Ladakh, India

Ladakh, India     34°08’43.18”N, 77°34’03.63”E , Elevation: 11,500ft

The flight from Delhi to Leh, takes just over an hour. Crossing the Himalayas by air is exquisite in its raw beauty. There is a sense of awe evoked from the grandeur of the immense, jagged peaks blanketed in snow that rise and fall, galloping into each far corner of the horizon. Looking out the window, the shadow of the plane resembles the outline of a small bird against the stark, stately ridges. The destination, the airfield adjacent to the capital city of Leh, is nestled at 11,500 ft, making it one of the highest in the world.

An elderly Ladakhi woman is switching seats so that she can see out of a window. She moves into the row behind me, and peers out at the wing of the plane, an obscured vantage point. I am pressed to the thick portal of my window thinking: this is her country, the land that she belongs to, that her life has unfolded upon and that she has seemingly never seen from the air. So I gesture to her to come and sit in my seat as I move into the aisle, letting her pass and then file in next to her, leaning over to take in our now shared view. We do not share a language, except for the one word of Ladakhi I know: “Jullay.” (Which ultimately means ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’, ‘blessings’ and ‘good luck,’ derived from the Tibetan ‘Tashi Delek.’)

As we begin our descent to land, twisting into a narrow opening between two rough, serrated peaks, she takes my hand in hers and squeezes tightly. Her hands are housed in homemade mittens that are cut off at the knuckles, the dark, worn fingers of her left hand working diligently yet hastily across her strand of mala beads, fingers turning each wooden bead between thumb and forefinger, spinning out urgent, insistent prayers as the plane dips and slides around the crests of these mountains. I have no way to know if she holds my hand because she is uneasy or if it is because she thinks that I might be.

Her traditional dress and the deep creases that line her cheeks and forehead suggest an existence in a remote, high altitude village. As the plane rides lower and lower and we twist around the mountains, we are both looking out the small window, watching the world coming closer and closer and I notice a ketchup packet from the airline boxed lunch tucked into the fold of her gray yak wool hat as though it were a feather. I imagine her returning home to her village, a place without electricity, and in her dimly lit kitchen, she adds to her shelf a small, rectangular packet of tomato ketchup. I wonder if she knows that this is an edible condiment or if she will keep it as a memento of her trip, a reminder of the time she flew in an airplane.

When we land and the wheels halt and the doors open, she releases my hand. Her mittened palm and all of its heat, within knotted joints and tangled, arthritic fingers is now gone. I can still feel in my palm, the warmth from where she had been. My eyes follow as she shuffles out into the lobby to collect her belongings and meet her people, the long loop of her two braids hanging down her back, threaded through with a strand of red silk, intertwined into each other at the base, like fingers interlaced, like two strangers holding hands.

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Ladakh is a region shrouded in mystery, a relic left over from distant, olden times, and you get the sense that something, elsewhere lost, has remained preserved in the rocks that it is built upon, in the culture of the people that move across it, tending to it, tending to their lives quietly, their ways and culture bound and protected within the fortress-like walls of the Himalayas. It may just seem mysterious because it is so remote. The physical isolation of the region has served as a source of its seclusion. It is not an easy place to get to. The roads are closed off to the world from November until May (the mountain passes are open from June to October) and only by airplane, when the weather permits, can you arrive in the capital city of Leh in the winter. Even in the summer months, travel by road is long and arduous, albeit most likely a stunning ride.

Mountainous walls divide the region from its closest neighbors. Ladakh is nestled in India’s northernmost state, an oft-tumultuous region of Jammu and Kashmir, which borders both Pakistan and China’s Tibetan plateau. The region, a stark high altitude desert, with dramatic mountain peaks climbing far above the clouds, was only opened to foreign tourists by the Indian Government in 1975. The northern borders of India are disputed still today. On the eastern ridge, China and India draw their maps differently, each claiming sections that overlap. On the western edge, surrounding the region of Kashmir (which is controlled by India), Pakistan is vying for the space and tries to shift the lines drawn on the maps. But in these remote mountainous lands, there are no fences that line the physical spaces and the rocks themselves seem indifferent to the names we call them. In an area of remote villages, harsh climate and nomadic herds, land distinctions and political borders are not always relevant. At least not to the place itself.