A visit to a winter school day in Zangla, where the cold was only the first thing I noticed
The first thing I remember is the door.
It was half open, letting out a strip of heat and the smell of smoke, damp wool and children who had been sitting too close to a bukhari. My boots were still carrying the Chadar with them: river salt, cold stiffness, a little arrogance from having survived days on the frozen Zanskar without falling through anything important. I had walked into Zangla after the Chadar with Cecilia, my trekking partner, tired enough to know that rest would have been the sensible choice.
Instead, I followed the sound of children.
The school sat below the old Zangla Fort, which rose above the village with its ruined walls and winter-stained presence. I did not know enough about the fort that day to turn it into history. I knew only that it was there, above the village, visible from lanes where water froze in shallow containers and smoke came out of roofs in narrow, hardworking lines.
Inside the classroom, nobody paused long enough to make my arrival dramatic. A few children looked up. A few looked at my boots. One child whispered something that made another child laugh into his sleeve. Stanzin Angmo, who was checking a notebook, glanced at me and said, “Sit. Warm first.”
That was the right order.
I had come as a visitor and observer, not as a volunteer, not as a teacher, and certainly not as someone who understood what school meant in winter Zangla. The visit was self-funded. The school day I saw was a normal one, supported by a local NGO, not a staged demonstration of mountain hardship. That distinction matters. The cold was real, but it was not the only subject in the room.
Zangla Fort
A normal day, almost
The room was smaller than my memory wanted it to be and more organised than my assumptions deserved.
There was a blackboard, a line of shoes, exercise books, pencils, a cupboard library, mugs near the bukhari, and children who behaved exactly as children should: attentive for a while, restless soon after, funny when the teacher was not looking, funnier when the teacher was looking and pretending not to. Their breath showed briefly in the colder corners of the room. Near the stove, cheeks reddened and fingers began to work again.
Stanzin Angmo moved between notebooks and the class with the calm of someone who had already solved ten small problems before breakfast. Sonam Dorje handled arithmetic with a patience I recognised from good teachers everywhere: the belief that repetition is not punishment if the room is warm enough and the child is not ashamed. Rigzin Dolma, younger and quick-eyed, corrected pencil grips, leaned over pages, and returned mistakes to children without making the mistake feel like a crime.
The original temptation would have been to write about courage. It was there, of course, but not in the way outsiders like to package it. Nobody in the room was standing around being inspirational. They were trying to finish a lesson. Someone’s pencil broke. Someone had smudged a line. Someone had forgotten what had been explained five minutes ago. Someone else knew the answer but wanted the pleasure of pretending not to.
That ordinariness was the point.
When I asked whether keeping school going through winter was hard, Angmo laughed. “It is work,” she said. Then, after a moment, “Hard is a word for people who can leave.”
I did not have a useful answer to that, so I wrote it down and stopped asking questions for a while.
What winter adds
Before any lesson could become a lesson, the room had to be made possible.
That meant the bukhari had to be fed. Yak dung cakes, willow twigs and a small amount of coal were handled with the seriousness of supplies that could not be wasted. The children knew where things belonged. An older child adjusted the stove hatch with the confidence of someone trusted with fire but still young enough to enjoy being trusted. The room gained warmth slowly, not generously, but enough.
Outside, snow moved through the day in thin, undecided spells. Fox prints crossed one patch of white near the lane. I remember seeing marmots too, odd and quick in the cold, and the memory still feels slightly out of season, as if winter itself had misfiled them. The cold did not need a number to prove itself. It was in the way mugs were held with both hands, in the way sleeves swallowed fingers, in the way children moved towards sunlit patches without discussing it.
Winter added labour to every ordinary thing. Water had to be watched. Fire had to be kept. Attendance was shorter than it would have been in easier weather. Some children arrived late, not as an act of indiscipline, but because lanes, animals, chores and cold do not arrange themselves around a timetable. The teachers adjusted without making a speech about adjustment.
At midday, thukpa arrived in steel pots, carried in by an aunt whose forearms understood work better than my entire travel vocabulary. The room changed as soon as the food entered. Lessons gave way to bowls, steam, spoons, children becoming quieter for the few minutes in which hunger outranks personality. Cecilia and I were given bowls too, not because we had earned them, but because hospitality in Zanskar often ignores the fairness of the matter.
The thukpa was simple: hot, thick, useful. Potatoes, noodles, warmth, salt. Food like that does not need adjectives. It needs cold hands and enough silence to eat properly.
The library was a cupboard with ambitions it had no reason to apologise for. Inside were schoolbooks, Hindi readers, English books, Ladakhi texts wrapped and stored carefully, a shared atlas, science comics, exercise books waiting for use, and a donated Kindle that sat uncharged because the solar panel meant to feed it had cracked in winter. I must have looked at it with too much city sadness, because Angmo said, “Don’t worry. The cupboard still works.”
She tapped the wooden door.
It did.
Under the fort
After school, I walked up towards Zangla Fort.
The climb was not dramatic, just cold and uneven enough to make my tired legs complain honestly. From below, the fort had been a presence in the corner of the day, visible through windows and above roofs. From closer up, it became stone, broken edges, old walls, wind, and a view back over the village where the school no longer looked like an idea. It looked like a small warm room someone had worked to keep warm.
That mattered.
From above, it was easier to see what the article should not become. The fort did not “watch over” the children in any magical way. Winter did not turn learning into a moral fable. The village was not a lesson arranged for me. Zangla had roofs, fields, lanes, smoke, chores, people who were tired, people who were funny, teachers doing their jobs, children trying to get through the day, and visitors like me trying not to overstate what we had been allowed to see.
Still, the fort changed the scale of the classroom. It reminded me that the school was not floating in some abstract Himalayan hardship. It belonged to a village with history, weather, work, and a winter that made every routine slightly more expensive in effort. A child learning to write a cleaner line was not saving civilisation. He was learning to write a cleaner line. That was already enough.
When I came back down, the school day was thinning towards its end. Children were putting things away with the speed of children released from structure. Someone could not find a cap. Someone else had two. There was an argument, a correction, laughter, and then the sort of settlement that only children consider legally binding.
The teachers stacked tomorrow’s wood where it would stay dry. This was the part I kept returning to later: not the blackboard, not the fort, not even the snow, but the wood. Tomorrow’s day had already begun before today had ended.
Switchbacks Become Stories: Five Days Between Zangla and Lamayuru
Notes on the river back
I left Zangla with the Chadar still waiting for us.
The return towards Leh was not an epilogue; it was still part of the journey. We were back on ice, back inside the careful arithmetic of the frozen river: where to place the foot, where to test, where to wait, when to trust the guide, when to let someone else cross first. My body returned to the same cautious rhythm it had learned earlier, but my notebook now had a different weight in the bag.
That evening, somewhere on the return trek, I wrote while my fingers argued with the pencil. The page was stiff in the cold. My handwriting became smaller, not from elegance but from self-defence. I wrote the details before they could turn into slogans: door half open, boots by the wall, bukhari hatch, yak dung cakes, willow twigs, coal, thukpa steam, cracked solar panel, cupboard still works, no child names, ask before photographs, wood stacked for tomorrow.
I also wrote Stanzin Angmo’s line: “It is work.”
That was the sentence that stayed. Not courage. Not resilience. Not hope dressed up for readers far away. Work.
The river made a low sound under the ice. Someone nearby coughed. Cecilia was already inside her sleeping bag, or pretending to be. I closed the notebook before my fingers went fully numb and tucked the pencil into the fold of the page.
In the morning, we would walk again.
