I work in software in Bengaluru, and I had told myself the trip to Kalga was for photographs. Three days in, I had taken maybe eleven.
The walk up from Barshaini took the decision out of my hands. Forty minutes of climbing with a bag that felt heavier by the switchback, and by the time I reached the first house I had already stopped composing captions in my head. There was simply too much breath being used elsewhere.
My homestay room had one plug point and no real signal. The owner, an older man who had clearly hosted a hundred people exactly like me, watched me hold my phone up toward the window for a full minute before saying, without unkindness, that the network here comes and goes with the weather, and that most people stop trying by the second day.
He was right. I stopped trying on the second day.
What replaced the checking was noticing. The specific green of new apple leaves against older, darker ones. The sound of someone's axe two houses down, steady and unhurried. A neighbour's dog that adopted our doorstep for the length of our stay and then, the morning we left, simply did not follow us down.
I have been back in Bengaluru for two months now. I still check my phone constantly. But I know, in a way I did not before, exactly what it looks like when I am not doing that, and I go looking for it more than I used to.
This is a Yatri Reflection: an editorial composite representing a commonly described experience among Indian travellers visiting Kalga, not a transcript of a specific verified interview.