My sister's Canada visa came through on a Tuesday in April. We hugged, we celebrated, and underneath it a clock started that neither of us mentioned. In May, we went to walk the Rupin, because some conversations only happen above four thousand metres, and we had eight days of them left.
Didi is the strong one; I am the stubborn one. The trail sorted us accordingly. Through Sewa with its trophy-hung temple, into Himachal across the wooden bridge, and up to Jhaka, the hanging village, where houses hold the slope the way our family holds secrets: layered and just barely.
The mountains ran a strange arithmetic on us that week. Every day the trail climbed, and every day something in the two of us descended, settled, came to rest. On the snow bridges over the river we crossed one at a time, and I watched her go first, the way she has gone first my whole life, into schools and jobs and arguments with our father, testing the ice so I would know where to step.
Dhanderas Thach is where the trek shows its hand: the amphitheatre, and the waterfall coming down in three white storeys, kilometre-tall and unhurried. We camped facing it. That evening she finally said the thing: "I'm scared I'm choosing wrong." And because we were sitting under a waterfall that has been leaving home continuously for ten thousand years and is still fed by its own snow, I had an answer for once. Water leaves. The mountain doesn't lose it. Look.
The pass day was brutal and bright: the gully climb, snow steps kicked by strangers ahead of us, lungs on instalments. At the prayer flags on top, 4,650 metres, we stood in wind straight off the Kinnaur snows and split a frozen Dairy Milk, our oldest ritual, first performed at Jakhu temple when she was nine and I was five.
We came down to Sangla through shepherd meadows, ate rajma-chawal that deserves its own paragraph but won't get it, and cried only once, briefly, at nothing at all.
She flies on the twenty-third. The Rupin keeps falling. Both of these are just water doing what water does, and the mountain, I am telling myself, does not lose it.
