Spiti valley is a surreal place. The sky drips blue and the river is pale and gray. The clouds hover low and drift swiftly while the river seems to languish lazily. The air is thin and the breath sometimes short. The head is heavy and the mind experiences a new level of lucidity.
I felt far removed from not just land but even my own body. Maybe it was imagination, maybe hallucination, but standing on the bridge looking down at the river and the mountains beyond, it seemed like the island I saw in shades and stripes of gray was the bottom tip of my country, India, and looming in the distance, swollen with pride, majestic and full of might, streaked by the shadows of low hovering clouds, were the Himalayas where I was supposed to be standing in that moment of time.
