Six weeks after my father's triple bypass, I climbed to Kheerganga, and I need to explain why those two facts belong in one sentence.
I am a trainer. Strength is my product. And that entire spring I had watched the strongest man I know lie in a hospital bed with tubes in him, and something in me needed to go uphill until the fear turned into sweat, because sweat, at least, I know what to do with.
The climb from Barshaini is honest work: villages, then pines, then the Rudranag falls where the river twists past a small shrine, then the long final push where every trekker's playlist dies and everyone just breathes. I overtook everyone. Old habit. At the top, the meadow opens wide and worn, prayer flags moving, steam rising off the spring pool like the mountain letting out a breath it had held all winter.
The story says Kartikeya meditated here so long the spring ran white as kheer. What runs now is hot, mineral, and non-negotiable about its own pace, and this is where the mountain got me. You cannot soak fast.
I lowered myself in at dusk, snow peaks going grey overhead, muscles glowing from the climb, and for the first ten minutes I was still training: counting breaths, timing the soak. Then the heat undid something, knees, shoulders, the six weeks of hospital corridors, and I sat in the mountain's hot water and cried like a client on his first honest deadlift. An old baba in the far corner watched the peaks and had the grace not to watch me.
Here is what I understood in that pool, and what I now tell every young lifter chasing numbers: strength is not the ability to carry more. It is knowing what you are carrying. My father carried three of us on a mechanic's salary for thirty years. The bypass was not his weakness arriving. It was his ledger.
I called him from Barshaini the next day, network permitting, and told him when his walking clearance came, I would bring him up slowly, my pace matched to his, all the way to the hot water.
The pool has rules: no soap, low voices at dawn, separate enclosures. Honour them. You are bathing in someone's austerity.
