Pahadon ka Mausam, aur Dilli ka Fashion – dono badalte rahte hai

I write this post as a renegade, with hands trembling under the weight of a forgotten past. I entered law school over three years ago. And over three years ago, I last published on this blog. Somewhere along the way, I stopped writing. Held hostage by the unsparing drudgery of a law student’s life, I gave up writing for me – writing for the love of it; writing whose colour was not bleached black-and-white in legalese.

Perhaps it was the insipidity of my university that choked and silenced me. Perhaps I caged myself in a paracosm of excuses and never tried hard enough. Either way, I write today to reclaim a part of me I grew up loving and nurturing. The law books jostling for attention on my table are witnesses to it. And if you are reading this, so are you.

***

It’s five in the evening on the 29th of September. The car halts in the middle of nowhere. After ten hours on backbreaking roads, we spill out to breathe life back into ourselves. The world shall spin for four more hours and shroud itself in darkness until we reach the homestay at Bawta.

We are greeted by cold cumulus clouds pulled roughly against our faces by hurrying winds – a foreboding sign that it’s going to be colder up there at the summit. I bury my hands in the pockets of my jacket and look at the cause of our halt. Or, should I say, the absence of it, for there is no road ahead. It’s hillside on one end, a hole in between, and Heaven on the other. And two JCB Backhoe Loaders toil to fill the earthly gap with earth.  I remember how Ma and I sighed hopelessly when the driver had jettisoned an empty bottle of Mountain Dew, finding no space for it in a twelve-seater car. Somewhere in the valley, a plastic missile had created another hole in the earth.

Koo and Kim had travelled all the way from South Korea, and Max all the way from Israel, for the trek. I was amazed. It takes a certain madness to climb mountains. You consciously choose to risk your life to understand it better. But to climb mountains of an unfamiliar land with unfamiliar people who speak an unfamiliar language is to repose all your trust in the goodness of the world. I asked Koo the meaning of his three-part name the next morning at Bawta. “Melting, politics, and academics”, he said. He was identified by a combination of words whose cultural significance I could only imagine.

Max, on the other hand, was loremaxxing (bad pun, agreed). He had sojourned in India long enough to have come to love rotis, haggle with shopkeepers, and survive Delhi. “If you want to talk to any Indian, talk about food, cricket, or Bollywood” – armed with his knowledge of butter chicken and idlis and Virat Kohli and Ranbir Kapoor, Max had cracked the Indian cheat code. When we arrive at a river crossing, I see him climb up a rock by the riverside. Our group is busy clicking pictures, reducing beauty to pixels to reminisce over later. But Max chooses to sit in solitude, humbly submitting to the might of a vagrant river heading in its reckless youth towards the seas. Like the river, I see him exploring himself and gushing towards the sea of life.

***

Sakshit, our trek guide, and I belonged to two different worlds. The only thing he and I shared was our age. He had grown up amidst the mountains, and the mountains had grown in on him. While we shivered to death at the campsites, resurrecting beneath shrouds of clothes on for warmth, Sakshit lay in his tent, wearing a pair of shorts as if that were the most natural thing to do. Ma and I had escaped our realities to come and experience what home was to him.

On one of those cold nights up there, as we all huddled up in a room at the homestay for the next day’s briefing, the title of this blogpost emerged. “Pahadon ka Mausam, aur Dilli ka Fashion – dono badalte rahte hai” – Sakshit quipped in his sing-song way. All heads turned towards Parv, who was from Delhi. He nodded approvingly, and we now knew what to make out of Delhi’s fashion. Parv was, as Sakshit monikered him, a “Bisleri baby” – a ghazal as opposed to the harsh “Dilli Se Hu BC” rap. But unlike the strict rules that ghazals follow, Parv was living life on his own terms. Midway through engineering college, he made the brave decision to quit and start afresh, realising that life was too short for him to end up doing something he hated. If you are reading this, Parv, I know you will have it all figured out. Life is like the Turkish ice cream game we played in Shimla – we order ice cream, keep reaching for it, miss many times, laugh at ourselves, but eventually end up holding the thing we sought for in our hands.

I, for one, sought a lamb and eventually ended up holding it in my hands. The mountains were sequined with white furry dots led by furry mountain dogs. Anywhere you looked, sheep were staring back at you. Every mountain ledge was buried beneath an avalanche of white wool, and we humbly waited for our turn to pass through. The shepherds carried the smallest of the lambs and tiny puppies in backpacks slung across their shoulders. Or, sometimes, they coddled them in their arms, more than happy to let people like me love them almost as much as they did.

I miss holding a hot plate of dal and rice, my feet dangling over the edge of a mountain, looking at a Windows wallpaper landscape not on a screen but in real life. I miss waking up in the middle of the night, stepping out of the tent, and being engulfed by an infinite sky freckled with stars. I miss playing Mafia with the group and dancing at Dussehra around a burnt cardboard effigy of Ravan high up in the mountains. I remember the Rupin gulley – the final climb before the summit, the steepest and most dangerous stretch of the entire trek. The gulley was almost vertical and made up entirely of loosely placed boulders waiting to shift beneath our feet. A rocky death lurked at every wrong step, and the measly helmets we had been given especially for the gulley were of little consequence. Ma and I were scared – scared for ourselves, scared for each other. But we made it. And we screamed our hearts out as we hung on to life for more time to come. Triumph, like Turkish ice cream, tasted sweetest then when we eventually held it in our hands.

***

“Time is such a damn thief – you don’t notice what it’s stealing from you”. It’s 12:30 AM on the 16th of May, 2026. In a few more days, I will be done with the 3rd year of my life at law school. I am grateful that I found my way back to writing before entering the final stretch of university.

I look at the pictures from the treks with my mom and dad. I see not Ma and Pa, but Tasneem and Murtuza – back when they were young, free from obligations, untouched by the harshness the world would later hand them. It took mountains to breathe life back into the inner children within them, and I am proud of the people they have become.

As for me, I have been fortunate to have trekked with my parents, to have them and Mus by my side, and to have met and been loved by wonderful people at law school. Three beautiful years have gone by, and two more beautiful years will.

- Hussain