On the Trail

The plane banked low over a sea of emerald just before touching down. From above, the fields looked soaked and waiting, the way land does before monsoon bursts open. Arunachal Pradesh had long sat on the fringes of my birding dreams, remote, unpredictable, and teeming with promise. This was to be my first trip to the Northeast, a land long imagined, its names carrying the mystique of borderlands, of birds seldom seen, and of cloud-laced valleys that held stories in their sile

The Ghost of the Mountains We began our journey to Spiti from Chandigarh—a long, winding route that would take two days and carry us from...