On my fortieth birthday I made a list titled Things Fear Has Decided For Me. It was longer than I expected. Item one was a mountain pass.
I have managed a bank branch for eleven years. Risk assessment is my profession, and I had used it, my whole life, as architecture for avoidance. Heights, specifically: since a fall from a mango tree at six, anything past a second-floor balcony turned my legs to wet rope.
I trained for five months in secret, stairs and morning walks, and joined a guided group for Buran Ghati in June, telling my wife the truth and my colleagues a lie about a conference.
The trek is designed like mercy. It starts gentle: Janglik's timber lanes, then Dayara meadow, which is so wide and level that fear has nowhere to stand. Litham next, under the snow walls, where our guide Chhotu Ram checked on me each evening with the tact of a good doctor: "Neend aayi? Sar theek?" Sleep okay? Head okay? Never: scared okay?
Pass morning, 3:40 a.m. Headlamps, tea, boot crunch. The snow slope steepened until the whole world was a white wall in the dark, and my six-year-old self woke up screaming somewhere around the third rest stop. I told Chhotu Ram I couldn't. He didn't argue. He just put my hand on the fixed rope and said, "Haath yahan. Aankh wahan." Hand here. Eyes there. And pointed east, where the sky was turning the colour of the inside of a peach.
I climbed the last hour hand over hand, eyes on the dawn, and I want to report the ridiculous truth: the fear came with me the entire way. It never left. It just stopped driving. At the crest, 4,572 metres, prayer flags cracking in gold light, Kinnaur's ranges rising out of blue shadow, I stood at the edge of the famous snow wall descent, and laughed until the guide checked on my head again.
Going down the wall, roped, heels first, I was somehow fine. Below it, the group slid the soft slopes sitting down, whooping, forty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds all six again, and this time the tree wasn't there.
Item one: crossed out. The list is still long. But the handwriting on it no longer looks like mine.
