Long after I left Kashmir, the mountains refused to leave me.
Some remained in memory. Others, in my blood.
I was born in Srinagar and spent many years in the foothills around Gulmarg, at elevations approaching 7,000 feet. Mountains were not something we travelled to see. They were simply there—beyond the orchards, above the houses, sometimes sharply drawn against a clear sky and sometimes disappearing into clouds. In winter, snow redrew them overnight. On certain mornings, the higher ridges caught the first light while the valley below was still waiting for the day.
As a child, I rarely thought about any of this. Children do not usually admire the permanence surrounding them. A mountain is no more remarkable than the sky when both have always been there. We learned distance differently because of them. Roads bent because mountains required them to bend; weather could alter a journey, and snow could decide whether one went somewhere at all. The landscape imposed its own terms, and because we knew no other arrangement, we accepted them.
Perhaps that is one of the quiet ways a place enters a person. Long before we have words such as patience, endurance or limitation, the physical world has begun teaching us when to pause, when to wait, when to slow our steps, when to gather ourselves for the journey ahead—and when it is time to leave.
So I left.
Like most people who leave home, I knew I would carry certain parts of it with me. Language came along almost unnoticed, as did habits, memories, family expressions and ways of looking at the world whose origins I could no longer identify. A smell could return me to a kitchen; a particular quality of winter light could open a room that had disappeared decades earlier. Sometimes a Kashmiri word spoken thousands of miles away could briefly abolish the distance between two continents. I did not expect geography itself to follow me.
Years later, life brought me to Virginia, where I settled among the Blue Ridge Mountains. They are very different from the mountains of Kashmir. They do not rise with the same authority; their slopes are gentler, their outlines softer, their great age somehow visible in the long, worn contours of their ridges. In autumn, they turn red, gold and rust, and entire hillsides seem to change character within weeks.
For years, I simply enjoyed them. Then, somewhere along those Blue Ridge trails, it began to seem less accidental that a man who had crossed an ocean and built a life on another continent had once again made his home within sight of mountains. We like to believe we choose our homes through practical calculations—work, family, opportunity, circumstance—and perhaps we do. But human beings may also carry private maps whose boundaries were drawn much earlier.
Perhaps the Blue Ridge felt familiar before I knew why.
For a long time, I assumed whatever I carried from the mountains was entirely emotional. Medicine eventually showed me something more literal. The percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere remains essentially the same at altitude, but atmospheric pressure falls as elevation increases, reducing the partial pressure of oxygen available to the lungs. The kidneys respond by increasing erythropoietin, stimulating the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells and increasing the blood’s capacity to carry oxygen. The physiology is elegant, but when I lived inside it, I knew nothing about it.
For years, my body had accommodated itself to elevations around 7,000 feet. Later, in Virginia, I was living just around 600 feet above sea level, and the body did what it has done throughout human existence: it adjusted to where it found itself. Physicians spend a surprising portion of their lives looking at numbers—hemoglobin, glucose, creatinine, sodium, cholesterol—values that appear on a screen and usually disappear from thought almost as quickly. But one number made me pause.
My hemoglobin, which at the higher elevation had often been around sixteen or seventeen grams per deciliter, eventually settled closer to thirteen or fourteen. There was nothing mysterious about the change and nothing requiring treatment. The major physiological adjustment after descent occurs over weeks to months as the stimulus for maintaining a higher red-cell mass diminishes. It was ordinary physiology. Yet I remember looking at those numbers longer than their clinical significance required. Medicine explained why they had changed. Kashmir explained why I noticed.
Somewhere between the Himalayas and Virginia, my body had renegotiated its relationship with the air. The mountains were thousands of miles behind me, yet for a time their altitude remained legible in something as intimate as my blood. My old laboratory reports were still medical records, but now they seemed to contain something else as well. Geography had translated itself into biology.
Perhaps we underestimate how thoroughly landscape enters us. We speak readily about culture, language, family and history shaping identity, while the physical world works more quietly. Climate determines what we wear and grow. Seasons alter appetite and activity. Altitude changes breathing; terrain changes movement. The body spends a lifetime negotiating with place, usually without asking us to notice.
Mountain life carries its own negotiations. A mountain does not care how urgently you wish to reach the other side or become flatter because you are late. You accommodate yourself to it: roads curve, steps shorten, breathing changes, sometimes you stop. There is an education in that, though I hesitate to make too much of it. Mountains do not automatically make people wiser, and hardship is not inherently ennobling. Difficulty can strengthen, but it can also simply hurt.
Still, there is something about resistance. Modern life has become extraordinarily skilled at removing it. We shorten distances, accelerate communication and design technologies so fewer activities require waiting, climbing, carrying or enduring. Much of this is genuine progress, and I would not exchange modern medicine, transportation or communication for some romanticised version of difficulty. Yet the body itself remains strangely attached to effort.
I am reminded of this when I hike. VO
I have experienced that on mountains in different parts of the world. The view is never the same, but something else sometimes is. I do not know whether the mountains of childhood actually teach us patience or whether we return years later and place our accumulated meanings upon them. Memory is capable of both preservation and invention. The Kashmir I carry now cannot be identical to the Kashmir in which I grew up. No remembered place ever is.
Perhaps that is why certain images remain more trustworthy than explanations: a ridge whitening after snowfall, morning light reaching the higher peaks before the land below, a road disappearing around a mountain. The physician in me can explain altitude, oxygen pressure, erythropoietin and hemoglobin. But those explanations belong to a language I learned much later. The mountains came first.
Even now, when I hike the Blue Ridge, there are moments when the trail steepens, and conversation gives way to breathing. Virginia is beneath my feet. The landscape before me belongs to another continent, another climate, another chapter of my life. I keep climbing. The heart works harder, my breathing deepens, and the trail rises through trees that bear little resemblance to the mountains of my childhood. Sometimes it turns sharply and disappears upward, leaving only the next few steps visible.
I follow it.
There are moments when the body seems to recognise something before memory has found a name for it. I stop where the trees open and the Blue Ridge stretches into the distance. Nothing before me resembles the snow-covered peaks that once defined the edge of my childhood world.
And then, on this unfamiliar terrain in America, my mind asks whether I have been here before.
My blood knows it.
(The author is a physician, poet and clinical researcher from Kashmir, based in Virginia, United States. His writings explore the intersections of science, philosophy, memory, literature and the human condition. He can be reached at [email protected])
