The airplane was suddenly enveloped in a giant cloud. The inside of the well-lighted plane became gradually darker and the white mountaintops below that I could see from the window were no longer visible. Before the story or the airplane goes any further, let me share with you a bit about the first time I visited the mountains.

I have always had a special connection with the mountains—the Himalayas, in particular. I have been fortunate enough to visit many places and travel around the world but there is a special tug between me and Himachal Pradesh. This could probably be because it was the first place where I had travelled solo six years ago. During that time, I was trekking through this thick forest in Pulga, which the locals refer to as ‘Fairy Forest’. When you’re trekking through a mountainous forest with no sign of human life in your five-kilometer radius, it puts things into perspective. There had been no mobile signal for the last three hours and the locals had asked me to find a waterfall, where I had planned to set up my camp. It would be lying if I said that my heart was not pounding even a little bit as the sun had already begun to set and I couldn’t even hear the waterfall—let alone spot it. I took out my mobile phone and began recording myself, chronicling my journey and the paths that I had taken, to stave off the loneliness. I was occasionally having some of the dry fruits from my belt pouch as I trekked on. It was around 5:30 pm when hope in the form of a furry angel came to my aid—a big, healthy mountain dog, who I had named Laska, showed me the way to the waterfall.