Eventually, in mid-morning, the taxi drivers kicked them out, explaining to Ravi in Hindi that they had long since reached the point where walking would be faster. This could be inferred anyway from the fact that several other taxis had pulled over and dozens of people could be seen trudging right up the side of a mountain ridge, cutting across all the switchbacks. The fellowship got out, loaded up, and climbed over the pass, shrieking for breath the whole way. In his proper backpacking gear Laks felt a bit foolish
whenever their path crossed with that of some random local who was just walking right up the mountain in street shoes and clothes, carrying his stuff in a plastic shopping bag. Also making them look ludicrously over-prepared were Sam and Jay, who had apparently made the calculation, back in England, that any clothing capable of keeping them warm through a ninety-minute soccer game in Leeds would be more than sufficient for summiting Everest.
The snow thinned as they went, for they were passing over into Ladakh, a place that was dry for the same reason that the Punjab was well watered: the mountains stopped all the moisture and converted it into rivers, just as with the Cascades in Laks’s part of the world. Inland was high desert. Surrounding the hamlet at the foot of the pass was a redolent plateau where locals went out to defecate in the open. Laks was glad his sense of smell had been devastated by COVID. Stepping with great care across this, they came to a cluster of buildings and located the guesthouse where they would stay the night. There they encountered Pippa, Bella, and Sue, playing Dungeons and Dragons.
During his journey up from Shimla, Laks had crossed paths with all three of these women glancingly, enough to follow their stories at a remove. Pippa was a lanky, freckled Kiwi. Bella was Argentinean. Sue—presumably an Anglicized version of her real name—was Korean. They’d not been together at the time. But backpackers in general and women in particular formed ad hoc alliances when they discovered, in the dining room of a hostel or the lobby of a bus station, that they were going the same way. This looked to be one of those. They could watch one another’s backs when they weren’t huddling together for warmth.
Back in Kullu, these women might have taken one look at Laks and surmised he was going north to the Line of Actual Control. Laks, however, never would have assumed the same of them. Until, that is, he descended into the smoky guesthouse—dwellings here were quasi-subterranean—and found the three of them eating bad stew from a communal vat and rolling twenty-sided dice. They’d walked over the pass for the same reason as Laks: Bella
had overstayed her visa while sampling the trippy delights of Goa and didn’t want to get caught at the tunnel checkpoint. Sue had come down with altitude sickness during the hike and they had holed up here for a day as she bounced back.
Bella and Sue, as it turned out, were just in it for the usual backpackerish reasons—to have adventures and see cool parts of the world before they settled down—while Pippa had a mission. Completely self-assigned, but a mission nonetheless. She had traveled most of the way up the Beas Valley in the company of some guy from California who, it could be guessed, was one of those aspirant filmmakers who came from money and so had the freedom to do stuff like this—or to tweet that he was doing it, anyway—but not the grit to stick with it when it got hard. Which it very much did, beyond Manali. Laks knew about people like that because there was a whole sub-Hollywood in Vancouver. He had observed them in their coffeehouses and brewpubs, hatching their plans and engaging in the strangely protocol-bound interactions of their tribe. Pippa had grown up in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand’s film industry, which was culturally quite different. Her objective in all this was to join up, at least for a time, with a network of streamers who were documenting the conflict that Laks intended to take part in.
Early in the conversation, Laks was inclined to keep Pippa at arm’s length. What benefit could there be in joining up with these three women? But the more they talked, the more he understood that they might need Pippa more than she needed them. She kept asking questions that Laks ought to have known the answers to. Which part of the front were they aiming for? The southeastern toe of the Yak’s Leg, perhaps, where the Chinese had lately encroached and needed to be pushed back? Or the “knee” farther north where Indian crews were rumored to be readying a counterattack across the high glaciers that fed the Pangong Tso? Were they going to join up with an established squad, or form their own new one? Did they intend to remain a purely stick-based unit, or were they going to team up with any rock throwers? Which langar network were they going to join up with; or did they have their own