Yesterday, pouring rain in Manali. Cold. Today, hot springs! In the open-air grey-walled pool for gents, Ganesh the elephant god of prophesy presides from within a white stone, all of us in underpants, wading the grey steaming water, sulphurous-smelling, a slight stink of matches, so hot my skin goes pink soon as I get in, & I am stoned from the heat of it. About twenty-five of us in total, bathing, feet-washing, in yoga postures, chatting, or just breathing. The father of a family from Mumbai owns a neat mustache, eyes me from the centre of the pool, & exclaims, throwing up his hands, “India climate!” We look up at the ominous El Greco clouds. A sadhu with black beard & long hair drifts past in the water like an otter, then vanishes underwater for a long time. He climbs out slow onto the edge tiles & holds a tricky yoga pose, his hairy brown skin steaming. His eyes are dark & powerful & give away nothing. They are beautiful.

Two children, girl & boy, appear at the top of the wall beside us & peer down with brown cherubim faces. They drop white rose petals on us, from a bush up there, which float down like snow onto the sadhu & the Mumbai family & the water. They also let fall an orange mask, by mistake, which hovers in the water face-up for a minute. The Mumbai father puts it on and takes the fierce bow-&-arrow position of a god, & the children laugh. He tries to throw the mask back up to them but it’s too light, & after two tries gives up, waving his hand in dismissal.

Off to Banff in a few days—another odd mountain town, other side of the world—for a third cool springtime. Goodbye to my lovely friend, Tiina! Hello Canada, first time this year. I have no idea what to think of this. I plug my nose, shut my eyes, & submerge myself in the murky holy water beside the sadhu.

I meet my lovely mother at the airport. She is wide-eyed, drinking in all she sees, taking slow pictures of chaotic broiling Delhi (now over 40 degrees) & Najafgargh with the great patience that has always provided balance to my father & me. On our morning train ride north, toward the hill stations, crossing Punjab’s endless fields of sun-golden wheat, the heat rises & our car overpacked with Sikh boys & Hindu grandmas wilts. My nausea has passed, but I am still weak.

In the evening we arrive at Dharamsala to meet Tiina. She studies Tibetan buddhism & has lived a year of her life here, home of the exiled Tibetans & the Dalai Lama, who attends tonight a high-profile cricket game (between the Punjab Kings & the Deccan Chargers) that has brought half of India to Lower Dharamsala this week. MacLeod Ganj, the upper village, is such a cool & calm relief after Delhi. We eat breakfast (chocolate pancakes, fruit & honey with curd, filtered coffee (ie not Nescafe!)) on a balcony at Carpe Diem, the Nepali place, with a clear view of the Kangra Valley below the Dhauladar Mountains. It’s breathtaking here, the servants’ entrance to the Himalayas. Hillside houses, nestled shyly between coniferous trees, festooned with miles of bright prayer flags, are yellow & pink & blue & white. A hawk circles very close & slow at eye level. A small brown monkey descends calmly the drainpipe of an adjoining rooftop.

Still, I’m holding on a little tight. I can’t get that fella’s smile out of my head, the one with the sad leg. On Bhagsu Road an Indian man squatting on a low roof offers my mother & me hash. “No thank you,” I say. “What did he say?” my mother asks. She is taking pictures of two Tibetan women carrying great loads up a steep winding stairwell. A monk with a devilish twinkle drifts past carrying a flat of eggs.

This is a complicated place. The mix of people laying claim is precarious. There are the Indians from this region, Himachal Pradesh; the Tibetans who were born here & speak Hindi & intermarry; the newly-arrived from Tibet Tibetans, who often marry westerners & move to Europe or Australia; the drug-addled Tibetans; the loveable Tibetan monks, in bright reds & yellows, with mobile phones & sharp sneakers, who always seem to be chuckling to themselves or kicking a ball with children; the Indian beggars squatting along the road empty-handed or sliding a bow across a dusty zither; the bougey tourists with expensive luggage, noses in their Lonely Planet guides; the hardened travelers in kurta pyjamas & dreads & dangling earrings & muddy sandals, with faroff looks, from no country any more. This masala of beings is a bit like the minor traffic jams that happen on stairwells, between dogs & monkeys & cows & goats & chickens.

Last year somebody set fire to a bunch of motorcycles, & the Indians blamed the Tibetans & attacked Tibetan shops, smashing their figurines & bells. A few years back a Tibetan nun was raped. Recently, a tourist’s head was found in the underbrush of Upper Bhagsu.

About 100 years ago there was an earthquake at MacLeod Ganj that leveled it. Some Tibetans believe that the presence of the Dalai Lama prevents another such. But this place—so peaceful & violent, such a great example of integration, with all the pain of wounded India & these exiles shored against the mountains—is a kind of mirage. One shudder wipes the slate. Because we hurt we understand. I really think I should’ve bought that fella an omelet.

Like clock hands made of people, the rough living morass turns. Some westerners have that I-don’t-believe-in-anything-but-I-will-go-with-the-flow look, or the I-am-actually-a-deadly-serious-religious-guy look, or are just shopping at the perimeter shops (that’s me, I bought a mala). There is too the kindness of hands laid across a child’s head, the heartfelt namaste, soaked in rain, the open face of believers, thunder. To rediscover the joyful energy of children! The Tibetans twinkle, often smiling & laughing. This is on a very old path out of Tibet. They’ve passed here for centuries, founding many monasteries nearby.

I need this place today. Last night I couldn’t sleep. My muscles are heavy, recovering from sickness. Despite my pissiness & ingratitude & shame, Luck finds me sipping masala tea, beside a flickering candle. Beyond all sense, She wants to forgive me, urgently, responding Yes to all my No’s. How can I let my sadness go, I ask Her, in this rain? How can I just be wet?

The sky grey & powerful, raining steadily, sparked every few moments by branches of light, like bones of an x-ray, & atrocious thunder. In overpowering incense, a Nepali covered in dirt is drunk & wrestling an invisible bear. A motorcycle whizzes by on the red bricks, honking. Tiina is ecstatic, eyes big. We join the lovely circling parade & are soaked. The hour when light changes every minute, every second. I have been suckled & schooled on irony, so why do I like to see people worship so much? Just as the torrent begins, we reach the Double Dorjee restaurant & duck into the candlelight for momos & thukpa soup.

At its main Tiananmen Gate hangs a banner with the glacial visage of Mao Tsetung. (I open up my shiny new copy of Mao’s red book & read, Everything reactionary is the same; if you don’t hit it, it won’t fall. This is also like sweeping the floor; as a rule, where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.) Across the street, Tiananmen Square is the biggest & ugliest piazza on earth. It strangulates. So much walking space, but all made of oppressive brutalist concrete. The opposite of freedom: raw power. Architecturally, it’s a kind of cult classic in the tradition of “Casablanca,” piecing together archetypal clichés from a slew of cultures: an Egyptian-style obelisk (“Monument to the People’s Heroes”), Russian-style statues of communist proles (in front of Mao’s huge mausoleum), Corinthian columns, & sixteen giant red flags à la the Nuremberg rallies. The result is Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

People are the same everywhere, no? We try to be kind. We try to be brave. We are fragile. A single act of carelessness ruins us. But politicos & their bureaucrats are also (usually) the same everywhere. We begin to believe in Big Ideas. We are offered compensation for compromise. We learn to sleep beside our own inhumanity. The Beijing Patriotic Health Campaign Committee suggests—blithely, ubiquitously—that we Do Not Smoke, although we have all of us witnessed, at the margins of the Chinese capital, the far-flung waste produced by the state & its nuclear smokestacks.

On the streets, military is pandemic. Boys in oversized green stormtrooper coats, waists like ballerinas, stand at attention in doorways, on pedestals, under flags. Around them, on the streets of the bright lovely Xuan Wu district, kids with Green Day hair wave Maoist red flags for digital pics while holding up two fingers sideways like Ali G. A man with an irretrievable expression drifts past clicking together two walnuts in his left palm. Electric scooters & bicycles wind among the people in constellations of silence.

Acrid smoke, pork tang in smog, burnt soy sauce, sulfur, grilled chicken stinging the eyes, dust. Red lanterns behind a grey gauzy lens, rice paper windows. Temple roofs curved to ward off the evil of straight lines. O’erhanging eaves, red tiles, roof charms. A high-pitched scream, eternal loss. Dogs in doorways, dumplings. Loud spitting. In the stones, imperial dragons. A bronze lion. Crouching tiger with a bright pearl in its mouth. In the walking tunnel under Tiananmen Square, a man low on his knees, left hand missing. Bowing so slowly, up & down. Causeful.

A long wide snowy valley ringed by mountains sharp & low, like the great open jaws of a dead god. Inga is our imperturbable guide/cook & Tascar is our driver, steering the Range Rover though the snowdrifts & endless swirling non-roads with loose precision. We stay overnight with a nomadic goatherd family whose lovely ger (yurt) glows at sundown like a little white circus tent. The mother & father wear the traditional long robes (deel) & golden sashes (bus). Their toddler girl chases down newborn sheep & goats & hauls them around with round-faced glee.

Cold springtime! Severed goat hooves in the dirt. Vertebrae & horns & all variety of animal bits are scattered about among discarded Sprite bottles & new-age waste. A few cows & horses lie frozen & arched, half-covered by duvets of snow.

Days blend. On the road there’s nobody for hours. Now & then a hawk seated beside the road. We veer around two monks sitting cross-legged on the asphalt. A man speeds past in the snow on a low-powered motorcycle, fur gloves fixed to the handlebars, in his deel & bus & ornate hat as if he’d just buzzed out of the 12th century. On the Ogii Lake, ragged snowdrifts like the bleached & smashed mandibles of goats. Ice fishermen in the distance. Blue Buddhist ribbons wrapped around frigid trees. The ice creaks wetly, bleerk, bleerk, blaark. I am worn out. My knee is twisted & swollen. I lost my favorite ring.

Inside a ger, women feed the stove with dung. On a solar-powered black & white TV, the famous Mongolian sumo wrestler Asashōryū Akinori—ancient, unsmiling, like a late Marlon Brando—has returned from Japan & holds forth to reporters in an eloquent whisper. We are spectres under the oculus, in smoky blue-grey dusk. Inga, after speaking to her boyfriend who’s in Korea, sits by herself in the starry dark in her fur hat, singing softly. All night the goats cry like baby humans.

Hills of frozen animals along the road attest to the coldest winter in fifty years. On the vast grey plains, under mountains that will never unthaw, a cow wearing a leather blanket grazes beside the corpses of her dead ancestors. Starlings crisscross like whims. Ravens, mock-khaans of this bright inferno, prance atop a pile of horses trussed in a motionless gallop, as if straining to haul themselves out of this white sea of death.

The Chinese major-domo will not smile but presides over our dreams with grace, shelling dreams, a retainer of the underworld, on this single endless passageway. Our Kafka, our Dalì, our Murakami. He transcribes my rêve, the one about breathing underwater, into his log. He scowls over the sink, elbow-deep in pig viscera.

In daytime the dream brightens, but veiled. We pull out of the turquoise Omsk station, pass its broken-legged grain elevators, its old women sweeping snow with their armfuls of sticks. Countless towns of great fuel tanks like the discarded coffee cups of gods. Dmitri, lonesome & hammered, smashes the small table with his fist & roars “это нормально!” soaking one of the Dutch girls with gherkin juice. The tall birch trees of Kirov reach for heaven but give up part way. We do not have enough blood to stain this snow, not all of it.

It’s a mistake to think of the train on a single track, or that we are moving through time, or that we are moving at all. We’re so still it’s unbearable. Thus the fantasy of such fluid movement, in which we take childlike joy, like birthing or breathing that rocks us to sleep & permits us to enter our dreams as through a door left ajar by the Chinese major-domo. It’s a mistake to think the train exists in space. It provides us with the blur-line of snow because that is all we can comprehend. If you hear a baby crying or a chicken skreighing behind a door, ignore them, ignore all the cubbyholes of lovers, card-players, shadowy readers, whispering quarrelers, the way you might ignore one of your own chaotic or murderous thoughts.

Suddenly a frozen river, the scroll unfolds, eternity, still as ever. But we shake, the samovar drips, the moon rises over the tall hats of Krasnoyarsk. And, as everywhere, technology is mankind’s imbecil. Men huddle before an oil tank, before a lime-green power shack. Electrical poles, our mute witnesses, arms broken, die in the snow. In Novosibirsk, tinny speakers bleat the ontology of discipline.

The rusted stairs of Tyumen! Potato piroshki five roubles. Lumber, lumber, lumber. Shaving is hard, water freezing. Snow collects between cars. Houses yellow as the constant toilet urine. The snowy roofs of Angarsk! The green fences of Ilanskaya! The train thinks for us, works for us, like a prophet, & we do not thank it or even notice. We who are separate, scared, tired, lonely, clean. Too clean. The train asks us, How did you get this clean? Our melancholy, we say. Our delight. Boo-huh, it breathes, boo-huh, boo-huh . . .

Imagining there is a train is a misconception. Yet on Day Three you have always been inside it & it breathes, drifts away from a sunset bleak as if the man you loved had vanished around a corner, or had never existed. They are rolling bones in the next cabin, you can feel it, the sky yellow, almost-white, going blue. Pink. Grey. Purple. When the stars appear colour drains. Snow falls like nothingness, leaving houses grey & shrunken, infinite cobalt blue. The referent vanishes & all you believed to be true is true, & near.