A Himalayan Poem in Twelve Breathes
This is a village that time forgot... and in forgetting, it received a kind of blessing. From spiced rings that warm the blood to roads that bow before white giants, Astam holds the old magic of Nepal.
In the Path of Hooves and Hunger: East Africa in Motion
Their long necks leaned into our open palms and something in their grace made time loosen its grip. Two young giraffes leaned over the railing, their dark eyes reflective, their lashes long as reeds. Their tongues, rough and wet, brushed our hands, curling for the small pellets we held between our fingers. The platform lifted us high enough to meet them eye to eye. We…
Big A and The Questions Beneath the Question
Dear Big A, I am not standing at a crossroads about school. It is more like the point every parent eventually reaches whether she expects it or not, when the path that carried the child this far begins to thin out, the signposts grow fewer, and the child must begin, little by little, to cut his own trail through the forest. It is not alarming…
Unearthed Settling onto New Shelves
Thamel is in full voice. The streets shout, scooters argue, cables sag and tangle themselves into incomprehensible knots. When the city swells to that pitch, I seek refuge. I look for bookshops the way others look for chai. A quiet banner interrupts the commotion: Pilgrims Book Shop. A fitting name for one who feels like a pilgrim in a marketplace that needs rescuing. I slip…
Once the Interior Goes Quiet, No Technology Will Bring It Back
Dear Conscience, I am writing from a place where the signal sometimes drops. Not metaphorically, but literally. There are stretches here in the Himalayas where the network hesitates, messages stall mid-sentence and meaning buffers. It is in these pauses that I begin to hear other things again. I hear the wind rustling through the forest in my backyard, the stream trickling over a dry winter,…
Hail Kali: On Milk, Myth, and Muscle Ache
Kali, our beloved buffalo, has recently given birth and decided that scarcity is a ridiculous concept. Postpartum and positively luminous in her own way, she produces milk in quantities that feel vaguely mythological, even after Seti, her beautiful calf, has drunk herself into a blissful stupor. By nature’s design, the more suckled, the more the maternal body gives. In this generous economy, human hands coax…
Written Under the Influence of Mr Dick
Dear Mr Dickens, I write to you once again, in dire need of answers. Having finished David Copperfield with immense delight, I naturally proceeded, without rest or restraint, to another of your mammoths, Bleak House. And what an opening it is. London swallowed by fog, the air thick with implication. I know in my bones that I shall love this book dearly as the other…
A Letter to Charles Dickens
Dear Mr Dickens, I hope you will forgive this intrusion. I realise it is poor manners to summon a gentleman from his grave but I have been living with A Tale of Two Cities all week and you have left me no peace. Do you suppose that this might be one of your more accomplished works? It’s terribly tight and tidy. At the same time,…
At 30, I loved It. At 10, He Sees It
There are moments in life when I feel less like a storyteller and more like a conduit, as if the pieces of a puzzle have been scattered across the years, waiting patiently for me to grow into the shape that could finally see them. The dark before dawn is one of those hours. The sky is dark, the world hushed, and dawn is still an…
The Cloud That Forgot Its Shape
There are mornings when the sky becomes an old friend.One that has always been there, just waiting.These sightings came from such a morning. But what rose from them was not just sky, but a conversation.Not with me, but between cloud and sky.A few minutes taken, a few minutes paused, walking from one kitchen to the other. I. ARRIVAL Cloud:I am here.And I do not know…
Because The Sky Has Never Belonged to Us
Rob asked me this evening about living without heating in our home. I carried the question into the shower, a hot shower powered by solar energy. Free, clean, abundant. But only when the sun remembers us. And so I shower in whatever truth the sky chooses. There is comfort but not the guaranteed kind. Not the mechanical certainty of a clock striking on cue. Some…
Big A’s Best Investment Yet
Dear Big A, You may not realise it, but you have just pulled off a quiet coup. You made the call first. Somewhere between a game of chess and one of your YouTube rabbit holes on Rucka Rucka Ali, you decided that you wanted school. I spent weeks circling the idea like a nervous mom on trial for taking her kids out of the schooling…
I Sit Inside the Storm and She Sits Inside Me
The storm did not arrive; she erupted. Spitting and splitting the air that I was already breathing inside her fracture. A tempest she was, refusing to remain outside and instead, unfolded behind my eyelids tasting of iron and damp stone. I did not dare enter her but she entered me and I recognised the trespass as fear. The walls of the room trembled but it…
Notes Between My Two Selves
This isn’t in the book. Maybe it should have been. The words didn’t come until we settled back in the quietude of Astam, after the pages were printed and bound, and after the book was passed from my hands to family and friends. My truth is already out there, bare. When the noise hushed, when bird song from the forest replaced the hum of condensers…
After Six Himalayan Years, A Book Finds Its Voice
Before the rain, the hills are like half-stories told. The kind that simmers just beneath the skin of the day, gathering weight in the silence. The grasses stand like sentences waiting for their final word, the rocks like punctuation, full stops held in place by time. The soil is dry but not indifferent. It listens. It remembers. Each root is a bookmark, holding its place…
A New Horizon for the Cloud
Photograph by Sameer Tuladhar When Clouds on Tour began, I didn’t know where the path would lead.I only knew we needed to move, to listen, to build something with our hands and hearts, even if we didn’t yet know its shape. Years later, the road behind us is lined with the small, stubborn miracles that only hindsight reveals.Walls raised from the earth, children growing taller…
When the Dust Settles, Words Weigh In
This space began as a quiet story of earth and effort - a journal of hands in the soil, of walls rising from dust, of children learning the language of a village. It was a place of documentation, of marking time in sweat and uncertainty. But time moved as it always does. Dust settled. The walls stood firm. The children no longer looked back. swararetreat.com…
Where Art Meets Science: Turner and the Science Boys
In my earlier years of adulthood, I stumbled upon a book on the dimly lit shelves of the Edinburgh University library, and it stopped me dead in my tracks. It was the Scottish winter of 2001, the kind of winter where the sun slips away before you have a chance to notice it was ever there. But in the fading light of that cold grey…
Where Sky Meets Water
https://youtube.com/shorts/aRAuxlqlU2Y?si=B0BbBSeL43W8Ld6L The lake was tranquil on a cold January morning. We were on a boat crossing Phewa Lake to get to the trail leading to the Peace Pagoda. The boatman pushed through gently, creating little ripples around his oar, nudging the boat forwards to an infinite horizon. It was a moment to just be. And to put thoughts into words. There is an unsung song…
Ethereal and Earthbound
At the turn of the new year, I walk out of the door every morning with a heavy heart. When I look up, I see the barrenness of our sacred mountain, the Machhapuchhre, unveiled from her white crown. It pierces the heart like a sharp knife slicing through the fragility of life and our ecosystems. Yet, somehow, the new winds seem to bring forth a…
The Page as a Playground: Writing Barefoot
Clouds on Tour began as a simple way to share the raw edges of our journey with family and friends. It came to life as a journal, documenting the challenges and triumphs of building a rammed-earth home and a retreat in the Himalayas, and unschooling two boys. But more than that, it was a line cast out to one reader: Papa. I knew he would…
The Quiet Pull of the Sky
https://youtube.com/embed/21k4xq02mSU?si=5NjWRWclxejDMCRe The mist rose from the Mardi River the way breath curls in the chill of dawn. The river gave a long exhale summoned by sunbeams, its breath ethereal and sinuous. And for a moment it seemed that all things were caught on the rising vapour, all of it, drawn into the immensity, then vanishing into the blue vault. The river gives it up slowly,…
Pumpkins Unleashed: A Tale of Culinary Doom
Who that cares to know much about the history of pumpkins, those voluptuous enigmas of the garden, and how that mysterious squash behaves under the experiments of Time, has not pondered on the life of Mr Kodo. To speak of Mr Kodo, as he was called in his sleepy village of Astampkin is to gather the strange tale of a man whose singular obsession with…
Shadow, Sunshine and Simple Truths
https://www.youtube.com/embed/OO4bhOrv5owThe act of growing our own food begins with the soil, that dark and silent essence which holds in its depth, a life-giving force. Beneath the sun's unyielding glare, the ground is broken, turned over by the blade of the plough. It yields reluctantly until the furrows run deep, exposing the earth's richness. The seeds are brought forth, small unassuming things, yet containing within them…