Arrival

Four wedding guests disembark separately from the Dhauladhar Express at the Pathankot train station in the state of Punjab.

Yosh, the yoga teacher, arrives a day before the others, from Vancouver. He has come reluctantly, to work for tourists in the country he vowed to leave behind once and for all five years ago. His father is a millionaire in American dollars now, but many in India have not forgotten that his family was once deemed untouchable. He grips one wrist nervously.

Monica arrives from Toronto with maps and pink fingernails. She buys trinkets and garments — souvenirs to fill her spacious suitcase — ignoring her shrinking bank balance. She has not yet told her family the truth.

As Reema steps off the train onto the platform, she searches for her Indianness: something that might be bred in bone, or skin, or song, because she left this country before she could speak. The text messages from her Scottish boyfriend arrive with a dissonant ping in the Indian soundscape. She places a hand on her hip.

And then there is Jackson, knees brittle, a coin he has carried for fifty-four years tucked into his shirt pocket. As he sees Reema’s hand fall from her hip towards her thigh, a crack splinters in his memory that lets dread through. Unknowingly Reema has brought with her a key that fits the door he had once locked tight. With only one task left to complete, he leaves the train station with strange whispers in his ear.

The stratosphere is dust and water, as well as particles — oxygen and nitrogen — so small that they are imperceptible. They make the sky blue. From here it’s all one shade of blue. But there … remember? There, all the colours seem separate, individual, the way the sky over the Himalayas has to stand back so as not to be pierced by the snow-capped peaks. Perhaps that trick of light is responsible for Jackson’s blindness all those years — in fact for his whole life? And perhaps the slanted light accounts for Reema’s fortitude.

No.

During those few weeks, snow and fire felt composed of the same chemical elements.

At a small train station in a town called Pathankot, four people with unrelated desires arrived for a wedding. Weddings are mirages; these four had no idea they would climb a mountain together and see different things from the top.