Three girls form Delhi, five nights under the stars

On the road, the smell of the air changes, languages are a babel -soothingly foreign at times, then strangely jarring.Women have green eyes that tell stories of the desert in one land, and in the next, blue eyed women smile with icy disdain. That's why we travel,isn't it?To take in all that the earth has to offer -an exotic discovery at each turn.
The heavens, though, remain the same, for the traveler. How comforting it is to know, that the same sun that languidly creeps into your room Sunday mornings,also browns the leaves in the deserts of Madagascar. The same moon that rises palely from behind the skyscrapers of Manhattan,shimmers brilliantly on the waves of the Indian Ocean. And to the stars, all the discoveries and travels of humans through millennia, just the blink of an eye.They've been there,navigating ships & caravans of ages past, and now, even as NASA studies them intently, they remain the same.
It is these stars I seek out on my travels. I look up at the sky from a new place, and they're there -old friends among new.
Leh-Ladakh -high,sparse plateaus amidst the Himalayas, offer an expanse of earth and sky that seems to stretch on forever.
I found myself there, a few years back,sans accommodation, trudging along a dirt path with my fellow travelers, not knowing where to go, just determined to find a place to spend the night. As we knocked on doors of inns, I remember the night was cool and still, heavy with the grassy smell of juniper. It was past 7 and all was quiet in this little hamlet. A row of houses ended, and we took a turn, slightly dejected. It was then that I saw it, fleetingly at first. A little cave at the mouth of a clear stream. A million fireflies. And the stars above. It was as if each firefly carried the light of the stars in its wings. Such tiny bugs, dancing feverishly in the midst of their mating rituals, reflecting light with such brilliance that it filled the cave with a celestial luminescence. Green and gold they glowed, wings ablaze, intent on the simple, ancient task of begetting progeny. No different from a college dance,I thought with some humor.I looked at these little creatures,and at the sky above,also ablaze with ancient stars,and suddenly, everything in this exotic land seemed a little more familiar. I left the fireflies dancing, and walked on in search of a place to spend the night. As Jack Kerouac said, "Maybe that's what life is.. a wink of the eye and winking stars." And winking fireflies far away from home.