Moon at Half Past Noon

In Binsar’s blue and breathing deep,
Where granite guardians wake and sleep,
A house of stone and ancient wood
Between the clouds and valleys stood.
And there, a man of five-foot height—
A sturdy spark of mountain light—
Kept watch upon the ridge’s line,
With windows framed in gold and pine.

His wife—a storm of restless grace—
Had sought the plains’ more hurried pace.
He let her go, as mountains do,
To give the children room to grow;
For love is not a tethered thing,
But the broad sky beneath a wing.
He missed her like a vanished scent,
A quiet, holy discontent.

Yet when the jeeps would groan and climb
To break the silence of his time,
The city children—loud and bright—
Would spill into the Binsar light.
The world of clocks, the grid of steel,
Dissolved beneath the mountain’s keel.
They shed the plains like heavy dust,
And placed in him their wilder trust.

But first, the rite: before the dawn,
While sleep was still a curtain drawn,
He’d rouse the Tribe with whispered breath
To meet the morning’s quiet death.
The mules stood waiting, dark and wise,
With ancient patience in their eyes.
A swaying, silvered caravan
To execute a sacred plan.

Up through the oak, where shadows dwell,
Marked by the rhythmic, lonely bell,
They climbed until the trail grew thin,
And the cold stars began to thin.
Then, at the summit’s jagged rim,
Where every smaller light grew dim,
The world fell back, the veil was torn—
The Himalayas were reborn.

Not distant hills of paint and glass,
But a sudden, breathing, titan mass.
A wall of prayer, a jagged white,
That drank the first of heaven’s light.
Peaks like the teeth of gods in wait,
Serene and cold and fiercely great.
A silence made of ice and air,
So terrible and so beyond compare.

The sun then struck the highest crown—
A molten fire come pouring down.
The valleys woke in velvet blue,
As if the world were strange and new.
And in that vast, unblinking glare,
The soul was stripped and offered there.
They stood upon the roof of time,
Where life is steep and light is prime.
A spotted griffon, sharp and slow,
Cut a shadow in the snow.

They’d journey down, the vision sealed,
Like a deep truth in marrow healed.
Then Baba, in his woolen shawl,
Would hear the evening’s urgent call.
The blackened pot, the hearth’s old king,
Prepared to do a magic thing.

With milk as white as peak-top snow,
And rice that held a pearly glow,
He’d stir the saffron, stolen gold,
Till every secret was retold.
Cardamom cracked like mountain earth,
And raisins swelled in sweet rebirth.
He stirred a rhythm, deep and slow,
To make the inner haven grow.

The smell of scorched milk, wool, and pine,
A binding of the heart and mind.
He told no tales of greed or war,
But of the spirits at the door;
Of ancestors who walked through stone,
And love that never leaves its own.
In every spoonful, warm and sweet,
The ritual was made complete.

The years spun on. The tribe grew tall,
Tempted by the city’s call.
On Kuntal’s last, deep-breathing night,
He made the pudding by the light.
And when the fire began to dim,
The mountain came to claim its kin.

He sat within his high-backed chair,
With starlight tangled in his hair.
Kuntal sat low, her head a weight
Against the man who’d mastered fate.
The rasp of wool against her ear,
His breath a tide she’d learned to hear.
She felt his heart, a slowing beat,
Till rest and silence were complete.
No sudden cry, no jagged breath,
Just a gentle, moon-lit shift of death.
Then—a sound the mountain split—
A child’s cry, where silence sit.

She held him—light as cedar-seed—
The man who’d met their every need.
He was the scent, he was the stone,
He was the ridge that they called home.
The Little King, the quiet son,
His migration had just begun.

Now others come with newer hands,
To walk these old, demanding lands.
They find the pot, they guess the grain,
To bring the magic back again.
And as the steam begins to rise
Beneath the Binsar’s watchful eyes,
The walls dissolve, the years unwind,
And Little Baba stays behind.

The circle that he built so wide
Holds every soul that steps inside.
A love not kept, but freely sown,
To lead the weary travelers home.