We reached the Line of Control near Kargil after sunset. The headlights carved thin arcs of light against the cliffs, the Suru River flickering silver below, the air muted into silence. I was travelling with two Ladakhis — Ali, my driver from Leh, and his friend who was unhelpfully also called Ali, but from Kargil. To keep them straight in my head, I had started thinking of them as Leh-wala Ali and Kargil-wala Ali, which made them laugh when I admitted it later.
We pulled over at Hunderman, the last village on the Indian side. In daylight, they told me, you might glimpse fencing or patrols or flags. At night, there was nothing — just the silhouettes of mountains, unmoved by borders. The two Alis raised their hands and traced the ridges for me: “That one is India. The next is Pakistan. Then India again. Then Pakistan.”
It felt like watching someone deal out cards in a game with no winner. On my left, they said, ran the old pedestrian road to Skardu. Once a lifeline for trade and commerce, it had been sealed since 1948. Every so often a torch flickered in the distance — an Indian patrol tracing its own circuit of repetition.
The absurdity of it reminded me of Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story Toba Tek Singh.1 Written in 1955, the story describes Bishan Singh, a man in a Lahore asylum at the time of Partition, who is told he must be transferred to India. The idea here is that just as India and Pakistan had exchanged prisoners from either side of the border, they would also exchange those in mental asylums. Given that most of the Hindus and Sikhs had crossed from Pakistan to India, Bishan Singh would also have to migrate. When he learns his hometown, Toba Tek Singh, now lies in Pakistan, he refuses to move. In the end, he collapses in the no-man’s land between two fences, the last lines of the story incredibly poignant and searing:
There, behind barbed wire, was Hindustan; here, behind the same kind of barbed wire, was Pakistan. In between, on that piece of ground that had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.
Ladakh today is not no-man’s land. Borders are enforced, loyalties declared, maps inked. But standing in Hunderman, I could not escape the thought that longing outlasts lines, for in people’s minds at least, the sense of being in-between still lingers.
Kargil-wala Ali told me about the village’s complicated history: how families found themselves on different sides when the Line of Control was established, how some houses were abandoned, their contents left behind. I had hoped to visit what locals call the Museum of Memories, housed in one such abandoned building, but we arrived too late. The museum, they said, preserved everyday objects — radios, cooking pots, prayer books — arranged as if families had only just stepped out.
Standing at that silent road to Skardu, I thought of something I had read just that week, in a slim book I had picked up on a whim: Travels in Ladakh. Its author, Mohammad Ashraf, had been Deputy Director of Tourism in the erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir that Ladakh had been part of when the Government of India decided to open the region to tourists in 1974, and one of the first officials sent to prepare Ladakh for visitors. His essays, written from those field visits, are records of Ladakh on the cusp of becoming both destination and frontier.
One passage described how Pakistani troops had penetrated the Zanskar valley during the 1947–48 war, remaining there for six months before the ceasefire was announced. When they withdrew, they took with them hundreds of local porters who never returned. Many settled across the border in Baltistan, joining the Northern Light Infantry or marrying into local families there. Even today, Ashraf noted, thousands of families in Baltistan and Kargil remain related, separated only by the politics of partition.
That was the painful undertone to what the Alis were telling me. Kargil-wala Ali added that until as recently as the 1990s, before the Kargil War, people would sometimes cross this very border informally into Baltistan to visit relatives. “After ’99, it all stopped,” he said. I have not found archival evidence to support this — the records all suggest the border was sealed in 1948 — but I am also aware that in places like Hunderman, oral memory often outlasts official maps. Borders here have always been more porous in practice than in paperwork.
Just as I was in-between thoughts, Leh-wala Ali mentioned he often asked the foreign tourists he worked with if they’d been to Skardu.2 “They say it is incredibly beautiful,” he admitted, before breaking into a grin. “Though of course, I like to think our side is prettier.”
It was meant as a joke, but something deeper was there: even in pride there was longing, even in rivalry there was recognition.
“You know,” he said, growing thoughtful, “people often say Ladakh ‘came out of isolation’ in 1974 when it was opened to tourism. But that isn’t quite right. The isolation they talk about was much shorter than the centuries of connections we had before. Ladakh was never really cut off. We were always part of bigger worlds.”
He had a point. The real isolation began in the 19th century, when the British and Russian empires turned the high Himalayas into a chessboard as part of what became known as the Great Game. It was only then that borders hardened and caravan routes were closed, so that when Mohammad Ashraf arrived in 1974, he wasn’t discovering a hidden land so much as reopening a shuttered window. It was this fact that historian Dr. Siddiq Wahid alluded to in the foreword to Ashraf’s book:
There was a time, as recently as seventy years ago, when we could move [relatively] seamlessly between the Central Asian-abutting regions of Ladakh, Gilgit and Baltistan to the magical ‘vale of Kashmir’ and on to the South Asian plains of Jammu and Lahore; and vice versa. We were cosmopolitan in the full sense of that word and world-citizens before the coining of ambiguous words like ‘globalization’.
The words felt different when standing at a road that now ended in silence and I couldn’t help imagine the traders who’d historically be crossing this; the seamless now severed, the cosmopolitan now survived only in fragments.
For most Indians, Kargil exists only in memory as the battlefield of 1999: the televised war of Tiger Hill and Tololing, the tricolour raised on the evening news. But the district’s legacies stretch far beyond its war memorials.
As much of my research for the book is about faith — about visiting specific shrines and sacred places — people often try to simplify the country for me. Friends who had travelled to Ladakh before told me: in Leh district, you will see the beautiful Buddhist monasteries; in Kargil, which is majority Shia — the 2011 census puts them at 77% — you will find the mosques. None of this was said in bad faith, and the facts are true enough.
But what strikes me is that in an age when identities are being solidified, the diversity within these regions themselves risks being forgotten. At Kartse Khar in Kargil, a 7th-century Buddha is carved into the cliff face, twenty feet high, draped in robes that show Gandharan influence that made me wonder if it was a cultural cousin to the Buddhas of Bamiyan. This stone Buddha is a relic of when Buddhism flourished along the Indus, centuries before Islam came to the valley, but today it stands largely ignored, even as shop windows in Kargil town display portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini and Khamenei in the many. Yes, the Buddha still stands, listed as a protected monument, unlike its now demolished relatives in the Bamiyan valley, but few come to see it.
Similarly, Leh holds more than monasteries: The Jama Masjid at the top of the main bazaar is stunning, with some of the most intricate Tibetan artwork I have ever seen inside a mosque; and the district also has numerous Sikh gurdwaras, especially as Guru Nanak, the founder of the faith, had travelled extensively through the region on his way to Tibet. At Patthar Sahib Gurdwara on the Leh-Kargil highway, I found one of the most spiritually serene places I’ve visited, made more memorable by arriving when it was empty except for a passing military convoy that had stopped for blessings. The soldiers always stop here on their way from Leh to Kargil, I was told — seeking blessings before heading to the frontier — and many from different regiments regularly perform seva at the gurdwara. There was something profound about sharing that thin air at 12,000 feet with both Guru Nanak’s memory and these soldiers who, regardless of their own faith, understood the power of this sacred space. These are reminders that the story is never simple.3
This forgetting of cross-cultural connections isn’t unique to Ladakh. In Kashmir a few days later, I had asked guides about Lal Ded — also known as Lalleshwari — the 14th-century Shaivite mystic whose verses blended Hindu and Sufi thought. She was close to Nund Rishi, the founder of the Sufi Rishi order, the saint lovingly called Alamdar-e-Kashmir, “the flag-bearer of Kashmir.” Legend has it that when Nund Rishi as a newborn refused his mother’s milk, it was Lal Ded who nursed him. The symbolism struck me: Kashmir’s greatest saint nourished by a Shaivite mystic. Her poetry — her Vakhs — were once sung by Hindus and Muslims alike. But when I asked guides and locals in Srinagar about her shrine, most looked blank. A figure who once bridged religious divisions had slipped from common memory.
If Hunderman shows how families were divided, then Dha in the Aryan Valley reveals how memory persists across division.
The Brokpas, or Dards, live in villages perched along the Indus. Their religion blends Buddhism with older animism: shrines are called mandirs, streams are treated as sacred, and flowers are worn on headgear as natural crowns.
One evening, speaking to a young local, Namgail, I heard about Bonona, their famous Bon festival, which was coming around in October this year. “It happens once every three years here in Dha,” he explained. “The next year is in the village of Garkon. And in the third year, we do not celebrate at all.”
That hiatus, I learnt, is deliberate, for that year is reserved for their kin across the border in Skardu. The assumption is that their extended families in Pakistan-controlled Gilgit-Baltistan will be celebrating the festival instead. It is hope preserved in practice, the memory of unseen villages across barbed wire woven into the calendar itself.
Standing at that sealed road to Skardu, I understood something about borders: they can divide territory between nations, but it’s harder to divide memory. Even as geopolitical realities force one Ali to point out peaks like cards in a game, another to joke that his side is prettier despite never having seen the other, a Brokpa calendar still leaves one year blank for kin across the border, and the rock-cut Buddha waits in a valley: a reminder that these mountains once connected rather than divided worlds.
I first read it during my postgraduate studies at Oxford, and those words have never left me. It’s sobering to realize that it took me all those years to encounter the human aspects of Partition for the first time — something deeper than the usual politicking over which parcel of land belongs to whom.
The sad reality being it’s hard (if not impossible) for people in these villages to meet their kin across the border, but relatively easy for Western tourists to travel there.
Unlike some of the other examples, Patthar Sahib remains a popular destination on the standard Ladakh tourist circuit. I’m not suggesting it’s forgotten like some other sites, but rather highlighting how military and spiritual life intersect here in ways that go beyond casual visits.