Devidarh to Shikari Devi

Every roof they built for her fell down. So they stopped building roofs.

That is the first thing you learn about Shikari Devi, and the last thing you understand. In between lies a day of forest so thick the light arrives green, and a ridge that keeps promising the top and then adding one more fold.

We left Devidarh at dawn with parathas wrapped in newspaper. The sanctuary forest is bear country, so we talked and let our steps be heard, and the forest managed us politely, sending down monal calls like dropped coins.

Near the summit the trees give up and the grass takes over, and then you see it: a stone shrine open to the whole sky, snow sitting inside the sanctum in winter, sun in summer, the goddess indifferent to weather in a way that reorganises your ideas about shelter.

An old pujari shared his fire with us. He said hunters once prayed here before the hunt, and that the goddess accepts everyone the sky accepts, which is everyone.

I stood where the roof should have been and felt oddly exposed, then oddly fine. Most of what I shelter myself from, I realised, is not weather.

Local truth: the dawn view reaches from the Dhauladhar to the Kinnaur ranges, but locals climb for the darshan, not the panorama. Do both, in that order, and the mountain makes more sense.

Go April to June or after the monsoon; sleep near the top if you can. Descend before afternoon cloud. Leave the shrine's silence the way you found it.

She never needed a roof. It was we who needed her to have one.