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Varanasi does not perform its antiquity. This is the first thing to understand about it and also the hardest, because everything about the city is extraordinary and yet the city itself is entirely indifferent to being extraordinary. The ghats have been there since before the category of tourist existed. The burning at Manikarnika has not stopped for as long as anyone can establish. The Ganga bends north at this specific point — anomalous, against the logic of a river that flows generally southeast — and the tradition holds that Shiva bent it toward his city as an act of will, and the geography confirms the bend, and whether you take the divine explanation or the geological one the bend is there and the city built itself around it. I lived in Varanasi for a stretch of time that I have written about elsewhere and will not repeat here in detail. What I can say is that the city changes you in proportion to how long you stay and how honestly you engage with what it is actually doing rather ...

The river at Yamunotri is cold enough that it has no memory of the plains it will eventually cross. This is not a poetic claim. It is a description of water temperature and what high altitude glacial melt does to a river in its first few kilometres of existence. The Yamuna at its source at 3,293 metres in the Garhwal Himalayas is entirely of the mountain. The warmth of the Mathura ghats, the Agra riverfront, the Yamuna Action Plan, the Delhi stretch — all of that is downstream and future and entirely absent from the water that runs past the Yamunotri shrine in these first cold metres. Yamunotri is the first of the four Uttarakhand Char Dhams and the westernmost and the least visited of the four. The least visited not because it is least significant but because it is the most logistically demanding to reach — the road from Rishikesh to the trailhead at Janki Chatti is 255 kilometres through the Yamuna valley, and the trek from Janki Chatti to the shrine is six kilometres gaining 800 me...

The giant squirrel was in the canopy above the temple. I know this because I looked up at exactly the right moment — the particular quality of movement in the upper branches that makes you look up even when you did not intend to — and there it was. Ratufa indica. The Malabar giant squirrel. The state animal of Maharashtra. Rust and cream, larger than any squirrel I had seen before, moving through the canopy with the unhurried confidence of an animal that has not been informed it is rare. The Bhimashankar Wildlife Sanctuary exists primarily to protect this animal and its habitat. The Jyotirlinga exists because Shiva manifested on this hill when he destroyed the demon Tripurasura, and the sweat from the battle formed the Bhima river, which runs from these Sahyadri hills to the Krishna. The forest department and the temple trust share jurisdiction over the same piece of geography and manage this with the pragmatic coexistence that Indian institutions develop when neither side can remove t...

The tree line ends at a specific altitude and the ending is abrupt. One minute you are in rhododendron forest, the trail winding through it, the sound of the Mandakini river below, the canopy filtering the light into the particular green of a Himalayan morning. Then the forest stops. The rock begins. The sky opens. Above you, the glacier. Ahead of you, the temple. I have been to Kedarnath twice. The first time was part of the Char Dham circuit I did on foot years ago, before the 2013 flood, when the valley was different and the town below the temple was a functioning pilgrimage settlement and the glacier above the shrine was twenty-two metres closer to it than it is now. The second time was more recent, after the reconstruction, after the Army had rebuilt the approach route and the helipad had been established and the pilgrim registration system had been made mandatory and the Bheem Shila — the boulder that lodged against the temple's rear wall and deflected the flood — had become ...

The Narmada at Omkareshwar split around the island and I stood on the bridge looking at both channels and tried to see the ॐ shape from where I was standing. You cannot see it from the bridge. You need to be above it — on a hill, or in an aircraft, or on the kind of map that makes the river's geometry clear. From the bridge you see two channels of green water and an island between them and a temple on the island's northern tip and ghats descending to the water and a dharamshala on the bank and a chai stall near the dharamshala entrance and a sadhu sitting on the ghat steps with the specific stillness of someone who has been sitting on those steps for longer than you have been thinking about visiting. The shape of the island — the ॐ carved by the Narmada over geological time into the landmass it flows around — is one of those facts that you either receive as evidence of a universe that occasionally makes its geometry visible, or you receive as an interesting coincidence of erosi...

I want to be careful here because Ujjain is a city that invites overwriting. The Bhasma Aarti, the cremation ash, the south-facing linga, the Lord of Time — all of it is genuinely extraordinary and all of it has been written about in a register of breathless sacred superlative that I find less useful than silence. So I will try to be precise instead. The Bhasma Aarti begins at four in the morning. The ash used is from the cremation ground — from the bodies of the dead burned at the Chakratirtha ghat on the Shipra river, brought to the sanctum and applied to the Shivalinga by the priests. This is not metaphor. This is the daily ritual that has been performed at Ujjain for as long as the tradition can establish, and it produces in those who witness it an understanding of what Mahakal — the Lord of Time, the Lord of Death — actually means that no amount of reading produces in advance. I had booked the slot online at shrimahakaleshwar.com. The booking opens thirty days in advance and fills...

The road into Srisailam runs for forty kilometres through the Nallamala forest and for most of that distance there is no mobile network, which means you have forty kilometres of forest and your own thoughts and whatever you brought to read, in that order of usefulness. I had brought nothing to read. The forest was sufficient. The Nallamala is part of the Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam Tiger Reserve — at 3,728 square kilometres the largest tiger reserve in India by area, though its tiger density is lower than the smaller more famous reserves that get the wildlife documentary attention. What it has instead of density is extent. The forest goes on. The road through it is narrow and the canopy closes overhead in places and the light that comes through is the particular filtered green light of a forest that has not been significantly disturbed, which is rarer than it should be. I mention the forest first because the forest is first. The Mallikarjuna Jyotirlinga at Srisailam is a forest shrine bef...