“Get the tap water. You’ll see it tastes much better than in England,” said a friendly old woman from the next table just as my father ordered bottled water at a pub in Edinburgh. This was in 2007, on my first trip to the UK, over half a decade before I made the city home. I remember thinking then: water is water, no matter which side of the border, so how can it taste any different?
I was reminded of that interaction as I stepped out of the plane at Leh airport and breathed in the cold, thin air. Given the altitude of 3,524m (11,562ft), air here has a distinct, almost metallic quality — it’s sharp and clean in a way that makes you conscious of every breath, as if the oxygen is announcing itself in your lungs, unlike the heavy, familiar atmosphere of lower altitudes that you breathe without thinking.
It’s been over a week since I arrived in Ladakh, an Indian Union Territory in the northern Himalayas, often called ‘Little Tibet’. The first five days I stayed at Thiksey monastery — a place that, according to local legend, was chosen by two crows who carried away ceremonial offerings and placed them perfectly on a distant hill, leading the monks to declare it ‘thik hai’ (it’s ‘in perfect order’) and build there. I spent the initial two days acclimatising; walking slowly, drinking endless cups of namkeen (butter) tea and letting my body adjust to the altitude. On the second day, while sitting on the porch of the restaurant by the monastery’s entrance, I made a friend who asked me to accompany him to a nearby monastery. He was an Israeli businessman, part of a trend I’ve noticed over the last week — just the sheer number of Israeli tourists here. I’d heard of the so-called ‘Hummus trail’ across India before, but wasn’t ready for how many had found their way to these mountains.1
A friend texted me last week: “Are you having fun?” I said I was, but confessed that I hadn’t been able to write much. It all felt too much … not just the research, but the people, the conversations, the air itself. I wanted to capture it all, to freeze it in memory and words. After every interesting interaction, I felt this inner urge to document it, but things were happening so fast and I was opening myself up to so many experiences that I just didn’t have the bandwidth to do it.
It’s only when you’re slow traveling, especially alone, that you realize how many people there are to actually interact with. In the past, I felt like every conversation while traveling had to be for something. The driver who took me around Cairo, the host with whom I shared a biryani in Amman; we’d exchange numbers, promise to keep in touch, as if the interaction only mattered if it could be made productive. Why spend time talking to someone if you’re not going to stay connected?
On the same porch another afternoon, I found myself translating a lunch order for a retired German woman — the staff couldn’t quite grasp her accent — and we ended up talking about how different countries leave distinct impressions. “Vietnam is much better than India, to be honest,” she said. “Same price, but the quality of accommodation, everything is so much better.” I bristled, a tinge of defensiveness coming over me, but then shared how I think that also comes down to how much of India’s tourism has always been domestic. According to the Ministry of Tourism, in 2023, 9.5 million foreign tourists came to India, a figure that’s shadowed by the whopping 2.5 billion domestic tourists across all Indian states and Union Territories. Places like Himachal, Manali, and Leh resisted becoming the next Bali for years, wanting to attract other Indians first, to remain something closer to Goa. “It’s only recently that the country is really opening up to foreign tourists,” I said.
But just as the conversation was getting interesting, she realized she was late for her bus and dashed out, leaving some cash on the table toward her bill.
The drive to Pangong Lake winds through valleys lined with poplar and willow trees, their leaves catching the morning light in ways that make you forget you’re in a high-altitude desert. It’s only here, in the Indus Valley — the modern heir to the banks that fostered the Harappan civilisations — that not much seems to have changed over these millennia. Humans still cluster around the riverbank, leaving the rest to dunes of desert and the mighty Himalayas, as if we’ve learned over thousands of years exactly where life can take root and where it cannot.
As I sat by the lake, the entire stretch of shore was empty save for another woman sitting some seven yards away, capturing the experience on her iPhone. After about half an hour had gone by in silence, I stood up and started wading in the clear, cold water. Just as I did, our eyes met and I found the courage to speak to her. She was from Mumbai, on a short holiday away from her family and kids, still recovering from acute altitude sickness. When I told her I was traveling across India, she shared her own story — how despite coming from an educated middle-class family, no one had supported her solo trip. “Even my friends and family asked if there were problems in my marriage,” she said. “Why else would a woman want to travel alone?” She said it made her happy to see people like me able to make these journeys without question. We talked about career, family, Indian society, and my anxieties about discovering the uncomfortable truths about this country. And then, just as abruptly as we’d started talking, we went our separate ways. We exchanged first names at the end, nothing more.
Maybe that’s enough?
As I walked further along the shore I heard Marathi being spoken; a group of women from Pune, laughing about how they had left their families and household chores behind for a week. I went over to talk. When I told them I was staying at a monastery, not a hotel, they were surprised, even a little confused. “Why would you choose that?” they asked.
For a minute, I didn’t know what to say, because living in a monastery is an experience in itself — one that’s often romanticized, sometimes exoticized, and certainly part of the tourist imagination of Ladakh. Even the guesthouses attached to monasteries are part of that industry. At Thiksey, for all five days I stayed there, I was the only guest who lasted that long, and at least while I was there, the only Indian.
It made me wonder what exactly draws people to these monasteries. They are beautiful, of course, and some of the most peaceful spaces of worship I’ve ever known. But I also felt oddly defensive on behalf of the monks. They were there for discipline, for concentration, for seva, for self-observation, and yet their days unfolded against a backdrop of clicking cameras and scribbling notebooks, selfie sticks pointed toward frescoed walls and strangers ooo-ing and aah-ing at their every move.
But perhaps this is the ultimate test of monastic life: how to continue in stillness despite the chaos at your doorstep. To focus on the sutra while shutters keep snapping.
There were also times when the observer became the observed. You’d see it on the faces of the little lamas, how they sometimes looked back at the tourists with their own curiosity, as if learning in turn what devotion, distraction, or even boredom might look like in another form.
And so I stayed, because I wanted to understand that life, and because the monks themselves never questioned me. I could sit in the courtyard at sunset, scribbling notes as the doors closed, and they would walk past with a smile. It was a kind of hospitality defined not by attention, but by letting you be. It reminded me of sitting within the premises of the Shantadurga temple in Goa with my grandmother as a kid; the same stillness, the same acceptance where no one questions whether you’re there to pray or not.
Later, hitchhiking down from Shey Palace with friends I’d made only an hour before, I got talking to one of the construction workers. There was something in his eyes that caught me — an intensity so electric, as if he carried a million stories. I asked if I could take his picture. He nodded, a slight smile crossing his weathered face.
Just as I was about to start a conversation, I heard my friend yell my name from somewhere behind me. We’d missed our bus. We ran after it to no avail, and like dust in the mountain air, the idea of the man by Shey Palace drifted away.
The road curved and twisted through valleys I hadn’t expected, and when it swerved in one dramatic sweep around an opening and up a steep hill, the sudden motion jerked me from a half-sleep I’d fallen into. We’d been traveling since seven in the morning and I’d already wandered through four monasteries, spoken to more people than I could count, drained at least one camera battery completely, and my phone flickered at 17 percent.
We had nothing else planned for the day, but Ali, who’d been driving me around these mountain roads with the patience of someone who understood that research rarely follows a schedule, mentioned that given my interest in historical sites, I might want to see this monastery. There was a palace here too, he said, though most of it lay in ruins now, scaffolded and under construction. It would mean climbing up a hill, following a rocky path that wound its way to the top.
I agreed, though I think even he could sense my reluctance.
As I made my way up the dusty path on foot, I could see workers scattered across the hillside, moving slowly in the afternoon heat. And then, among the unfamiliar faces, I saw eyes I recognized: the same intensity, the same depth that had caught my attention days and kilometers ago.
“Julley,” I called out, waving the Ladakhi word for hello, feeling something like joy spread across my face.
That’s when I finally learned his name: Abdul Khala. We talked in a mix of broken Hindi and gestures, and he told me how he had come from the Kashmir Valley to Ladakh in search of work and was now part of a group of day labourers. When I asked how he’d ended up here, at this site more than a hundred kilometers from where we’d first met, he smiled in a way that suggested the question contained its own answer. This, after all, is how it works when you follow the roads, when you let work carry you from one mountain to the next.
I came here to research, to write. Instead I find myself collecting fragments of people, of conversations, of air that tastes metallic and of places of worship on top of mountains. Some of it I’ll remember, some I’ll forget. The task, I think, is not to capture everything but to experience what can’t be captured. The rest — the words — will come later. After all, wasn’t it Buddha, who the locals here call Shakyamuni, who said: “Don’t rush anything. When the time is right it’ll happen.”
In Leh, for example, there are whole streets full of cafes with Hebrew menus and boards, but this exploration is for another time.