Syllables of Slate and Deodar

Kerosene fumes rise from the small tin stove, cutting through the damp chill of the stone veranda. Blue pine needles litter the flagstones. Up here, on this high ridge, silence does not merely sit—it presses against the temples like cold slate.

Syllables of Slate and Deodar

The wind has no teeth today,
only a tongue of salt and ice.
It licks the whitewash off the stone,
mumbles in the rafters.
Kachha walls hold the scent of old wood-smoke—
a bitter charcoal ghost.

You ask how the mountain stays so still.
It is not still.
It is merely slow.
The granite is moving, inch by cold inch,
toward the river’s throat.

In the corner, the copper kettle whistles.
A thin, sharp needle of steam.
I drop two leaves of wild mint into the mug.
They turn like drowned beetles.

Thand. It is a flat word.
It tastes of well-water.
It smells of frozen sheep-wool.
We do not speak of the snow that is coming;
we watch the crows fly south instead.
Their wings are clean, dry ink
scribled across a page of lead.

Let the fire burn down to grey.
The ash is light as bird-bone.
We will wrap our knees in coarse Kullu shawls,
and wait for the frost to seal the latch.

A single pine cone drops.
A small thud on the tin roof.
The day ends without a shout.

Notes on the Breath of the Line

The rhythm of these lines mimics the diaphragmatic pull of walking uphill with a load of dry oak-branches. At nine thousand feet, metrical feet are measured by the pulse in the throat. You learn to discard the decorative. The adjectives drop away like dry needles because there is no breath to spare for them.

In the third stanza, the word Thand—the Hindi term for cold—is used not as an abstract climate, but as a heavy, physical wedge. In the local dialect of the higher valleys, cold is not a temperature. It is an intruder. It sits in the corner of the room, taking up the space of a third person. It demands its own share of the fire.

The structure of the poem follows a loose, conversational nazm format, though it eschews the strict end-rhymes of the classical radeef. Instead, the music relies on internal assonance—the short "i" sounds of tin, thin, mint, and ink clashing against the flat "a" sounds of flat, wrap, and latch. This mimics the acoustic reality of the stone hut, where high frequencies rattle against the metal roof while the low frequencies are absorbed by the thick mud-plastered walls.

There is a specific silence that belongs only to the high ridges of Uttarakhand before the first heavy blizzard. It is different from the silence of the plains. It is not the absence of sound, but the suspension of it. The air becomes so dry that sound waves travel with a brittle, glass-like clarity before breaking against the rock-faces. When a dry branch snaps three ridges away, you hear the clean cleavage of the wood as if it happened behind your shoulder.

To write here is to strip the ink of its vanity. The page is just another surface to be weathered, no different from the cedar planks of the ceiling or the sheepskin spread across the floor. You write a line. You drink your tea. You watch the grey clouds descend from the pass, swallowing the ridges one by one, until there is nothing left but the small circle of light from the hurricane lamp.

​#writon​