Himachal Pradesh

Shimla wears its history like a slightly absurd inherited coat, and knows it. The summer capital of the British Raj (the empire governed a fifth of humanity, for half of each year, from this ridge) keeps its Gaiety Theatre, its Gothic church on the Ridge, its Mall Road where traffic is banned and evening promenading is constitutionally protected, and the Viceregal Lodge, a Scottish baronial pile where the Partition conferences were held and where the paperwork of my grandparents' world was signed; it is now, in one of history's better jokes, an institute for scholars. I liked Shimla the way one likes an old professor. But Himachal's 真 self begins where the postcards thin out, and I had planned my route accordingly: east and north on NH-5, the old Hindustan–Tibet road, into Kinnaur, where the highway becomes a ledge blasted into vertical rock, the Sutlej roars a kilometre of air below, and the bus conductor collects fares with one shoulder out the door, calm as a man watering plants. Kinnaur's villages (Sangla, Chitkul, the last village before old Tibet) sit among orchards and slate-roofed temples where the valley's gods hold legal title to land. And beyond the Kinnaur gates, the world changes planets: the trees surrender, the colours go mineral, and the road climbs into Spiti, 'the middle land' between India and Tibet, a high-altitude cold desert where villages stand green as postage stamps on a canvas of ochre and grey.