Every now and then, amid the hum of ceiling fans, the quiet buzz of the air-conditioners and the relentless cacophony of city traffic, a memory sneaks in. Not of a person, but of a place -tall, quiet, ancient. The mountains! The kind that embrace you amid the mist, offer you the comfort of silence and remind you that there is more to this world than the rat race and the deadlines. It’s been years since I’ve been to Northern parts of the country. Life seems mundane, shackled in routines, and practicality chipped away at spontaneity. But the mountains - they haven’t left me, not once. They keep calling me relentlessly. A sudden breeze in the middle of a hot April day reminds me of the gusty winds at Rohtang Pass, when dusk had painted the Solang Valley in strokes of orange and grey.

 

A sip of bitter chai takes me to a roadside shack in Sonmarg, where silence stretched for miles, broken only by the tinkering of a bell around the neck of a yak. Sometimes, even the smell of wet earth carries the scent of pines of Gulmarg -if I let my mind drift far enough. I often think about who I was back then -a little lost, a little lighter. My backpack weighed heavier than my responsibilities. Conversations were had with strangers whose names I never asked, and sunsets were watched with a reverence usually reserved for shrines. One was disconnected from the world and yet so ‘connected’. There’s a peculiar ache that sets in when you miss a place that was never truly yours, but made you feel at home, welcome even. The mountains don’t offer ownership; they offer presence. You belong not by birthright, but by how quietly you enter, how slowly you breathe, how much you’re willing to unlearn. When I scroll past reels on my phone of snow-laden roads and monsoon treks, a strange jealousy creeps in. Not for the people enjoying all of it, but for their proximity to that kind of stillness.

 

I wonder if they know what they have? Perhaps I’m romanticising -mountains come with their own share of discomfort, after all. Thin air, no heaters, aching legs. But those were the kinds of discomforts that made one feel more alive, not less. You earned every view, every star, every ragged breath. Someday, I’ll go back. I don’t know when. Maybe when the noise inside me gets too loud, or maybe when the city life become too much to handle, or maybe when I remember that the version of me I liked best lived somewhere between a forest trail and a bonfire-lit sky. Until then, I shall carry the mountains in my heart- in my playlists, in the way I pause at sunsets and in how I crave for a pristine silence- all in the hope that one day, I will be in the arms of the mountains again.