They watched him climb the three steps up to the tea stall. He asked for tea, then stood at the entrance. Why was he not going inside?

Outside, in the late afternoon sun, a game of carrom was in progress. Four played but many sat or kneeled around the board, smoking bidis and passing commentary. This group was busy, he noted thankfully, and while one man looked up at him and said something in a language he could not understand – which caused a few of the other men to grunt or snort – most were satisfied with a momentary glance before turning back to their game and banter.

A truck stood on the earth road in front of the tea stall, loaded with sacks of what looked like cement. Four men were involved in unloading the sacks. One stood on top of the stack, helping the sacks onto the bent backs of three men, who deposited them one by one in the store room of the provision shop. The truck was still two-thirds full, another half an hour or forty minutes, he estimated, before they finish unloading. Then he could hitch a ride to the main road, eight kilometres away, which would take him back to the town.

The two men inside the box-sized tea stall – smoky and hot from the wood-fire, and with a single wooden plank to sit on, so low that your knees would be doubled up to your chest – were looking at him now. If he met their eye, they would no doubt beckon him inside and he would have to make conversation, answer questions.

He looked away. Not today, he thought to himself, not this evening. He had climbed up to the ridge of the mountain behind this valley, a walk through forests of red rhododendron and pine trees that had become much longer and more arduous than what he had been prepared for that day. On the steep descent, his legs had turned wobbly, and he was grateful to have been able to hold on to the boulders that had caused such trouble on the way up. Now, having reached the end, he found that the day’s last share-jeep had left, and he would have to hitch a ride on this truck that was still going to take forty minutes to unload. Standing outside the tea-stall and sipping on lemon tea that was too hot for the occasion, all he could think of was taking off his shoes and his shirt soaked with sweat, then bathe and rest. He was too tired now to translate pleasantries and descriptions of his day to the language common to him and these men. For them, this language came easier, but he still had to translate word by word, reply in short sentences with many pauses, often end his side of conversations abruptly because he had no translatable words left.

Word had spread in the village, that an outsider was here. He had come this morning, alone, and had gone up to Pinnath. It was he who was in the jeep that had passed this way at eight thirty. He had paid a fare of a hundred and eighty rupees. He heard them saying these things now, snatches of facts being repeated, as he walked to the bench outside the provision shop to wait.

It was evening, not long to go before dark. Most of the men of the village – he counted fifteen houses, spaced wide apart – seemed to be out, outside the tea stall, playing carrom or standing around the provision shop. Women walking to the shop, some with children in tow, studied him as they passed – openly now, he noticed; they did not turn away as they had in the morning when he had passed them on the way up to the temple. Across the road, near the truck, one man was sitting apart from the others – an old man with a walking stick and wrinkled skin – on a mound of broken-down stone that must have been unloaded on a previous trip. Behind him lay the strips of wheat, precious strips of valley flatland amid the vast barrenness and wild shrubbery of the mountainsides all around. The houses of the village stood on the slopes facing the valley, Pinnath temple a single white dot at the top of the mountain. The old man spoke to no one, he did not approach the other old men who sat on the parapet below the tea stall. But, like most of the others, he too was watching him now.

In fact he, the outsider, had not been able to speak to anyone in either of his two languages at all since coming here. He had always known that he could “manage” in the common language, and he had – with the man at the shop to buy something, with the man next to him on the bus, even the friendly ones on the road who would come up and strike up a conversation that would go on in some form, with him trying to keep up with the words, for five or ten minutes. But a few days of this and things had begun to grow more alien, conversations – their questions and his, his answers and theirs – predictable. He knew it wouldn’t be like this for long. He would hear more, get better at speaking it. In a few weeks he knew it would be a lot better, and once it got better it could only improve further. Soon it would never be like these first two weeks again. But sitting there on the bench outside the provision shop, all this seemed far away. And on an evening such as this, with his body tired and mind unwilling to cooperate, he only felt it more, he felt as if all the eyes of the village were on him.

The truck still had a few rows of sacks to be unloaded. He asked a young boy passing by where could fill up water to drink.

“From the tap there, behind the truck,” the boy pointed. At this, the man with the kid spoke to him rapidly, as if giving him instructions. The boy then turned back to the outsider and said, “Give it to me. I will do it for you.”

“No, no, it’s ok. I will do it myself,” he said and went in the direction of the truck, bottle in hand.

The old man, sitting silently on the pile of stone, watching, cried “Teek Hai!” when he heard this exchange, and flashed him a wide grin.

He grinned back at the old man as he passed him, and met the warmth in his bespectacled eyes with a warmth that had reached his own, and it was all better.