Atul and I met in 2010 while filling our bikes at a petrol pump outside Leh. It would be easy for me to say that he gave me magic. A magic that built dreams. I lived in that dream, a few of us. We witnessed it together. A year after I met Atul.
It was Teach to Learn for his organization Karmabhoomi
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This year in July we had gone for an Omni journey to Hanley. We pulled over at Leh for a few days. We were meeting Bhai, Atul.
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One lazy, sunny, cold, leh morning Atul was direly asking Sirjee to come along. That day I went along instead to The Last resort
I had visited this place before years ago. When it was unknown. Like Reaching a measure, or when becoming a process of leaving. It was a place that makes you only. I now remember looking at horses that kept crossing the homeless river. There was a bell inside a Buddhist temple, which kept feeding a language to the wind. Later we went walking towards the unseen empty roads adorned by fields of sea buckthorn and leafless apricot trees. I was happy to imagine that i was there. Atul was there with me even then but I could not imagine that he was imagining keeping his happiness’s intact for an age to come.
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A farm stretched in the highest land like lines of a lonely poem. Alongside a legendary river that let’s you stand in her stream while you roam like these helpless little tributaries, wandering inside you, till many horses appear again and you move away. You see the wind again, through the leaves on every tree bending towards a side. That night we saw how many lights have multiplied in the city of Leh since we saw it the first time almost a decade ago. There were two helicopters flickering over the city for many minutes soundlessly. It was like looking at a giant television thirty kilometers far from Leh, yet we could still see Leh from here.
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So, if you plan to come over here, you know now where you will find your playground where the horses roam. In the lap of river Indus.
