1.Misfortune on the mountain pass—Unexpected visitors—The captain’s ambitions—Last night at the borderThey were only at the beginning of their expedition, and already they were three men and twice as many sheep short. The captain said the men who deserted the camp, like most natives, lacked nerve. About the sheep no one was certain, but high up on the mountain pass snow leopards were known to sneak into wind-rocked pens at night and vanish with their prey silenced between their teeth. The bearers were spooked because when the white mist lifted at dawn, they saw neither animal tracks nor blood and, behind the boulders, they found no bones or carcasses.
Balram watched them scuttle away from the camp, their sullen faces reddened by lashings of wind. They mumbled about the smell of the netherworld in the air, creatures that were half-animal and half-human whose knotted fur carried the mustiness of long-buried wants.
It fell on Balram, as the captain’s right-hand man, to dispel their fears. He supposed he could confess to feeling light-headed himself, a fate inescapable at this height. He could remind them of his previous travels, when he had encountered specter rising out of the mist only to realize such visions were the work of exhaustion and insufficient air in his lungs.
All these words he ought to say.
He didn’t feel particularly inclined to say them.
A clank caused Balram to turn around. Pawan was packing his knives and ladles, muttering curses to himself. Face as smooth and shiny as a baby’s, though the mouth on that boy could put a drunk to shame. Balram snapped his fingers and gestured that he should hurry. Pawan scowled but hoisted his sacks over his shoulders and walked away in a clatter of pots and pans, a squabble an indulgence neither of them could afford when their breathing was so ragged.
They were now midway through the Mana Pass, a gap in the Himalayas that was nearly as formidable as the snow-cloaked mountains it cut through to form a passage to Tibet. At eighteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, here they were closer to gods than mortals, but this proximity to the divine had brought them no blessings, only burdens.
Balram kicked dust over the remains of the previous night’s fire. The light was full of shadows, the sky heavy as a bog. There were no fetters on his ankles. Then why did it feel as if he had been tied down to the coarse logs of his own funeral pyre?
The captain bellowed at the men to gather around him, his shouts necessitated not as much by anger as the unruliness of the wind. The nine bearers left in their group, and the two shepherds, flocked together, sacks and trunks at their feet.
“If you return home without a formal letter of discharge from me, carrying my signature, you’ll be punished severely,” the captain warned them now. Plumes of white breath laced his words. “You’ll be sent to prison—as your friends who have deserted us will find out soon.”
Despite his fluency in the language, the manuals he read on masculine and feminine nouns, and the companionship of native women whom white men called “sleeping dictionaries” owing to the twofold nature of their responsibilities, the captain’s Hindustani had a strange inflection to it, the whiff of vast oceans no one could cross without losing caste. His threats sounded comical because of his manner of speaking, but the bearers kept their eyes downcast. They knew the native’s role well; they had played it all their lives. Jumped out of the path into a ditch when a white man’s carriage spat a cloud of dust in the distance. Readily arched their backs when condemned to flogging for improperly greeting an officer. Polished the boots flung at their faces for nodding off after midnight while fanning their English masters.
“If you imagine you can escape detection, say by traveling to Calcutta and finding employment on the docks, let me remind you, the Survey has detailed records of your families,” the captain said. “They will experience the full force of the British government’s fury.”
Balram examined the ground again. He saw footprints but no animal tracks. The three missing bearers had most likely stolen the sheep and retraced their steps, having decided the expedition was too perilous for them to undertake. Balram ought to have sensed their disquiet. Gyan would have. Gyan used to say that Balram had spent so much time with white men, he had imbibed their manners and vocabulary, and his thoughts were no longer his own but of a race that would never see him as an equal. The memory of it tensed the muscles in Balram’s back. He wished he could give Gyan a clout on the head and clasp him to his chest.
He bent down to wipe the ash off his boots. His belongings, tied up in a bundle on his back and fastened across his chest, swayed to the side. The heat of a sharp gaze scalded his face. He looked up, chest thumping, expecting to lock eyes with a snow leopard, its thick tail assuming the curve of a sickle, wool snared between its bloodstained fangs. But behind the creaking rocks, all was still.
•
Afterward the captain took Balram aside and said, “The men were idle for too long. Their heads have filled with clay.”
“We’re making good time,” Balram said, an itch beginning in his throat that felt like ants scurrying up to his mouth. “Took me the same number of hours to cross the pass last time.”
“How can you speak of hours when we were detained at Mana for weeks?” the captain asked, his saffron robe flapping in the wind. “All that time we squandered, waiting for the Tibetans to decide if India is a fit country to have relations with, you have forgotten it already?”
“The pass was closed on account of snow, sir. The Tibetans couldn’t help it. Besides, they worry we will bring smallpox with us, or war. They want to first ascertain nothing has gone wrong on our side of the border.”
“You don’t have to repeat every lie the Tibetans tell,” the captain said.
Balram kicked a pebble into a tributary of the Alaknanda that curved below their path. For much of their journey through the pass, they had followed the river, whose waters swelled the Ganga farther down south; but here it was slight, no more than a sea-green vein that appeared to be hewn into rocks. At first its banks had been carpeted with scarlet and yellow wildflowers, but now the earth was bald, and as dreary as the sky.
“When I was a small child, I knew summer was beginning not from the skies but from the sound of sheep bells ringing,” Balram said. “It was the sound of traders guiding their animals to the pass. I used to dread it because it meant my father would leave for Tibet.” As soon as he said these words, he wished he hadn’t. “Our traders sell grains and dried fruit and tobacco. After a long winter, Tibetans wait for their arrival.”
“Not with bated breath,” the captain said.
“They do take their time once the snow melts,” Balram tried to explain to the captain once again. “But they’re merely being cautious.”
The wind hissed in Balram’s ears, but he heard Durga’s voice, pointing to the lack in his head that kept him from speaking when he should, and garrulous on those occasions when tact demanded silence. He smelled the sesame oil she dabbed on her cheeks each night and wondered if her arms were aching now from hours of thrashing clothes against the rocks by the river.
Always he carried her reproaches with him as he walked. At first he had believed it to be a certain sign of madness in him. But then, one evening, trading stories with Gyan about Tibet, his friend had put him at ease with a confession: he too heard the voices of those he had left behind. On occasion their laughter and screams goaded him, burning his ears as if gods were shoveling hot embers into them. He said such sounds could tempt you to leap into a crevasse if you didn’t watch out. Just as sailors across the high seas were enticed by sirens, those scaling the Roof of the World were tempted by the call of the abyss.
Now his friend too was only a voice inside Balram’s head.
But not for long, Gyan whispered in a rusty tone, and Balram felt Gyan’s ghost thumb draw a damp line across his cheek.
Copyright © 2026 by Deepa Anappara. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
