Cloud walking: Landour in August

All photos: Rashmee Roshan Lall

There’s cloud walking and cloud walking.

One sort is about feeling like your feet will never touch the ground.

The other is to literally walk through a mass of water drops suspended in the atmosphere. They look like the sky took a drag from a cigarette and exhaled, slowly and deliberately.

In Landour, a small British Raj-era hill station in northern India (click here and here for earlier blogs), puffs of cloud hang about the military cantonment, the scattered houses, the two churches and handful of shops.

And then there is the green of the Deodar (cedar) trees and the abundant ferns and flowers.

Note the moss-covered carving of a name on the roadside boundary in the last photograph.

Within a year or two of ‘Harpreet Singh’ laboriously carving their name, the moss completed an emphatic green embossing of the letters. It is reminiscent of arborglyphs, the centuries-old practice of people carving names, dates, and even pictures into trees.