Twilight is by all means a magical time of the day… crepuscular congregations in full swing as the skies grapple with those sudden transient spurts of colour fading into the dusk or the day as soon as they appeared… twilight is when the sun really gives a few glimpses of it’s true artistic potential, for during the day ‘tis busy parenting a planet respiring, perspiring and aspiring… at twilight, especially the one post sunset, it seems dispensed off from those duties, as does the mortal pausing to gaze at the horizon in pure awe…

Camped above Sural Bhatori village in Pangi valley, we emerged out of the tent as an evening drizzle subsided and the weather started to clear… the canvas was laid, and the sun started to force the issue on clouds now devoid of moisture, lighting up the sky in a yellow that for the next hour brooded into shades of amber getting darker by the minute… there was a shark toothed peak rising up behind the snow covered peaks in front of us that seemed to be the cynosure of attention, spiralling clouds and seeping colours, plumes of smoke rising from the valley in their improbable journey to join the melee…

Transfixed to the twilight horizon, there is a sense of reconciliation taking over… for the hourglass is halfway down and still one grapples with the ways of world, subsisting in their compliance yet feeling somewhat disconnected when juxtaposed against the elements outback… there’s life and then there is mortality… in quest for the former, one loses context to the latter, and ‘tis these amber palettes that bring it back… a sense of life beyond human constructs, one that is part grotesque and past picturesque, part violent and part serene, part beyond repair and part seeking a requiem… between light and dark, there is twilight, where hubris dies and hope resides…

Musing on mountain sunsets, Pangi valley, Himachal Pradesh