Rishad Karmalkar had a habit of choosing places that maps didn’t bother naming properly.
This one was a ridge above a meadow locals called Vanshila-ka-Dhaar, not on any brochure, not even consistently spelled the same way by the two tea stalls down in the last motorable village. He liked that. It meant fewer people had rehearsed their awe here.
By the time he pitched his tent, the sun had already begun folding itself behind a line of distant peaks. The meadow opened like a quiet bowl, and the mountains stood at its rim, not dramatic, just... present. Like old men who didn’t need to prove anything anymore.
He sat on a flat rock, unlacing his boots slowly, letting the silence introduce itself instead of breaking it with music.
It wasn’t silent, of course.
There was a steady whisper of grass shifting against itself. Somewhere to his left, a bird made a call that sounded unfinished, as if it forgot the last note. Insects stitched the air with a thin, constant hum, rising and falling without pattern.
Rishad inhaled.
The air here didn’t smell like anything he could name in one word. It wasn’t just “fresh.” It carried resin from unseen trees, damp soil from somewhere below, and a faint bitterness, like crushed leaves rubbed between fingers. He’d smelled it once as a child when his grandfather broke a twig and told him to breathe in “the green.”
He pulled out a small kerosene lantern from his bag but didn’t light it yet. The fading light was still enough. Lighting it too early felt like interrupting someone mid-sentence.
A pair of crows or something larger cut across the sky, heading toward a denser patch of forest below. He watched them disappear and wondered, how animals knew when to return, when to stop wandering.
By the time darkness settled, it didn’t fall all at once. It arrived in layers.
First, the colours drained from the mountains, leaving only outlines. Then the outlines softened. Then even the distance itself seemed to disappear, as if the world had been trimmed down to just the radius of his breathing.
He finally lit the lantern.
The flame flickered stubbornly, adjusting to the thin air. Its glow was small, almost embarrassed and it made everything outside its circle feel deeper, more deliberate.
Rishad wrapped his shawl tighter. The cold didn’t rush in, it crept. It found the gaps between buttons, the space at the wrist, the back of the neck. By the time you noticed it, it was already there.
He stepped away from the lantern.
That was when the sky revealed itself.
Not dramatically. Not in the way photographs promise.
Just... quietly.
Stars appeared like they had always been there and he had simply taken too long to look up.
He lay back on the ground, hands under his head. The grass was cold and slightly damp, pressing into his jacket. Above him, the sky stretched without any sense of edge. A faint band almost like breath on glass cut across it.
He remembered reading somewhere that at this height, the sky wasn’t the same sky you saw in cities. It wasn’t clearer because it tried harder. It was clearer because nothing argued with it.
A breeze moved across the ridge.
It didn’t just pass over him, it paused, as if testing his presence. It touched his face, slid past his ears, and tugged lightly at the loose flap of his tent. The fabric answered with a soft, irregular tapping.
Behind him, from the unseen forest, came a sound.
Not loud. Not threatening.
Just... something alive acknowledging something else alive.
Rishad didn’t turn.
He realised then that fear, in places like this, wasn’t sharp. It was wide. It spread out and sat beside wonder, not opposite it.
He thought of Meghna Vaid, who had once told him he travelled too much to avoid staying.
“You go looking for quiet,” she’d said, stirring her coffee without drinking it, “but you never stay long enough to hear what it says.”
He had laughed it off then.
Now, lying under a sky that didn’t care if he listened or not, he understood the accusation better than he liked.
The mountains didn’t perform. They didn’t explain themselves. They simply held their shape while everything else light, sound, thought shifted around them.
Maybe that was what unsettled him.
There was no response here. No applause. No rejection either.
Just space.
The lantern flickered behind him.
He got up, walked back, and turned it off.
Darkness closed in immediately, but his eyes adjusted faster this time. The stars felt closer without the competing glow. The breeze felt colder, but cleaner.
He stood there for a long minute, doing nothing useful.
Then he laughed quietly, to himself.
Not because something was funny. Just because for once, nothing needed fixing, explaining, or improving.
The insects kept working their invisible threads. The trees below shifted and sighed. Somewhere, that unfinished bird-call returned, as if it had finally remembered the last note.
Rishad zipped his tent halfway, leaving the flap open.
He wanted the night to come in uninvited.
Just before sleep, he noticed something small.
The smell of the air had changed.
It carried a sharper edge now, almost metallic. Morning wasn’t here yet, but it had sent word ahead.
He closed his eyes.
For the first time in a long while, he wasn’t thinking about leaving.
And the mountain, indifferent, steady, patient didn’t seem to mind.