Children, lessons, and laughter in the cold the quiet courage of teachers who stay.
Prologue After Ice, a Door Opens
“A river can teach you to walk; a village can teach you why.”
I arrived in Padum with the Chadar still in my bones those careful days on the frozen Zanskar, the daily grammar of ice (tap, trust, tiptoe), the way breath becomes visible long enough to confess all its secrets. Boots white with salt, knuckles raw from rope, I should have slept for a week. Instead, I asked for Zangla.
“Fort?” the shopkeeper at the corner said, as if I’d asked for an elder by her first name. “Go. Children there. School is open.” He pushed a copper kettle toward my hands. “Tea first.”
The Zangla Fort ruin, palace, lookout, memory keeps its shoulder to the valley like a stubborn uncle. In winter its shadow lengthens into the lanes, a cobalt stamp across courtyards where water frosts in bowls and the air learns to ring. I had heard that a winter school kept going here when other things sensibly stop; that teachers stayed when roads left; that children wrote neat rows of letters with mittens off and courage on.
I went because travel isn’t just passes and views. It is also the people who insist that tomorrow should be literate.
The Walk Up, With a Multiplication Table in the Wind
“The fort watches; the village remembers; the children practice.”
The path from Padum to Zangla was a crunch-quiet snow that squeaked under weight, ice that advised rather than threatened. Across the river the palace ruin tilted into sky, its white scabs of snow like punctuation across an old sentence. A fox printed its cursive into the drift and then erased itself between poplars. The morning sun behaved like the senior-most teacher: slow to arrive, stern even when generous.
At the base of the hill I passed a line of boys with slates under their arms, caps pulled low, noses confessing winter. One had written 7 × 8 in chalk that glittered. He turned the slate toward the wind, as if asking the valley to confirm.
“Fifty-six,” I said, and he smiled as if I had paid a fine. The smallest ran ahead to show me where the school hides: a stone house with a smoke thread rising from a bukhari, a door half open, the day already inside.
“Wait. Shoes,” the tallest said politely, pointing to a line of footwear warming on the sill. I stacked mine alongside plastic boots and proud hand-stitched slippers. A heat like trustworthy news met my knees. The bukhari ticked. Ink lay in neat puddles inside cups, resisting viscosity as best it could.
“Julley,” said the teacher without lifting her eyes from a notebook. “Sit. Warm first. Then you can help us spell ‘January.’”
The Teachers Who Stay
“To teach in winter is to believe that letters generate heat.”
Her name was Stanzin Angmo, and she had been teaching through eight winters. Beside her sat Sonam Dorje, the arithmetic sovereign; by the window Rigzin Dolma, twenty-two and stubborn, the new recruit with cheeks like fresh punctuation. Three teachers, two rooms, one resolve that felt like infrastructure.
“We do not close,” Angmo said, as if clarifying weather. “They forget, otherwise. The mouth forgets the sounds. The hand forgets the roundness of ‘cha’ and the straightness of ‘ka.’ When spring comes, we start again at ‘A’ that is waste.”
The day’s register was shorter than summer. Some children were herding, others sick, two families already on the move toward houses lower down. “But most are here,” Sonam shrugged. “More than enough to make a blackboard worth its chalk.”
He tapped the timetable: English until the tea boils, Math while the bukhari is at its bravest, Ladakhi script when fingers are warm enough to remember strokes, story when the light moves to the far wall. The school day is a choreography with wood and sun as co-teachers. They don’t write it on a chart; they write it in pulses and patience.
I asked the question that city people dress as curiosity but mean as doubt: “Is it hard?”
Angmo laughed. “It is work. Hard is a word for people who can leave.”
Warmth Is a Syllabus
“First we light the fire. Then we start the alphabet.”
A bucket brigade formed toward the bukhari: yak dung cakes, willow twigs, a small brick of coal kept for days when ice argues. The oldest girl tended flames with authority that would make half the managers I know blush. She lifted the bukhari’s little hatch like a stubborn eyelid. The room won five degrees and a sense of future.
On the board Rigzin wrote JANUARY in a careful ladder. She turned to the kids and split it into January / February / March three siblings they already knew by wool thickness and sun angle.
“Which month is the river a road?” she asked.
“January,” the chorus said, as proud as a choir.
“Which month is the road a river again?”
“May,” from a girl with a nose ring too large for her face and confidence exactly right-sized for the room.
They spelled river and road R-I-V-E-R, R-O-A-D and then wrote both in Ladakhi script below, tiny black ladders that made snow on the windows seem like a kind of punctuation. Dual literacy is not a policy here; it’s a habit of survival. The words that keep bodies safe (ice, slip, hold, wait) sit beside the words that help leaving (exam, English, form). Both are needed. Silently the teachers balance belonging and choice.
At tea break, gur-gur cha arrived in mugs with fingerprints older than me. A child taught me how to cup without scalding: left hand under, right around, thumb perched like a small hawk prepared to flee. Butter floated like punctuation. Salt explained why we were all still present.
“You write?” asked a boy, pointing at my notebook. He meant are you a writer, but also do you remember anything. I wrote his name slowly Norbu then asked him to write mine in Uchen script. He did. He followed the grain of my name as if it were a plank he had learned to sand.
Arithmetic with a View of Stone
“Numbers behave if you let them stand near the window.”
Sonam drew a multiplication grid that could have comforted an engineer. Tables 2 through 9 marched across in chalk-square order. “We do this daily,” he said, tapping a rhythm into the room. “Cold changes memory. Repetition is a stove.”
He sent the youngest to the window and asked them to count crows. “Not the same crows as yesterday,” he warned, as if they might sneak in past the canyon and duplicate themselves. Five sat on the fort’s broken edge, two more hopped upward like punctuation marks. Someone miscounted, laughter sledged across the floorboards, the bukhari ticked approval.
Into a notebook lined with thick kindness Nawang wrote:
7 × 7 = 49
7 × 8 = 56
7 × 9 = 63
He whispered each product and his breath made clouds over the numbers as if truth in winter must be visible to be believed. The pencil was chewed. The eraser was down to a polite smudge. The teacher had a drawer of pink erasers with ridiculous cartoon bears on them, a bribe to precision. The children resisted, then succumbed, as all of us do to small, bright resistances placed in the right drawer at the right time.
I remembered a figure from a talk in Leh attendance drops in deep winter; teachers posted up-valley sometimes go home. I asked Angmo why she stayed. She rewrapped her shawl and shrugged into the answer: “Because numbers will be needed here in July. Not in Srinagar.”
The Day’s Geography
“A timetable is a map of two suns: the one in the sky and the one inside the stove.”
By one o’clock, the sun agreed to visit the far wall. Children took their seats in that warm parliament of light. Social studies began. Rigzin spread a map on the floor, the kind that pretends rivers are lines and borders are facts. The children put little poppy seeds on villages: Padum, Zangla, Stongde, Karsha. Zanskar curled through the paper like a quiet, instructive snake.
“Where do your nannies live?” she asked. A dusting of seeds north, west, unknowable. “Where do the rivers meet?” Tiny fingers tapped Nimmu. “Where do the roads forget themselves?” Every finger pressed the passes: Pensi La, Singge La, Sirsir La our future. The children had never been over them; they knew them the way we knew the alphabet we’d not yet written our greatest sentence with.
A radio crackled on the shelf for the official broadcast; it announced the time and an old man in Kargil shouted weather at everyone’s kitchen. “Snow possible,” it said as if requesting a meeting. The teachers looked at each other as you look across a table when a guest cancels: disappointment and relief shook hands.
They wrapped heads and ears and sent a cousin to check if the khul at the end of the lane had burst under ice. He returned thumbs up: tomorrow’s water still had plans.
Recess in Minus Something
“Play is the curriculum where hands stay warm, and hearts, too.”
After maps came break. Outside, the fort’s shadow now stretched like a quiet, long dog across the slope. Boys pulled a rope between two sticks and invented a kind of skipping I couldn’t recognize. Girls divided into teams to play a throwing game with stones, each catch a minor triumph awarded with the exact degree of smile the Himalaya allows itself. One kid smuggled a carrom striker from his pocket just the striker, no board and used it to compact snowballs into legal ammunition.
“No at faces,” Angmo said without turning, then turned because the rule is also a ritual. Two snowballs disobeyed gravity and instruction simultaneously, then apologized by melting.
By the wall, a goat found sun, folded its legs into neat grammar, and practiced being an aunt. A marmot brown comma of confidence showed up absurdly early for the season, reconsidered, vanished. The bukharis in the houses below coughed, cleared their throats, settled into purrs.
Cecilia, whose fluency includes play, taught a clap rhythm. Sound bounced off the fort and came back slightly older. The kids laughed at the echo that made them sound like themselves tomorrow. In that moment nothing else existed: not the long state of the river, not the line across the map, not the arithmetic of fuel and flour. Just skin, sound, and light trying together.
The Library That Would Fit in a Duffle
“Small shelves, wide worlds.”
The library was a cupboard with ambition. Its wood doors had absorbed decades of oiled hands. Inside: schoolbooks, Hindi readers with stories about monkeys and mangoes, English books where boys in shorts drink orange squash, Ladakhi pechas wrapped in cloth, and a shared atlas with a crease through Tibet that had become a mountain in its own right.
“This came from Leh,” Sonam said, holding a box set of science comics so loved that the staples were visible like honest bones. A page about cloud formation had new pencil clouds drawn in its margins; ownership is sometimes a creative act rather than an economic one.
A visitor had donated a Kindle, and it sat uncharged because the panel that should feed it had cracked in December and the boy who knows how to fix panels was in Jammu. I felt briefly exotic and useless in the face of such straight facts. Angmo misread my expression such that she rescued me: “Don’t worry. The cupboard still works.” She tapped the wood. It sounded like reliability.
In a corner stacked exercise books waited for spring ruled lines, margins red as resolution, covers undecided between tigers and dancers. I ran a thumb across their edges the way one does when trying to gauge the weight of a year. A child caught me and said “April” as if that single month contained all the patience between now and then.
Ink on Fingers, Courage in Shoulders
“Handwriting is how you pilot your own weather.”
Calligraphy hour right after break made sense: fingers warmed, minds open, light improving. Uchen letters lined the board a final line of tsheg dots like little villages along a road. Children copied, slower than you think, faster than you fear. The smallest boy licked his pencil every third letter, a ritual he considered essential to legibility.
“Curve softer, Norbu,” Rigzin said, touching his wrist rather than the page, communicating with the lever rather than the result. He made a better cha at the next try and looked toward the fort as if checking whether old stones approve.
I wrote my own name again, this time careful, and it sat on the page like a polite stranger. Angmo corrected me: “Less temple on your ‘ka’, more river.” I smudged and learned.
Ink stains on the children’s fingers told their afternoon’s story better than diaries: a smudge of red on the girl who tried the title, a rain of black dots across the boy who knocked his cup, a sure line around the apprentice who sharpened everyone’s pencils with a knife as trustworthy as a first sentence.
“If I can write my name well, I can ask for a job well,” the oldest said, data and hope braided.
Midday Meal: Steam as Pedagogy
“Soup tells you what knowledge tastes like in January.”
The midday meal arrived in steel two pots cradled by an aunt with forearms sturdier than my plans. Thukpa, with potatoes guarding the corners, carrots performing as if spring could be willed, and the noodles not entirely believing in the argument for softness. The older kids carried ladles with the same gravity they bring to manuscript pages.
We ate quiet, each spoon a lesson in economy. Cecilia and I were pressed bowls with the authority of hospitality. Second helpings were allowed only if your handwriting showed improvement from last week; the bargain made everyone a believer in practice.
In the scrape of spoons I heard an education being funded not by a grant, not by a post, but by women’s time in kitchens, men’s breath on firewood, and children’s willingness to chew and then keep still until the next bell.
The Fort as Teacher
“Old walls do more than cast shade they cast standards.”
After lunch I finally asked the question that had been gesturing at my sleeve all day: “Do you ever go up to the fort?”
“On Saturdays,” Sonam said. “History class moves its legs.”
They make a procession, he explained single file, hands inside sleeves, teacher at the back to catch strays. At the courtyard, he tells them about kings and queens who had more problems than we do and no pencils to solve them with. They touch the carvings, pick up a shard of fallen wall, put it back because ownership is a privilege better used on books.
From the highest platform the valley shows its long sentence: river, field, house, road, snow, the places where dogs keep their own government. The children point at Padum, at Karsha, at the bend where they think summer lives. For a minute nobody speaks and that minute also counts as curriculum.
“Fort is like an elder who doesn’t use words,” Angmo said. “They learn to listen to silence.”
Visitors, Always Complications
“Hospitality is a subject; behave as if graded.”
By mid-afternoon two tourists wandered in, cheerful and hatless. A camera neck swayed against down jackets. The urge to picture what we cannot understand is universal; the merit lies in what we do after the lens decides we are not its boss.
Angmo did a quick calculus and glanced at me. I understood my assignment: intercept warmly. We placed the visitors on a bench near the bukhari, showed them the cupboard, the register, the charts. They asked to take photos. Angmo said later, and they agreed, which made me like them.
When later arrived, she asked for hands-only pictures: copybooks, pencils, ink. She asked them not to take faces without specific permission from children and their parents. They nodded. They left a donation that was quietly recorded in the ledger as if admitting money is merely another kind of pencil.
“We are not a museum,” Sonam told me afterward. “We are a hallway. People pass; learning stays.”
Twilight Dictation
“Light becomes a teacher when it runs out.”
The late lesson was dictation: five English sentences, then their Ladakhi equivalents. Angmo spoke as if the room had different ears planted in different corners. The children wrote with the clarity of people who expect to be understood.
- The river sleeps in winter.
2. My mother makes tea for the teachers.
3. The fort is old and kind.
4. February is cold but not forever.
5. I will read to my sister tonight.
They sounded the vowels, gave consonants enough room, and corrected each other with laughter that never bruised. In Ladakhi the sentences turned an elegant modesty less declarative, more shared.
The sun left the window. The bukhari cooled to assertiveness. Pens lifted as if birds at a startle. One more bell from the temple stepped across the lane, and the day closed its notebooks.
The Walk Down, and Everything That Followed Me
“A day of learning weighs less than the clothes you wore in it.”
I put my boots back on and felt them more mine than they had been in the morning. Children aimed their goodbyes accurately: Julley, see tomorrow, bring erasers, learn our ‘cha’, don’t slip. The river down below turned the steel color that makes you think of forgiveness. Smoke lifted out of homes and wrote quotations in the air.
“You come again?” a girl asked, the way a librarian might ask about a book she knows will be continued.
“I come again,” I said, knowing that travel sometimes tells lies it wants to be true. She smiled as if to say make it true.
At the lane I looked back. The fort leaned into blue. The school tucked itself under its language of stone. The teachers stacked tomorrow’s wood under an eave that could use repair and probably will get it before breakfast. The world lower down could keep its speed. Zangla had chosen endurance instead, and suddenly I envied the children for the exact shape of their homework.
Epilogue What Winter Taught Me About Staying
“The bravest line is the one written every day.”
I went to Zangla searching for a view and found a vocabulary. The fort gave me scale; the school gave me sense. Stanzin Angmo, Sonam Dorje, Rigzin Dolma and the aunties with soup and the cousins with wood are the script keepers of a curriculum no ministry can fully design: how to keep learning lit in a season made of excuses.
Winter is not a pause here; it is a classroom whose walls are wind and whose blackboard is sky. It has a syllabus: start fire, share tea, hold pencil, remember, repeat, laugh, correct, sing, dismiss. The final exam is April, when the road remembers itself and the world tries to tempt you into forgetting that some truths were made when the river was a road.
If you find your way there as a traveler, a volunteer, a carrier of erasers walk in with hands ready before questions. Stand low so that younger eyes can see the board. Ask to help but be prepared to be taught instead. Give with the ledger in mind, not your camera. Remember that hard is a word for people with return tickets; for those who stay, it is work and work is belonging.
I have carried from that day a small, stubborn set of sentences I write when the road is long and the engine complains:
Light the bukhari before the blackboard.
Write as if someone colder than you will read it.
Count crows honestly.
Let the fort teach your spine to listen.
Spell February with forgiveness.
And when I cross a frozen place anywhere now a bad spell on a ride, a thin hour in a life I hear Angmo’s uncomplicated courage in the way she stirred the fire and the class at the same time: “We do not close.”