Two Timelines
Two parallel lives
Rohit Patkar
Two Timelines
Yesterday (31 May 2026) , I was walking through the market in Leh when I saw two familiar faces approaching from the opposite direction.
For a moment, my mind struggled to place them.
Then I recognized them.
Krishna and Greenie.
The three of us had worked together in Thailand in 2023. We had all been part of a program for students from international schools in Bangkok. It was not a large part of my life. In fact, looking back, it was a relatively brief chapter.
Yet it contained one of the most consequential events I have ever experienced.
Two and a half years earlier, during that period in Thailand, I had a serious accident.
Not the kind of accident people describe casually over dinner.
A genuinely life-threatening accident.
The sort of event after which one begins dividing life into before and after.
Krishna was trained in first aid and was among the first people to help me. Both she and Greenie came with me to the hospital. Eventually Krishna left, but Greenie remained longer, staying through some of the most difficult hours that followed.
Had Krishna and Greenie not been there, the outcome might have been very different.
Life is strange that way.
The work itself was never especially important to me.
The accident was.
And now, somehow, the two women most closely associated with that experience had appeared in the market of the town where I live.
There was a brief hug.
I thanked Krishna again for the first aid.
I had already thanked them before, both in person and later on WhatsApp, but gratitude is one of those things that sometimes resurfaces naturally.
The conversation itself was short.
A little awkward.
Not unfriendly.
Just awkward.
Two and a half years is a long time.
People change.
Lives diverge.
Former colleagues become strangers who still recognize each other.
After a few minutes, they continued on their way.
But the encounter stayed with me for the rest of the day.
Partly because of who they were.
Partly because of what they represented.
And partly because of where it happened.
Leh is not a destination for me.
It is home.
I first arrived here in 2011. Since then, sixteen years have passed.
The mountains, the market, the monasteries, the changing seasons, the rhythm of daily life—this is not a place I visit. It is the landscape within which my adult life has unfolded.
That distinction matters.
For Krishna and Greenie, Leh was a work assignment.
They were leading a student group and keeping an eye on the students who had been given some free time in the market.
For me, it was simply another afternoon.
I was not passing through.
I was exactly where I belong.
Perhaps that is why the encounter felt so surreal.
It felt as though two separate timelines had suddenly crossed.
One of the things that struck me was how differently our paths had unfolded.
Years earlier, I had imagined myself doing more of this kind of work.
The idea had originally come from an experience I had in Spiti in 2014.
That program had been wonderful.
I spent time with a group of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old students from England and their teachers. We travelled through the Trans-Himalayas together, and for the first time I felt that people genuinely understood my sense of humour.
They understood my deadpan!
The conversations were enjoyable.
The mountains were magnificent.
The work felt meaningful.
I was less of a logistics coordinator and more of a mountain guide.
I loved it.
That experience planted a seed.
Years later, when the opportunity arose to work on programs in Thailand, I thought I might rediscover something similar.
Instead, I found something quite different.
The students were from international schools in Bangkok. Most of the time we moved from one location to another, one activity to another.
Occasionally I taught a skill, pitched tents, or facilitated an exercise.
But there was very little depth.
Very little genuine interaction.
Very little opportunity to mentor, guide, or build meaningful relationships.
The experience often felt superficial.
I remember feeling underutilized.
Not because the work was beneath me, but because I knew I was capable of contributing more than I was being asked to contribute.
Even while I was doing it, I suspected it was not my future.
For Krishna and Greenie, however, it became part of an ongoing path.
Years later they are still doing similar work.
That fascinates me.
Not because one choice is better than the other.
Simply because we all began from roughly the same place and ended up somewhere completely different.
Standing there in the market, I realized I was looking not only at two former colleagues.
I was looking at an alternate version of my own life.
A version that continued moving from program to program, destination to destination, season to season.
A version that remained in that world.
Meanwhile, my own life had moved in another direction entirely.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is how little I miss the life I once thought I wanted.
There was a time when exploration defined me.
Remote valleys.
Remote villages.
Mountain expeditions.
Camping beneath the stars.
Crossing passes.
Disappearing into wilderness.
For years I felt compelled to keep going farther.
To see what lay beyond the next ridge.
Today I live among some of the most beautiful mountains on Earth.
And yet I rarely feel the need to venture very far at all.
I am content with a walk through the market.
A conversation with a stranger.
A cup of desi chai.
An hour sitting quietly overlooking the valley and the snowclad mountains where I used to work as a climbing guide.
Teaching meditation.
Meditating twice each day.
People watching (in the pedestrian only market).
The younger version of me would probably find this difficult to understand.
He might think I had become less adventurous.
Less ambitious.
Less alive.
But that is not how it feels.
If anything, it feels as though the search has ended.
Not because I found all the answers.
But because I no longer feel compelled to look for them in the next valley.
As I watched Krishna and Greenie disappear into the crowd, I realized that what moved me was not nostalgia.
I did not want to return to that life.
I did not wish I were leading student groups.
I did not feel jealous of the road they had taken.
What I felt was something much simpler.
Amazement.
Amazement that a chapter I had long considered finished could suddenly reappear in front of me.
Amazement that two people connected to one of the most intense and life-altering experiences I have ever had would unexpectedly walk toward me in the place I have called home for sixteen years.
And amazement at the strange, invisible threads that connect events which, at the time they occur, seem entirely unrelated.
Two different chapters of my life, Thailand and Ladakh, two different realities, seem to blend into each other for a few minutes.
The market carried on.
Tourists wandered past.
The mountains remained exactly where they had always been.
Nothing had changed.
And yet for the rest of the afternoon I felt as though I had briefly stepped outside of time and watched two versions of my life meet each other before quietly moving on.
Disclaimer: Information on this website is provided for general purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. TM is not a substitute for professional medical care; individual results may vary.
© 2026 Rohit Patkar. All rights reserved.