the main world
It came out mid-sentence, the way the most revealing things usually do. Amroo and I were sitting outside after dinner, talking about the difference between life here and life in cities, and I said "in the main world—" and stopped. Because I had heard it. In the main world. As though Uttarakhand, the village, the mountains, the cattle on their ancient schedule, were background content. A side-quest. And the traffic, the Slack notifications, the Saturdays that dissolve into Mondays — that was the main world. The real one. The thing I had apparently decided, without ever deciding it, was the point. I had not decided this. I had never reasoned my way to it.
I should say something about how I ended up there. The startup I work at moves fast. I got really tired of living the same day everyday. It is this constant loop with cheap dopamine hits from screens and food. Taking a break from work and people had been at the back of my head for months. I just booked tickets one day. I barely planned anything. No itinerary, nothing. I've always believed there's a difference between being a traveler and being a tourist, and for once I wanted to actually live that instead of just saying it.
The first day was genuinely uncomfortable. Not in any dramatic way, just the low, persistent discomfort of a person who has forgotten how to be somewhere without a reason. For months the structure of a good day had been clear: work, output, the small dopamine of a task completed, a message replied to, a thing moved forward. Cheap, reliable, repeatable. And suddenly none of it existed. No laptop open, no chores, nothing that needed doing. Just a village that was entirely indifferent to whether I did anything at all. I kept standing up and sitting back down. Kept reaching for my phone and putting it back. At one point I felt genuinely guilty, guilty in the mountains for not being productive, and the absurdity of that didn't make the feeling go away. It took almost two full days before my body stopped waiting for the next thing. And when it finally did, I realised I couldn't even tell you what the next thing had been.
Gokul, the caretaker, has barely left Uttarakhand. He knows every trail, every family in the village, reads the weather from the way clouds sit on the ridge. He asked me what Bangalore was like, whether it was true the food was different down south. I tried to describe what down south actually feels like to someone who has never left the mountains. The heat first, I said, not the dry kind that comes and goes but a wet, heavy heat that sits on your skin from the moment you step outside. And the beaches, the whole culture of just sitting at the edge of all that water and doing nothing, watching it. He listened carefully and looked at the ridge for a moment. I realised I was trying to describe endlessness to someone who already lived inside it, just horizontal instead of vertical, warm instead of cold. I cooked noone vankaaya one evening, a Telugu eggplant dish. He ate two servings and said it was a little spicy for his pahadi palate. We sat in the kitchen afterward not saying much, and I became aware that I was relaxed in a way I hadn't been in years, and also that I couldn't identify a single thing responsible for it. Nothing had happened. That was precisely it. Nothing had happened and it was enough. He said he would like to see the sea someday. I told him I'd take him. Gokul has built a full, sufficient life inside a set of concerns completely unlike mine. He is not waiting to arrive anywhere. He is not optimising for anything. When I tried to explain what I do for work, the explanation kept collapsing, because so much of what I do only makes sense inside a system of assumptions he has no reason to share. Described plainly, from outside those assumptions, a lot of it sounds like a person running very fast inside a building to get to the other side of the same building.
Mushi was the house dog, six months old, perpetually hungry, operating on a two-item agenda: food and potty, in whatever order the moment demanded. She had no interest in your emotional state. She didn't register departure as different from any other moment that wasn't producing food. On my last morning I said goodbye to her and she sniffed my bag hopefully, found nothing, and wandered off. That was it. No ceremony, no acknowledgment of the fact that something was ending. Just a puppy with needs that were honest about being needs.
I found this, sitting in the car as it pulled away, unexpectedly clarifying. Everything in that place had been like that, present, functional, unperformed. The mountains didn't care you were leaving. The cattle had a schedule that predated you and would outlast you. Gokul would read tomorrow's clouds whether or not you were there to watch him do it. And Mushi wanted breakfast. Nothing in the mountains had been arranged for your benefit, and somehow that was the most restful thing about it.
I'm back in my room now. Same screens, same four walls. Uttarakhand is already quietly becoming something that happened to a slightly different person. The loop didn't pull me back. I walked back into it myself, the way you return to a habit you know isn't serving you, because at least a bad habit is familiar, and familiarity, it turns out, is most of what we mean when we say something feels real. Which is maybe the whole problem. I called the mountains a side-quest not because I thought about it and concluded that, but because the main world had been running so long and so loudly inside me that it stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like gravity. Gokul is up there right now, reading clouds, not optimising for anything, living what I spent two days trying to remember how to do. I don't think he'd understand why I left. Honestly, I'm not sure I do either.