Mornings in Leh seem to wear a frail shawl of mist. The mist hangs around the ankles of apple trees, just above the reach of dew-drunk grass, and slowly moves in the direction the cool, morning breeze suggests. The freshness in the air fills the lungs like frigid water, and the cold air comes out condensed, and mist disappears into mist again with unspoken joy. And in this way my lungs speak with ankles of trees.
Forty kilometers from Leh the road runs - boundless, heedless, higher and higher, scraping the ceilings of the ability of man and machine, until it reaches gasping, eighteen thousand eight hundred feet above the sea. To reach the top of Khardung La is the icing on the cake, the crowning achievement, the final destination of the Ladakh biker. There is something about the highest and the deepest and the farthest that the human imagination gravitates towards, and Khardung-La evokes a curiosity soaked in magnetism.
We woke up early to ride with the rising sun and to ride in the evaporating morning fog. On the outskirts of Leh, the modernity disappears and unblocks from view the hard, rock-strewn hills and scree-filled mountains, and the nomadic sands. Villages rise from the sands, and monasteries spring from mountain tops. The villages look distinctly Afghani to my eye, and are all of one color in their use of hard, weather-beaten leather for their tents. But the monasteries ooze color, and catch the eye unexpectedly in its observation of the contrast of sky and sand. There are blue, yellow, pink, white, green, red prayer flags, and orange-robed priests that animate the stone-faced monasteries. Beyond the last color-drained village the craggy, sandy path rises suddenly, and with stones and rocks and pebbles, forms quietly a gentle road. We meet here the sky again.
An hour later we reached, and were instantly sent scurrying deeper into our jackets by the driving cold of the place. Another snow-dressed mountain overlooked Khardung La, and I walked up the mountain pass as high as it could take me. The landscape beneath is Nubra Valley – a cold desert devoid of any vegetation except where the Shyok River makes its presence felt. Rolling, moving sand dunes shining in the early morning light fill the valley, and large Bactrian camels gently roam the land. The wool for Pashmina shawls comes from goats that graze this valley.
This is a spiritual moment. Khardung La is a culmination of our efforts of the past few months – the physical result of our collective mental energies. It is an indication of the power we yield in the way we can alter our very material realities through the modification of the very ethereal arrangements of our minds. Every road I have been on in this long and distant journey has influenced my mind, and therefore has had some measure of pressure on my shifting reality.
I look around the emptiness of the place – the constant whistle of the uncomfortable wind, the dry desert earth, and the mountains of piling snow - and I realize life is alive and well even at this altitude, even in this deprivation. If it wasn’t for the brightness of the Sun, it would have been a desolate place. The sun had, by this time, edged over the horizon to begin his long watch over this half of the world, but the opposing sky in the west was ominous and dark, and spoke of distant rain.
Sunrise and sunset are indistinguishable at certain moments of their animation. The color of the sun, the clarity and definition of its sphere, the way the eye is allowed now, permitted now, to move over the surface of that star without being burnt, and in this way allowed to gain a sense of its shape; the color of the suffused sky, the way it soaks up a range of colors like a blotting paper soaks up ink. There is this one breath of a moment when they are equal – sunrise and sunset. In that whisper of a second, day and night are undone because their beginnings are undone. Time is undone. But then that moment passes, and if the sun is rising then there is a glow in the cheeks of the sky as if it is suddenly shy, and if the sun is setting then the sky gains a depth that tends towards darkness. At sunset, the Sun is the releaser of night. By its disappearance, a million other stars are allowed to rain down. At sunrise, it captures again what it has released. But really, at the end of all flights of imaginations, there is a simpler definition of the sun. The Sun is simply energy. All other attributes we attach to the Sun are romantic calculations of our psyche. And that is why it is god – for being one thing and being able to sustain so many.
At nearly 18400 feet, this was the closest I’d ever be to the Sun, for now. My eyes are closed in its warmth, and in the way the cold wind enters my lungs, I realize that with every breath I take, a little sky enters me. With every shivering exhale, I give back a little of my earthness. The more of myself I give away, the more sky I become. But then the realization comes with a slow, wistful smile - I do not own my earthness. I am paying for a gift with a gift.
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The Anatomy of God