangled amind the bluest sky - The jerky pain of hair caught too tight - A tiny bird with stilled wings glued to the tendrils of a webby cloud - A huge lump of packed down exultation, struggling to be born, then suddenly soaring free, free - Oh! so free and in such ecatacy!!

They lay together on their clothes for hours. keeping each other warm, with skin against skin, smiling foolishly at each other amazed at finding each other, innocent of transgression, enmeshed in the deliciousness of all kinds of discoveries..

He sat kneeling in the inner garden.

Motionless he the watched the gibbious moon, light up the blossom tree, the branches jet against the lighter sky, the clustered blooms now barely tinted.

A petal spiraled towards the ground and he thought:

Beauty
Is not less
For falling
In the breeze.




Another petal settled on the materess of flowers beneath the blossom tree.

The wind sighed in the branches and another petal detached itself and began the spiral towards the ground.

Revolving slowly in the now barely existent wind..
His eyes followed the decent and then moved up to the tree again and tried to guess which would be the next petal to detach itself.

All of them appeared perfect to him.. and it took all his will to concentrate on the flowers and not think of her....

He looked up at the nervous sky watching the night fight a losing battle with the advent of another dawn. The wind picked up and plucked another petal and swirled it towards the ground. The swirl reminded him of her.

He looked towards the east. But she was part of the sky.

The petals looked as graceful as her. lissome and pure.

He sought distance now and only then could he feel that he was not within a box - a box filled with other men and women and all their evil.

Without women, he thought helplessly, men are only a cruel joke.

And with this thought he bled in the starch of the newly risen sun...

Your Body is a Wonderland.

I am leaning on the sofa, she is sitting on the floor, the small table between us. It seems to be absolution simply to listen to her. But I know that if she touches me my shame will be exposed, she'll see in my eyes the terrible things that have marked me/.

A last shudder of strangeness, last flash of fear before longing pushes its blade into me, up to the hilt. Skinned alive, my hand reaches for her hesitantly....

Now impossibly she is placing her cheek - soft - sun warmed peach - against my cold palm.

I begin to trace every line, her lengths, and shapes, and realize suddenly that she's perfectly still, her hands clenched and I'm appalled by my stupidity, my longing humilates her. Then I realize that she is totally concentrated, pinioned under my tongue, that she's giving me the most extragavant permisson to roam the surface of her. Only after I explore her this way, so slowly, an animal outlining territory, does she burst into touch.

I'm paralayzed in the cave her hair makes. Then my hands move to feel her slim waist and suddenly I know how she would bend after a shower, twisting her hair into a wet turban, feel the shape of her back would make, leaning over. I like an oar balanced in its arc above the water, dripping silver. I hear her voice but not her words, so soft, the noise of her whole body is in my ears.

I am deafened by the buzzing drone of her body, the power lines of blood, blue threads under her skin. Cables of tendons; the forests of bone in her wreist and feet. Each time she stops speaking, in each long pause, I renew the pressure of my grasp. I feel her slowly going heavy. How beautiful the blood's pull towards trust, the warm weight of the sleeper entering her orbit, pulling towards me, fragrant, heavy and still as apples in a bowl and oh ! so beautiful the serene calmness of her look as she meanders in the gardens of sleep.

It's not the stillness of something broken but of absolute rest......


When I drift off to sleep I dream of her - young, glistening smooth as marble, sugary wet with sunlight. I feel the sun melting over my skin.

I wake as if I've been dug out of the dream and lifted into the world, a floating exhaustion. My muscles ache from stretching into her, as I lie in sunlight across the bed.

Every cell in my body has been replaced, suffused with peace........

The Man in The Long Black Coat: Going, Going Gone.....

Like a Beast in the pen I'm cut off
From my friends, freedom, the sun
But the hunters are gaining ground
I've nowhere else to run.

- Boris Pasternak Nobel Prize.

She was a good woman and nothing was her fault. They were all good women. They were women with a mission to him, to serve him, straighten him out, to get his oh-so-many talents working in one direction, to help him make a fresh start that would get him clear of all the fresh starts he had made before.

He had encouraged her as he encouraged all of them. He had stood beside them at the patient’s bedside as if he were not himself the patient but a member of the healing team.

" So what shall we do about this poor chap that will get him up and functioning again?

The only difference was he had never believed in the remedy.. Never ever...

She lay face down, exhausted and possibly asleep. She had cleaned the flat. As prisoners clean cells and the bereaved tend tombs. She had scoured the surface of a world she couldn't alter.

Other people might tell him he was too hard on himself. Women said it to him often. How he mustn't hold himself responsible for both halves of every relationship that had collapsed on him. But he knew better. He knew the distance between himself and everything else.

In those days he was still the unequalled expert on his own incurability.

His disease: falling in love head over heels every time.

He touched her shoulders but she didn't stir, so he knew she was awake.

" I have to go" , he said as he began loading his junk into his long black coat, ritualistically as if setting off on a safari. his bent wallet, full of unpaid bills and cancelled credit cards; his passport mildewed with sweat and too much travel; the notebook and pencil he kept handy for penning gems of wisdom to himself for contemplation when he was sober and not under the influence.

He fished out a suitcase and began filling it with shirt's that she'd ironed for him.
" You said this time you weren't going back, that you'd served your time?"

"I have to go, there's nothing I can do, stay here, use the flat."

"If you just hadn't said all that stuff we'd have been fine. I’d have been happy just having an affair. You should see your letters and hear yourself in them."

He didn't look at her. He stooped over and picked up the suitcase.

"Just don't do it to anyone else", she said.

That was as far as her calm could stretch. She began sobbing and was sobbing when he left and she was still sobbing the next morning when she called her friend over and babbled out the whole story, yet defended him and his actions to the death.

She defends him still, a surfeit of loyalty to this day, even though her illusions are destroyed......
All that was left is ....

The eloquent silence, All that you hear at a hundred miles per hour is the ticking of the brain.

Where is the Love??

There's no avoiding it any longer. This feeling has been growing in my mind for the last decade and it is time I elucidated on it, otherwise I will constrain myself too much.



I don't like any of my friends. I've just flicked through my address book, a thin volume it has to be said, and was filled with irritation, distaste and an overwhelming sense of boredom.

{There I said it.... it just had to be said, }


None of my classmates from School feature in it. The friends in college I keep in touch with have dwindled. Most are from out of town, maybe distance is what does it for me, I’m a very private person as it is and I don't like it when people think they know me too much.



One of the great boons of living in a citylike Delhi is that you don't really need friends to exist and keep yourself entertrained. There are 97 million people within walking distance, a thousand new people every day for the rest of my life and no need to repeat anyone.

No, I like Acquaintances: a wide circle of faintly familiar people who smile and wave but whose names escape me.

An acquaintance has all the expectation, desire to please and vivacity of a first date.

They flash wit and compliments and don't expect you to call or go to their children's weddings.

Friends are only necessary in the rural country or when you go where your being an island is of no use, Where you have to have them, otherwise you stand in serious jeopardy of ending up in one of those institutions which instead of calling themselves Mental Asylums, prefer to be known as Institutions of Meditations & Mind Relaxation (just fancy names for Re - hab centres).

This is not to say that I have foresaken everybody.

There are a select few whom I count as true friends and all of them know this about me by now, that they still remain friends with me is something which is strange. They too are like me in many ways. They share the same passions and appreciate some similar things in life. Maybe we have got used to each others eccentricities long before to give a damn.



I have given up on my other so called wannabe friends, the more you know of another person the more distaste, gorge rises in your throat, common decency prevents me from telling them what i really feel about them. But I have recently done this and I feel lighter in my heart of having cut off those 2 from my former so called “friends”.

Trusting another person after having been betrayed is a very difficult thing for me to do. I can forgive easily but forgetting is the main problem for me.

Why do I cling onto the past so much. Is it because I think I have no future?

No there are things I look forward to but those things are not everybody’s cup of tea.





I try and reconcile to the fact that at least I was morally correct. But that doesn’t help either. Morality doesn't give you squat in todays rat race. yes morality is not a commodity whose stocks are soaring at the moment, while those of deceit & deception are soaring high, every one wants a piece of the action.





In order not to encourage other people to really get to know me, I form a wall around me, this is my private domain, if anyone comes close to intrusion, I behave and act in such a hostile manner that usually I succeed in keeping the walls around me solid, no one and nothing is allowed in here. This makes me think that I am a callous human being, maybe yes, maybe I just can’t fake it no more. .. Just cannot be bothered.


No one you meet for the first time sees the real you, what they perceive is really your representative, who puts the best foot forward and keeps up appearances. But I am not like that anymore. I have developed this aura by which I repel any curiosity which is aroused in another person about me.



I have seen some people shudder when I act like that. It doesn’t make me feel good or pleases me to be so obnoxious but lately I don’t even have to concentrate to bring this ugly face of myself to display to the world.

Over time I have realized that I like mostly unfamiliar faces around me, where no one knows about my past, my present and very few will know about my future.

While everyone thinks they know all about me, I let them delude themselves of this folly, if they think they know me, they will not pry into my affairs that much.

From sport to sport they hurry me to stifle my regrets.
And when they win a smile from me they think that I forget..
(But I never do forget..)


It is not a comfortable thought that I shun life away.

I rationalize with myself that I reach out to people in other oblique ways, help some without showing my face. Do deeds which soothe me and try to piece together my shattered heart. Like a big bad Jig Saw puzzle, I am patiently trying to get it right, but fragments of my heart have been lost and don’t want to be found again.


I will not pretend anymore. I am sick of pretending, this farce has run its course, and it must end before I go to the valley below.

I have known people from a distance whom I like without having ever met them, and I feel that somehow that distance is best to keep a long friendship going and not meeting everyday, frankly no one can keep up with the kind of shit my mind conjures up, and they either act bemused or look incredulously at me saying "You all right Mate!!"



I mean WTF!! I prefer seclusion to companionship,

I have changed and so has the world around me, that I don’t feel like a part of the world anymore, it is just my shortcoming and I try to live with myself for not learning the ways of the world. (maybe I missed the classes).



I used to be very different, I used to make an effort to befriend everyone in college, reach out and embrace strangers but now I shun even the people I know really care and worry about me.

I feel nothing, I am numb. I am very cold blooded. I am stone cold.

Where did my humanity go. down the shitter is my guess. How I became like this is a mystery to me, maybe what I need is a self forensic exam to trace my humanities disappearance.





It has dawned on me slowly, there were clues galore but maybe I just wasn’t looking in the right place or maybe I chose to ignore it.



Self-deception is very easy to achieve. Don’t you think so?

I deceived myself while I went on deceiving my audience.

Maybe I will meet humanity again or maybe I will just wither away in the time honoured tradition of solitude and be a recluse for the rest of my time before my dying.



Maybe like the late great Jerry Garcia of The Greatful Dead once said :

“I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like...