Till Maggi do us part

February 4, 2012. We all huddle around this tiny feature at our campsite of Tilat-Sumdo; this feature that has unknowingly contributed the most to these 12 men forming a close bond, and also to a cross-cultural exchange between us city-wallahs and the Zanskari village-folk. [If "campfire" was the first thing that came to your mind, then you could revel in having satisfactory logical skills for base function in this society. And by now you'd have deduced that the feature was the campfire, indeed, as is expected of any person with above-parking-lot-attendant IQ.] In fact, this is our last huddle - a retreating huddle, you can call it - before we find the roadhead up ahead and step off the Chadar and shuttle back to Leh; only huddles after this - I'm guessing - will tend to be around a bottle of alcohol and a pack of cigs (not to ignore the detail that even now a single Tendu leaf roll aka 'Beedi' that is doing the round adds to the character/headcount of this huddle).

"Chadar - come for the ice, stay for the fire"

The surroundings are in an excess of white from the continuous snowing in the past 3 hours. Everybody, at this moment, is in a tired-et-buttraped-yet-cheery state, negligent of their general defenses (or "letting the guard down" in easier English) which is appropriate for a farewell moment of sorts. This tiny - so tiny that you could calculate an average of two twigs for each participant - fire today is a big draw.
We sit and thaw and share our fall count. We LOL over the LOL and the 'DONT FALL' - the last of the snow-scribbles worth recall. Sitting - on boulders, on sleds, on the snowy ground itself. Sipping on our last cuppa tea. Jaggery sticks doing a couple of rounds before being exhausted. A lone beedi makes rounds, some attention to its one-puff-then-pass trail map will give you a nautilus shell, as the beedi ends up somewhere in the countryside in this district of "the huddle". Then arrives our farewell bowl of Maggi noodles too, which, despite being our lone lunch food to the point of anguish, is finished with eagerness; and then we crave for some more.

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