The sun does come to bid farewell after all that water, and Harmukh yawns mischievously as no trout seems to take the bait… farewell is bid to the septuagenarian inspirations braving the weather one more day, but the young ones always want to walk more and soak less goes their lament; the river crossings start getting man made bridges…
The meadow that follows is huge, easily spread over a couple of miles, and the Harmukh grows shiny and in stature with every step taken away, the ravens swoop around, and the fishing rods going the other way pelt their queries on to the exasperated faces…
The tree-line is arrived at, and the conifers whistle their welcome song, the birds all in the comfort of their shrouded perches again, a twitter on the last branch slips on to the mud, to look up or down when those weird crows with coloured beaks (the Chugs, actually, the Bharti saves us from ignorance) are hovering around the Harmukh soaking up the meadow as the green blinds in a monotonous determined to wed gaiety, off with the gallops of that horse rushing horizontal to tackle the vertical… there are sounds now …
Propriety, but then, of and boulders, is in any case never a wise choice, for what the wickedly still relents to the moving wet has always been a hearty feast for the adrenaline, but with a few fences and some fish, a picnic in ne’er too far away it seems…
There it ends with the trees, and familiar trails follow, narrow and winding, meandering up and down, ne’er gaining any altitude but not losing any either; huff up to realize the feet won’t listen scuffing down, get apricots in return for some worldly conversations, and beckoning the dot of a town down in the distance, carry forth…
Entrancing as civilization, the steep trial snaking down buries the knee into a perennial ache, brake and brake then swear and run to wince and stop and hop at the bend, the dot now bigger, but not nearer anyway…
What looked like a half an hour jog stretches into an hour at monsieur ‘halfway’, the socks sarcastically mutter, shouting back constantly at every boulder’s mud… lizards seem to be out in families as well, the chase lends a sizable number of slips and false starts, and families, as general knowledge goes, ne’er like being disturbed…
Some companions along the way, of their fears of discrimination yet the joys of travel, of places without mountains but with malls, of never having to walk, of luxuries detached yet in this age of communication…
Naranag slips in without a fuss, the beeline of the trial now a general bustle of the bustle of the town… the temple at one end defining eras when the will of that prophet wasn’t so profound, and the lull and fury of Shiv still echoed this side of the Himalayas, craters of communal ire, decadence of history unto mushrooming loves, keepers of their own and the rush for the bus…