No hills closer at hand would do. Not the Nilgiris, nor the entire Western Ghats. It had to be the Himalaya – it would be impossible for me to understand why until I experienced it, Michael told me, and one day I would. Meanwhile, each year, the rucksack and sleeping bag came out and his body left in the trail of his mind, which was already 9,000 feet above sea level and climbing.
One year, Michael decided to go on a trek to Roopkund, a lake in the Himalaya at about 16,000 feet. It is reached by a long, hard climb towards the Trishul, a snow peak that is more than 22,000 feet high. For much of the year, its water remains frozen. A park ranger stumbled upon the lake in 1942 and it has been an enigma ever since: it contains bones and skulls, preserved by the cold, of some six hundred people who died there in the ninth century, some say the sixth. Many of the skeletons wore gold anklets, bracelets, necklaces and bangles. Six hundred travellers at that altitude, in that stark wilderness – where were they going? Impossible to tell: there was no known route from Roopkund to Tibet, or to anywhere else. How did they die? Archaeologists think they may have been caught in an avalanche or hit by large hailstones: there are tennis ball-sized dents on many of the skulls.
The bones were stripped of their jewellery and most of them were left where they were. And there they have remained, although memento-seekers have carried off bits and pieces as trophies. Even now, each time the lake melts during the monsoon, bones and skulls float in the water and wash up at its edges.
Michael had tried to reach Roopkund once before and failed because of bad weather and lack of experience. This time, he had better equipment, he said; he was timing it differently, he knew what to expect. Even so, I felt a cloud of dread grow and darken as the day for his departure neared. I found myself looking at him with an intensity I had forgotten over six years of being married to him. The smell of him, which I breathed in deep as if to store inside me, the bump on his nose where it had been broken when he was a boy, the early lines of grey in his hair, the way he cleared his throat mid-sentence and pulled at his earlobes when thinking hard.
He knew I was worrying, and the night before he left, as I lay on my stomach and his fingers wandered my tense back and aching neck, he told me in a voice hardly more than a murmur about the route: the trek was not really difficult, he said, it only sounded as if it was. His fingers went down my spine and up my neck while an iron ball of fear grew heavier inside me. Many had done it before, he said. The rains and snow would have retreated from that altitude by the time they reached it; there would be wildflowers all over the high meadows on their route. His hands worked their way from my legs to my shoulders, finding knotted muscles, teasing them loose before he returned to my back. The boots, sleeping bag, tent, would be checked, every zip tried, every rope tested. The bulbs and batteries in his headlamp were new; he would get himself better sunglasses in Delhi. It was as if he was running through a list in his head.
Each item he mentioned reminded me of things that could go wrong. I did not want to know any more. I touched his always fast-growing stubble and I think I said, “By the time you’re home you’ll have a beard again, like every other time.” My fingers held the inch or two of fat he had recently grown at his waist. “And you’ll have lost this. You’ll be thin and starved.”
“Completely starved,” he said. “Lean and hungry.” His teeth tugged at my earlobes. He stretched over me to switch on the shaded lamp by our bed and traced with his eyes every curve of my face and the dimple in my chin. “Why did he marry this girl?” he said in a voice that imitated the stereotypical older relative. “Why did he marry this stick-thin girl, as dark as boot polish? All you can see in her face are her big eyes.” He ran his fingers through the tangled mass