Most travelers, even some tourists may be, carry the place of their desires inside them even before they visit it.Words and images converse with our inner longings and create the urge to move, to travel to that unknown yet familiar land like a lover hoping to meet his beloved, with expectations waiting to be fulfilled.
I traveled to Leh with a longing for the vast, barren, mountainous hue of brown hoping to find infinity and it’s resonance in me.I told love that I might be overwhelmed to tears in the lap of that deserted, monastic, expanse.
Overwhelmed I was, but not by beauty or fervor; nor did I consummate my union with infinity.It was fear, primordial and visceral that stirred within me from its slumber.Being face to face with that immutable terrain (though the winds, rains and snows soundly refute me) once again acquainted me with my insignificant mortality, with the evanescence of my days; some moths barely exist for a few hours they say.
It seemed inconsequential to try and freeze into a summer frame a land which seemed frozen in time despite its many seasonal faces.Many a photographer has already humbly laid his spoils before Beauty’s altar; she couldn’t care less for yet another worshiper.
Everything was there as promised: majestic mountains denuded by summer’s warmth, monks and monasteries going about their daily spiritual chores, old women made entirely out of time’s wrinkles and peripatetic Europeans; yet it all seemed like a dream, a simulacra Leh, which at its altitude induced a shortness of breath at the slightest ascent.
Travel, I believe, is a purely sensual experience. The encounter with new sights, smells, sounds and tastes is like making love to a stranger you have coveted; how it turns out is but circumstantial and private.
I wonder what Kublai Khan would have felt on encountering his vast empire woven into reality by the itinerant words of the fabled Venetian, Marco Polo.
Tony Xavier 