The picture- Sikkim

 

You never miss the picture, only the moving parts, for the picture is logged into your head in perpetuity, for all time to come. It is these moving parts that trinkle into crevices- crevices that hold everything you thought you didn’t want but ended up needing.

 

In a different city from the one I have lived my entire life in, I do not miss the big picture, I miss the moving parts. I do not miss family or friends, I miss the walk home, the raging sun, the smoke laden air. It is crazy I know, but it was home. The familiar pavements were home, the laughing strangers in the park at 8:30 pm were home, the tender windchimes on the ground floor apartment were home, it was their home, and my home too.

 

You leave a place, and you leave behind familiarity, comfort, of knowing where the roads are, and what the blind turn up right leads to. You leave home and you leave the indents in your pillow, the leaking tap, the dying trees in the 45 degree heat.

 

The way I see it, you're merely an element in this ever-running ecosystem of lives, of routines, of people who hang windchimes in their houses. So why do we do it?  Why do we leave?

 

These are questions of supreme controversy, while some would tell you that stagnancy is too overbearing in the long run, others will say that progress is innate, and nothing in the world can make you evolve so long as you have chosen not to.

 

But who am I to care? All I know is that I miss home, and the more times I say it, the less of it I remember, the more I remember the longing to leave , that would cling on to me like a shadow in every room I was in, telling me soon it'll be time to go. There has always been an ache to leave, all places but one.

 

June 19, 2024

Long flight, longer car ride, I step foot into Gangtok, Sikkim. Unfamiliar, scathing, cold, high. Eccentric colored conical roofs on small shrine like buildings- a waterfall or two. I enter the hotel, it is 7 pm, I will soon be fast asleep.

 

June 20, 2024

I am up, it is 3:51 am and I am wide awake, the air is hauntingly cold, and outside my window there isn't an ounce of light, just the bloodcurdling sound of waterfalls in the distance. The day had much in store, but no one could have seen it coming for the sun was still sleeping in the distance. Hour long car ride took us some 14000 feet above the ground level, to see the country’s border, but I could be the least bothered. I was looking at the roads, the houses on them.

The driver makes a stop for a cup of tea at the house he claims is his aunt's, we go inside, its small, there's one common room, strung with all sorts of foods I have never seen before, adjacent to it is another room, with corn cobs hanging on the ceilings, why that was, I still don’t know. The lady with the headscarf is standing cooking in the kitchen, she's laughing and on her face there is a red glow, one that comes from your blood vessels contracting because you've spent your life 14000 feet in the air. I ask her if she's happy, she tells me she is. I don’t need to hear anything more.

 

June 21, 2024

The day was supposed to be spent travelling, occasionally making pitstops to see some greatness between all greatness. We stop at one such odd place, which I couldn’t quite tell if it was religious as it was amusing. It was quiet, quaint, calm. We tried walking on what they called the skywalk, its an illusion, that there's no ground beneath you to hold you to it, but there is. I knew it, but I still was scared, who has ever needed to know more than just about everything? There's a shrine some 250 stairs up, the crowd aged 40 at the very least isn't really up to the challenge, but I'm 17, quite young still to not even try, so I go on, climb, mount. I enter the room, its quiet, makes quite an echo, and is very very cyclical, everything is in patterns, repeating.

 

I sit right in the middle of it, I sit in silence, for there's nothing else to do. Minutes pass- one, two, three- I feel a tinge in my heart, a year later when I look back at it, it was more of a puncture. I start sobbing, mindlessly, for seemingly no reason, but then there were reasons, every second there were reasons, so so many of them. I did not want to be who I was anymore, and there was nothing you could do about it. This was me- a vessel, and then there was me- the extractor- I had emptied myself- by myself. This has been the turning point of my life thus far- the craziest thing is that I didn’t even know what the place was called up until a month ago, and I intended to keep it that way, until someone’s shameless show on social media stole the poignant soul of it in the background of some horrific rock song.

 

June 22, 2024

I get lost in a forest, on the way to a palace, there is no reception, I am walking still, for I'm looking for the goldmine somewhere in the middle of all wildernesses, people come and they warn us about bears, but 7 year old boys play football in very same place. So I kick the ball hoping that I don't kick the bucket.

 

June 23, 2024

It has been a while since I have lost all touch with all people in all places, and I'm walking down mall road with the same song on repeat, one, two, three, ten times. I run into a familiar face, and she invites my mother and me for tea, as we go I'm wondering what to make of this sense of knowing. I try to hold on to it but she has to go, so I move on.

 

June 24, 2024

Dead animal carcasses preserved in resin, haunted hotels, gigantic chinese fans, shops for trinkets, toy train stations, and the sunset telling me it is almost time to go.

 

June 25, 2024

The flight didn’t land for 40 minutes, it kept circling the city, there was an unwillingness to it, the way it refused to come back, the way it longed to never leave, the 3 hour delay was tolerable, but the 30 minute buffer was not, for I was stepping back, old shoes for new feet.

I came back a different person. 

 

Why I think about Sikkim so much I don’t know, a year has passed, a couple more will before I find my way back, but there is something there, an unfinished story, a silent prayer, another cold morning. It is waiting for me, it has been. I didn’t write about it before because the ache wasn’t there, I missed it sure, but I had a hand to hold on to.

Only when you're stripped naked of all comfort, all similarity, all acquaintance, do you realize that the earth has always been quietly cold.

Picture Credit- Pinterest