Drive Me To The Moon And Back

Go get into a car. Drive to a remote corner of Zanskar. Pitch a tent. Gaze at the Firmament. Wonder if someone out there is gazing back at you. Walk. Climb a rock.

- Meraj Shah

Forty kilometres from the middle of nowhere, in the rarefied boulder-strewn landscape of Suru Valley in Zanskar, your car refuses to fire up. The warning lights on the instrumentation panel glow all at once, and every time you turn the key, hope flickers, only to fade the next moment. The frigid valley rasps with a cold wheeze that grates down the jagged moonlit peaks. Diligent satellites trace arcs across the busy night sky. Your car, on the other hand, is quite dead.

You sit in the darkness and ponder, strangely detached from your predicament. Car breakdowns are real-world problems, and you left that place when you entered this primordial expanse. “What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?” Kerouac asks. In Suru Valley’s parallel universe, you’re not as concerned about fixing a car as you are by thoughts of physical, spiritual, and metaphysical roads still left to try.