4th July 2010
We reached Pangong and having taken up one of the only two rooms available there and having dumped our luggage, we walked to the lake.
It was blue for sure, but a dull blue.
I had hoped to amaze my parents with the 10 or so different dazzling blues I had been enraptured by a year ago. It was Pangong, more than anything else in Ladhak that had made me bring my parents to the place. But then...
We walked by the lake and the blue became lighter and silvery as the day faded. We walked back; dad went back to the bench by the tent close to the rooms where the locals lived and cooked for the tourists and I, followed by mom walked to the spot which roughly marks one end of the lake and is reached by vehicles unlike other parts of the shore that are reached only by walking – this spot is where people usually gather, their vehicles parked nearby, to watch the water birds and to look at the lake that goes on till the horizon and beyond.
Standing at this spot I saw 3 to 4 different shades of blue on the lake that was now calm, all of them pastels, very subtle and very surreal.
While all the sky was covered in clouds and all the mountains around the lake washed by a soft light, a shaft of diffused sunlight fell on one part of the mountainside and it glowed, not brightly but just enough to look ‘enlightened’.
As it got darker, the whole picture became more and more surreal. It became a painting.
And I walked back to the pavilion, thinking of the next day that I supposed to be the most important day of our tour.
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