The Call of Leh

Travel piece

The Call of Leh

They say a pen, capped, dreams in silence. Mine had been sleeping for far too long. I was told to listen to my heart, but mine is no tidy chamber; it is a chancel of contradictions. A vast house of voices: some rumbling lullabies, others wailing storms, a few speaking in languages I have yet to learn. At times, it grows deafening within me. And yet, to write, I knew I must learn to stand still in that noise until the rhythm revealed itself, the heartbeat beneath the chaos.

I wish I could begin with Once upon a time… but fairy tales are for stories that begin in certainty. Mine started in hesitation, a trembling breath before the plunge. And then came the leap: I set out alone for Leh Ladakh, where the earth stretches upward, yearning to kiss the sky.

I stayed for a month, because anything less would have been an insult to its slow, balmy sorcery. I do not travel to collect places like pressed flowers between the pages of memory; I travel to dissolve to blur into a place until it begins to dream me back. My everyday world had grown too narrow, too domesticated, and my feet itched for wilderness, for paths unpaved and skies unclaimed and unpromised.

So, I left with a vow purred to the wind: no plans, no reservations, no polite maybes to life’s wild invitations. The word no I kept only for safety. Everything else was yes, yes to strangers, yes to detours, yes to the raw edges of my own becoming. I wanted to unbolt every locked room within me and let the windstorm in, rearranging the furniture of my soul.

Where the Sky Hums

Leh received me like an ancient host not with applause, but with the gentle unveiling of its secrets. Mountains rose like the bones of the earth, snow crowns whispering to clouds in an old dialect of wind. Rivers shimmered like molten glass beneath the sun’s tender gaze. Wildflowers embroidered the meadows in impossible colors, saffron, violet, blue as a gasp.

Souls gathered from every corner of the world, their stories cascading like wine across café tables and roadside benches: puppet-makers, wanderers, hearts freshly broken or newly mended. Some people leapt across the drawbridge of my heart in a single hello; others stayed afar, quiet constellations I still trace. Yet even those who drifted away left behind ripples that glimmered long after they were gone.

True travelers, I realized, are kin beneath their differences. They might name their quest freedom, wonder, or peace. Beneath the naming lies the same ancient ache: to belong everywhere and nowhere all at once.

The monasteries were older than time. Inside, incense rose in thin spirals toward painted ceilings, and monks’ chants moved through the air like a heartbeat the world had forgotten. Outside, prayer flags fluttered madly, ribbons of color sending human longing skyward.

One evening, I stood between the azan of a mosque and the gongs of a monastery, and for a fleeting heartbeat, the universe seemed to hum in unison, as if all opposites had agreed to dance.

The locals moved with a serenity that felt like water gliding downhill effortlessly, unhurried, sure. Somewhere, a drum echoed from an unseen valley, its rhythm fading even as I tried to hold it. I tasted yak cheese in every possible form and stared at flowers that looked as if imagination had dreamed them into existence.

At night, the sky transformed into a playground of stars so vast, so crystalline, I half expected them to fall, not as meteors, but as blessings.

The cottage where I stayed belonged to Nurboo, an 84-year-old Buddhist whose calm radiated like candlelight in a dark room. He prayed for hours, tended his garden as if in conversation with the earth, and spoke with a gentleness that saw straight through pretense into essence.

He let me play with the stray cat in his garden, a privilege, he said, no one else had earned. I could not tell if it was jest or truth. His stories were not merely told; they were bestowed, wrapped in the quiet patience of someone who knew I would carry them gently.

If I could choose, I would have made him my grandfather, the kind of elder who teaches without teaching, whose silence holds more wisdom than words ever could. I suspect many travelers stayed for him as much as they did for Leh.

One Table, Many Worlds

A solo Englishman, whose puppet-maker love lived oceans away.
A French boy with a smile like an unfinished sketch.
A South Korean girl chasing the colors she’d once seen in a book.
An American wanderer, raw and luminous in her first solitude.
An Indian man from New York, with whom I shared a brief, sunlit chapter.

We were a mosaic that would never be assembled again, and yet, for those hours, we fit perfectly, fleetingly.

Every journey carries both light and shadow. There were days I soared, and days I dissolved into the undertow of my own thoughts. But I would not trade a single shimmer of it for the safe monotony of home.

When I left, even the roads seemed reluctant to let me go. My heart was swollen, not heavy, not light, but full, as if the mountains themselves had taken residence within.

Now, even as I walk through the familiar veins of my city, I carry Leh within me
the wind in my hair,
the drums in my chest,
the stars above,
and that quiet, eternal hum beneath it all.