Sikkim is filled with temple secrets, sprawling tea gardens, and waterfalls that flow down mountains and over roads. It oozes untamed lands, mysterious rituals, and unspoken words hidden in the folds of everything. This land swallowed me and showed me what it means for a place to be woven with mystery, for a place to haunt you long after you leave. But that is not where this story begins.
On a high hill over looking the Batasia Loop where the toy trains make stops coming and going from the city, we sat in our room and gazed toward the hill stations scattering the landscape. And in the far distance, Mount Kanchanjanga loomed high above the clouds. We sat in the our spacious, sparse room wrapped in our warmest clothes, attempting to acclimate to the high elevation and cold temperature--from Delhi to Darjeeling in one day is bound to shock anyone's system.
Five in the afternoon sunsets and late night dinners with the windows wide open. The alarmed looks we'd get when we asked for them to be shut. Climbing near vertical stairs that narrowly squeezed between the buildings etched into the mountainside, riding the train from the city back to our hotel as it wound around the cliffside in slow motion.
In the afterglow of the sunset, we followed the train tracks and made our way up the steep hill to our hotel. Like the vibe of Twin Peaks, one could easily lose themselves in the ambiance, the lurking surrealness, an underbelly of strange. But this was just the edge. We hadn't even crossed over into the vast, mystifying land of Sikkim yet.
Sikkim is a place you energetically feel and visually absorb. It's one that cultivates magic and holds secrets. And if you move slow enough and listen, it has layers of stories to tell. Themes of intrigue, meandering detours, and raw beauty dominated our entire trip. The towns, the villages, the temples, the mountains, the roads, the people all veiled behind something invisible and indescribable.
The iconography of all the Tibetan Buddhist temples throughout the state is wild enough to stir one's imagination in strange and dark directions. I think of The Lightness and the strange, dark path the characters go down as they dig deeper into the esoteric practices of Tibetan Buddhism that lead them nowhere good. I can see how and why it happened. I tend to lean into these hidden realms, exploring just far enough, but never so far as to lose myself. But Sikkim doesn't just lure you to the edge, it pushes you to the center and leaves you grasping for the familiar which is no longer there.
Olivia's journey began as something entirely different. Much like Richard from the Secret History or Samantha in Bunny, these characters were simply on a path that led them straight into the orbit of darkness with a gravitational pull so strong they couldn't escape. As the familiar falls away, they each lose sight of their path and begin a new journey with no sign posts or memory from where they came.
I stood in the small room at Pemayangtse Monastery and stared at the Tara covered walls. Stories of the goddess told through murals, her image ancient, yet evoking something much closer to me. In an early draft of my novel, there was a nameless minor character that stood in the background of everything happening around her. But a dear reader of that draft honed in on her and asked all the right questions. This is her story, my friend told me. This is who you are channeling. Ask her name and tell her story. By the final draft, Tara had become a far more important character than I had ever planned.
Tara, I later learned, is commonly translated as star or planet. When I dug a bit deeper, I discovered the root of the word comes from the verb "to cross" as in to cross over as stars and planets cross the sky. Without giving too much of my story away, the name represents my character to her core. To walk into this room and see this goddess painted across the walls felt more than a coincidence. It felt inevitable. Another reinforcement that when we stop looking and forcing meaning onto everything, it simply appears.
We crossed Sikkim from west to east and back again, hours in a car over one lane gravel roads that hugged cliff edges, moved across remnants of avalanches where boulders were still blocking half the road, through water fall flows that cascaded down mountainsides and over the roads. Getting from point A to point B was not for the faint of heart. But the majestic untamed wildness of it with eyes wide open, proved to be a risk worth taking.
We uncovered hidden gems tucked down steep city staircases and up endless ones etched into mountainsides. Within sacred spaces and behind locked doors. In cups of chai, pages of books, inscribed along the walls of a rare Hindu temple.
I could go on about all the wonders our trip entailed--from the mist and prayer flag covered peaks of Lake Tsomgo to getting caught up in Yuksom's local Diwali celebration that involved decorating cows and being serenaded by villagers in the night. Precarious hikes and leech attacks. Quaint bookshops and cozy libraries. But I will end with a story about ghosts and shadows.
After nearly not finding a ride out of Yuksom, we ended up on a three hour detour that landed us in Rinchenpong--a far flung, rundown village on the edge of nowhere. Most guesthouses were shuttered and many buildings abandoned. Clouds covered the view of Kanchenjanga, and life shuffled around us as though we were ghosts floating through the town.
One hundred years prior, Russian painter Nicholas Roerich had passed through painting some of his most well known works of the Himalayan Mountains. And not too many years before that, Rabinranath Tagore had written one of his Nobel winning poems there. It was easy to picture the place 100 years prior as not much developed over those years, a forgotten place existing in the shadow of the mountains, haunted by what was or what could have been, where people pass through and feel the distances between. We didn't linger too long, and being in our most remote, off the beaten track destination, we were once again nearly stuck.
Unlike the characters in The Lightness or my character Tara, I've crossed back from somewhere otherworldly with stories and impressions that I carry with me. These days I'm not so sure I ever fully cross from point A to point B, but continue to traverse layers of places and stories and people, including myself.
