Leh, Slowly

Leh, at three and a half thousand metres, begins with a mandatory lesson in humility: the first day is for acclimatisation, and the town enforces it through simple physics. I spent mine as prescribed (short walks, long teas, a headache negotiating terms) and let the old town introduce itself at invalid's pace: the nine-storey Leh Palace leaning over the bazaar like a smaller, sun-dried rehearsal of Lhasa's Potala; the lanes below it where Kashmiri, Ladakhi, Tibetan and the odd stray German conduct the apricot-and-pashmina economy; prayer wheels at corners, set spinning by every passing hand including, by day two, mine, out of a courtesy that had stopped feeling foreign months ago. By evening I climbed (slowly, in the approved wheezing style) to Shanti Stupa above the town, where half of Leh gathers to watch the light leave the Stok range peak by peak, and where I first noticed the Ladakhi night switching on behind the sunset: stars in quantities that made Rajasthan's desert sky, months and worlds ago, look like a rough draft. Down in the valley, the Indus, the river that named the entire country, met here surprisingly slim and jade-green, still close to its Tibetan youth, ran dark between the villages, and I did the arithmetic with an odd shiver: I had now stood beside the Ganga at her birth and the Indus in her upper reaches in the same fortnight. Somewhere between those two rivers, most of Indian history happened. Up here, both are just cold, quick water, minding their own beginnings.

From Chapter 26 of 28 Shades of India. Read the opening of the chapter on the Ladakh journey page.