An 18,000 ft. road trip
“We boarded our flight, and within an hour we already witnessed something that dropped our jaws and popped our eyes. Being an Indian, accolades of the Himalayas were common, but to look at them from 30,000 feet and witness an ocean of snow-covered peaks did hit hard. There was a sense of aghast and mental applause across the flight, and as we started to descend, the mountains below started to climb around us. For the last ten minutes, we were flying between the peaks, and I knew that the sequence of seeing things for the first time has started.”
India is a country of diverse cultures, religions, climates, casts, creed, color, economic-backgrounds, languages, dietary restrictions and most important for this story — terrains.
The mighty snow-covered mountains of Himalayas though considered as the crown of India, might not be the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about the Indian topography. Northern-most Indian state, the Kashmir, is afflicted by a land dispute involving three countries. I would like to stay away from any geopolitical commentary, but this is one of the reasons why the place is not as open to tourism as it should be, and maybe also because the lowest plane in the region is 5000 ft. above the sea level and you need several days of not-doing-anything to just get used to the diluted oxygen.
But if you are in your twenties and looking to plan a trip with two of your college friends (who are hopefully also in their twenties) craving for exhilarating road trips and breathtaking views in manageable budget, Ladakh becomes almost sort of unmissable, and missed it we did not.
My two trip-mates and I graduated from a common college in 2018 and managed to stay connected through our ordeals, enough to plan a trip together after five years of practically not-meeting. For the sake of sparing them embarrassment — if they one day decide to read this — I will not be calling them by their actual names. Instead, I would call them Ron and Malfoy — because why not. (If your childhood somehow missed Harry Potter, my stories might keep reminding you that).
At the time of planning the trip, I was in Connecticut, two years into my job post-masters, and Ron and Malfoy had just finished there MBAs from two of the esteemed institutes of India.
We were supposed to meet at Delhi on 5th May and leave for Leh on 6th. I came to Delhi about a week before as I had some other errands to run in India and was staying at my aunt’s place. Ron joined me on 5th evening and Malfoy was supposed to meet us at the airport on 6th morning. And that’s exactly what happened.
Disclaimer: What I am writing is log of a trip carried out by three reasonably responsible guys, who likes to keep things in control and think at least half a dozen times before practicing something that might have a remote possibility of causing harm or adding any detrimental drama in our lives. Therefore, unlike the popular logs where thrill concocts out of unpreparedness or accidents, and protagonists keep on making a wrong decision after other, here most of the things will go “according to the plan”.
Day 0
Soaccording to the plan, we three met at about 4 AM at the Delhi airport and found a delight — and I am sure I speak for Ron and Malfoy as well — that last surfaced above the rubble of emotions about five years back. I was not very hungry or sleepy, as I was under severe jet lag and was approaching my dinner time at about 4 in the morning. But Ron and Malfoy were sort of dizzy and the adrenaline rush of seeing old friends was superseded slowly by the need for coffee.
We were at the Delhi airport and there were bunch of coffee options. We turned to Starbucks.
Just to offer some context, a general perception of a middle-class engineering college student was always that nobody would ever, in their right minds, pay the amount of money for a coffee cup that is charged by Starbucks. So, we never tried Starbuck during our college days.
But though we are still, middle-class engineers, it has been five years since we have been college students. So, we turned to the Starbucks to check if that instinct still kicked in. It surely did for Ron and Malfoy, as they chucked looking at the prices and continued turning to find another place. I, on the other hand, have been earning in dollars for almost two years now and have been a regular Starbucks customer in US, patted on Malfoy’s back with an unsaid assurance that “time has changed buddy, Starbucks is fine!”
Both Ron and Malfoy, agreed upon my financial superiority but still suggested against wasting it on a Rs.700 coffee cup. After couple of complete 180deg opinion flips, I complied with them, and we slid to a much cheaper coffee station giggling at the stupidity of people drinking from Starbucks.
It is fascinating how peers around you shape your definition of what is right or wrong and what is wise or stupid. Thanks to that, I had couple of extra dollars in my pocket and the Starbucks experience in India continued to elude us.
Our boarding call was made and as we started walking towards the plane, a very natural urge stared to hit almost all of us simultaneously.
If you are reading this far in future, let me clarify that May of 2023 was the time when doing something fun without posting it on social media was not considered to be half as fun. The satisfaction of seeing your friends validate your travel choices was almost as integral as the experience itself.
Owing to this cultural trend, we started creating some reels only to confirm what we were secretly hypothesizing — that we were terrible at it. Scummed to this unsaid realization we started focusing more on looking around and nostalgic conversations instead of the documenting it. It stayed that way through the whole trip.
There has been a decades-long debate, that when you are in middle on an important moment, should you try to document it or should you just chuck the cameras and let your natural senses live to its fullest and imbibe the experience.
My answer to this — and answer to any debate that has survived more than a couple of arguments — is that it depends. But what is depends upon is of course unique to each question.
The technological possibility of being able to document every minor exciting bit of our lives renders us with flurry of what I would like to call — decision-points. Points where we have to decide, whether to do something or not.
A fundamental thing that separates us from our ancestors is the number of decision-points one must go through in a day. Though this creates an illusion of freedom, it opens many doors for regret to creep in.
Interesting things about this modern life is that you usually don’t choose to be at a decision-point, they are just forced upon you. A bus full of decision-points will hit you out of nowhere and it’s part of the job to evaluate each one of them. You can decide in a minute or a month, but you must decide. Ignoring is not an option. Ignoring a decision usually means you going with a default option or just delaying the decision to the other time.
And the realization that the outcome of a decision point can convert into regret in future spurs anxiety, and leads to an anxious generation.
Anyways, coming back to the trip, we boarded the plane and within an hour of flight we already witnessed something that dropped our jaws and popped our eyes. Being an Indian, accolades of the Himalayas were common but to look at them from 30,000 ft and witness an ocean of snow-covered peaks did hit hard. There was a sense of aghast and mental applause across the flight.
As the flight started to descend after a few minutes, the mountains below started to climb around us. For the last ten minutes before landing, we were flying between the peaks, and I knew that the sequence of seeing things for the first time has started.
Usually when you peek outside the window before landing, you get a sense of the airport approaching. Here, nothing of that sort was sensed. Just huge spans of snow sprinkled valleys and peaks, with absolutely no sign of an airstrip until we landed on one.
We deboarded the plane and walked to the terminal of Leh. It was a small airport with one airstrip and two baggage claim belts. That two minutes’ walk across the airport tarmac already had the views unparalleled to anything we have seen before.
Ron and Malfoy enjoyed the walk too, until we reached the baggage claim and Malfoy discovered that there was a significantly big oil patch on his newly bought bag. It spoiled his mood as bag was new and patch looked stubborn, and it spoiled our mood because knowing Malfoy we knew he would spend way too much time tring to remove the patch than he should.
After complaining and trying to rub it off for half hour, Malfoy finally gave up and we walked out into the beautiful open air again where found our driver waiting for us. We took the cab, reached the hotel 30 mins before our check-in time, and imeediately hit the restaurant to handle our starvation.
At this point I want to remind you that we are now at 5000ft as opposed to near 0 about couple of hours ago. The height was not a problem, in fact it was relieving, but the air pressure was, which is much lesser at 5000ft than it was at Delhi.
Imagine a balloon in your room, it is not exploding neither shrinking-in because the air on both the sides of the balloon-wall pushes it with same pressure. If you carry this balloon to a height where air pressure outside is less, the balloon as you can probably imagine would blot. Or in extreme cases explode.
This change in air pressure along and lack of oxygen causes multiple issue conveniently bundled under a term called “Acute Mountain Sickness” or AMS.
We completely forgot about that and devoured the breakfast, which was actually dinner according to my mental clock, so I devoured more that a person who’s supposed to be acclimatizing to the mountains should and my body didn’t approve of that.
After checking in, me and Ron spent the afternoon, dealing with nausea and throwing up. Which scared a bit of a hell out of us as we thought this might spoil the next day, but fortunately all turned out to be good.
Day 0 was designed to acclimatize, to reach our hotel, rest and roam around the local market in the evening, which was instead spent recuperating in our room by me and Ron, and Malfoy boosting about his superior immune system at our side.
Day 1
Itwas ‘renting-a-motorcycle-and-driving-it-in-mountains’ kind of a day. One of the cheap thrills for young tourists travelling to Ladakh is to rent a heavy mountain bike and drive it around the crescendos of Himalayas. I could only imagine how that feeling might be, as one of the many things I failed to learn in my life was how to drive a motorcycle.
A car, a gearless scooter, driving a motorcycle on plane road with several annoying hiccups — no problem. Driving a heavy mountain bike on hairpin turns and slippery roads of Himalayas — sort of a big problem. So, we rented two motorcycles next day, each for Ron and Malfoy, and they decided to share my load in turns.
Two guys from our bike rental company arrived with our rides for the day while we were having breakfast and that lit up Ron’s and Malfoy’s eyes. We greeted the bikes and took photos around it, Ron requested bike’s autograph which it was coldly ignored.
We started our bike ride, driving towards a famous river bend about 3 hrs. north-west stopping at some stunning points on the way.
Our first stop was the famous Magnetic Hills, where — as rumor has it — gravitational fields are entangled in such a way that if you leave your vehicle in neutral, it will — like some possessed piece of machinery — will start going up the hill.
When we reached the location, we saw some curious minded Indians abandoning their vehicles in middle of the road and hoping for it make this magical maneuver while filming with seven different phones to capture this paranormal activity.
From distance the vehicles didn’t seem to be doing much. But when we reached closer, we realized to our surprise that the vehicle still seemed to be doing absolutely nothing.
We stopped on the side, took off our helmets, and stared at the parked hatchback for minutes which didn’t budge. But we were no different. We thought maybe the weight of the hatchback was too much for the poor magnetic fields to do much, so we decided to do the same experiment with our motorcycles.
Malfoy agreed to use his bike as the ginny pig, while me and Ron would be the camera crew. He drove it to the center of the road, dismounted and carefully started separating himself from the vehicle. At one point he was just supporting the motorcycle by holding the handle by one hand, and next step was to let that grip loose slowly and film it rolling up hill.
As he let the grip go, the bike did roll, but towards an unapparent downhill, for exactly two seconds before falling on its side. Ron instinctively rushed towards the vehicle to unsuccessfully save it from falling. I on the other hand was unperturbed and stuck to my camera duty. No we were not high!
We continued our journey towards the river bend, reached there, reeled in an Indian Army Museum, a monastery and local market visit on our way back. Reached back our hotel way after the sunset, watched final few overs of an IPL match and dozed off.
Day 2
Day 2 was a big one! The intention was to drive about 100 mile north to an absolutely phenomenal place named the Nubra Valley. We rented an SUV with a driver in whose hands we decided place our lives for next two days.
This is the day where we’ll hit that 18000ft mark. Enroute to Nubra Valley, the road climbs up to a place called Khardung La Pass which is at 18,380ft and then descends back to the habited Nubra valley at 10,000ft.
We woke up early morning to the sight of Himalayan Mountains outside our window and started on time for the trip.
Fifteen minutes into the journey, while discussing the perils one might face trying to do somersaults at 18,000ft, Ron asked a question to the driver that where he has kept the oxygen cylinders in the car and how long will it be able to last if one falls short of breath at the Khardung La Pass.
The question was relevant, but according to me should have been the second question in stream of multiple questions. With the first one being “Are you actually carrying an Oxygen cylinder?”
Maybe that’s why I was not surprised out of my wits, when the driver replied that he’s not carrying any, but Ron was. And he expressed it.
While expressing his surprise, he frantically started looking for a mail in his phone for the agreement that stated a pair of oxygen cylinder was included in the plan and he found it. He shoved the mail in the face of the driver, to which he responded quite calmly, saying it was not his job to read the agreement, it was his bosses’. So, Malfoy, supporting Ron’s claim, asked the driver to stop the vehicle on the side and make a call to his boss asking for two cylinders before we go too far from the city.
This driver — maybe because his job requires him to be calm in literal cliffhanger situations — was completely — and this is the word I learned to describe saints — equanimous. He with his usual half-closed eyes recommended Malfoy to not press on it as according to him they were already late and driving after sunset was much riskier than spending fifteen minutes at the Khardung La Pass without an oxygen cylinder. He added that almost none of his passengers had ever needed the cylinder.
The “almost” part was not able to counter Ron’s paranoia and ultimately the driver had to stop, call his boss, and made him send two cylinders to us. After spending about an hour to resolve this we were right back on our trip, with an hour lost but with a gained confidence of being able to do somersaults at the Khardung La.
The road to the pass, and beyond, was one of the riskiest ones I had ever seen. I was used to travelling in an over-speeding vehicle on an India hilly road without proper signage or railings, but I was not used to all these things on an ice-covered road at an 18,000ft. But the driver seemed to be driving pretty confidently possibly because of his long experience. To confirm this, Ron asked how long he has been driving in this area. To which he replied:
“I stared last week.”
You know that feeling when you are waiting for some big result and one day it finally comes, and you learn that you didn’t make it? We three felt that simultaneously. Something in our stomachs moved, and we looked at each other with fear in our eyes. We fixed our postures, checked our seat belts, and started requesting God to be kind. Ron opened his mail to find if there is another claim saying whether the driver needed to have a certain experience, but he couldn’t.
Few moments passed and we sort-of forgot how to make conversations. Sensing the elevated level of caution in the vehicle, our driver chucked and divulged to our great relief that he was not driving for last one week, but for about seven years now, and can’t even remember number of trips he has done. We felt as if a nightmare had ended, and God was forgotten again for some time.
We started climbing up the mountains and only about 30 minutes later were high enough to appreciate the might of it. If you squint really hard you could see a speck of cars crawling on the neck of a distant mountains. It was a clear day, so no clouds were to be seen below us and the precise execution of every turn deserved a mini applause for the driver.
After about couple of hours of thankfully eventless drive we reached the much-awaited spot of the whole trip the Khardug La pass top. It was the topmost point of the whole journey and the highest place in the world where you can drive. The only thing that was scarring the beauty of the place were humans.
The saddest part about the highest motorable road was that it was a motorable road. If you were a road and you had the privilege to be the highest one in the world, you have to inevitably handle the responsibility of entertaining people and justify your position. Your friends on the other hand — the other not-so-high roads — though never garner any accolades, are able to maintain their sanctity and enjoy their pristineness.
Unlike a usual 18000ft high place, there was parking area at the Khardung La pass, where naturally bunch of cars were parked and more than bunch of people of every shape and sizes were roaming around. And to Ron’s shock none of them needed an oxygen cylinder.
There was a big stone-marker at the top of the pass that had the words “World’s highest motorable road” written on it. Everybody wanted to get a picture next to it, so they were supposed to form a queue and wait for their turn. But an interesting thing about Indian, is that we hate forming queues. Instead, we like to blob around the point where we want to reach and shoulder-push our way forward. This might make one reach the point faster if one has strong shoulders, but not others. We were others.
So, we took the harder and more civilized approach. We started asking people to form a queue, and not all of them liked that, most of them did, but not all. In fact, there was just one person who didn’t like that. And one was one too many. He jumped out of the blob and started passing lot of statements with serious exclamations at the end. And obviously none with a positive ring to it.
As he started pointing fingers and painting the picture for us, it started becoming apparent that this was the guy who had been pushing his way through the blob for a long bit of a time and as he was about to get his turn, we jumped in and started enlightening the crowd.
Voices were raised, fingers were pointed and our dream of seeing a queue to take pictures at the Khardung La was shattered.
We eventually got our picture at the spot, spent about an hour there and started our decent to the Nubra valley. The decent was as scenic as the ascent but as we started entering the valley the spontaneous applauds started coming back.
There is a famous spot in the valley next to a gorgeous lake where there were camels. And not just any camels but camels with two humps, worthy of charging money to let people ride on them. So, we gave money, took our ride, and Ron and Malfoy fairly enjoyed it. I enjoyed it less, as mine was a baby camel, who only had one hump.
We covered a few more spots at the valley, reached our stay at night and slept early as we had to start early the next morning. It was going to be a long day. We were supposed to Go back to Leh, but via different, longer, and riskier route, covering two breathtaking spots, the Pangong lake and the Chang La pass.
Day 3
Wewoke up on time next day, though not as early as our driver wanted us to, but we were still proud of ourselves. We had good breakfast and a phenomenal cup of tea against the backdrop of Himalayas, tipped the bellboys, who waved us good buy like family members and we started our journey towards the Pangong lake.
Pangong Tso or Pangong lake is a 14,000ft saltwater lake, which is the highest in the world. It is split between India and China and a subject of multiple political discussion which as I said I don’t want to go into. But the thing I do want to go into, is its beauty, or maybe not even that, because I don’t consider myself a writer good enough to put it into words, so let’s leave it there. It is an amazingly beautiful, world’s highest saltwater lake.
The road to Pangong was four hours long back-breaker, but the views made the trip more than worth it. We ascended from Nubra valley, towards the clear skies and every twist of the road presented us with an exquisite view of the mountains.
On our way we stopped at an army cafe next to a small river carrying crystal clear blue water. The whole cafe was a small room with a table and four plastic chairs with a kitchen cum storeroom attached to it, where the meager ration of the entire cafe were kept. It was run by an army personnel, who was dressed neatly and had a clear strong voice as you will expect from a soldier. On our arrival he asked if we’d like to have a tea to which we gleamingly replied yes, and just like that we had our another round of tea that morning, next to a little window of a small cafe overlooking an exquisite Himalayan river.
After roaming around there for a bit and taking few pictures we continued along our way only stopping for lunch before the Pangong. We got our first glimpse of the blue lake slowly reveling itself from between two mountains. You would assume one would get used to these views, but that first look warranted the same gasp from three of us as the first look of the Himalayas from the plain did.
Last fifteen minutes of the drive was along the lake and can be safely deemed as one of the best drives of my life. Finally, our driver parked near the shore of the lake, we got off, picked up our jackets and started walking towards the lake. While our bodies were doing all this, our eyes were locked onto the lake. The verbal exchange between us was astonishingly minimal, apart from occasional exclamations like wow!, oh man! And some colloquial curse words which in this context meant wow!
Pangong is a long lake with the width of about 5km and the length of about 134km. And as I mentioned earlier the whole length is divided between India and China with China having 2/3rds of it.
It is not particularly close to any town, the only people there were tourists, and people who sell stuff to tourists, and they did not amount to a lot.
We sat next to the lake for some time, walked on the shore, chatted, soaked in the beauty as well as we could and continued our journey to Leh through the dreaded Chang La Pass.
The drive to the Chang La pass was one of the most horrifying sections of my life. It was May and in these lands that’s roughly the time when you see receding patches of ice on the road which can make it extremely slippery and unpredictable. Ours was a nice car, but it wasn’t a kind of car that instills confidence at 17,000ft on a twisty icy surface.
In US, these kind of trips are usually preceded by a major paranoia episode. People check the weather seven times, check their car’s oil, air pressures, chain their tyres and then cautiously proceed on specially designed roads with sophisticatedly barriers and road gratings that climbs to 5000–6000ft height at best.
Here, we were in a nice-ish car, which had a very high possibility of being at the edge of exhaustion because of doing more that safe number of trips during last few days. There were no barriers around us, neither to protect rocks from falling on to us from the left, nor to protect us from falling into the dreadfully steep and deep valley on the right. So, every turn was an adventure. An adventure you had no option to opt out of. I felt like an amusement park ride with one of the most thrilling turns and exquisite views, and excruciatingly minimal safety features.
I expressed this concern to Ron and Malfoy, and they educated me for 30 straight minutes about how India is developing so fast and progressing so well at various avenues. Which frustrated me a bit but parked my fear of dying by slipping into the mountains. Which at a whole sum level was a win, I guess.
The route elevated to 17,500 ft. and sort of flattened. Chang La pass was slightly lower than the Khardug La pass but felt a bit riskier. This place also had the stone with its name and height on, but a much lesser crowd around it. We took all the time to click photos, and strolled around while enjoying the views.
We stayed at the Chang La pass for just about fifteen minutes. Perhaps because our driver kept perpetually reminding us about the high mortality rate of driving in dark, or perhaps because we have been seeing these views for three days now.
The latter seemed slightly heart-breaking, but that was the reality. Your heart can’t keep skipping a beat for three straight days. All the mountains still stood with all their glory, but our eys perhaps started to crave for something ordinary.
So, to find the ordinary back, we started our descend. Stopped for a tea break and reached Leh after the sunset. We stayed at the same hotel we stayed at before leaving for the Nubra. We had our dinner, put an IPL match on and slept while talking about something I can’t remember.
Day 4
Wehad an early morning flight from Leh to Chandigarh. We reached the airport well in advance bought some souvenirs, sipped coffee, watched our flight coming to us from between mountains and boarded it. Again, after an hour of having our faces glued to the window, we reached Chandigarh.
The plan was to rent a car and drive it to a famous hill station about 2.5 hours away named Kasauli. It was supposed to be an extremely unambitious day. Although Chandigarh and Kasauli are great tourist spots where people from all over India come, our goal was just to enjoy the drive to Kasauli, relax there for about an hour or two, enjoy the same drive back and catch our late night train to Delhi.
It all depended on getting a working car on time, which was much harder that we imagined. We reached the railway station which was our car’s pickup spot, I stood with the luggage and Ron and Malfoy decided to find the car and bring it to me. After about 40 minutes, I saw both of them walking swiftly towards me performing angry hand gestures. There was obviously no car. On reaching me, they said that there was no car at the mentioned spot, and strongly speculate that it can be on the other side on the railway station. I asked why we can’t call and check the owner, to which they said they already did that, and nobody picked up.
We tugged our luggage to the other side of the station roamed the parking lot with stooped backs to find the car with the matching plate number, gave up, called the owner who obliged to pick up this time and told us where the car exactly was. We threw our luggage in the trunk and finally started the journey to Kasauli.
As I did not do very well the bikes, Ron and Malfoy had twitchy hands with the car, however, they never wanted to miss an opportunity to learn, so I negotiated to drive in the beginning and let Malfoy takeover once we were out of the city.
The moment I let the clutch go, I sensed something was wrong with the car. But since, we had already spent too long at the railway station, I didn’t want to delay by even a single minute. So, I decided to keep the concern to myself and allowed the questionable engine to work.
After lunch, Malfoy announced that he’ll be driving. That fact that he has just learnt driving two months back and that we were about to climb a mountain were irrelevant.
The moment he released the clutch, the car jumped and stopped. Ron gave a sarcastic laugh and commanded him to do a better job. But Malfoy couldn’t. After about three jump-started he finally got the car rolling but was continuously cursing its condition. Finally, after few kilometers of climbing, and getting thoroughly abused by almost every passer on the hill, he finally decided to hand it back to me.
It was about a 2-hours drive to the top, after about 1.5hrs of driving we noticed black smoke coming out of the hood of the car. This was a novel sight for all three of us. It scared us a lot because we were relying on this same car to take us back to the station and we didn’t have the time to explain the owner how the engine exploding was not our fault.
So, we decided against going all the way to the summit, found a safe spot and released the car of its misery by parking on the side. We opened the hood, the engine heat due to extremely high revs while climbing was burning some fluid, we let the hood open for a bit to cool down and chatted next to the smoking car. We searched for a local café, and after about fifteen minutes of cooldown time we closed the hood and went to that café.
We had some long personal conversations over a cup of tea at an overcrowded hill station café. This was the only part of the day which I didn’t really mind.
It was almost late afternoon. We carefully started our car and drove it cautiously back to Chandigarh.
We had some time to kill before our train, so we went to a mall watched a movie and had dinner. Then we left the car at its designated location and thanked it for not completely dying on us during the day.
We caught our train at about 2AM and reached Delhi about 6 in the morning.
Day 5
Iwoke up and sat next to the train window for the final few minutes of the journey, looking out at the same India I have been looking at for whole my life through a train’s window. But this time it stung a little bit more.
No mountains to be seen now. Just a series of half broken houses with people and their families living in them. Most of them in extremely shabby clothing, brushing teeth, taking bath, eating, playing, living, next to the railway line, amongst stray animals, with the filth thrown by themselves and by the train passengers. Surviving days and nights in the noise and smell that would be unbearable for most.
I felt an urge to blame someone. The people, the government, the britishers, and I blamed them all, one-by-one, with all the genuine hate inside me. But it did not help. After every mental rant, I felt more helpless. I felt lesser in command.
It was hard to believe that just an hour’s flight away there is a world so different. A land of blue skies, pristine rivers and snow-covered mountains. A land for an inch of which our soldiers are ready to give their lives. But here, at the heart of the country, for the land that is undisputedly ours to live, protect, and nurture, we have such low regards.
During our school days, at almost every major function, there used to be a chief-guest, and each one of them — with almost zero exceptions — used to point at us and say — ‘Kids, you are the future of the country!” I did not feel the gravity of these words standing in school assemblies, but I have started to get it a little bit more now. That future those guys used to talk about is here. My generation is the major working force of the world right now, and irrespective of what has happened in the past, it is our job to fix the problems today. If I was the future, and the future is here, that means I am the culprit of everything that is happening and I am the one who should decide if it is worth fixing.
You’d think this thought would make me feel worse, but it didn’t. This thought gave a bit of command back to me. This eliminated almost all the decision-points and left me with just one option — to do my part.
The train slowly started sliding into the platform, and the hustle-bustle of the morning Delhi railway station started to wake people up. Ron climbed down and sat next to me. We looked at Malfoy who was so deep in sleep that we decided to let him be for extra two minutes. We took out our luggage, packed our belongings and woke Malfoy up once the train had finally stopped.
We took our time to deboard, had a cup of tea and walked up to the cross-bridge, overlooking the whole station and the old Delhi beyond it, with all its mosques and the tangled overhead wires.
At the middle of the bridge, Ron and Malfoy realized that this is the point we had to separate. We decided to stay discrete about our heavy hearts, hugged each other and made a promise of meeting again soon. They both walked down to their platform and I towards the exit, to enter back the life I had forgotten about over the last five days.
