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A traveler walking a misty Himalayan trail in Spiti Valley at 12,500 feet Featured

Himalayas · Field Notes · 8 min read

Six mornings in Spiti, told in silence.

A
Arjun Mehta
Delhi · October 2024

I arrived at Pin Valley in the second week of October, when the harvest was already done and the road to Kaza had shed most of its tourists. The bus dropped me at a crossroads with no phone signal and a hand-painted sign that said "Guesthouse — 200m." That sign belonged to Tenzin, a monk in partial retirement who had decided, eight years ago, that the best way to keep his monastery's kitchen garden alive was to feed strangers.

Mornings at Tenzin's place begin at 5:45, when the valley is still a negative space — all darkness and the sound of the Spiti river somewhere below. By six he has butter tea on the stove, made the old way from dried brick tea and a long wooden churn. You take it whether you want it or not. It tastes of salt and something almost smoky, and the first sip is the closest I have ever come to drinking a landscape. The window of the kitchen faces east. The mountains turn from black to indigo to a hard pale gold, one ridge at a time.

On my fourth morning I asked Tenzin if he ever missed the monastery full-time. He poured a second cup before answering. "The monastery is still there," he said. "But guests ask better questions than monks." He laughed at his own joke for a long time. Outside, the first snow of autumn was beginning to settle on the upper moraine. By the sixth morning it had reached the kitchen garden, and I understood why he needed the season to end when it did. Some things close not because they have to, but because the silence asks them to.

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Spiti Valley at 12,500 feet in October Himalayas

Six mornings in Spiti, told in silence.

"The first sip of butter tea is the closest I have ever come to drinking a landscape."

On the first night, the temperature dropped to minus four and the generator went off at nine. Tenzin handed me a wool blanket that smelled of pine smoke and said, in the most matter-of-fact Ladakhi English, "Power comes back at six. Or not." I slept better than I had in years.

By the third morning I had begun to understand the rhythm of the place. Tenzin woke before light to turn the prayer wheel at the edge of the garden. The sound it made — a low, continuous metallic hum — worked its way into my sleep and eventually became indistinguishable from the sound of the river. This is what Spiti does to you if you stay long enough. It dismantles the categories by which you separate the world from yourself.

On day five, a young doctor from Chandigarh arrived, and the three of us ate dinner together — tsampa porridge and a relish made from dried apricots and green chilli. The doctor was furious at his phone for not working. By the second bowl he had forgotten to be furious. Tenzin watched this with the polite amusement of a man who has seen it many times.

I left on a bus that came an hour late and left forty minutes early. As it ground up the switchbacks out of Pin Valley, I looked back. The guesthouse was already invisible. Just the white mountains, the brown river, and a column of smoke from the kitchen fire. That smoke was breakfast. It was also, I realised, the most honest farewell I have ever received from a place.

A
Arjun Mehta
Delhi · Himalayas · October 2024 · 8 min read
A Khasi grandmother cooking in her traditional kitchen in Meghalaya Northeast

A Khasi grandmother who turned her kitchen into a school.

"She did not give us a recipe. She gave us a morning, and expected us to pay attention."

Kong Bah — everyone calls her Kong Bah, though her name is Baiaphi — lives in a village twenty kilometres east of Cherrapunji, in a house that has been in her family for four generations. The kitchen is at the back: a wood-burning stove, three blackened pots, a shelf of dried things in unlabelled jars, and a window that frames the valley like a painting no one asked to be made.

She takes three guests a week, maximum, and the rule is simple: you sit in the kitchen while she cooks. You do not help unless she asks. You do not write things down. I asked her about this policy on the first morning and she shrugged. "If you write it, you will read the paper instead of smelling the smoke." The smoke that morning was from smoked bamboo shoots, which she was softening in water before adding to a pork curry so slow-cooked it had begun to resemble a stew from another century.

The meal she produced — three hours in the making — lasted forty minutes. Wild mushrooms she had foraged the previous afternoon. Fermented soybean paste she called tungrymbai, which smelled terrifying and tasted like the earth learning to speak. Rice cooked in a banana leaf. A thin broth of ginger and dried fish that cleared the sinuses and the mind in equal measure.

Before I left she pressed a small jar of the tungrymbai into my bag. "Don't open on the train," she said. She had clearly given this advice before. The jar survived the journey. It tasted different at home — not worse, just smaller, as if Meghalaya had stayed partly inside it. I think of Kong Bah every time I open a jar of anything now. I think of what it means to cook for strangers and expect nothing except their full attention.

S
Surbhi Dey
Kolkata · Northeast · March 2025 · 7 min read
A houseboat on Dal Lake in Kashmir in winter Himalayas

Winter dinners on a Dal Lake houseboat.

"The lake had begun to freeze at the edges, which made the lights from Srinagar look like they were painted on glass."

The houseboat is called Gulshan-e-Kashmir, which is the kind of name that would be embarrassing anywhere else and is here somehow exactly right. My host — whose family has run the boat since his grandfather fitted it with the carved walnut ceiling in 1961 — is a man called Bashir who speaks in full sentences and refuses to carry a phone during dinner. His reasoning: "If something important happens, someone will shout."

In January, Dal Lake is a different body of water than the one on the postcards. The shikaras move slowly through a skin of early ice. The vendors who usually work the lake are largely gone. The mountains, stripped of summer haze, stand so close you feel you could rearrange them. Bashir serves dinner for four at a time, a formal affair at a table set with cloth napkins and mismatched silver that his mother assembled, piece by piece, from the old Raj-era shops in Lal Chowk.

The wazwan he serves is a seven-course Kashmiri ceremony in miniature: seekh kebab, tabak maaz (fried ribs, extraordinarily good), rogan josh with an oil sheen the colour of autumn, followed by a lamb yakhni so delicate it seemed to have been persuaded rather than cooked into existence. He talks about each dish the way a careful person talks about family: not proudly, exactly, but with a sense of responsibility toward the past.

After dinner we sat on the small deck at the stern with kangris — firepots — in our laps, watching the ice form. The temperature was minus seven. The city across the water made no sound at all. Bashir refilled my kahwa without asking. "People always ask me if it is lonely in winter," he said eventually. "I tell them: the lake is still here. What more do you need?" I had no answer to that, which felt, for once, like the right response.

I
Imtiaz Khan
Srinagar · Himalayas · January 2025 · 7 min read

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