At around 1:30 in the afternoon, a big red Tata truck slowed down beside me on the road outside Sonamarg. I had my bag with me and my thumb out. The driver and his helper looked over, waved me up, and a few minutes later I was sitting inside their truck heading toward Kargil.
I had left Srinagar that morning, 15 May 2016, on a local bus at about 8:45. The bus was packed and the windows were half open. We followed the Kashmir Valley toward Sonamarg, arriving around midday. I ate a quick lunch in a small restaurant — rice and dal, nothing complicated — and walked back to the main road.
My plan was simply to hitchhike east.
The truck that stopped could not have been more visible. Red cab. Turquoise, green and yellow panels. Hearts, flowers, lines and lettering everywhere. “Goods Carrier” across the top. “Super Fast” lower down. Other words and place names covered almost every available surface.
This kind of lettering on Indian goods trucks mixes decoration with instructions to other drivers. Messages such as Blow Horn and Use Dipper at Night are part of the truck itself, painted alongside flowers, geometric patterns and whatever else the owner or painter wanted on the vehicle.
I threw my bag inside and climbed in.
Up Toward Zojila
At first the landscape was still green. There were grassy slopes, scattered buildings and traffic moving through the valley ahead of us. Then the road began climbing and everything tightened.
The asphalt disappeared.
The track became rougher, dustier and narrower, cut directly into the mountainside. We joined trucks carrying goods east and yellow fuel tankers moving in convoy.
Inside the cab there was colour everywhere. Green painted metal. Red, blue and yellow lines. A small devotional picture above us. A fire extinguisher beside the windscreen. Blue-and-red checkered seats. My dusty beige bag was pushed into whatever space was available.
A metal cup swung as the truck moved. Every hole in the road sent everything shaking again.
Outside, it was rock, dust and traffic. On one side we had the mountain wall. On the other there was sometimes almost nothing between the wheels and a very long drop.
The Sonamarg–Drass section crosses Zojila, the pass controlling the road connection between the Kashmir Valley and the Kargil and Leh side. When I went through in May 2016, the Srinagar–Leh highway had reopened from its winter closure only on 30 April — fifteen days before I arrived.
That explained what we soon drove into.
The road had been cut through the winter snow. In places the truck passed between dirty white walls several metres high, with meltwater running across the surface below us.
It felt strange because spring had already arrived lower down. Green grass was visible again on some slopes. Then the road would turn and we would be back inside snow.
The convoys also made more sense up there. This road was not just a scenic mountain route. Trucks carried goods toward Kargil and Ladakh, and every winter the snow at Zojila interrupted that road connection until clearance crews could get it open again. We were crossing soon after that work had been done.
Chai in the Cab
Somewhere during the afternoon we stopped.
The driver and his helper produced a battered aluminium pot and a small gas stove and started making chai inside the cab.
The helper wore a red-and-grey striped jumper and held the hot pot with a piece of cloth around the handle. The driver sat behind the steering wheel in a cream sleeveless sweater, drinking from a little steel cup.
The tea was thick, milky and sweet.
There was no ceremony to it. The truck stopped, the stove came out, tea was made, and a cup was handed to me.
We did not have much common language. We communicated with a few words, gestures and smiles.
That was enough.
The cab was their working space, and for those hours they made room for me inside it.
Then everything was packed away and we started moving again.
A Road Cut Into the Mountain
The higher we went, the less softness there was in the landscape.
Green slopes became scree. The mountains turned grey, black and brown. Snow remained on the higher ridges, but around the road there were sections of almost vertical exposed rock.
The truck moved slowly.
Sometimes we could look down from one bend and see vehicles on several other sections of road below us. Trucks and cars appeared tiny from above, following switchbacks across the mountainside.
There was almost no room to make a mistake.
At another point I watched a man climb onto the top of a truck and arrange bundles while wind moved across the exposed road. These trucks were carrying their loads through a place where even standing still could feel precarious.
Dust came through every opening in our cab. The truck groaned on the climbs and shook over the broken ground. When another vehicle approached, everything became a slow negotiation over who had enough space to pass.
Late in the day the light became warmer but the air outside felt colder.
We stopped again and I got out.
A local man in a long brown phiran stood in the middle of the road. Behind him was a truck. Behind the truck were some of the strangest rock formations I had seen that day — dark slabs pushed almost vertically out of the mountain. And behind all of that was snow.
Then we continued toward Kargil.
Kargil by Evening
We reached Kargil at around 7 pm.
I said goodbye to the two men, found a simple local hotel and dropped my bag. After the bus from Srinagar, the hitch from Sonamarg, the dust, the cold, the traffic and hours of being shaken around inside the truck, I did not need much else that night.
I slept.
At 6 the next morning, 16 May, I was back beside the road. The journey continued the same way: bag, road, thumb out. I hitched east again, following the Srinagar–Leh highway toward Leh. By around midday I was there.
Two days after leaving Srinagar, I had reached Leh mostly through ordinary local transport and lifts from people already travelling the road.
The Silver Cup
When I think about that journey now, I don’t first see Leh.
I see the red truck. I see the green metal inside the cab and the blue-and-red seats. The aluminium pot tipped toward a steel cup. The driver holding the wheel. The helper beside him. Trucks disappearing around bends ahead of us.
I see the fresh cut through the snow at Zojila and vehicles crawling along a strip of road underneath mountains that seemed far too large for any road to be there at all.
And I remember that small metal cup swinging inside the cab while the whole truck shook underneath us.
More roads like this one live in the stories collection — and every border of that trip is dated in the ledger.
