On the Himalayas
The Himalayan mountains are many things, but most of all they are huge.
It was good to have seen the Himalayas. Ubiquitous in the Indian imagination, they exist anywhere that a pile of rocks or a small hill can be found, the home of Shiva and his consort, Parvati. The aura of innumerable meditators in mountain caves can be felt by any seeker resolute enough to sit down in hope of the truth. And there is good reason for them to be felt that deeply everywhere. They are damn huge. Big, bigger than you imagine. Bigger that that even. They’re so big that they singlehandedly are responsible for the warm and humid climate of most of the Indian subcontinent. Their shadow literally defines the place as it is.
What is strange is that you can go and see them. With a suitable vantage point, you can contain several of these peaks in your gaze, in their entirety. And you keep looking. You look down eventually, and see a carpet of trees a glance below the peak. This brings the primal sense of trigonometry to the forefront of your brain. You bounce your gaze between these two points of the peak and the treelike. Invisible lines extend themselves towards you. Calculations take place without you being aware of them, and you come to realise that this mountain is much farther away than anything visible to the naked eye really has a right to be.
Keep in mind that you yourself are likely at a height yourself. You are farther from the sea at a vertical distance greater than you are used to being horizontally. Yet you still have to look up, at something that is at a distance that you can only describe as obscene. As the reality of distance makes itself felt, as it makes itself almost comprehensible, a new realisation hits. You realise that you don’t really know what you are looking at. In your view there is a snowline here, a ridge there, perhaps a prong there. There is a whole world at that distance and at that height, nearly sterile of life as you know it.
The next thing you come to feel is that this behemoth has cousins. You may be able to see them from your vantage point without turning, or by turning your neck, or not at all. Even invisible, they press in on your awareness. You have seen maps, but only now you realise that a whole army of these monstrous rocks stand linked arm in arm over an area that would take lifetimes to walk over.
You come to remember, at many many levels. You don’t just feel human, you don’t feel exposed, you feel mortal. If a fly were to sit on you, it would feel a certain kinship. You feel exposed down to your DNA, faced with the fact of size. You then feel human. Hundreds of stories and songs and images come tumbling to your mind and your eyes and your tongue. You can almost see the places in the rarefied blue air where the devas and apsaras and gandharvas may be flitting around playing their celestial games. You remember things that feel like being in the mountains, songs, words, images. More and more wondrous and horrible things all push and shove their way into your mind.
Yet you don’t get overwhelmed, you find yourself at ease. If someone were to ask you what was going through your mind, all these associations and more would tumble down to your tongue and in perfect harmony would come to say something like, “Wow, these are huge!”
Mercifully, the mountains demand nothing from you. They know what they are. It is only you, separated from them for many months and by thousands of kilometres, who finds your fingertips being pressed flat against a pen, unable to stop trying to subordinate them to description. And how can you let the pen go? Its work is incomplete until it can describe precisely your longing to sit and watch a peak until your legs decide to move you on their own, to another point with another view. Until it can describe in precise shades your jealousy towards those who can see and feel the mountains every single day. Until it can reproduce those ethereal colours they wear at sunrise, at sunset and at every time in between. Until it speaks of the contrast between the mountain’s mass and the absolute emptiness of the sky above. Until it can convey the notes of a song in a distant valley, carried up to you by the pure and hollow winds. Until it can tell of the pure presence of the mountain at night. Until it runs out of ink leaving you with a universe around the mountain still unportrayed. Were you given the time and the ability to put to words every aspect of the beauty of any peak in the range, you would find yourself with a pile of paper the size of the mountains, none of which could compare to even glancing upon one of the peaks for a few moments.
The mountains demand nothing from you. You accept that eternity has no beginning nor end, you salute the mountain in your own way, and you turn around hoping you’ll see it again. You go have some chai at the nearest little shop. Preferably one with a mountain view.