Sangay's answer and my Bengaluru commute

You feel it before you can name it.

The moment we crossed from India into Bhutan at Phuntsholing, something in the air shifted. The road narrowed. The mountains arrived. A woman at a small roadside stall was selling masala chai, unhurried, as if the day had nowhere else to be.

We were five in a small car. Yohaan, six years old, was either asking questions nobody could answer or pressed against the window watching the pine forest move past. My wife Supriti was beside him. In front: Sangay, our guide, and Mr. Gimboji at the wheel — driving through switchbacks, past mountain streams, through tall forest corridors, and not once reaching for the horn.

I noticed the horn.

Back home in Bengaluru, the horn is reflex. The Silk Board signal, the Ejipura flyover crawl — you don't even decide to honk, your hand just finds it. Gimboji hadn't used his once. Not when a truck appeared on a blind bend. Not when a dog walked into the road. He slowed, waited, went.

I kept watching him. And then I started watching everyone else.

Somewhere deep in the forest — no village, no signal, just the trees and the sound of a waterfall we couldn't see — I asked Sangay the question I'd been sitting with for two days.

"Tell me honestly. Don't Bhutanese people get angry? Don't you — even with your wife, at home — don't those feelings come?"

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he said: "Yes. Of course. I get angry. I get sad. Even with my wife, even with my child."

He paused.

"But that's all the point, right? You let it go. You don't hold it. A river — you cannot hold a river. It must flow. That's all."

The forest kept going. Gimboji kept driving. Yohaan was asleep against the door.

I sat with that for a while.

Not because it was new. Because it was so simple it had no room for an argument.

The road kept going. Yohaan had woken up and was directing his questions at Sangay and Gimboji now, which gave Supriti and me a quiet we hadn't asked for but didn't refuse.

Gimboji pulled over at a small café that overlooked a monastery. We spent half an hour there. Coffee, the view, a few stories from the journey so far. I don't remember what anyone said. I remember it felt easy — the particular ease of a conversation you're not trying to steer anywhere.

We passed a small village and Sangay's words came back.

I thought about the argument at work that followed me home for a week. The thing a neighbour said, two years ago, that I've turned over so many times the original words are gone. The falling-out with someone close — how I kept it alive long after the moment had ended, adding to it, returning to it, making sure it didn't go anywhere.

Gimboji drove on.

That evening at the hotel, I asked Supriti if she'd come for the Tiger's Nest trek the next morning. 5 AM start, Sangay would take us up.

She said she wanted to rest. She and Yohaan would stay. Go, she said. Sangay knows the way.

That felt odd for a moment. I'd pictured the three of us on the path.

Then I thought: yes. This is the right thing.

I left at 5 AM. I reached the top in under two hours.

Best moment I've had in years.

I hadn't planned it that way.