The wooden path in the forest was suddenly overhung with trees – sinister-looking, grasping, their gnarled hands reaching out. Rhododendrons! And so many of them! In bloom, this must be a mountainside of bright red – just blood-red flowers hanging overhead and on either side.

Which would “the multitudinous seas incarnadine”, he thought. Macbeth, from English class. He smiled, how deep the stamp of colonial schooling ran in his subconscious. “The multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.” The whole green, broad-leaved forest must be red in May, incarnadined.

“Look,” he pointed out to Mandhira, “the rhododendrons you wanted to see.”

“Oh, are these rhododendrons? I thought they’d be more like creepers.”

“Tree rhododendrons, different from other ones. I think those grow on creepers.”

“Didn’t Manish say they wouldn’t be around this season?”

“True. Very strange. Maybe it’s climate change – the patterns of things are changing.”

The sun they had started under had disappeared in a blanket of mist. Out ahead, a person would be visible and then not, just a glimpse of a red backpack disappearing. The path in the rhododendron forest had been pressed into place over the years with rough sleepers hewn from logs.

“So, tell me, how does it work? The yoga business.”

“Yoga? Or the business of yoga? Because the business of yoga is all about Instagram. People want to feel good – rather they think, the yoga does – but they also need to look good. They need to be seen looking good. They need to connect with other people who look good.”

“People are doing yoga on the internet?”

“I only hold the group classes online. Otherwise, it’s one-on-one in person again these days. But I meant the social idea of yoga. It’s become essential for any young woman to do yoga, to own yoga clothes, to think about wellness.”

“My daughter does yoga. She keeps trying to get me to join. Things have changed so much. When I was younger, yoga was only found in ashrams and only sadhu types used to do it. Sadhus and old people, to keep everything working. So, I tell her – my daughter, I mean – that I’m still too young for it. But now it seems like everyone is doing yoga and meditation.”

“Everyone actually is. It’s the biggest revolution of the last 20 years – wellness, self-care, diet, functional fitness.”

“I suppose it’s a good thing,’ Moeen patted his belly, ‘I could definitely use more daily fitness. I almost envy the young.”

“Shall I tell you something?” Mandhira winked, “So do I.”

“You’re still a kid yourself!”

“Yes, yes, of course. But you know young people now, they’re so much more confident. They say things they’re thinking. They use such strong, deliberate language.”

“You might even be fooled into thinking they know things.”

Manish caught up with them.

“Kyun Manish bhai, what do you think of the youth these days?”

“Sir, compared to you, we’re all the youth. We have so much to learn.”

“Arrey, this meethi churri,” Moeen laughed, “what can I say to that?”

“No seriously, it would be great to hear about your experiences when you have a little time. We only know what we get told in our courses and it’s not a lot of information.”

“They were different times. Equipment was impossible to get hold of and everything had to be imported through the IMF or bought from foreign expeditions. If we were lucky, some stuff was left behind for us to use. Even trekking boots were so rare, we used to do most treks in army surplus canvas boots. Information on anything and everything had to be obtained from the government; you never knew before you started whether a route was viable or not, whether a pass was open or the weather was going to get bad,” he shrugged his shoulders. “We just assumed the worst even before we started.”

“It’s amazing what you managed to achieve in those circumstances!”

“You know, I nearly got a chance to go on an expedition with Chris Bonington. To climb Changabang.”

Moeen could see the doubt in his eyes. He knew Manish thought he was lying and was holding back from accusing him of it. This fat grey man, he must be thinking, telling bald-faced lies, hiding behind his age. You can’t see it if you look at me, he thought, but these are the same bones. Maybe everything else has changed but the bones are the same.

“I didn’t go. It didn’t happen. I never met him, which was a pity. He would have been about 55 then. I was 23 and I was going to be one of the junior guys on the expedition. It was either me or one of two other guys.”

“Then what happened?”

“Bas,” he smiled, “shaadi ho gayi. After that, I started my job full time and then I don’t know where the years went.”

That was how it had been, the short and long of it. He had come back from Satopanth at the end of October, thin, rangy and sunburnt, strands of his hair tangled so badly they would have to be cut free. He had sat cross-legged in the sitting room, eating his mother’s food, ravenous. Piles of rice and mutton curry, till he could barely move. His mother had looked at him with love, and fretted about his face, his sunburn, the red skin peeling off his nose.

“You look like a mazdoor,” she had said.

His father, however, had not been so indulgent.

“Enough is enough. You’ve had your fun, but now it’s time you grow up and become a man.”

He had gaped. If gutting yourself to climb the snow and ice faces of the big mountains was not manly, he couldn’t think what was.

“I’ve spoken with Javed Bhai. He has a very beautiful daughter.”

“Papa, I don’t have time for that yet. I’m very young.”

“I was married long before I got to your age. All your friends are married. Your brother is married, has a child and he’s only a year older. You are going to get married.” His tone was unmoving and firm.

Maybe if things had been different then, if the times had been different, Moeen had often thought. Maybe if his father had not always towered above him like the head of the family that he was – the comptroller of its purse strings, its absolute moral authority. Maybe, he had wondered, if he had shown more spine and strength, and asked for the life he wanted.

That winter, the nikaah happened and he had been more than happy at the time. Asifa was pale and beautiful. From under the thin veil she looked at him with a frankness that thrilled his bones. He was wearing a new achkan with gold thread edging. The whole community of Muzaffarabad had come to adore them. Javed Bhai had not stinged on the wedding, as his father had worried he might. There were more kinds of sweets and jalebis than anyone had seen before. In the crisp air of December ’90, Moeen was happily married. He started at Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited after his honeymoon.

By 1992, when the ITBP expedition had gone up Everest, Moeen was the father of a young child. He read about the summit in the newspapers and briefly thought that a few years ago he would at least have known about it – if not been on it himself. But it was another world. He had diapers to change and shifts to supervise. He was busy. He was happy. By 1996, when the big disaster happened on Everest, he was no longer sure he was happy.

Asifa’s low drone had developed into a perpetual shriek. His days were full of rancour, punctuated by office work. He went back to his father, to sit by him.

“Do you think I am happy?” his father asked him, “Do you think I am overjoyed every day?”

“Why wouldn’t you be?” Moeen had never imagined his father happy, sad, or as anything else but that exactly: his father, who did exactly the things his father did.

“I’m not, Moeen. There is no such thing as happiness the way you describe it. There is goodness and contentment, that’s all. You have a good job. You have a beautiful wife and two sweet children. If you started going to the masjid a little more, you could have a standing in the community. No one is beating you. No one is starving you.”

“In the mountains I used to be very happy. I used to wake up every day and be thankful.”

“Every child is happy playing in his patch of shit. That doesn’t mean anything. That’s not the real world. You get these stupid thoughts out of your head. It might have been good then, but it’s over now.”

There must be more to happiness than the absence of pain, thought Moeen. But he spent one night at home and then went back to Asifa and the kids. He reminded himself that he was not in pain.

The kids grew up. They went to school. They went to university. His son was an engineer like he had been. His daughter was a journalist. When they were younger, he had tried to take them up to the mountains. They went to Auli one spring in 2005. He took them walking up the ski slopes to look at the peaks. But Asifa complained that it was too cold and his younger one, his son, sat down instead of walking. Even Moeen felt breathless and his knee twinged. He had put on the weight of being 40 years old. Already his numbers had started to grow on their own and the doctor had started to give him grim warnings. Looking up at the line of perfect, immortal peaks – Neelkanth, Chaukhamba, Hathi–Ghori, to the black pyramid of Kamet in the distance – he felt defeated. He would never go into the mountains again. He knew then he would be forever tied down to a world he had never wanted.

Excerpted with permission from Redtooth: A Himalayan Horror Story, Satyajit Sarna, Hachette India.

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