Chopta was the first time I almost scared myself to death. There was this guy at the chulha who told us we'd get roti and lauki ki sabzi, nothing else, he also told us that we'd better get back to our room quickly because sometimes panthers went by the village at night. I was nine and secretly neurotic already, and a panther was a PANTHER! but the folks stepped out anyway. Within half a minute of walking down the road we were in a kind of darkness you don't see anywhere else, pure pitch without glimmerings of any other shade. And since you don't need a panther if you're inside it already, my usual attack of silent hyperventilation started. Then I looked up at the peak of it all, and there seemed to be more light up in the sky than down here, more stars than I had ever seen in my life, spread out till as far as I could follow. All right this sounds really sappy now, like a parable or something. But it was huge then, like Complan powder on a granite slab, like spray-painting with toothbrushes (white paint, black chart paper) during craft classes. Charts of the solar system, encyclopedias with colour illustrations, science city, nothing compares. We sat down for a bit in the middle of the road at great peril to our bottoms and huffed out mouthfuls of vapour, and all I wanted was to get back to a lit room because as far as I was concerned a panther was following us back all the way from the village.

It's always been my favourite part of being in the hills ever since, looking up at a clear night sky on a dark road and becoming Microbe Number One. And a part of my refusal to learn to tell constellations apart, I think, is this need to not be able to discern, to not, for once, try and find a pattern to everything. It's not that it helps you survive a walk at night, looking up. It just distracts in a way I can't explain, almost subliminal, I don't even completely know what that word means. But there it is.