His composure drenched by copious quantities of gin, Lobsang reeked of new verve. Post-dinner, he fished out the Nokia Nseries from his pocket and a few button clicks later, gleefully showed us the animated porn queen’s slow stripping on his screen. A friend from the plains sent him the MMS, and at 9000 feet above sea level, in the small North Sikkim village criss-crossed by icy winds and snow-capped mountains, the explicit skin show ensures Lobsang never feels the distance. Nothing is too far for him to reach, thanks to technology.

Early that morning, when icy winds attack the skin the way stingrays would and the Teesta charges towards the North Bengal plains, Lobsang revs up his jeep. Inside, we are cosy in the belief that at well over 17,000 feet, and within a gunshot from the Chinese border in Sikkim’s north, Gurudongmar Lake is a safe bet for a faraway destination.

From Lachen, the languorous hamlet where we had stayed over for the night after an entire day’s travel from Gangtok, Lobsang’s jeep had puffed its way up the gruelling incline. The metalled road had given way to a rock and pebble path, the snow-covered peaks that surrounded us during the gloriously moonlit night at Lachen now a mere jog away. Tufts of cloud drifted in and enclosed mountaintops in their opaque whiteness. By the next hairpin bend, the clouds had moved on, allowing the snow to sparkle in the early morning sun.

The road signs, with their point-blank reminders of human frailty on mountain roads (‘It’s better to be 15 minutes late in this world than to be early in the next’, ‘On whisky, driving risky’) which stared back at us on our way from Gangtok to Lachen, had now been substituted by a message more alien, more ominous: ‘Beware of flying rocks’.

... contd.