A deferred life India tells many stories like this one. We shared a tent at Lyuti Bugyal with a 63-year-old from Kolkata who had trekked Everest Base Camp, Kailash Mansarovar, Sandakphu, Adi Kailash, and the Panch Kedar. He was finally free, he said. His son had started working. This essay is about what the waiting cost and what it didn’t.
We met him in the tent at Lyuti Bugyal.
This was the evening of the first day—after eight kilometers of steep uphill and before the remaining stretch to Rudranath the following morning. The four of us had chosen to stop here rather than push through in a single day. He was already there when we arrived, settled in the way someone settles who has done this enough times that the routine of it is comfortable.
He was 63. From Kolkata.
He had trekked Sandakphu. Kailash Mansarovar. Everest Base Camp. Adi Kailash. The entire Panch Kedar—all five, which is what we were attempting now and which he had already completed. He traveled alone, mostly. Occasionally he hired a guide to walk alongside him.
He had stories the way some people have furniture—accumulated over years, each one with its own history and weight.
We talked until the cold outside the tent became more persuasive than the conversation. Then we slept.
The detail I have been sitting with since that night is not the expedition. It is something he said in passing, with no particular emphasis, the way you mention a fact that requires no explanation.
His son had recently started his job. Now he was free.
He said this without bitterness, without ceremony. His son was employed. His responsibilities were done. The mountains were his.
I am 45 years old. He is 63. Those are eighteen years.
Earlier on the same trek, on the descent from Rudranath, on a high-altitude bugyal with wildflowers and snowcapped peaks, I met a twenty-year-old from Bijnor who was completing the Panch Kedar this year. His notebook factory funds the Himalayan life he wants. He has been here before. He will be here again.
He was not waiting for his son to start working.
He was not waiting for his responsibilities to be done.
He was not waiting for anything.
He was 20 and already living the life he had drawn.
The 63-year-old from Kolkata was living the same life.
Forty-three years apart.
I want to be careful about what I am saying here, because it is easy to say it wrong.
I am not judging the 63-year-old for the choices he made across a life I know nothing about. He raised a son who is now employed and well. He has a wife he has been married to for decades. He fulfilled what his generation understood to be the obligations of a man—and having fulfilled them, he turned toward the mountains with no visible resentment and enormous competence. He climbs Everest Base Camp. He has done Kailash Mansarovar. These are not the achievements of someone who gave up on life—they are the achievements of someone who finally arrived at it.
The question I am asking is quieter and harder to answer.
What did the waiting cost?
Not the financial cost. That question has an easy answer and is not interesting.
What did 43 years of waiting cost in terms of the specific experience of being in the mountains—the conversations at altitude, the particular quality of silence above 3,000 meters, the specific way your body learns to move on an uphill trail over years of doing it?
What did it cost in terms of the relationship—the wife who mostly complains about the travel, whose position on the mountains was formed over decades during which they were the thing he was always going to do later?
I do not know the answer. I only know that the deferral shaped everything that came after it, including what the freedom feels like now and what the constraint produced then.
What a Deferred Life India Builds by Default
A deferred life India rarely interrogates is not usually the result of indifference. It is usually the result of a specific cultural inheritance: the obligation to build first and live later. Career first. Family first. Children educated and settled first
The mountains were always the plan. Just not yet.
He is from Kolkata. He belongs to a generation and a culture where this sequence was not a choice but an assumption so embedded it barely presented itself as a choice at all.
You worked, you provided, you waited. This was not weakness.
It was the air everyone breathed.
And then the son started working. And now he is free.
The freedom is real. The mountains are real. Everest Base
Camp is real.
I only wonder what the 43-year wait felt like in the years before the freedom arrived. Whether there were mornings when the weight of it was heavier than others. Whether he ever looked at photographs of the Himalayas the way someone looks at a letter they cannot yet open.
He did not say. I did not ask.
The Yash comparison is worth making explicit because I think it points toward something useful rather than something judgmental.
Yash is 20. He has not waited. The life and the work are not separated in his mind—the factory funds the mountains, and both exist now, simultaneously, as they were always meant to.
The 63-year-old is 63. He waited. The life and the work were separated for most of his adult years—the work came first; the life is coming now.
Neither path is objectively better. Yash has decades of living ahead of him on the design he made at 20, with all the uncertainty that entails. The 63-year-old arrives at the mountains with 40 years of life lived first—with stories, earned wisdom, and a body that has survived enough to know what it is capable of.
But there is one thing the 20-year-old has that the 63-year-old does not and cannot now have. The early years.
The decade of Himalayan mornings at 25. The acclimatization that happens at 30 is different than at 60. The specific quality of doing the thing you love when your body is new to it and your whole life is ahead of you.
Those years are not recoverable. The deferral made them unavailable. The mountains do not keep those particular mornings in storage.
I am not writing this to alarm anyone or to suggest that family obligations are the wrong choice. They are not. Most people who raise children, provide for families, and honor the obligations of their generation are doing something real and valuable. The 63-year-old’s son exists because his father showed up for 43 years. That matters.
What I am writing is a question, not an accusation.
If the mountains are life—if they are what you love most and what you would do if you could—when did you decide they could wait?
Was that decision made consciously? Was there a morning when you looked at the calendar and said, “Not yet, but when the son is employed, the mountains are mine”?
Or did the deferral accumulate quietly, year by year, without a decision being made at all? One year of responsibility becoming two, becoming ten, becoming the default, and becoming who you are?
That quiet accumulation is the deferred life India builds by default rather than by design.
The 63-year-old from Kolkata is living beautifully now.
The question worth asking is how much of it he could have lived with at 40—and what it would have taken to begin.
We heard his footsteps leave the tent early the next morning.
The rest of us were still in sleeping bags. He was already on the trail.
He knows what he is doing. He is not wasting what remains.
That is something.
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