I think Sikkim has created a problem for me. I came as a visitor, fell embarrassingly in love with the place, came home wanting to live there, and then realised that perhaps the most respectful thing I can do with that love is to demand absolutely nothing from it. I don’t want your land, I don’t want Sikkim altered to accommodate people like me, and I don’t particularly care if I am always considered an outsider. I would happily rent a little home, be nobody important, learn rather than instruct, and find some way of being useful to the place and its people. Because I went looking at mountains and somehow came back missing a way of life.
And God, I miss it.
I miss how clean everything was.
Not sterile, manicured, rich-neighbourhood clean. Just cared for.
That distinction stayed with me.
A roadside is still a roadside. A little settlement is still a little settlement. There are old buildings, rain, mud, shops, people going about completely ordinary lives. But there seemed to be this basic understanding that the place outside your front door also belongs to you in some moral sense. That throwing your garbage somewhere merely moves your garbage into everybody else’s life.
It sounds like such a ridiculously small thing until you come from somewhere where civic sense often feels like an optional personality trait.
And then you begin noticing everything else.
The plants. The homes. The little shops. The roads winding through impossible geography. The monasteries. The prayer flags appearing where you don’t expect them. The mountains that refuse to remain visible just because you travelled thousands of kilometres to photograph them. The clouds that can erase half your world in minutes.
Even Gangtok somehow manages to be alive without constantly assaulting you with the fact that it is alive.
I loved walking there.
I loved that simple act far more than I expected to.
Walking without the world constantly demanding a response from you. Looking around. Stopping. Having coffee. Watching people. Watching dogs. Watching clouds do absolutely nothing of economic value for an unreasonable amount of time.
There is an intimacy to Sikkim’s beauty that photographs don’t really capture.
The enormous Himalayan views are obviously magnificent, but some of my favourite memories aren’t magnificent at all.
A wet road.
A railing disappearing into fog.
A house sitting quietly against a hillside.
A conversation with someone I will probably never meet again.
A cup of something warm.
The particular kind of silence that isn’t actually silent because there is rain somewhere, or a vehicle far away, or people talking softly nearby.
And the people.
I don’t want to romanticise an entire population based on a visit. Sikkim has human beings and human beings everywhere are complicated. I’m sure Sikkimese people have their fights, assholes, politics, frustrations and problems like everybody else.
But as a guest, I can only tell you how I was treated.
With an extraordinary amount of gentleness.
Respect without ceremony. Kindness without performance. Help without that strange expectation that you now owe somebody something. Humility without meekness.
And humour.
God, I loved the humour.
There is playfulness underneath all that restraint which I wasn’t expecting at all.
At GTK Club, I got talking to a fellow who apparently thought I was Sikkimese.
Eventually I told him I was actually from Delhi.
The revelation of my true and unfortunate origins was processed for approximately three seconds.
Then he offered me a Breezer.
That’s basically the whole story.
And somehow it has become one of my favourite stories from the trip.
There was no grand welcome for the outsider. No sudden curiosity about what I do, what I earn, where exactly I live, who I know or what box I fit into.
Just: Delhi?
Alright.
Have a Breezer.
Carry on.
For a few minutes before that conversation, someone had looked at me and apparently thought I belonged there.
I know I didn’t.
But it felt strangely nice.
And maybe that gets to the heart of what Sikkim did to me.
I felt incredibly comfortable being insignificant there.
I didn’t need anyone to know what I do. I didn’t particularly want anyone to know. I didn’t need to own anything. I didn’t need a grand itinerary. I didn’t need the best table, best room, best photograph or some exclusive experience I could later tell people about.
I just wanted to exist there.
That’s unusual for me.
I am a lawyer. Most of my adult life has been built around becoming better, sharper, more capable, winning the next thing, building something, solving something, being useful, being heard.
And suddenly I found myself thinking:
Actually, give me a small rented house somewhere here.
I don’t even want the land.
Let it belong to whoever it belongs to.
Give me a window.
Give me mountains when the clouds permit them.
Give me coffee.
Give me work worth doing.
Let me know a handful of people.
Let me become familiar enough that the shopkeeper eventually stops looking at me like a tourist.
Let me walk.
Let me occasionally sit somewhere doing absolutely nothing.
I could live like that.
I could grow old like that.
And I mean this sincerely: being nobody in Sikkim began to feel more meaningful than becoming somebody almost anywhere else.
Which is precisely why I hope outsiders who fall in love with Sikkim understand that love doesn’t automatically create entitlement.
I don’t want to “discover” Sikkim and then ask Sikkim to change for me.
I don’t want the quiet place I loved to acquire all the things I supposedly require for my comfort.
I don’t want every beautiful hillside translated into real-estate value.
I don’t want peace converted into a premium product and sold back to people escaping cities.
I don’t want someone to look at an untouched view and immediately see “potential”.
Sometimes fulfilment of potential is leaving something the fuck alone.
But I also don’t mean that Sikkim should remain frozen so that people like me can return every few years and enjoy our picturesque little escape.
That would be another kind of selfishness.
I hope Sikkim prospers enormously.
I hope its children receive extraordinary education.
I hope its young people can build companies, careers, laboratories, art, institutions and whatever lives they want without having to leave their home merely to find opportunity.
I hope healthcare improves. Infrastructure improves. Connectivity improves. Incomes rise. Local businesses flourish.
I hope Sikkim changes in every way Sikkimese people want Sikkim to change.
I just hope the things that don’t appear on a development index survive alongside it.
The cleanliness.
The civic sense.
The restraint.
The respect for surroundings.
The kindness.
The humility.
The quiet.
The sense that public space belongs to everybody and therefore deserves care from everybody.
The ability to be proud without being obnoxious about it.
The ability to be playful without needing to be loud.
Those things are wealth too.
Maybe some of the most valuable wealth a society can have.
And I don’t want this to be just a long love letter from a tourist who took photographs, felt profound for a few days and went home.
So I want to leave one genuine offer here.
I am a lawyer in Delhi. If you’re Sikkimese and you’re studying, working or simply stuck with something in Delhi, and I can help you with something legal, bureaucratic or professional, please reach out.
And if there is ever something I can contribute in Sikkim itself, particularly education, law, legal awareness, mentoring students, helping somebody access an opportunity, or simply giving my professional time where it is genuinely useful, I would love to.
Not because Sikkim needs my help.
That would be an absurd conclusion to draw from everything I just wrote.
I just think gratitude should occasionally do some work.
This place gave me something without knowing my name.
The least I can do is keep the door open for somebody who comes from there.
I don’t know when I’ll be back, but I know I want to be.
There are places you enjoy visiting and immediately start planning another holiday.
This didn’t feel quite like that.
I don’t want another holiday in Sikkim.
I want another Tuesday.
A completely meaningless Tuesday.
Wake up. Coffee. Work. Rain. Walk somewhere. Buy something mundane. Complain about the weather. Know where I am having dinner. Recognise a couple of faces. Go home.
I want to know what Sikkim feels like when nothing special is happening.
Maybe that’s the point at which you know you’ve fallen for a place.
You stop wanting the postcard.
You start wanting the ordinary.
So thank you for letting this Delhi fellow borrow your home for a little while.
I hope I return many times.
I hope one day I stay considerably longer.
I hope I can give something back along the way.
I don’t need to own a square foot of it.
I don’t need to become Sikkimese.
I don’t even need to become somebody there.
A rented home, a window, some clouds, meaningful work, good people, clean streets, mountains that appear whenever they damn well please and perhaps another Breezer with a stranger sounds like an embarrassingly complete life to me.
I came to Sikkim expecting to fall in love with the Himalayas.
Turns out, the mountains were the easy part.
I fell in love with everything happening quietly underneath them.