Mustang
“Padme”
As I alighted the bus from Pokhara to Jomsom, the first thing that struck me was the darkness. It was way beyond sunset, the valley was enveloped by a looming silence and the wait for the next day’s sunrise. The village smelled of leafless trees, dust, and isolation. The conductor handed me my rucksack, and the bus made its way to Jomsom, the 14-hour journey’s final destination.
They say that morning light always brings hope, but here, it was more than just that. The fierce, storm-like wind is coupled with a temperature that plummeted 13 times below the freezing point would have to be endured till sunlight reaches my hotel’s part of the valley. As I waited in my hotel room, staring at the skeletons of the apple trees in the orchard, waiting for sunlight, the sense of isolation hit me, stronger than the cold winds could.
I open my room’s door and am confronted by an empty corridor, deserted even by sunlight. Outside, the streets are empty. The white stones which the streets and the houses are built with seem to stare at me with a queer curiosity, questioning my presence in a village deserted even by the inhabitants at this time of the year. I walk for merely an hour and reach the end of the village. I kept walking, not knowing where to go, into the streets and the alleyways. met with stones, woods, and more stones. The locks on the doors were a reminder of the darkness of the night before, with the faint sound of the Kali Gandaki river as the only constant.
“Chocolate chha?”, I hear a young, out-of-breath voice of a girl calling from behind. I turned to see two very grim faces of a sister and brother duo, carrying a pile of broken branches on the backs, to their house. Maybe they were as surprised to see a strange-looking traveller roaming about aimlessly as I was happy to finally have someone to talk to. You know how it feels when, on a hot and humid day, you open a window in the morning, and the cool wind touches you, bringing a soft smile on your face? I left the village with that smile, having learnt that there is wisdom in realizing impermanence and emptiness; that when you visit a remote village in a cold desert at the end of December, you have to be prepared for the cold and the isolation. However, beware of not letting both creep up on you.
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