Notes from a switchback where I almost turned back.

Autumn slipped into Leh like a quiet correction. Poplars flared to brass, willows drank the light and gave it back in a softer amber, and the river picked up a steelier hurry as if rehearsing for winter. The mornings were dry and exact. Even footsteps sounded more honest. I woke one of those mornings with a simple plan written in the plain ink of a promise: ride up to Khardung, listen to the wind, come back before the sun learned new tricks.

I wanted the kind of day you can fold neatly into a notebook and press between pages like a leaf: a measured climb, an altar of views, the familiar stunt of a photograph beside the sign that announces more feet than the body quite believes. I wanted the comfort of a story I already knew how to tell. Khardung, after all, is a road that has learned how to be famous without strutting switchbacks that annotate the flank of the mountain, a pass that has argued for years with altimeters, a permanent festival of prayer flags that cannot be persuaded to behave.

But the mountain had scheduled a different curriculum. Somewhere above the checkpoint, somewhere between a confidence I had not earned and a caution I had not yet learned, the wind set up a classroom and I almost turned back.

I rolled the motorcycle out into the brittle morning. It was the kind of cold that keeps a hand on your shoulder to make sure you’re paying attention. The mechanic across from the guesthouse was already drinking his first tea, both palms around the cup like a prayer. He looked at my front tire, looked at the sky, and said the Ladakhi version of “Don’t be a hero.”

“Ride slow,” he added, because the desert has no pity for speed, and because advice here often arrives in the simple architecture of two words.

Leh was still rubbing sleep from its eyes shopkeepers lifting shutters like eyelids, a woman pouring water down a stoop with the ceremonial flourish of a priest, a dog deciding whether the sun had earned him yet. I strapped the notebook into the tank bag as if words could anchor the day. In autumn you don’t waste the clarity; you spend it carefully. I eased the bike into second, let the engine find its own idea of patience, and threaded out of the town like a needle looking for a seam.

On the first climb the city fell behind in rectangles flat roofs, prayer flags that already knew more verbs than I did, a skein of roads unspooling toward Indus and Nubra and memory. The signs from the Border Roads Organisation saluted with their weary, cheerful scolding “BE SOFT ON MY CURVES,” “AFTER WHISKY DRIVING RISKY,” “I AM CURVY, BUT NOT NERVOUS” the weather-beaten humour of a department that has learned how to lecture with a wink.

The air changed with a neat ruthlessness. In Leh it sits in your mouth like a clean coin; a few switchbacks up it becomes a more demanding currency. You pay for every view with breath. The engine’s thrum settled into my ribs, the road set the metronome, and my vanity lived where it always does two inches behind my sternum, working without pay.

South Pullu appeared with military pragmatism: a checkpoint, a spill of stones that had briefly believed in gravity, the steel smell of tea and diesel. I killed the engine and swung a boot down with the relief of someone who has been pretending not to be tired. The soldier at the barrier did not need my permit to know who I was; the set of my shoulders and the particular uncertainty with which I removed my gloves said tourist well enough.

“First time?” he asked without malice.

“Not the first,” I said, “but the first this autumn.”

He nodded at the sky the way locals nod at relatives with moods. “Wind up there,” he said, like a diagnosis. He stamped something official with a noise that always makes me obedient, and added, “Don’t stop on the outside of the bends. If you must stop, stop where the mountain can hold you.”

I took a tea from the stall a thin metal cup that bites at the lip and smooths out your bad ideas and stood where the road rose, counting trucks as one counts omens. A convoy came down green, patient, inevitable each driver making decisions I couldn’t see. The kettle hissed, the soldier’s pen scratched, the stall boy memorised change with the accuracy of a prayer. A dog I did not yet know would become important chose a patch of sun like a verdict.

I could have turned there and called it discretion. But the horizon is a beggar and I am an easy mark. I kicked the engine back into a growl, nodded at the barrier like it was an argument I’d won, and rose into the kind of light that makes you forgive yourself for thinking you can belong to landscapes you do not yet understand.

The first kilometres above South Pullu are a factory of opinions gravel that has not agreed with itself, patches of asphalt like treaty islands, gullies where yesterday’s melt had argued with tonight’s freeze. The road scribbles across the slope with the confidence of a child who has not been told to write neatly. The wind arrived without ceremony, as wind often does, and assumed the rights of tenure. It did not announce itself with drama; it simply began to edit the day.

It found the small imprecision in my jacket zip and poured itself through, cold as a new rule. It tested the seam between glove and sleeve and discovered the nerve endings I had left undefended. It leaned into the bike’s broad side and asked a question: How much of that posture is balance and how much is bravado?

At one switchback the road bunched up like a muscle. The outside fell away into a theory of gravity I had no argument against. There is a way the mountain gathers itself at a hairpin that feels like a shoulder shrugging. I took the inside line, polite as instructed, and felt the rear tyre skate on a ribbon of stones that behaved like laughter. The front found purchase, the rear threw up a handful of pebbles that hit my boot with comic energy, and for a fragment of a second the bike and I were two opinions on the subject of direction.

We settled on a compromise that noticed the abyss more than it needed to. I stopped with the kind of tidiness that only looks composure from far away. The engine knocked once with a leftover heartbeat and went still.

This is where I almost turned back.

It was not dramatic. No violin of panic, no theatrics of breath. Just a precise inventory of facts. The wind was teaching a stronger conjugation. The road had adopted more personalities per kilometre than my confidence had prepared for. My lungs were writing complaint letters. Most crucially: there was no reason to continue that would look wise if written afterwards by a less forgiving narrator.

A gust came up the valley like a lesson and held itself steadily against me. I felt the bike rock minutely, saw a prayer flag’s long tail entirely horizontal, heard a loose tin on a pile of stones begin to clap. The smell was metal and snow a scent that makes promises it intends to keep.

A truck breathed down toward me, big and square and untempted by drama, and eased around the bend with the patience of a grandfather who has already seen the joke. The driver glanced at me for a syllable of time and did not honk, which is a form of respect mountains teach.

I put the bike on its stand and stepped down into the wind exactly as if the wind were a person and I did not wish to be rude. My calves hummed with the memory of the skid. My heart was larger than my chest had budgeted for. I drank a sip of water and the wind took it from my mouth as if to check it for poison.

Everything in me composed a small speech in favour of prudence. Turn back. Two words. The shortest epic about surviving. I could be in Leh in an hour, reheating my pride beside a window. I could write a paragraph with a moral that would look good in italics. No one would call me a coward except the version of me that keeps a ledger of bravery in untidy columns.

The mountain did not care. That is one of the reasons I love it. It is indifferent to the theatre of our self-persuasion. The wind, however, had opinions.

I have heard people call wind a voice, and it’s a metaphor that does good service. Up here, in autumn, it talks in more than one register. There is the whisper that fingers the edge of your hood like gossip, the hiss that goes past your ear as if late for a deadline, the organ note that stands its ground across a whole valley. What I heard on that switchback was somewhere between instruction and invitation. If I had to translate it and translation is always accusation as much as grace it said:

You may turn back. Turning back is an art. But if you go forward, go because you have something smaller than courage and larger than vanity. Go the way water goes: choosing the line that does not make a fuss.

I do not know if the wind said that or if I have learned to throw my own voice when I need to be parented. I only know that the sentence arrived with the clarity that weather sometimes lends to thought.

Footsteps scuffed the gravel above me. A figure came into view a woman with a scarf tied pirate-wise, a thermos tucked into the crook of her arm. She had the compact competence of people who do not introduce themselves to mountains with Instagram. Behind her, a Sumo idled; a child’s hand flickered against the rear window in the international language of waving at strangers.

“You’re stopped in a good place,” she said, kindly avoiding all the places I could have chosen to be foolish. “Wind is high on the outside today.”

“Today?” I said, as if there were a day up here when the wind applied for leave.

She smiled, small. “It comes in pulses,” she said. “We wait. Then we choose the next corner. One corner at a time.”

Her scarf snapped out a syllable of authority. She poured tea into the thermos lid and offered it to me the way one offers help to someone who might be tempted to make a myth of refusing.

“Road is jealous of hurry,” she added, not as poetry but as policy. “The mountain doesn’t care if you reach by four or by never. So reach by four.”

In the Sumo the child had turned his palm into binoculars and was observing me with unassailable seriousness. The woman was not a guide, not a rescuer. She was simply a person who had seen more switchbacks than my pride. We stood in a little parenthesis of wind and sipped like conspirators. The tea was sweet and lung-shaped, the kind that settles arguments between your ribs.

“Going to the top?” she asked.

“I was,” I said. “Then I wasn’t. Now I am again, but more humbly.”

“Humility is better traction,” she said, and laughed once, a neat laugh, as if to acknowledge the pun and get on with the day.

We watched the flags for a minute, because flags speak for sky when we need body language. Their tails softened from angry to urgent to merely insistent. A breath of stillness arrived, surprising enough to feel like a favour.

“One corner at a time,” she repeated, as if she were reminding me of something I had taught her long ago and forgotten since. She capped the thermos, lifted two fingers in a salute that was not military but somehow more binding, and went down to her car.

They pulled away politely, wheels whispering, cheeks to the wind, a convoy of three minds driver, passenger, child agreeing, as families do, that their version of the mountain was the mountain that counted.

I put my hand on the tank the way you put your hand on the shoulder of an impatient friend, and I made a plain pact with the road. Not heroics. Not bragging rights. I set a rule as simple as the soldier’s earlier ones: If the flags shout, I stop. If they speak, I listen. If they breathe, I move.

I went on.

The climb above that corner was the longest short distance of the day. I took it in low gear, hands loose, eyes soft enough to see more than the obvious line. A truck descended with its own weather, and I waited inside the mountain’s elbow until the etiquette of passage felt learned rather than guessed. Where the surface broke into stones, I imagined water and asked it for advice. Where black patches shone with the mean intelligence of ice, I let the throttle be a suggestion rather than an argument.

The pass did not arrive so much as relent. The last switchback opened its hand and there it was, still practicing its famous face: prayer flags in long sentences, the white of the chortens bright enough to think in, the sign insisting on a height my lungs endorsed even if the maps had doubts. A soldier with an apple-red face laughed at the state of my hair, which had written its own manifesto, and directed me toward tea with the benevolent tyranny of someone who has saved more fools than statistics record.

Inside the canteen the condensation on the windows wrote cursive in a language I did not know. Travelers took the steam onto their faces like absolution. A biker with the posture of a bruised saint removed his gloves, fingers coming back to nouns slowly. Someone asked for extra sugar in a tone that implied they had been brave, and the man with the ladle made all the appropriate allowances.

I sat with my back to the wall, as people do when they want to be both in and safe. A boy with a broom wrote an invisible letter on the floor and erased it. The table had acquired a history of carvings initials, dates, the occasional heart that had not persisted. I drank something that called itself tea because it was brown and warm and inside a cup; it was also salt and butter and the kind of kindness your mouth learns to accept without returning the terms.

The wind did not stop at the wall. It spoke at the windows, pressed itself thin, found the seams in the door’s intent, said things to the flags that made them forget their mission of flapping at tourists and return to their older work of speaking to the sky. A small boy tugged at the sleeve of the man with the ladle and the man lifted a whole kettle with one hand the way some people lift a child: without complaint, with practice.

I thought of continuing down the far side, into the wide mouth of Nubra, toward sand that has conspired with river to play a joke on geography. But the shape of the day had returned to its first plan: go up, listen, go back before the light learned new tricks. Sometimes you come to the pass so that the pass can turn you around.

On the way out, a soldier with handwriting I envied pushed toward me a book with columns. “Sign,” he said, not so much requesting as recording a continuation of a ritual that had begun before either of us and would outlast us both. I wrote my name, the date, the place I had decided to call home this decade, the number of my permit, the hope that I would never be so proud that I could not be recorded as the kind of person who arrives and leaves in a day because the weather asks nicely.

The descent is always a different road. Gravity has opinions at the best of times; here it has an agenda. Braking is theology. I kept my left fingers committed without being doctrinaire, chose lines that would bore a lesser person with their caution, and let the engine tell stories below 3,000 rpm. Between two bends, a string of bharal stood on a slope with the particular patience of creatures that do not seek applause. They chewed like people who have already read the ending of the book and know everyone survives.

At the switchback that switchback the wind had shifted to a different page. It still spoke, but like a teacher who has found the tone that makes a room exhale. I stopped deliberately in the pocket where the mountain could hold me and looked down at the corridor of road I had just taken small. From here it made sense. That is the trick of looking back: it arranges your bravado into something that can be forgiven.

The Sumo was nowhere in sight; somewhere a child was clicking his tongue at a new view. The woman with the thermos existed now as a sentence in my head: One corner at a time. It is a profound economy, delivered in an accent that did not know it was writing my day.

The wind had more to say, because the wind always has more to say. If I were to translate again and I am wary now of ventriloquising sky it said:

Grace is braking in time. Courage is going when you can be kind to the road. Pride is what makes the newspaper. Wisdom is what lets you write tomorrow.

I went down the rest in a practiced quiet. At South Pullu the soldier with the apple-red face was teasing a dog in a dialect of hand gestures. He waved me through with the gravity of a man who has waved better men to worse fates and keeps his humor as a talisman. The stall boy counted change without looking, which is a trick that earns you heaven in most religions. I bought a packet of glucose biscuits because storms of any kind require namkeen and sugar.

Leh welcomed me with the unadjusted personality of a town that has seen every story and still finds the parable in each. The bazaar had made noise its uniform again. Apricots had returned to their careful pyramids as if nothing essential had happened. A woman adjusted a prayer wheel with the tenderness of someone smoothing a child’s hair. The mechanic who had told me not to be a hero lifted his eyebrows high, amused that he had been obeyed in spirit if not in letter.

“How was Khardung?” he asked, knowing that the only honest answer is always plural.

“Windy,” I said a simplification so vast it could hold religion.

He nodded like he had written the script. “Autumn,” he said, and returned to a carburetor, which is another sort of prayer.

Back in the room, I unspooled the day into my notebook before the mountain edited it into something more generous than it had been. I have learned to distrust memory’s kindness. It removes the swerves and sands down the corners; it denies you the honest ache in your calf and the small foolishnesses that make a day true. So I wrote the facts of the turn: where the gravel was most unpersuadable, how the flags spoke in a horizontal tongue, the way the engine knocked once like a fist on a door before falling silent. I wrote the woman with the scarf and her humble thermos; I wrote the wind’s sentences and gave them a better grammar than they deserved. I wrote the soldier’s apples and the stall boy’s subtraction; I wrote the dog’s patch of sun as if it were a committee decision.

Mostly I wrote the part that would be easy to forget when those who love me ask for the happy ending: that I almost turned back. The almost matters. It is the place in the road where you put your pride down and discover it is light enough to carry in your pocket if you fold it right.

What the wind said on Khardung was not a single pronouncement. It was a set of small, usable sentences. Some I already knew and had failed to remember; some I learned the way you learn a language that refuses to be embarrassed by your accent. In the clean light of autumn, they look like this in a list, which is how my mind files truths it is not yet brave enough to tattoo:

• One corner at a time.
• Stop where the mountain can hold you.
• Humility is better traction.
• Grace is braking in time.
• Courage is what you can be kind with.
• The road is jealous of hurry.
• A pass is a place that returns you to where you began, but with your furniture rearranged.
• If the flags shout, stop. If they speak, listen. If they breathe, move.
• Turning back is an art; turning toward is also one.

I turned the page and drew the switchback with a pencil as careful as I could persuade my hand to be an inside line, an outside, a thin sketch of the abyss, the little square where the stand bit the ground. I shaded the place where the wind felt most like a person. I wrote South Pullu in a handwriting that looks like better weather. I placed a dot where the Sumo had idled, and beside it a small rectangle I labelled thermos in a script that made me laugh at myself.

Before sleep, I stood at the window and let the night search my face for the foolishness the day had left. The stars had put back on their official uniform. Beyond them the mountains stood in their old attitude of indifference. The flags rattled just enough to remind me that they report to sky, not to tourists. Somewhere a dog rehearsed the thesis that got him into this life; somewhere a kettle became the sound a home makes when it forgives you.

In the morning the town would brush its teeth with cold water and start again. The mechanic would point his eyebrows at someone else’s plan. The soldier would stamp his way toward mercy. The stall boy would learn a new trick with coins. The woman with the thermos would tie her scarf and become a curvature of road in somebody else’s story. The child would turn his hand into binoculars, because curiosity is the world’s most renewable energy. The wind would speak in whichever language the day deserved.

As for me

I would shovel the biscuits into a pocket, zip the jacket more intelligently, look up at Khardung without false piety, and repeat to myself the sentence I am beginning to trust: One corner at a time.

And if the flags shout, I will stop. If they