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After the rush of the last two days, to find ourselves slightly ahead of schedule was relaxing. We could take a breather, and we did so in a tiny hotel in Rumptse. When we stopped for a late lunch, curious children gathered around the bikes and I bent to shake hands with one kid. He shyly held out his hand and Moham snapped a picture of us. Inside the hotel, we sat down and asked for the usual, dal-chaval. A large, ragged dog watched us with one eye, and deciding we were good sports, got up from his place in the sun to sit down right next to me.
I looked down at the dog and saw that his fur was unwashed and flea-bitten. Large fleas were making colonies on the poor dog’s back. It barked a booming bark and I immediately felt a kinship, the kind of kinship you sometimes feel when you meet a person for the first time and you know nothing about them, but you still like them instantly. I bent down to scratch his neck, and he settled into a drooly slumber.
After lunch, as we prepared to leave, the boy I had shook hands with came to us and said, ‘Joley’! Joley is a Ladakhi word that can mean ‘hello’ or ‘welcome’ or ‘good day’ or ‘good luck’ and you will often find bikers and locals greeting each other this way. The dog’s name too, was Joley. I like to imagine he is still asleep under the tables of the restaurant at Rumptse, letting the battalion of fleas eat into him, waking up only to see which new traveler had walked in, and then walking over to them and sleeping under their table, just for company and just because he could.
We had noticed that the size of the animals increased with the altitude. Dogs and cows and goats were bigger than average, but some of the birds we saw were enormous. And what we thought were crows turned out to be a type of yellow-beaked crow-black birds that seemed to enjoy to swooping down on dogs to scare them out of their furs.
From Rumptse to Upshi and beyond, the road improves drastically. As we approached Upshi, we approached civilization, and we met for the first time the perennial, powerful Indus. Many etymologies of India lead back to this river – the names of language and country, of race and culture, of religion and geography, all stem from the Indus like her many tributaries. It gushed along the highway and accompanied us to Karu.
At Karu, large trucks were parked on both sides of the road, right outside giant military establishments. Karu is a military town, and is well equipped. We found our cell phones working again. Without stopping, we tried to reach Sumanth on his cell phone, but could not connect to him – it looked like he was still out of network range. It was also possible he was already riding back towards us, and we prayed this was true.
From Karu to Leh is a beautiful stretch of dark tarmac, bordered by pebbles painted patriotically in white and orange and green. Here and there are other patriotic elements – the Indian flag painted on rocks and hills, the statue of Mother India outside a military camp and ‘Jai Hind’ picked out in white stones on the face of a sun-burned hill. From the highway, with the sun setting in front of us, we could see a line of mountains recede into the horizon, each mountain a slightly lesser shade of blue-grey. At sunset we reached Leh. In the background of the setting sun splashed all over the dark road, we stopped at the entrance to Leh, where a signboard spelled out the words ‘Welcome to Leh’. We took a picture in front of that signboard, Moham, 3 and I, and rode into the long-imagined city.
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The Anatomy of Mountains