A mud-and-marble ride along the Indus switchbacks from Khaltse to Bema/Garkon river-crossings, cliffside wind, puncture fixes, and the reward of hot gur-gur cha at a roadside hearth.

The road east of Khaltse begins like a promise and continues like a dare. At dawn the bazaar shutters are still half-closed, the petrol pump yawns once and comes to attention, and the Indus shoulder to shoulder with the asphalt clears its throat. I straddle a dust-bitten two-wheeler whose mirrors tremble with the altitude and with my optimism. A bungee’d duffel taps the grab rail; a foot pump and puncture kit hide inside like secret confidence. A scarf, a cheap visor, mitts with mended seams. The checklist looks like poverty to an accessory catalog and like wealth to anyone who has ever argued with a cliff.

I kick. The engine answers hoarse, then willing. On the far side of the bridge, BRO rhymes painted in a hand that knows both cheer and accident: “Be soft on my curves.” “I am curvaceous, not dangerous.” “If you love her, please inform us.” The signs make me laugh the way only mountains can: with permission.

The Indus keeps me company from the first meter. Slate blue. Steel. Then the pale green of a bruise remembered. It inhales the light and lays it flat. It carries silt that glitters like it has memorized every glacier it has ever known. The road is a ribbon stitched to its hem, sometimes obedient, sometimes sulking uphill to pass a stubborn boulder, sometimes pretending it invented the river.

I ride the first hour gently not out of virtue but because the cold has opinions. The visor fogs at every exhale; the bridge decks wear frost like a thin lie. A dog of indeterminate allegiance trots the center line as if he’s collecting toll. A convoy materializes and dissolves, khaki squaring the morning with its own mathematics. I tuck behind a truck on a rise, counting bolts on its tailgate until the wind stops sharpening my cheekbones.

Beyond the cluster of Domkhar rooftops, the asphalt sighs and lets itself be interrupted by gravel. The bike loosens underneath me not a wobble, a different grammar. I remember the ritual my Leh mechanic taught me: stand a little on the pegs when the drifts pile up, let the front float, trust the rear, ride with the washboard and not against it. The clutch lever becomes a dialect coach. The Indus flexes and unflexes beside me, running its long muscle through a valley that it carved when patience was younger.

A first water-crossing tests the reflexes in my wrists and the courage in my knees. It’s nothing just a runnel coming off a melt shadow but experience knows you don’t insult small things here. I stop, watch a local Hero Honda pick a line and glide, stones moving under it like polite decisions. I throttle gently, slip clutch, keep my eyes up instead of staring at anxiety. The front kisses a submerged rock. The rear corrects me without holding a grudge. On the far side, I grin at no one and feel the day grin back.

Wind takes a vote higher up and wins. It comes cliffside, elbow out, shouldering the bike toward a thought I’d rather not finish. I lean until my ribcage believes the angle. In the visor’s corner a hawk hovers, reading the same gusts in another script. A stupa sits in the lee like the punctuation of a wiser sentence.

At Saspol’s memory I stop for a tea that pretends to be coffee and gives up quickly. A woman wraps her shawl and considers the motorcycle the way grandmothers consider grandchildren: indulgent, skeptical, secretly fond. “Kahan?” she asks. Where?

“Bema. Garkon.”

She nods as if I have finally improved my aim. “Hawa zyada. Dheere.” Lots of wind. Slowly.

The road complies with her grammar and gets slow in all the right places. Switchbacks. A stretch of marble-white shale that powder-coats my boots so my steps leave ghost footprints. A cliff where the Indus forgets to be river and becomes a mirror auditioning for sky. The bike hums a baritone I can feel in my bones; my bones keep tempo; the valley decides I’m not a threat and releases detail: a mani wall scrolled by a thousand fingertips; a khul slicing between fields with the authority of history; a woman irrigating with a spade that has taught her forearms patience; a strand of apricot trees rehearsing their bloom buds clenched like small, polite fists.

When Skurbuchan appears, I don’t ride through. I idle. Goats disagree politely with their rope tethers. A boy kicks at nothing and invents a game that does not require plastic. Two women in wool, coins stitched into their headbands, pass with baskets that make my spine ache in sympathy. We exchange julley with the elaborate economy Ladakh prefers eyes first, then chin, then the syllable.

The road threads higher, then drops like a thought that remembered something important. The Indus does not mind my metaphors. It keeps its own.

A flicker. The handlebar tugs left, then yields. I glance at the front fine. The rear feels drunk. I pull over beside a heap of BRO gravel where an orange flag smiles in exhaustion. The tire slumps, defeated. A puncture announces itself in the universal language of not today.

I park on the paddock stand. The wind observes but does not help. From my kit, the simple theater: reamer, plug, insertion tool, tiny rubber worm. A child appears from a doorway like an editor from a footnote. He squats, serious, and hands me stones without explanation.

“Kahaan?” he asks.

I roll the tire, spit, listen for the impolite fizz. Find it. A thorn stares back as if offended that its day just got interrupted. I pull it with pliers that have a chip in the jaw, widen the hole with the reamer until my heart protests the logic, thread the plug, twist, seat, a small prayer to the God of Butyl, withdraw. I pump until the tire rounds into better manners. The child nods, approving. We high-five like two mechanics who will never invoice each other.

“Naam?” I ask.

“Nawang.”

“Shukriya, Nawang.”

He sprints away to report that the stranger’s tire has learned obedience.

I ride gentler after that, not from fear but gratitude. The road rewards me with a new chapter: cliffside wind where the gorge narrows and the Indus acquires a voice you feel under your shirt. I cross a series of causeways where snowmelt argues with engineering and loses politely. Some are dry, some film-slick, one a cheerful ankle-deep sprint. In the shallowest, a row of stones peeks up like wisdom teeth. I aim between histories.

Somewhere after Achinathang, the light changes. Not dimmer clearer. It’s the kind of noon that makes the world admit its age and then forgive it. A BRO dozer sleeps under a tarp; two men sit on its blade, lunching out of tins, and gesture with their steel spoons the universal stick figure of Go slow. I salute like a private and comply.

There’s a pull-out I remember from hearsay, a ledge that lets the river lay itself out like a scroll. I stop there and silence the bike to hear my own heart. I drink water that tastes like old plastic and absolution. Down in the glitter, a man in a pheran leans into a plank that has reinvented itself as a bridge over a khul. This detail pleases me enough to start the engine reluctantly.

The first sign for Bema is a stenciled correction on a rock. Bema or Boma, depending on who painted, who corrected, who still cares. The settlement announces itself in courtyards, in wood smoke, in a child on a rooftop whose job is to supervise weather. I pull up outside a blackened shack that calls itself, without irony, a Café. A bukhari drum stove sits inside like a hot heart. Two men, a woman, and a grandmother who is obviously in charge look up with the exact delight reserved for idiots who arrive on motorcycles when pickup trucks exist.

“Cha?” the woman asks, hand already on the kettle.

“Gur-gur,” I say, trying to sound like I deserve it.

She smiles because everyone deserves it. The butter tea arrives in a steel bowl, surface shimmering like good intentions. The first sip is a slap and then a hug. Salt. Fat. Heat. A language my blood learns in a sentence. Khambir bread follows, with a smear of apricot jam the color of well-kept fire.

“Garkon?” the grandmother asks. You still going?

“Haan.” Yes.

She appraises the motorcycle with the gaze of god and mechanic. “Hawa zyada,” she warns. Lots of wind. This warning is not new, but in her mouth it becomes law.

I sink onto a bench and thaw. The stove ticks. A poster of a Bollywood hero has lost half his face to smoke but keeps his hair. A pile of apricot stones in a basket waits to be cracked into winter. The woman refills my bowl like forgiveness. The grandmother asks where my mother is and refuses to believe she approved this trip. We all laugh because mothers approve nothing except survival.

At the doorway, the river makes a horizontal sermon. The grandmother nods at it once, as if to say we’re listening, but we have errands. I pay, overpay a little, and she returns a coin to my palm without looking.

“Bas.” Enough. It’s a small lesson in rates that keeps dignity alive for everyone.

Back on the road, Garkon arrives like a sentence I’ve been trying to write all morning. The valley narrows into attention; terraces rise and stack like reasons; the Indus remembers how to glare and does it beautifully. A footbridge narrow, serious, strung like a thought across a fact leads to houses that seem to grow right out of rock. I kill the engine and listen. Bees at a rehearsal. A tin pail knocking against a stone lip. The sort of laughter that improves a wall.

I walk the lane with the motorcycle idling beside me in first, a dog escorting my ankle with the dignity of a police detail. A man in a rolled cap steps from a doorway.

“Julley.” Hello.

“Julley.”

“Kahan se?”

“Khaltse… Leh.”

“Accha. Baito. Cha.” Sit. Tea.

He doesn’t have to ask twice.

Inside, the hearth is the room’s thesis. The walls keep their smoke as an archive. A shelf holds bowls whose enamel has learned about impact and forgiveness. A shawl lifts in a draught and falls as if it has made a decision. He pours gur-gur again and adds a ladle of soup thick with turnip greens and the discipline of barley. The butter is honest, the salt exact, the warmth immediate. He watches me drink like a person guarding a theory he believes in.

“Bike?” he asks.

I nod, smile with my mouth full of gratitude, mime a crosswind, a wobble. He laughs and mimes a goat. We have a language.

“Tyre… theek?”

“Abhi theek.” For now, fine.

He nods. “Yahan hawa sada hai. Dheere.” The wind is regular here. Slowly.

The door admits a rectangle of river and a child trailing a willow switch with imperial flair. The man ruffles the boy’s head and introduces him as if he were president of the lane. We finish the tea and the soup, and I press notes onto the bench and tuck them under a stone when he won’t take them in his hand. He pretends not to see and points me to a roofline view that will improve my memory for years.

When I mount again, the engine feels different less tin, more purpose. Maybe that’s me. Garkon behind me is not mythology this is important but households, fields, an argument with wind, a treaty with water, the texture of work. It’s all more beautiful because it doesn’t ask for my adjectives.

The return ride is the Valley’s exam. You think you’ve learned the road. The road asks politely if you’ve learned yourself.

Cloud has drifted up from some other country and draped the ridges in thoughts. The wind is the same but more articulate. I lean more. I grip less. On the long slant above Bema, a truck appears around a blind too fast, too wide, too unsurprised. My right shoulder and the cliff’s left stone audition for intimacy. There is room. There is always room if everyone chooses less. The driver salutes; I nod; we return to our own prayers.

Halfway to Achinathang, the rear goes soft again not catastrophe, just fatigue. This time there’s no shade and no audience. I lay the bike on its hip, again the reamer, again the plug, again the modest, oily satisfaction of self-rescue. A whisper of rain attempts courage and gives up. I pump, check, ride out of the gravel like a patient sentence.

Somewhere above Skurbuchan, the Indus turns the color of a heavy idea. The road drops to meet it in a run of linked switchbacks that make a song about gravity. I hum along, third to second to first, lean, look, release, throttle. The bike and I cooperate at last; we stop trying to improve each other and simply agree.

At the marble dust again, I see myself in a small roadside mirror a woman has hung like a warning for her goats my face powdered, my hair an argument, my grin suspiciously young. She catches me looking and laughs from the depth people reserve for good weather and bad jokes. I blush, raise two fingers, and ride on.

Afternoon loosens its belt. I pass the BRO blade now awake, its diesel throat turning piles into lines. The operator leans out and waves with a hand that has lost count of boulders. A motorcycle behind me tries to overtake on a blind and reconsiders. We are all being improved by each other’s choices.

Near Domkhar, there’s a ford that has become a cross-examining torrent. Two local bikes wait; a Mahindra pick-up noses in, finds a line, stumbles, then recovers. I watch the current, find a slow in it, pick a thread of stones like an old rosary, and commit. First gear, steady throttle, no clutch, eyes on the far bank, shoulders quiet. The front goes light, the rear writes a letter to the river, the pebbles translate, I don’t stop. On the far side, we all cheer for each other with mountain impunity. One of the local riders pats my tank as if congratulating a mule.

Khaltse is still a dream under the horizon when the wind changes its mind and begins to go home. With it, the dust drops. The Indus widens into serenity and lets the sky climb into it. People put out duvets to remember the sun while it still exists. A herd spills across the road like punctuation. I stop. Goats edit the verge down to a paragraph. A child whose job is to be joy waves and adds a free exclamation mark.

At the Khaltse bridge in last light, I cut the engine and let momentum carry me. The world slides. The river speaks in a vowel humans have never managed to write. A prayer flag flaps enough syllables for three religions. The throttle has learned my wrist; my wrist has learned to ask for less.

I roll to a stop by a dhabha where steam and diesel establish a truce at dusk. The owner, eyes like gossip and hands like work, looks at me and says the only Ladakhi benediction that truly matters to riders: “Aaya?” You arrived?

“Aaya.”

He tips his chin at the bukhari as if introducing me to a long marriage. I sit, and he brings gur-gur without ceremony, and then thukpa without negotiation. The bowl fogs my glasses; the noodles argue with hunger and win. Outside, a long horn down valley announces a convoy; inside, a transistor radio announces a song and then changes its mind. I sit until the metal in the bike cools from ping to silence.

That night in a room rented by the hour and the kindness of cousins, my hands smell faintly of apricot oil from a little bottle the Bema grandmother slipped into my pocket when I wasn’t looking and the sleeping bag smells like wet gear warmed into honesty. I count the day in small, indecent satisfactions: the plug that held, the ford that forgave, the gust that obliged my lean, the bowl that steadied a soul.

I also count what I did not photograph. It is a long, gleaming list.

 

The Slow Return (Because All Rides Are Loops)

In the morning the high clouds have found their dignity and kept it. I start west, back toward Leh, not because the story is over but because stories that end earlier are sometimes truer. The road reverses its metaphors: what descended now ascends; what turned right now pretends it was left all along. The Indus, loyal, stays on my left hand like a friend who knows when to talk and when to be river.

A puncture shop the size of a patience appears in Saspol patches tacked to a board, a bench that knows the weight of men thinking about money. The man inside sells me two extra plugs and nods with the gravity of the medical profession. “Dheere,” he says, not as advice but as worldview.

I obey. The engine acquires the voice of a companion instead of a tool. A stretch of unexpected asphalt appears like a blessing arranged by a bureaucrat with a guilty conscience. I don’t squander it. I also don’t believe it will last.

A cluster of BRO workers wave me into a side pull-off. A blast goes off somewhere upriver and the cliff remembers it is powder. We all stare at the dust plume the way city people stare at a typo that cost a career. A man with a whistle dismisses us without malice. I go, and the road returns to its average of four kinds of surface, all of them sincere.

When the first view of Leh is still a rumor and the day has unspooled most of its thread, I pull over beneath a strip of poplar. I kill the engine to teach my ears gratitude. The chain ticks, the exhaust exhale dies, the bike surrenders heat with that endearing series of apologies. I press my palm to the tank and whisper something that isn’t a prayer and isn’t not.

Thank you is a simple tool. It repairs the rider more than the road.

How to Ride This Without Becoming a Fool (Notes for the Future Me)

Carry less than you think and one extra of the thing that will end your day. Learn to stand on the pegs without drama. Trust the front lightly and the rear like a friend. Watch the river out of the corner of your eye so you remember you are a guest of geography, not its hero. Stop when a grandmother lifts a ladle. Pay without turning generosity into theater. If the wind puts its hand on your shoulder, lean into that friendship. If the road becomes marble dust and your mirror shows a clown, laugh and ride dheere. Lift stones out of khuls only if someone asks you with their mouth, not with your desire to be helpful. Keep a bitter kernel in your pocket so you remember that truth is not always pleasant; keep a sweet one on your tongue so you remember to return.

Above all, let the Indus choose your adjectives.

Epilogue: What the Bike Remembers When I Forget

Weeks later, back where houses touch each other’s windows and horns make permanent announcements, I wash the motorcycle and watch Garkon run down my driveway in a pale ribbon. Marbled dust leaves the plastic like a second skin sloughing. The chain accepts a new idea of oil. The tires keep their secret thorns and their confidence.

People ask where I went. I say Khaltse to Bema, Garkon, back again, and it sounds like five words for hunger. They ask if it was dangerous. I say it was attentive. They ask about the Brokpa, about the flowers and the coins, about the myth they’ve inherited from brochures. I say I was offered tea by a woman who knows how to turn winter into flavor, that I crossed a run of water by agreeing with it rather than denying its existence, that a boy named Nawang supervised my competence with stones and silence. I say the wind touched my shoulder the way an uncle might and that I leaned because sometimes trust is aerodynamic.

At night I unscrew the little bottle of apricot oil and press one drop into the seam between thumb and forefinger. The smell returns the bukhari, the khambir, the dull gleam of a bowl used by three generations. I close my eyes and hear an engine that is not running and a river that never stopped. In that overlap mechanical memory and water sits the part of me that rode better by the end than at the start.

The map says the Indus flows on, east to west, older than our questions. The road says it will be repaired tomorrow and torn by the second rain. The motorcycle says start me; I remember. And I do, even when I cannot.