The monastery festival meets a biker’s misadventure – revs mixing with rituals.
A Festival at the End of a Spanner
“Some mornings you tune a carburetor and end up tuning your expectations.”
Two nights after the long crawl from Kargyak to Padum, I woke to the small arithmetic of a town getting ready: women loosening apricot stones in courtyards; a boy whistling at a dog already doing its own thing; a mechanic warming his palms over a tin of coals as if devotion were measured in increments of grease. Cecilia was already up, hair tied back in its habitual field-knot, bottle of water balanced on a hip, grin that said we’re not done yet.
“Sani?” she asked, as if the word were a gear we only had to click into.
“Sani,” I agreed, knowing full well that even when you’re going to a festival, the road may decide to celebrate you in its own, less comfortable way.
The Sani festival had been a rumor in our ride notes since Delhi. Masks and drums, a cham of dust and devotion in a monastery built around a chorten said to be older than most of our maps. It would be a short hop from Padum, everyone said, a switchback saunter. And yet our bikes two stubborn singles had learned to mistrust words like “short” and “hop.”
We did checks with post-journey tenderness: oil, chain, cables that had learned new pitch in the Reru flats. The air was thin but indulgent, the blue notched with the ridges of Stongde and Karsha. Somewhere out in that blue, long horns dungchen would sound later, folding monks and villagers and curious travelers into one long vowel of presence. First, there were roads to argue with.
Padum Morning, Bolts and Butter Tea
“Begin with heat in the kettle and slack in the chain; the day is easier if both are correct.”
We tuned to the rhythm of a courtyard that had seen too many winters to bother with pretense. The guesthouse owner pressed a bucket of hot water into my hands like a benediction, and brought gur-gur cha for Cecilia, who accepted it like a pilgrim accepts a blessing: eyebrows raised, mouth brave. I went to the yard where the local mechanic in the backward cap ruled all that creaked and most that trembled.
“Rear shoe’s a sinner,” he announced after a lap around the block, and set about scraping the brake lining with the love you usually reserve for fruit ripened by patience. He tapped the carb bowl once for luck I’ve learned that every mechanic here taps bowls the way monks tap bells and tightened a little slack from the clutch cable. I glanced at the sky. Clean. The kind of clean that tempts overconfidence.
Cecilia arrived with two paper cones of roasted barley and a question that was less a question than a map. “Sani first, Pibiting later? Or both and see what breaks?”
“Both,” I said, as if we had enough spares to justify that optimism. We did not. But we did have whatever it is that rides on top of spares: the willingness to ask, the ability to wait, and a few extra biscuits to turn a stranger into a neighbor for a minute.
Out of Padum: The Festival Begins in the Lane
“Festivals start long before drums and last long after banners.”
The main lane of Padum hosted its own pageant. Boys in tracksuits pretended they were late for nothing. Girls in aprons made a geometry of apricot halves on wicker trays. A monk in sneakers balanced butter lamps the way tightrope walkers balance entire afternoons. We idled out behind a tractor, past the stupa with the perfectionist white, under a tangle of lines and prayer flags that rewrote the sky into different tenses.
The road toward Sani pulled us into a denser script: dust, then hardpack, then a rash of pebbles like punctuation that insisted on our full attention. The Tsarap to our right spoke in low phrases. The fields to our left rehearsed green under their breath. We stood on the pegs to spare our spines and to let the front tyre think it was better than it is.
“Listen,” Cecilia shouted over the single-cylinder hymn. At first I thought she meant the engine. Then I heard it: drums not loud, but present, as if the day were winding its own mainspring somewhere in the next village.
The First Detour: A Bridge That Changed Its Mind
“The shortest distance is a rumor; the real line is wherever people are carrying things.”
Three kilometers shy of the Sani turnoff, a bridge had entered into a disagreement with the concept of bridge. It wasn’t entirely out, but it had adopted that sideways shrug of a person who intends to be unhelpful. An uncle with red wool cap took one look at our wheels and performed that gesture all the older men in Zanskar have perfected: flat hand seesaw, meaning maybe, then not worth it, then tea first.
A boy pointed us to the detour a sandy bend down into the dry braid of an old riverbed, then up a ramp that looked like it wanted to be a ramp one day. The tractor ahead gamely dug two trenches for us to follow; we followed. My rear fishtailed like a story I was trying to make better than it was. Cecilia eased her bike with that Brazilian surf patience I had come to respect weight back, eyes forward, throttle a suggestion, not a threat. We both emerged with our pride dusty and our chains singing the grit song.
On the far bank a tea stall advertised only by smoke took us in. We sat under a tarpaulin that had known gales and gossip. The owner a woman with silver threads woven into her hair the way light is woven into morning handed us tea like a correction. We shook dust out of our scarves and accepted the correction.
“Sani Gustor?” I asked.
“Dance-day,” she said, and pointed at our tyres. “Leave hurry here.”
We left some of our hurry under her bench and carried on with the rest.
Sani: The Yard of Drums and Dust
“Noise can be prayer when it remembers what it’s for.”
Sani monastery is a geometry of stone and shadow that has decided to hold a festival and not apologize. The chorten at its heart looked older than my reasons for being here. Masks waited in a side room, faces stacked like careful weather. Monks in burgundy moved like promises: slow and kept.
We rolled in among a constellation of bikes and tractors, parked where a goat might have wanted to be, and stepped into the yard. Drums began. Two deep dungchen horns answered. Cymbals cut the air into manageable pieces. The first cham dancer stepped out, mask snarling and compassionate, robes fanning dust that turned light into honey.
I felt the afternoon tilt. Revs from a late-arriving motorcycle braided themselves into the percussion; the contrast was hilarious and right. This is what we came for to watch a town be itself all the way: ritual and repair, drums and detours, faith and fuel not as counterweights but as co-conspirators.
A monk no older than my patience stood beside me and tracked the dancers with a stare that belonged to a century neither of us had access to. He glanced at my boots and said, “Good for walking. Bad for sitting cross-legged.” He wasn’t wrong.
We rounded the chorten, stopped at a butter lamp shelf where women tended the flame with thumbs that knew more than most manuals, and slipped into the dark room where thangka watched our breathing. I let my eyes learn the shade the way gold rests when not performing, the way blue pretends to be distance even up close.
Outside, Cecilia had found a kid with a wooden top that tolerated stone floors and insisted on applause. She clapped like a good aunt. The kid claimed victory like a monk claims quiet without ownership.
The Misadventure Begins: When the Throttle Stumbles
“Rituals are scheduled; misadventures never are.”
We decided to ride the upper loop a string of switchbacks above Sani that gift a view of Padum plain that even patience would pay for. We told ourselves we’d be back before the lion masks. The first hairpins were tidy and predictable; then the surface switched to marbles and powder. My bike coughed, not the heat cough, not the altitude cough the old fuel-starved stutter. We found shade and investigated.
I cracked the fuel cap the hiss was confession: vacuum locked. The vent had taken yesterday’s dust and made a philosophy of it. I loosened the cap, shook it, muttered a sec-ular mantra, and told myself the bike would be grateful. It was, for a few bends. Then came a sneeze through the carb and a stall that felt personal.
“We go back?” Cecilia asked.
“We go sideways,” I countered, pointing to a track that skirted the ridge and rejoined the main road near a stupa painted with a blue that forgives. The map in my pocket was unhelpful; the map in the goat tracks was honest.
We took the detour. The detour had plans. A rock step pretended lower than it was; the rear hopped; my left foot sought ground and found air; the bike kissed the earth with the weary affection of a traveler who has slept in worse beds. I killed the engine fast enough to save oil from the wrong geography. We righted the weight with a count one, two, lift and laughed like people who believe laughter shortens the path of dignity on its way back.
Cecilia’s hand found my shoulder. “We made our offering to Sani,” she said. “Dust and a little ego.”
We checked the lever, the peg, the mirror that has ambitions of freedom. All attached. All sullen. We rode on, a degree older.
Mid-Slope Aid Station: A Mechanic’s Fire Under a Mulberry
“If you’re going to break, break where someone knows how to mend.”
Halfway down, confident that we could rejoin the yard before the final dance, the clutch cable chose to rehearse mortality. First a creak, then a stretch, then the handgrip coming back to the bar with the emptiness of an unkept promise. The outer sheath had frayed just where it enters the perch classic and ill-timed.
We coasted into a yard where a mulberry tree made shade so generous you could have taught reading under it. A thirty-watt bulb swung from a wire that had more faith than engineering. A bench. A box of screws. The smell of coal and chai. It was a mechanic’s fire without the signboard. The man who emerged had a red tika on his brow and black half-moons under his nails that looked like the insignia of competence.
He saw the cable, nodded a diagnosis before I formed a sentence, and went straight to the coffee can that all mountain mechanics seem to inherit at birth. Out came the universal cable nipple, a small brass mercy; out came a strand of wire that used to be part of something ecclesiastical like a brake. He threaded, he tightened, he pinched with pliers whose handles were taped into heroism.
Cecilia brewed tea at the threshold with a borrowed kettle and politely bullied payment in advance. Children collected in forms of two and three to watch. A monk passed, approved with a smile that said everything is practice, and moved on.
Cable spliced, lever adjusted, free play taught back to the knuckles. I squeezed. Resistance returned with a memory of smoothness. “Only to Sani and back,” our red-tikaed savior said, measuring future with thumb and sky. “Buy new tomorrow. Faith is good; cable better.”
We paid what he asked and then found other excuses to add to the bundle: biscuits, candies, a postcard of Thiksey from my pack. He refused the postcard and pocketed the cable nipple, as if to remind us that the only souvenir that matters is something that makes tomorrow easier.
Back in the Yard: Masks, Dust, and the Sound a Valley Remembers
“Arrive late, but not too late enough to know the ending, not enough to claim it.”
We slid into Sani’s yard with the grace of a scooter three drinks down adequate. The final cham had begun: Mahakala in a mask that teaches truth by frightening you into paying attention; drums finding the heart’s old logic; horns curving the air into agreement. The monks moved in circles that looked like maps of a safer world.
I stood beside the woman of the tea from earlier and tried to match my breath to the drum’s verdict. Cecilia watched with her helmet off, hair alive in the wind, face lit by the kind of concentration that looks like rest from afar. A child tugged my sleeve and pointed at the clutch perch, proud to notice the fresh wire. I gave him a thumbs-up. He gave me one back with the seriousness of officials.
In the corner, butter lamps shivered. Cymbals kissed. The dust caught in the light like a blessing you can see. There was a moment there always is when everything stops: not goes quiet, but stops the valley holds breath, the wind steps outside, and everyone, even the goats, listen. Then it all begins again, exactly as before and entirely new.
We took our leave the way you leave a beloved kitchen backwards, reluctant, promising to return by touching the doorframe like a charm.
The Long Glow Back to Padum
“Evening is a great mechanic; it repairs the day’s noises into a story.”
We idled out with the other latecomers tractors strung with kids, one bike with a sheepskin lashed to the rear rack like a captured cloud, laughter in Hindi, Ladakhi, Zanskari, and that global dialect called it was good.
The switchbacks that had flexed against us earlier now received us like a porch. The patched clutch did its job with a sturdiness that made me consider its theology. The road had smoothed the way memories smooth taking off edges, keeping edges where a lesson needs to catch. Padum exhaled ahead, a scatter of roofs and small smokes promising rice, dal, rest.
At the guesthouse, the bucket of hot water again, the plug again misbehaving, the awkward dance of a body that’s been rattled learning to be upright and still. Dinner tasted like belonging; sleep had all the kindness we had not found room for earlier in the day.
In the night, a dog reorganized its dreams under our window. A scooter, late, apologized to the lane. Somewhere, distant, a drum or my own heart remembering thudded twice as if to sign the day.
Morning After: Cables, Kids, and the Serious Work of Play
“Fix what can be fixed; befriend what can only be carried.”
We found a new clutch cable in a shop that sold also biscuits, batteries, soap, and conversations. The owner weighed it in his hand as if to judge not price but fate. The new cable slid through guides that had learned obedience the hard way, and the lever regained that factory memory of smoothness. I greased the speedo drive for no reason other than it felt like gratitude.
Cecilia spent an hour as a goalkeeper in an uneven field where stones served as defenders and the children took turns being Messi and Monk. A shark of a dog darted in and out with the politics of a born striker. I sat on a low wall, tuning nothing, finally. It’s important to balance a life with maintenance and admiring.
An old man in a coat heavy as a metaphor joined me. We talked about Sani in gestures: his hand the drum, mine the horn, both of us the dust. He said, “Roads make noise. Festivals make meaning. Both are needed or the place forgets itself.” He could have been speaking about a bike, a valley, a person.
We rode to the pump that is not a pump just a drum of fuel siphoned with mistrust and expertise into Coke bottles. We topped up prudently, learning from yesterday’s optimism. The man pouring squinted at our odometers and performed the arithmetic out loud, as if reciting from a poem.
A Small Pilgrimage Within the Big One: Pibiting and the Flat That Wasn’t
“Not all detours are punishments; some are gifts with grease on them.”
We followed an afternoon impulse to Pibiting, the village whose chorten on a knuckle of rock leans into the sky like a polite question. The climb was a palate of switchbacks thoughtfully spaced, and our bikes, newly humbled by cable theology, behaved like students after a stern look.
Halfway up, I felt a wobble the sort you feel when your intuition keeps pointing even as your eyes are on the view. We stopped. The rear tyre looked narcissistically perfect. Cecilia sprayed a little water on the bead because she’s a genius that way. Bubbles whispered a slow leak. Not a showstopper. Not a story. A reminder.
We leaned the bike on its left, rolled the wheel so the valve was a butler, and pumped enough air to ask for an hour of courtesy. In the chorten’s shade, we watched Padum rearrange itself under late light. Prayer flags performed their ordinary miracle: cloth teaching the air to be seen. A nun descended past us, radio in her sleeve playing a song that must have been from All India Radio, the past speaking through a small plastic speaker into the emphatic present.
On the way down we stopped at a house that sells apricot oil and stitches nets for barley. We bought a tiny bottle that would later make every hotel room smell like a Zanskari morning. The woman wrapped it in newspaper with a precision that told me she has wrapped harder things than glass.
Back in Padum, a patch on the inner tube took first time under a mechanic’s fire so warm even my doubts forgave him for doing it all with tools that belonged in a museum I would gladly visit.
The Festival of What Goes Wrong and Goes Right
“If it didn’t test you, it wouldn’t keep you.”
When I think of Switchbacks at Sani now, it’s not any single curve that returns first. It’s the sound-mix: dungchen under drums, rev under ritual, laughter under instructions shouted across dust. It’s the mulberry shade and the cable nipple and the mechanic’s thumb pressed into the small world where brass meets wire and becomes another day’s continuity. It’s Cecilia laughing as we tilted the tank to gather courage from corners, and later clapping for a kid’s wooden top as if all balanced things deserved applause.
We had come to chase a festival and found a curriculum: how to arrive late and still arrive, how to break well, how to accept detours as a language the valley uses to keep you from mistaking travel for consumption. Sani taught us that a place can be holy and still practical, that faith is as much about keeping a spare cable as it is about keeping a promise to show up for the dance.
The next rides would go to Rangdum, Pensi La, the usual litany of passes whose names sound like instruments when spoken right. But the day at Sani stays in the toolbox I carry everywhere: a small brass mercy, a matchbox memory, a rope of laughter.
If you ride there, ride soft. Let the drums teach your throttle its manners. Stop under the mulberry. Pay fairly and quietly. Tilt the tank if you must, but tilt your head more often to listen, to thank, to watch. And when the mask swirls dust into light, let some of that dust be yours not left behind as a mark, but carried away as a lesson:
Detours are not obstacles; they are the festival’s encore.