The under-construction frontier road   and what it means to ride through uncertainty.

The Map That Refused to Sit Still

“Some roads are not taken; they are taken apart and re-made under you stone by stone, rumor by rumor.”

Manali, early summer 2016: a town of wool caps and soft promises, engines idling under rain-dark eaves, and travelers comparing altitudes the way schoolchildren compare scars. I’d been there three days, long enough for my jacket to remember the smell of petrol and damp pine, long enough to circle routes on a paper map until the paper softened, then curled, then became all thumb-crease and coffee stain. The plan kept shifting, as if the mountains were still writing the season’s choreography. Rohtang was brooding. Baralacha La had woken up cranky. Somewhere farther, men with orange vests were drawing lines across rock with chisels, dynamite, and patience.

That’s when I met Josephine French, sun-browned, her hair curtained into a practical knot, riding a 250 that wore its scratches like jewelry. We shared a table at a damp café where the tea tasted of cardamom and a little heroism. She’d been tracing the spine of the Himalaya for a month, from spitting rain in Dharamshala to the sudden heat around Kinnaur, sleeping where there was shelter and laughing where there wasn’t.

“Padum?” she asked, as if the word were a dare.

“Padum,” I said, as if it were an apology.

We compared maps like surgeons comparing incisions. There was the old logic over Rohtang, past Keylong, then Darcha and there was the new rumor: a road threading Pangi to Padum over Shinku La, not yet done, not even sure of its own name some days, but being built, dreaming itself out of stone. We decided to leave the next morning, together for a bit, then separate when the road required separate answers. That uncertainty two lines parting in the dust was the first honest thing of the trip.

That night I tuned my Enfield like a violin that had not forgiven its player. Valve clearances murmured back into sanity, chain slack turned obedient, filter coughed a little and then remembered how to be air. The rain eased to a long conversation with the tin roof. Somewhere in that drizzle I realized what I wanted: not a destination, but a road that was still becoming so I could learn to become with it.

Manali to Udaipur: The Mountains Clear Their Throat

“Begin in drizzle; you will remember more details than in sun.”

We left before the parathas, riding a seam of pale in the sky. The town yawned itself awake dogs uncrumpling, tarpaulins being rolled back from sleepy stalls, steam rising from kettles like soft grammar. Rohtang was practicing its mood somewhere above us. We climbed without conversation, Josephine’s smaller engine singing, mine thudding like a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep. Above Marhi the air cooled into reason. The snow walls had slumped to shoulder height; buses breathed in and out of corners; tourists rehearsed the same pose against the last snow-black streaks.

We crested the pass in a small grey triumph and dropped into Lahaul, that hard, clean basin where blue looks carved and the wind feels like recent steel. The road unrolled to Keylong, then Tandi, where the Bhaga and Chandra braid themselves into the Chenab and a sign reminds you to fill your tank as if it were also reminding you to fill your courage. We ate lunch at a dhaba that smelled of ghee and truck calendars, the kind with women smiling at mountains as if they were shy suitors.

By mid-afternoon we swung left toward Udaipur instead of straight to Darcha Pangi tugging, old river road calling. Here the Chenab is not a river; it is a rumor said loudly. The road is a half-note carved into its cliff. We rode inside our helmets, inside our heads, inside the day. Whenever a truck came, we negotiated space the way dancers negotiate space: body memory first, logic after. I kept one finger on the front brake and two on the clutch feather, don’t grab and felt the back wheel talk in the language of gravel.

In Udaipur, the sky finally remembered gold. The temple chimed, the goats counted themselves home, and we found a guesthouse that smelled of kerosene and prayer. The owner brought tea without asking, the way mothers do when they’ve met tired before. On the wall hung a map of roads that existed five summers ago. We drew our route with the tip of a key and she laughed.

“Shinku? Suno… road is shy,” she said. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Like husbands.”

We all laughed, even the night. I fell asleep to the river telling the stones what it would do to them eventually, and the stones pretending not to hear.

Udaipur to Killar: A Lesson in Edges

“The cliff is not against you; it is indifferent. Ride accordingly.”

The road from Udaipur to Killar is a dare written in shale. The Chenab continues its white sermon below, the slope leans in, and the road confesses it was built by faith with a little help from dynamite. Every corner has a memory of rain, the kind that loosens rock from its ideas. We rode close to the mountain, where the gravel is more honest and the drops less conversational.

By Tindi, we were dust in human shape. A BRO crew waved us down not to stop us, but to offer chai. “Killer Killar,” one of them joked, and then didn’t joke. Their boots were caked in a particular mud that looked like wet coin, sticky and resentful. They had been there three weeks, rebuilding a culvert the river chewed in one night of appetite. A young engineer named Negi pointed with his chin at a shelf where the road ended in a shrug.

“We move the line every day,” he said. “The mountain moves it back.”

We followed a dump truck into a slant of light where the road narrowed to a notion. Josephine’s bike looked light enough to carry; mine argued with gravity and then relented. We took turns calling out the next patch of sand, the next puddle that was probably a hole, the next overhang that looked like it wanted to think about falling.

In Killar the air felt like you could cut it into portions. The town sits stubborn and essential, a comma in a long sentence of rock. We found a room with a thin window that framed one slice of sky and two prayer flags talking to the wind. The evening gathered in the bazaar like a family argument animated, repetitive, comfortable. A tailor hummed at his machine. A child practiced whistling and failed beautifully. A man with new shoes inspected his feet as if they belonged to a future self.

Josephine and I ate rice and dal with a seriousness usually reserved for rituals. “Tomorrow, Sansari,” she said, as if naming a deity that promises boons but demands humility. We clinked steel tumblers like timid bells.

Sansari Nallah to Sural: Between Water and Stone

“Crossings are not events; they are conversations with timing.”

Rain is a language the Chenab translates into authority. It had rained enough, high somewhere we couldn’t see, and the nallahs were telling us about it. At Sansari a barrier made of sticks and optimism blocked the way. A jawan with an old ledger wrote our names and shrugged what passes for a blessing in uniform: “If it rises, turn back. No shame.”

We waited with truckers at the water’s edge, counting the seconds between surges like midwives. One guy from Kishtwar chewed tobacco and told a joke about a goat who goes to school because the mountain won’t move to the market. Laughter rose in little bursts; fear took smaller bites. When the water stepped down a notch, a Tata 407 went first, axles grumbling, exhaust hissing. We followed: second gear, steady throttle, eyes across, not down. Halfway through, a stone kicked the rear tire; the bike twitched; my heart wrote a paragraph I will not repeat. Then we were up the far bank, the engine tick-ticking as if amused.

A kilometer on, the road disappeared into a fresh landslide, rock still warm the way bread is warm. The BRO crew, led by Negi, had already arrived like a small, efficient storm flags, whistles, the slow animal called Dozer chewing, spitting, retreating. We parked in the only safe hollow and made ourselves useful moving small stones, fetching water, becoming part of the human choreography that makes improvised roads.

“You ride for views, we ride to make views reachable,” Negi said without malice. I nodded, and meant it.

We reached Sural late, through air that felt like it had been rinsed. In a mud-walled room above a shop that sold biscuits and bicycle bells, the owner gave us salt tea that tasted like civilization after a siege. The bed had its bumps in the right places, the quilt had the weight of old winters, and the dark arrived like someone who knows where everything is kept.

Before sleep I oiled the chain, wiped grit from the fork stanchions, and tightened a handlebar mirror that had been telling me lately it wanted to leave. The bike and I agreed to try again in the morning. Outside, water talked to stone in endless present tense.

Back to Tandi, Onwards to Darcha: The Long Detour That Wasn’t

“Sometimes forward is a circle that returns you wiser to your own footprints.”

The talk in the bazaar said the cliff ahead had slumped in the night as if finally admitting gravity makes fair arguments. The sensible route was to loop back via Udaipur to Tandi, then take the Leh road to Darcha, and meet the under-construction Shinku La from that side Zanskar Sumdo, Kurgiakh, the valley of conversations that end in Padum. Josephine’s eyebrow did a small dance of resignation. “We make a big circle to step across a puddle,” she said, and grinned.

We backtracked with less dread and more housekeeping. The river, having been dramatic the day before, now purred; the cliffs, having flexed, now sat like old cats. By Tandi we were sun-dusted and less brave in exactly the right way. The ascent toward Darcha was a return to familiar grammar BRO signs flirting (“Be Gentle on My Curves”) and trucks composing their diesel haikus.

At ZingZing Bar, a dhaba with tin tables and a calendar of film stars who look unbothered by altitude, we met Dorje, a truck driver stalled by a leak in a place that had no leaks to spare. He had tea boiled into submission on a kerosene stove; he had the particular patience of men who live life in gradients, not in goals. We shared a packet of glucose biscuits and stories about roads that think they are rivers and rivers that play at being roads in winter. When he heard about Shinku, his laugh had a particular kindness.

“The road is not a thing,” he said. “It’s a season. Sometimes it’s all seasons in one hour.”

At Darcha check post our names found a new ledger. The soldier required nothing but time and clear handwriting. Clouds gathered across the high basin like small committee meetings. We rode up-valley until the air forgot to be generous; then the new work began bulldozers, cut faces, wind, and that particular smell of fresh rock torn open: a metallic breath not yet oxidized into memory.

We camped near a bridge skeleton, in a village of canvas that belonged to road workers who looked up from their dinner to nod us into temporary citizenship. A woman named Tara lent us her pressure cooker with a look that said she understood debt and knew how to collect it gently. Rice cooked faster than the moon climbed. I fell asleep to the bassline of engines idling out of sight, and dreamed in beige and grey.

Shinku La: Thin Air, Honest Work

“Where breath gets shorter, the truth grows longer.”

Morning at Shinku La looked like work in progress, which is to say it looked alive. The track climbed through fresh cuts the rock face scribbled with drill marks, the talus tidied into windrows. The bike’s idle wandered, then found itself; my lungs tried the same trick and took longer. We rode first gear, second, back to first, no drama. Josephine rode upright and quiet, a study in economy: of movement, of nerve, of oxygen.

Snow held on in northern gullies like old grudges. A shovel propped against a milestone. A prayer flag faded to its threads. A man sat on a rock eating something that looked like a jam sandwich with altitude. He waved as if he were waving at the weather, and perhaps he was.

On the last pitch the wind developed opinions. It came lateral and purposeful, and the bike leaned into it like a sentence finding grammar. The pass itself a flattened idea, a strip of compromise was occupied by a dozer, yellow as myth, its bucket yawning. We parked away from its shadow and walked the last thirty meters to a cairn that had collected small pieties: a twisted ribbon, a rupee coin, a button that had nowhere left to fasten.

There was no grand signboard 2016 did not have time for such theater. There was only work and the weather and the idea of a road introduced to the idea of a desire. We shook hands, and our breath made small, visible arguments.

The descent toward Zanskar Sumdo was less forgiving but more honest. Slush made latticework of the track. We walked two sections, engine off, clutch in, letting the bikes become animals that know their feet. Once, the rear stepped out with thirsty enthusiasm; I caught it with a counter and a promise I said out loud: not today.

We bottomed out by a green thread of water where a canvas dhaba tried to be both kitchen and cathedral. Inside, Tara again how had she arrived so fast? She laughed at my surprise. “Road is a circle,” she said, “and so are we.” She spooned dal into bowls that understood gratitude and lectured us gently about sleeping warm and drinking slowly at altitude. Advice has a different gravity here; it doesn’t land so much as settle.

Kurgiakh: The Valley Learns Our Names

“After the pass, the world becomes human again: fields, children, a dog who decides to escort you.”

The road eased into the Kargyak valley willow, barley, stone houses the color of thinking, and children whose cheeks had their own weather. We idled into Kurgiakh with a hush you learn around monasteries and first snows. The village sat properly not humble, not proud; placed, like a bowl on a table.

“Julley,” a girl said, and I said julley back and felt like someone had stamped my passport into a different life. We bought biscuits and then surrendered them to a dog with the confidence of a small mayor. The school’s door stood half-open, chalk dust visible in the air as if in slow snow. Down-valley two men repaired a wall by persuading stones rather than placing them.

Josephine and I found a patch of shade by the stream and let time purl around our boots. I wrote the names of the villages on a wet notebook page: Kargyak, Purne, Cha, Ichar, Reru, like beads on a string not yet tied. The Phuktal gompa hung somewhere down a side valley like a thought one might have if given an extra hour of life. We didn’t have the hour. We had the road’s current and the next construction camp and a rumor that Padum was only two careful days away if the river didn’t change its mind, if the dozer kept waking, if we resisted the urge to celebrate before arrival.

That evening we slept in a homestay that had one bulb, two quilts, a family’s laughter, and a painted shelf of butter lamps that put the stars to shame. The grandmother poured gur-gur cha like algebra measured, exact, comforting in its logic. We lay down with our feet toward a tin stove and listened to a boy practice his multiplication tables and a goat insist on its point outside the door.

Somewhere in the night the wind rehearsed a change of script. The prayer flags reframed their syllables. I woke once to pee under a sky so unbearably exact it felt like being evaluated kindly by a thousand witnesses.

Purne to Reru: Edges That Break and Hold

“The river and the road do not agree; they alternate in being right.”

In the morning Josephine traced the line to Phuktal with her finger and frowned. “Next time,” she said. We both heard the hollow in that; we both accepted the truth. The trail to Purne held us in a beige mathematics of switchbacks and fordings. The Tsarap Chu argued, as all rivers do in July. Bridges those sudden miracles with bolts alternated with crossings that asked knees to remember their loyalty.

At a point where the track had relaxed into confidence, a fresh bite in the cliff waited, teeth still white. Men were already there with baskets of stone, passing weight the old way hand to hand, shoulder to shoulder, laughter bridging what engineering had not yet finished bridging. We put down our bags and joined the chain. The rhythm settled into a metronome no one could have invented alone.

“Where from?” someone asked.

“Manali, then Pangi,” I said. The men whistled the way only road workers whistle half admiration, half evaluation of your sense.

“Padum today?” another teased.

“Padum is always tomorrow,” a third replied, and the whole ridge laughed. It is good to be corrected by people who are happy to correct you.

We crossed later on a bridge that looked temporary because it was, and rode into Reru with our shoulders lower. The lake there held a color that refused to admit any word other than lake. Children ran from the school and convinced us to attempt something like cricket with a bent bat and a ball that had seen too much stone. A monk in sneakers umpired with real severity and secret delight. The dust rose in small halos around ankles.

At dinner in a partially built guesthouse cement bags stacked like unslept dreams we ate thukpa and fried momos so hot they made the night warmer. A man in a wool cap explained the road politics without politics: “When the road completes, winter will become the only honest season. We will be reachable, and reachability is both blessing and bill.”

I slept with the view in my head turned off, like a light the mountain had gently touched.

Padum: Arrival Is a Kind of Pause

“When a road ends, it is often just catching its breath.”

The final stretch to Padum in 2016 was a string of agreements: the BRO’s, the river’s, the weather’s, our own bodies’ and none were permanent. We left early, unwilling to test any of those contracts. The track alternated between powder and paste, between singing gravel and ruts that pulled at the front wheel like a friend with bad ideas.

We stopped for tea at a compound that smelled of diesel dawn. A man in a green sweater told us which segment to walk, which boulder to avoid because it moved if you looked at it, which culvert was being planted today like a crop. He spoke of the road with the affection of a gardener seedlings of asphalt, nurture of drainage, pruning of corners that tried to grow into hubris.

By noon the valley widened. Stongde stared from its perch, Karsha hunched in the distance like a summoned memory, and Padum exhaled into view flat, dusty, polite, with new paint refusing to be shy and old walls refusing to be impressed. We idled down the main lane with the awkwardness of people who have been alone with wind too long.

We found a room that had the good sense to be plain and the vanity to have one mirror. I saw my face and laughed out loud: sun salted on one side; dust owning the other; eyes doing that post-journey wideness where everything seems both ordinary and engineered.

We ate at a place where the cook inquired, “Veg? Non-veg? Hungry?” in that order. The dal was bright, the rice patient, the pickles direct. Josephine and I raised steel cups of water like it was a drink with a price. We said it at the same time: “We made it.” Then, almost at the same time: “We didn’t.” Because what we had arrived at was a pause. The road beyond toward Zangla, toward Lingshed, toward Leh still negotiated its own existence.

In the evening, we walked to Karsha because evening asked nicely. The mani walls kept the day’s heat the way books keep old hands. In the gompa, boys were learning to be men in voices that still squeaked, and an old monk moved butter lamps with a tenderness I reserve for certain sentences. The sun went to work on the dust, making it gold as if forgiveness were a particle you could suspend in air.

On the way back Josephine stopped by a workshop where a mechanic was resurrecting a clutch cable with twine, grease, and certitude. She asked about the road to Rangdum for tomorrow. He nodded a yes that contained two nos and three maybes. We paid him to tighten both our chains anyway; gratitude needs tasks.

That night, Padum had the sound of a town that has learned to sleep despite unfinished sentences. I wrote the day’s notes with a hand that had known bars and brakes for too long, then lay back. The image that came was not the pass, not the cliff, not the river. It was a stack of stones by a half-built culvert, and Negi flicking sweat from his eyelashes into sunlight. Somehow that felt like the honest center of the journey.

The Day After Arrival: Drift, Repair, Listen

“Once you arrive, learn how the place continues without you.”

We stayed a day in Padum because our legs demanded it and our sense agreed. Josephine rode out at dawn to test the Rangdum line; I stayed back to have my carburetor cleaned by a man who called every engine “beta.” In his yard, a carb bowl held a galaxy of fine silts, twinkling like failed stars. He flicked his screwdriver, explained altitude jets in a math that preferred stories: “Too fat here, too thin there, bike becomes like my brother-in-law after winter lazy.” He laughed; the screwdriver did its doctrine.

I wandered the bazaar. Apricots on a charpai; a post office that measured time in three speeds; a shop that sold batteries, biscuits, blessings. A boy showed me his marbles, each a planet he could hold. An old man made my tea with milk that had recently been grass. He asked how the road was from Pangi. I said it was confused, and he said, “Good. Certainty makes bad travelers.”

In the afternoon, Josephine returned with her helmet full of wind and her eyes full of a story: a washout, a dozer, a line of trucks waiting with indifferent calm, a woman at a roadside shack who mothered the entire queue exactly enough. We promised to meet again somewhere in the idea of Ladakh, where all roads negotiate their treaties. We hugged like people who like each other but like roads more.

That evening I walked, alone, out beyond the last whitewash, to where fields go quiet and sky goes big. The road narrowed to a ribbon, then a thread, then a story the dust told to itself. I thought about 2016 about the dream of Shinku becoming a baseline, about future summers when this would be just a drive. I felt the particular grief of witnessing something half-made you will not see half-made again. And I felt the particular pleasure of realizing that unfinished is another word for alive.

 

Field Notes – The Grit That Taught Me

“The machine is honest; the mountain is indifferent; you are the variable.”

• Braking: The rear is a comma, the front a full stop. Use both as grammar, not panic.
• Corners: Look through, not at. Your eyes pull the bike the way rivers pull roads.
• Sand: If it glitters, it lies. If it looks dull, it might be a friend.
• Water crossings: Second gear, steady, eyes across. Feet light, ego lighter.
• Altitude: Engines forgive sooner than lungs. Drink warm, sleep heavy, move kindly.
• People: Share biscuits with crews. Learn one name. You are a guest of both the road and its makers.
• Trash: Carry a tiny-sins bag. The wind is a brilliant distributor of shame.
• Maps: Paper folds where your mind does. Let both crease.

 

The Road That Dreams You Back

“We think we dream the road. Sometimes the road dreams us, and lets us wake where we belong.”

Years later, when someone says Padum in a café far from any cliff, I taste diesel tea and hear stone being persuaded into steps. I see Josephine’s taillight finding a better line. I hear Negi shouting above machinery, a human syllable against a mountain of consonants. I feel the nallah shrug under the wheels and the exact moment the front finds the far bank and you become the kind of person who tells himself not today and means it.

If you ask me why I went that way in 2016, I will fail to give a map and succeed to give a verb: becoming. The Pangi–Padum road was not ready, and neither was I; that made us good company. We decided our next meters together the dozer, the river, the sky, the machine, my stubbornness, all co-authors of a page we signed with mud.

When the road is finally finished, and perhaps by now it is closer to the idea of finished than to dream, I hope the drivers still roll down their windows at Sural to listen; I hope someone still counts stones into a wall by hand; I hope a monk in Karsha still adjusts butter lamps like a man who has learned to measure light. I hope a new traveler stops in Reru to be terrible at cricket and excellent at laughing. And I hope, when you ride it, you ride it slow enough to hear the truth under the thrum:

Certainty is not the goal. Presence is.

If the mountains allow, if the river doesn’t object, if the crews wave you through and the wind keeps your secrets, you will arrive; and when you do, you will find what I found in 2016 not a place, exactly, but a way to be with a place: unfinished, tender, alert, and enough.