In the early morning of July 24, I set off with family and friends from Manali for Leh in Ladakh. We returned to Calcutta 12 days later, flying out of Leh’s sun-splashed valley, glimpsing the sparkling Indus river, shaded by poplar and willow and encased by jagged hills whose stones gleamed crimson and purple and a lurid blue. It was exactly two days before the night of August 5, the night when clouds would ferociously burst over Ladakh, when rivers would swell and sweep over banks, when mountain sides would slice off and crash down on sleeping houses and town centres, dissolving roads from Leh to Manali and to Kargil, burying lives and livelihoods in mud and rubble. In Calcutta I searched the television images and newspaper reports, trying to grasp the enormity of the disaster and to assess its impact on the places I had so recently enjoyed as a tourist. In the subsequent days, it was the touristic experience that needed reassessment within this context of devastation and suffering.

We had been avid tourists, eager to receive all the enchantment that guide-books and previous travellers had promised. With no intimation of the impending catastrophe, we spent our holiday indulging our touristic appetites for Ladakh’s sites, scenery, souvenirs and savouries. Neither the tortuous roads, nor our giddiness, throbbing heads and panting breaths (occasioned temporarily by the high altitude), not even the two-hour long traffic jam caused by a landslide before the Rohtang pass, diminished our rapture at the enveloping and constantly changing natural beauty: mountain streams frothing out of glaciers, dizzyingly high mountain passes with mellifluous names like Baralacha La and Tanglang La, ice-rimmed lakes, and the burnished ochre of sand and stone stretched on plateau surface and twisted into fantastical formations along mountainsides.

We made short trips to monasteries and palaces around Leh, and longer overnight stays in Lamayuru (an old monastery-village that teetered on a hill above the road to Kargil) and in the Nubra valley whose barley fields and apricot orchards trailed the ancient commercial wanderings of the Silk Route. We marvelled and clicked (with the abandon that digital cameras permit) at expanses of sand dunes fringed by snow-peaks in Hundar, at chocolate hillsides that slid into the undulating beige folds of a “moon crater” near Lamayuru, at sudden fragrant bursts of lavender and rhododendrons along the approach to the snowy Khardungla Pass (supposedly at 18,350 feet the highest motorable point in the world), at slivers of green valleys tucked between striding barren mountains, at dazzling white-washed, red-roofed monasteries, at Bactrian camels’ stately strutting, at hulking black yaks with streaming blonde hair. And everywhere were rivers — the Shyok, the Nubra, the Indus, the Zanskar — muddy, crystal and aquamarine, leaping, rushing, meandering and sometimes entwining. And everywhere was the crisp sky and the dry air, sometimes particled with dust, but hardly ever with moisture.

This dry weather was the reason for our holiday in July and August, when most other Himalayan locations drip or drown in clammy rain. Ladakh, as expected, basked in the “rain shadow” of protective mountain ranges — the Ladakh, Stok or the Zanskar ranges and the mighty Karakoram. On occasion, stray grey clouds gathered but never menaced; sometimes when the heat thickened, we muttered about global warming and the absurdity of sweltering at 10,000 feet surrounded by snow peaks. But like the other tourists we encountered, we couldn’t imagine that the weather had more ominous intentions and that the mountainsides wouldn’t remain spectacularly benign.

After all, we do say “as old as the hills”, implying stability and endurance. But hills have lacerations and gouged crevices and tumbling rocks that should remind us of the violent energies that make them shift and crumble.

The upheavals of water and earth that engulfed Ladakh after our departure projected a different “rain shadow”. It darkened my recent memories and dampened my touristic effusions. Friends called expressing relief that we had “escaped in time”. I was both touched by their concern and somehow shamed. Our “escape” seemed trivial, even irrelevant, in view of the many who had suffered and were suffering. Had we still been in Ladakh we would probably have been safely ensconced in our hotel, merely inconvenienced by cancelled flights and disrupted telecommunications. I was shamed also that I had treated primarily as scenic backdrop a land that had its own compulsions and convulsions, its own people and their needs.

After the August 5 disaster, all the news trickling out — initially from Leh and its nearby Choglamsar village, and then from numerous other places all across Ladakh — indicated the incipient fragility of every location that we traversed. To some extent I had been aware of the seasonal and the ephemeral all around us — some roads and passes would have been blocked by snow eight months of the year before being cleared and patched up for use from June to October; the rudimentary shacks serving masala chai and snacks in even the most desolate spots catered to this fleeting summertime passage; the service staff in our Leh hotel had come from parts of Uttar Pradesh and would migrate to Goa in October for a different tourist season, and the sheep grazing on high pastures would be snuggled in valley huts as the snow crept down.

So when we observed how swollen and turbulent the rivers — particularly the Indus — seemed, we accepted that as seasonal normality too. This was meant to happen in the life-producing cycle of nature: the glaciers melted and streams gushed into rivers which kept barley and mustard fields vibrant. News had reached us of the ravaging power of the Indus in Pakistani Swat just to our west, but the drowned villages there seemed to bear little resemblance to the apricot-shaded dhabas where we ate aloo parathas and listened to the gurgling Indus. Even when stretches of the road disappeared under cascading water-falls, I assumed the skilled manoeuvring of our drivers testified to a routine occurrence.

Now it seems different. Now it seems that every patch of arduously carved, cobbled and paved road, every rockface, every ravine, every house and especially every human presence was infinitely, wrenchingly precious. Having already fetishized them through tourism, I am reluctant to fetishize them further in tragedy. To abstract them further as objects of their calamity and my compassion. To impose on them my sorrow in their passing and in my passing gaze. But as the various place names are mentioned in the news, I remember them now and wonder about their present situation.

In Leh the greatest damage seems to have been inflicted on parts of the old town of mudbrick houses and shops that since the 17th century were centres of multi-cultural commerce and exchange. Through an open doorway, I had watched an old man hammering a piece of shiny metal with steady precision, and then I lingered by three women knitting under a balcony full of flowers. In the distance was the neat rectangle of the bus station, now repeatedly shown in TV images as a dereliction of shattered tin. I fear for our drivers who might have lived in the old town. I wonder about the wry Kashmiri shopkeeper who had unwrapped coils of corals and turquoise and lapis lazuli and amused us with his sly denigration of foreign tourists, who apparently are more stingy than Indians. And I wonder about the roadside vegetable-seller who filled my arms with shalgams for a mere ten-rupees. I carried the shalgams home to Calcutta, thrilled at the prospect of enjoying their distinctive winter taste in August. I wonder about the well-being of that generous woman, about shalgams on farmlands, about farmlands themselves.

At Choglamsar, close to Leh, is the Central Institute of Buddhist Studies, where we had observed students learning wood carving, tangkha painting and traditional Tibetan medicine. The institute itself seemed too solidly built to have succumbed to the massive onslaught that destroyed much of Choglamsar. We failed to contact its helpful director and, even more frustratingly, a senior lama who had accompanied us on our visits to many monasteries. The lama is learned and so genial, and taught us about Buddhist thought and iconography, and about Ladakhi history and social conditions. As a child he walked long distances on rough tracks, and knows the countryside intimately and cares deeply about the people. I wonder how his wisdom contends with the wreckage.

When I read of visitors to Lamayuru being rescued, I remember our guest-house staff and their children. As we ate our dinner of thukpa and momos during the few hours in which the entire Lamayuru village enjoyed electricity from its lone generator, those children with their family gathered around the dining room’s TV set, and their Tata Sky package allowed them to keep switching from an old Anil Kapoor-Sridevi film to a Hollywood monster melodrama. We watched snippets with them, commenting on technology and its global reach. Then all the lights went off at 11 pm. The children, I remember, were on vacation, summer holidays in Ladakh continuing till early August, and now I wonder whether they’re back in school, whether there is a school.

In Sumur village we had inadvertently chanced upon a local celebration when we followed the sound of drums to an elaborately decorated shamiana where people wearing traditional costumes danced in a circle, amidst women wearing embroidered magenta top hats and old men rotating prayer wheels. It seemed this was a ceremony for a local lad before his departure to become the reincarnated Rimpoche of Spitok monastery. He was due to leave on August 6, and journey over the Khardungla pass. I wonder whether his training for Rimpoche is delayed, whether he is still at Sumur.

I wonder particularly about the fate of the many Bihari migrant labourers who, we noticed, did all the repairing and building of the roads. They were also seasonal itinerants, brought long distances by contractors, for the most strenuous and vital work that sustains the flow of people and goods and army personnel in Ladakh. Their homes were flimsy roadside shacks, sometimes barely a tarpaulin cover over piled stones. When the rivers raged and the hillsides plummeted, they were among the most exposed, the most vulnerable on the very terrain that they were taming into roads for us. For us to sightsee and photograph and collect memories.