c u on top - satyabrata dam

As I trapeze the rickety wooden bridge, swinging into the wild winds across Wakhan River, I find an old man smiling to himself by the river, looking deep and lost into the turbulent waters. I need a shelter for the day and through the grassy fields I could see the top of one at a distance and no one else around save the old man. I have my backpack on my back and I must look haggard and deserted and severely in need of a bath (though that is not a point that gets you sympathy in a land where no one bathes). I stride up to the man, who continues to stare into the waters, timeless like the mountains around. He couldn’t possibly have missed seeing me. I walk closer and he looks up. With my back to the sun he has to squint and so he did but his smile remains intact and then his eyes return to the river. I too look at the river but couldn’t find anything out of the place or interesting for this man to give it such undivided attention. By now I thought I knew enough Dari / Wakhi to get b...

How often does it happen that you reach a place for the first time in your life and instantly feel you have arrived that you have been here before, and this is where you belong. As my feet lands upon Afghan soil, this is exactly how I feel. A country that I have dreamt of ever since I have known the great Himalaya and the trans-Himalayan Ranges. My childhood was replete with Afghan encounters as dry fruit sellers from Kabul (we called them Kabuilwallahs) would potter around selling their merchandise and would enthrall the buyers (especially me) with tales of a magic land full of snow white mountains, green lush pastures, beautiful men, women and children, legends of fairies and jinni, orchards full of apricots and peaches, gurgling mountain spring a sip from which could make one immortal, the fierce horse riders, the nomadic tribes and the valor of the Afghan people who have never been conquered or subjugated by a foreign force. Names like Kabul, Khyber Pass, Bamiyan, Mazar-e-Shari...

They (I would really like to know who this ‘they’ are!) say, there’s method in madness while I say there can never be a method without madness, at least not the kind of methods I follow or apply. I am shortly heading for another madcap enterprise of mine that is not my creation or concoction. Since the chances of getting back from it is remote and slim (just like my physical entity) I thought a prelude is in the order if not the conclusion; which may or may not be in the offing in the days to come. So here goes. I am headed for Afghanistan in less than two weeks, which, if I do manage to cross the obscure borders and enter, and get the entry stamped on my passport, would perhaps become the 137th or 138th country of my nomadic life. This does make me happy on one hand and also excited on the other. Excitement and thriving on the edge is my way of life, I know of none other even then this very exciting and decidedly dangerous expedition is not my doing; not entirely in a manner of spe...