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  The man pauses, considering. He wags his head, once to the left and once to the right, a slight and particular movement that you see all over India. He reaches into his pocket and draws from it a package of gum, pulls out three sticks and hands two to my father, who passes one to me. We unwrap our gum, put the sticks in our mouths, and then the man crumples up his wrapper and tosses it on the ground. My father and I put ours in our pockets.

  “Thank you,” my father tells the man. We chew for a minute. “It’s nice gum.”

  “Welcome to India,” the man replies, smiling to reveal white teeth. All around us, the land sings with crickets, and the clouds are passing fast over our heads. A fresh wind rolls up the Nepalese side of the ridge and down the Indian one. The gum-man reaches out to shake my father’s hand, then turns from us and trudges on down the hill. Our gum tastes slightly of lemon. We watch the man pick his way down the rocky trail, until he turns the bend and disappears. Ahead of us, we can see where someone has strung two strands of prayer flags, stretched between boulders at the ridge’s edge.

  Outside, it’s pouring rain, and my father is vigilantly watching the sky. This is our third morning in India. It has been dark and wet like this every day so far, with just a few blessed patches of bright light. My father woke up this morning before five and went outside, his hiking boots unlaced, and saw that miles away, at the edge of the horizon, there was sunshine peeking through the cloud cover. He had rushed into our room to get the camera, his binoculars, and his book, to wait outside for the rain to stop and the clouds to break up so he would finally get to see the snow-capped peaks. We’d come all this way, after all.

  But the mountains hadn’t revealed themselves; the clouds only thickened, and he’d finally come inside again. And yet he was not dissuaded.

  “Morning clouds,” he’d declared, while I pulled the pillow over my head to cling to sleep. He stuffed his clothes and his sleeping bag into his pack and, ignoring my grumpy silence, spoke with a grin in his voice. “I think we’re in God’s pocket, now.”

  Now he has finished packing, has glanced again out the window, and has picked up his book but hasn’t opened it. He sits down on the bed and crosses one leg over the other to wait. “After the rain is when the sun comes out,” he says. “So we’ll be ready.” He peers out the window, searching for the light that he swears lies just beyond those clouds, and as if the gods have decided to give him a gift, a slant of sun enters, suddenly, to fill the window’s four chipped panes.

  My father tells me that he is too old to learn new words. It gets harder every year, he tells me. Namaste, that Hindu greeting used everywhere here, is a phrase I have heard a thousand times in the course of a decade of yoga classes, three years of Cambridge bumper stickers, and four months in India after college. It is, however, a word that my father just cannot remember. “Hello,” he always says pleasantly as we walk past Indian families, or boys with big bales of sticks on their backs, or old men leading donkeys down the road. “Dad,” I always whisper afterwards, “say namaste.”

  “Namaste,” he repeats, putting the emphasis on the ma in the center of the word. But each time we pass someone new, my father gives them a jolly hello. For this he receives gruff nods.

  The other word we most often use is dhanyavad, the Hindi word for thank you. My father can’t get that one right, either.

  “Danyabob,” he tells the man who takes our picture on the trail.

  “Danyabob,” he tells the women who bring us our chai at the hill stations. I have given up on correcting him, and anyway, for danyabob we always receive a smile.

  As the track rises up and up, through the clouds and then above them, my father notices that the plants resemble more and more the ones he finds at home.

  “See this?” he asks no one in particular. “That’s sedge.” He leans down and smells.

  “Sedge,” I repeat, peering at the scruffy, sage colored brush.

  “Sedge,” says our guide, Satjin, a twenty-one-year-old Nepali guy with gel in his hair and a tiny backpack with all his clothes tucked inside. He smokes cigarettes when he thinks we aren’t watching, coming out from behind trees and boulders, stinking of smoke.

  My father runs a finger along the length of the plants’ slender leaves.

  “It looks like grass, but it’s not,” he tells Satjin and me. “It’s a high-elevation plant.” He turns to look at me. We’re both dotted with raindrops, but we’ve long grown used to the constant water that trickles from the sky onto our packs, our shoulders, the napes of our necks. “This is what we have on Algonquin.”

  Maybe Algonquin is my father’s favorite Adirondack peak; I forget. I wonder whether he even has a favorite; he knows them all so well, has climbed each one so many times. Algonquin he’s summitted in summer and winter both, at least twice a year for many years, and so I figure that this sedge must come as a comfort, like meeting an old friend on the other side of the world. As we continue along, he points out monk’s hood, bachelor buttons, stubby pines like the ones that grew at the deepest points of his mother’s garden path, back before she had to sell the house and move into a nursing home.

  He points out many times a spiky plant with tiny green leaves and red berries. I guess that it’s holly; he’s certain it’s not.

  “Satjin,” he calls, and Satjin turns around and slips his phone in his pocket and walks back to where my father has stopped walking. He is a chronic text-messager, Satjin, and is adept at walking and texting in sync. To be polite, he puts the phone away when he talks to my father.

  “Yes, sir?” he asks delicately.

  “I don’t know what this plant is called,” my father says. He leans into the leaves and draws one close to his face. “But we have it at home. What is it, Satjin? What’s it called?” Satjin peers down.

  “My mother had this in her garden at home,” my father tells him. “Every year I’d have to go there in springtime and clip it.”

  “I’m not sure what it is, sir,” Satjin finally says. Together they continue to examine. Satjin, I suspect, knows he will get a better tip if he shares my father’s interest in the fauna.

  “Yup, we have this at home,” my father declares, straightening up. “All the way in Lake Placid, New York.” Just then, the rain lets up a little and a little slant of sun shines down onto us. My father notices and looks up into the sky. From where we stand, we can hear the light clanging of cowbells; the unseen cows are eating the sedge, and when night begins to fall, they will head back down into the valleys. Satjin told us this. The sky opens a little more and the sun pours onto us, all of a sudden, and so much like a gift that we have to blink our eyes in surprise.

  “Looks like we’re in God’s pocket now,” my father says, and takes off his glasses to clean them on his shirt.

  We sit in our room as the sky darkens, and we wait for the rain to stop. We’ve opened the windows to let the cool night air in, because the mildew is making my father cough. We wait for the clouds to bleed from the sky and the stars to appear; we wait for the wind to empty of its flecks of rain. There is no sunset, only the lengthening shadow of night. We check the windows every few minutes, wiping the condensation from the glass with our fingers to peer out, but the mountains remain ghosts, shrouded in the incessant fog.

  On the last morning of our trek, I wake up to my father saying my name. I pull my pillow over my head, but I can still hear him talking.

  “You gotta see this,” he says, and by the tone of his voice I know I won’t be getting any more sleep this morning. This is the voice he uses when he wants my mother to come out and look at something in the sky—Jupiter, or the full moon, round and bright and illuminating the road and fields around our house. He used this voice the day he spotted a bear, a black momma bear with her two cubs, in the backyard of our house eating apples from the stubby crabapple at the edge of our property. “Pearl,” he had said to my mother in a hushed, frantic whisper that morning. “You gotta see this!”

  He says it with me now, and s
o I push the pillow off my face. He is standing by the door, his hat pulled down over his ears, his green puffy jacket unzipped, and he is pulling on gloves. He has tugged on his hiking boots without tying the laces and his socks have been hurriedly yanked on so that they stand at uneven heights on his shins.

  “It’s about to turn pink!” he tells me, and then he dashes out of the room, leaving the door wide open.

  What is about to turn pink, I grumble to myself as I pull on thick socks, my fleece, my gloves, my hat. Even with the sunlight coming in, it’s freezing in here, and I can see my breath. God, I hate being cold. I slide my glasses on last and then I stumble outside, cupping my hands to my face and blowing on them. But when I make it out the hotel’s front door and see what he sees, what the clouds have concealed for days, I forget my numb fingers and the way my breath looks in the cold air.

  The mountains are turning pink, that’s what he meant. Past where he stands, at the lip of the ridge, I see the jagged edges of the Himalayas. We are closer to them than we’ve ever been in our lives. Oh, God, I say, because it’s the closest thing to a prayer I can think of. And then I am crying. I can see the outline of my father’s body before me, standing there, gazing at the mountains he has waited his whole life to see. He has imagined how they would look so many times, but all the hours he’s spent studying maps, pictures, reading National Geographic and the chronicles of Sir Edmund Hillary and Jon Krakauer—none of that has prepared him for this. Mount Everest has never looked this way to him before.

  They glisten in the sun, those mountains, and the morning is so very still, so perfectly clear. Oh, my God, I say again, my voice high and tight with emotion. When he turns, finally, to me, my father takes off his glasses and wipes them on his pants and I see that there are tears in his eyes, too. I can’t remember ever seeing my father weep. He blinks and looks back and we just stand there, dazed, watching as the coat of pink rises up over the jagged peaks of silver.

  Before we left for India, my father told me that the Himalayas were a Mecca for mountaineers like he. His home is in the mountains, the high peaks, the ranges that stretch all over New York State and Canada, breaking across the middle of North America and then starting up again in the west, running down the length of British Colombia and Montana, Colorado and Utah. These are the places, I think, that my father is most free. They are his church, they are where his God resides.

  As the morning continues to swell open, continues to wash the earth in gold, my father and I search for a better place to watch the peaks. The clouds are already rising; soon they will sock us in, and so this could be our only chance. Not far from the lodge rises a short, steep pitch without a trail, and we scramble up it, passing our cameras to each other, glancing over our shoulders every few minutes to make sure the mountains haven’t disappeared in the clouds. They are growing redder and redder with the movement of the sun.

  We reach the top of the mound and discover that its knobby summit is swathed in prayer flags; they flap from every rock, every crag, every stubby bush. We have to push them out of our way at times to get to the top. When we look down either side of the ridge, we can see that the flags trail deep into the valley, curved lines of alternating red and white, blue and green, bright yellow squares. Satjin told us what the flags represented: blue is the sky, white is the wind, red is fire, green is the water, and yellow is the earth. From where we sit, we can look at those flags and feel all of the things that they mean, smell all of the elements in the wind. I want to tell my father how full I feel, how rich, sitting on that ridge beside him, but I don’t. We have never really been that kind of family.

  My father has lost his book. “I just had it,” he says, more to himself than to me. I don’t look up from my own novel; he will find it, I assume. He’s always putting things down and then forgetting where. He’s already in bed, in his sleeping bag, so he doesn’t stand up, just looks in all the places he can reach: under the bed, beneath strewn-about clothes, on the nightstand. He rummages through his backpack, grumbling. But this seated search comes to no avail, and so he must stand.

  He doesn’t climb out of the sleeping bag; he just stands up in it and holds it up around his waist like he’s competing in a sack race. I imagine that he does this because it is too cold to step out of the sleeping bag and onto the cold floor. He is barefoot; for as long as I can remember, my father has slept in the white JC Penny briefs my mom buys him. He hops around the room, sack in one hand, while with the other he moves things around, in search of the book.

  “It’s bright red,” he remarks, opening the tall wardrobe at the other end of the room, a wardrobe he hasn’t opened until that moment. “You’d think it would be obvious, where it is.” Next, he jerks open the little drawer of a tiny dresser in the corner. This drawer, too, we haven’t yet opened. I can’t think why the book would be inside, and only now, when I laugh out loud, does he notice that I’m watching him. He looks at me, grinning, and shrugs his shoulders, holds his free hand out in front of him, palm up. He has done this motion for as long as I remember; it can mean many things—maybe he is mad at my brother, maybe he is tired of his administrator at work—but today it means that he is baffled, and he is willing to laugh at himself. I could get up and help him, but he looks so silly, his sleeping bag in hand, and so I lean back and watch.

  “Did I bring it in here?” he asks himself, checking the bathroom. Of course he did not; all that’s in there are our bottles of shampoo and conditioner and our tube of toothpaste. There isn’t even a real shower in there, just a tap and a bucket and a toilet and a drain in the middle of the floor.

  “I just had it,” he mutters again, befuddled. He checks the wardrobe again, his backpack again, the bathroom again. He is looking in the funniest of places. He lifts the cushion by the window seat and checks there; he gets down on his knees, the sack still around him, and peers under the bed. Finally, he sits down on the bed, defeated.

  “I don’t know where it is,” he says, and does that thing with his hand again, holding it out in front of him, palm outstretched. “I just don’t know.”

  “I might have something else for you to read,” I tell him, and reach into my pack for one of the books that I’ve already finished. While I’m digging, he fluffs his pillow, flips it, and finds the red book underneath.

  Ridges covered in tea bushes; women under umbrellas, plucking the leaves. The smell of wet earth, wet clay, chai when we pass the smoky hut. The smell of the constant rain. The sugary smoke of fruit trees burning, an open fire, and the sweet hint of a jasmine branch that hangs over the road. Banana trees, their wide leaves bent and dripping. Gutters overflowing with brown water; a girl washing her hair in the street. She returns our driver’s smile, her head still bent over, her hair to her knees. Wild orchids growing off the trunks of trees. Cardamom, corn. A toothbrush and toothpaste placed for safekeeping in the crack of a stone wall. Rain, rain, and a patch of blue sky. Rice paddies in layers; cardamom, corn. This is our drive to Sikkim.

  In Yuksom, one of Sikkim’s tiny hill towns, you can hike to a monastery at the top of the nearest mountain. The path is paved the whole way, a narrow, winding track with steep, even stairs, but you have to be careful, because the abundant rain of this region makes the going slick. The green moss is beautiful, though: emerald-soft. It’s humid in this jungle, and we stop often to drink water.

  But when we break out onto the ridgetop, the thick vegetation is replaced by a crisp and sudden wind, and there is the monastery, recently whitewashed and surrounded by neatly cropped grass. Both sides of the roof curve slightly to a point, upon which a big, brass bell is perched. There’s no one around except a small, white cat who sits with her tail wrapped around her on the steps of the temple.

  “A holy cat,” my father says.

  We have been to so many monasteries so far that we know just what to do—you can see a lot of monasteries in three days in Sikkim. First we walk all around the outside of the temple, admiring the carvings on the wooden columns an
d the luminous paint, rosy pink and pale blue, seafoam green. We can see that the monks take care with that careful paint, the manicured grass, the even hedge, but there aren’t any here, not today, just the holy cat so far.

  After we’ve circled the monastery, we take off our shoes and set them on the step, beside the heavy front door. It’s been freshly painted red, a deep color like bricks, and the wood gleams in the afternoon sun. The door has been propped half-open, and we slip inside. Every monastery feels this way: dark on the inside, cool and silent. Each one has a smooth floor like this one, the boards wide and stained almost black. Every interior has this scent of old documents, of mildew, of the incense and candles that burn all the time, that are burning now, flickering and fragrant.

  We circle the inside of the monastery, examining, as we have at each one before this, the stacked scrolls and the rich embroidery of the tapestries, colored like jewels, that hang everywhere. Every surface is adorned: framed photographs of the Dalai Lama, artificial flowers, white silk scarves, chunky candles. We clasp our hands behind our backs and walk slowly around, and when we come to the tall red door again, my father takes a bill from his pocket and slips it into the offerings box. He has done this at every monastery; it has become part of our viewing ritual.

  When we step out of the monastery and into the sun, we are surprised, as we always are, at how bright it is, how crisp the wind feels. The holy white cat is cleaning her feet; she freezes, watches us for a moment with big, blue eyes, and then resumes washing. We sit on the step and lace our shoes. Two small boys wander over; one squats a few feet away from us and sets three marbles down in front of him. He arranges them in a perfect line. The other one, the littler of the two, is not wearing any pants or shoes, just an old T-shirt that’s too big for him. They watch us the way the cat does, perfectly still and with eyes open wide.