Alchi. A mountain looked like a great Buddha, its face smooth, leaning back, facing the sun. There was a long row of chortens close by, white and disintegrating, like forgotten footsoldiers. I’d recently been reading about a chorten in a village that supposedly had a cow’s head in it. I started mentally populating those here with bizarre and macabre things, blood and charmed bones, hand-painted scrolls and carved emeralds as the cab drove past them, the road winding up and up.

We passed mountains, brown and grey and purple-pink, spectacular and bare.

The monastery would close at one for lunch. There was no time, I thought, hurrying past the stalls selling horns with dragon mouths, singing bowls and vajra -headed bells, no time at all to see everything. I thought of the walls I had read about, alive with paintings. It would be like Tabo, I thought, in Spiti valley, where I’d gone the previous year and had lingered for as long as I was able, the mysterious thousand-year-old Buddhist temples immersive and haunting.

I’d come here from dusty Leh, to the one place I wanted to see most in Ladakh, on the last day of a too-long and tiring trip. I’d finally booked the return tickets that morning, unwilling to stay even a day longer, feeling inexplicably stretched thin and exhausted.

There was a monk sitting on a bench outside the three-storey Sum-tsek temple in the sun-bright compound as I paused at the map and looked at the number of temples there were, the chortens with paintings in them; and another man who got up from a bench as we came, and went to sit at a table near the temple door, rooting in a drawer for the ticket booklet.

A thousand years old, almost, I said, and started taking off my shoes, looking at the fragile carved wood framing the temple, at the door that hid everything within from view.

“It looks like we’re going to war with Pakistan,” said the monk.

“Tomorrow,” said the ticket-seller.

I stood there, one shoe hanging limply in my hand.

“What?”

“It’s a good thing,” said the ticket seller, a little sternly. “Look at what they’ve done!”

“But what happened?”

“You don’t know what happened in Uri?” said the monk. “So many of our jawans killed. We need war.”

“There should be war,” said the ticket seller, “because if we don’t stop them now –”

I must have said something, because now the monk and the ticket seller looked at me with disapproval.

“War is good," said the monk. "It is necessary. Don’t you watch the news?”

I went into the temple, blinded by going from the afternoon light into the dark, looking perfunctorily at the murals I had so much wanted to see for so long, forgetting the torch I had packed to look at them, mind reeling.

It didn’t feel like Tabo. I saw people looking at painted walls with torches in their hands.

I looked unseeing, at the rows upon rows of Buddhas, the ascetics, the lush, gorgeous Green Tara, the nobles, feasting and hawking and hunting, people with finely braided hair, in silks and jewels, palm trees, figures in tiger skin, the paintings of a hell with dismembered limbs. I looked at the mastery of painters that had travelled from Iran, maybe, and Kashmir, at stories and lives, meanings and symbols of Vajrayana Buddhism painted on walls that I did not understand.

I looked up at the statues of the Bodhisattvas; the crowned Maitreya, waiting to bring enlightenment; at the towering Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of compassion, at the intricate designs on his dhoti – possibly portraits of actual cities of that time; at the cloth patterns on the ceiling in the filtering sunlight; at goddesses, suspended for nine hundred years in flight. At the last vestiges of a vibrant culture and civilization which were here in this fragile, living temple that somehow, by accident or miracle or both, had managed to survive.

I felt nothing like I had in Tabo. I tried — I tried to feel, because maybe I would never be here again, and these paintings were what I had longed to see, to be immersed in. What I felt was disassociation, and overreaching sadness, and fear.

I thought now of the elaborate painting I had seen in a book years ago, of a swordsman on a horse bearing down, his robes swirling about him. Did I remember right? Was that painting at Alchi? I came out. The monk had gone.

“There was a painting I’d seen in a book — a man with a sword on a horse. Do you know where that is?”

“It’s there,” said the ticket-seller, waving at a spot behind his back, on one of the top stories. “And I’ve seen you before. You bring people here every year. Tourists.”

No, I said, I hadn’t. He looked at me knowingly. “Your painting is right inside,” he said. “Right up. You can see it.”

There was no way to go up. No way for me, or for anyone, to really examine what was on the floors above; at the paintings, at the mandalas high up on the walls that those lamas centuries ago must have seen, been surrounded by, the maps of higher worlds that you must be able to read to understand.

I stood on the ground and tried to look for the painting, but try as I might, I couldn’t see the horseman. No horseman, and no sword.

Suhasini Kamble is a Mumbai-based freelance writer

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