The road ends four kilometres short of Thangkhar, which is the first thing anyone tells you about the village and the last thing they need to. Everything after that — the load you carry, the hour you arrive, the person who meets you — follows from the gap between the last hairpin and the first house.

I walked in on a Thursday in late September, behind a man named Pema who was carrying two hundred eggs in a wicker frame and did not once look down at his feet.

The valley below Thangkhar
The last of the monsoon cloud clears off the ridge above Thangkhar. For six weeks each year the walk-in is a river of mud; for the rest, it is the only street the village has.Photograph by Ajith M

A village measured in walking hours

There are eleven households in Thangkhar and, at the time I visited, forty-three people. That number moves. It swells at harvest, when sons come back from Leh and Manali with cash and city haircuts, and it shrinks again by November, when the pass closes and the arithmetic of a winter here becomes serious.

What does not move is the barley. Every household still plants it, even those who no longer need to, because the terraces are the reason the slope has not slid into the river in three hundred years.

Dolma at her loom
Dolma has woven the same border pattern since she was fourteen. She can no longer say who taught her the sequence.Photograph by Ajith M
Barley drying on a roof
Barley dries on a flat roof in the last usable light of the day. By the first week of October, every roof in the village looks like this.Photograph by Ajith M

Pema set the eggs down outside the third house and shouted a name I did not catch. A door opened. Tea arrived before introductions did, which is the order of things here, and by the time I had finished the first cup I had been assigned a room, a blanket and an opinion about the road.

“If the road comes, the young ones stay. If the road comes, the young ones leave. Both are true. We are only arguing about which happens first.”
Pema Tsering, farmer

The road is the argument that has run through Thangkhar for eleven years. A survey team came in 2015, drove stakes into the slope above the third switchback, and left. The stakes are still there. Nobody has pulled them out, which tells you something, and nobody has cut the trees below them either, which tells you the rest.

What a morning looks like

It starts at the water channel. Someone walks the length of it before light, clearing leaves, and whoever that is on a given morning has the right to be short with everyone for the rest of the day.

The water channel at dawn
The channel is cleared by hand every morning, in rotation.
A kitchen at first light
Kitchens face east. Nobody could tell me whether that was rule or habit.
Tools against a wall
Tools live outside. Theft is not a category anyone here uses.
Photographs by Ajith M

By eight the terraces are full. By noon they are empty again, and the village has the particular stillness of a place where everyone is somewhere specific.

The upper terraces after cutting
The upper terraces, three days after cutting. The stubble is left standing until the first snow flattens it.Photograph by Ajith M

I left on the Sunday, downhill, which takes half the time and costs twice as much in knees. Pema walked the first kilometre with me and then stopped where the trees start, the way people do when they have decided the goodbye happens here and not at the road.