Meditations of an Explorer

A land, warring nations still fight over, like squabbling brothers.
Kashmir or as it is better known as “Heaven on Earth” is where I went looking for peace but instead I found myself.

In the lower Himalayan range I chanced upon a mountain mythologized to be the abode of the Hindu God Shiva (“The Transformer”) and his wife Parvati. Mount Harmukh, the mystical mountain, stands tall with a seemingly unreachable summit surrounded by thick, dark clouds blurring the horizon. These otherworldly bodies of stone look like gargantuan vertical spaceships left here by a higher species for our ultimate escape. It is rumored to inhabit the hermit whose hapless search to face the gods led to his unexpected attainment of nirvana.

At the foot of the mountain sits my hastily pitched home a small, blue tent. Mirroring the hues of the sky are the clear glacial waters of the Gangbal Lake. Reaching the majestic lake was no easy task. It required a day of walking uphill through alpine meadows, well above the tree line. The surreal trek consisted of a path covered in intense green grass with a hint of blue poppies. The muddy goat tracks in the snow, tell me I’m not alone. It is here that I find absolute peace. The black night is icy cold with abrupt drizzling. It is eerily quiet and all I can hear is the sound of my breath.

I find myself in a single-poled tent with a multi-colored kaleidoscopic cloth interior and in the middle sits a freshly prepared hookah, bellowing smoke. All this along with the sensuous smells of meat searing in a pan, cooking with intoxicating Kashmiri spices, teleports me to a parallel universe. Its warmth is welcoming and comforting. My host (Shafi) is a traditionally dressed, bespectacled man with a scruffy beard. He is kind enough to offer a fresh goat's leg that he sourced from a nearby Gujjar (Himalayan herdsmen). Shafi sings in his heavy and deep textured voice, which echoes through the tent. The voice snuggles its way into my ear and eventually into my soul, the foreign language makes perfect sense to me and I enter a trance.

The peace that has eluded me in the city all these years seems to suddenly fill my being, like a blanket of sunshine on a chilling cold night. I walk out a changed man, calmer and more at peace as if the mountain and the lake were not my intended destination, rather it was the soul stirring experience.
The Mughal emperor Jahangir’s words thus resonated with me, “If there is paradise on Earth, its here, its here, its here.”