23/09/2025
His last massage 💔💔
The silence in Yasin Valley is a heavy shroud, broken only by the distant groan of the shifting glacier. The soaring cliffs, once animated by the cries of lammergeiers and chukars, now stand mute. The apricot orchards are still; no song thrush sings from their branches, no bee hums amongst the blossoms.
Strange, lonely survivors a solitary Himalayan snowcock on a ridge seem to search for traces of their vanished companions.
We have killed life.
The earth no longer teems with the furious industry of ants; the wildflower meadows are empty of the vibrant dance of butterflies. Wherever one looks, from the riverbank to the high pasture, life seems to have fled, and no one seems to know where it now hides.
The grasses appear sad, uninhabited, no longer tormenting women’s calves with buzzing insects as they walk the paths to the fields.
The wild is no more. The insignificant yet so precious, buzzing life of small, flitting creatures has vanished.
All that remains is livestock. Children are taken by noisy jeeps to see yaks and goats, just as they were once brought to gaze upon the majestic markhor or the elusive snow leopard now confined to stories.
Poetry speaks of a world of distracted wanderers, saved from their own awareness by life the astonishing and deceptively invincible life of yesteryear.
We can now only sing of a world we have killed, one that will never return.
One day, the first chemical runoff washed into the river from new terraces, the first concrete pier was laid in the meadow, and the requiem was pronounced. A scientific requiem, an arithmetical requiem, a developer’s requiem, written in blueprints the scriptures of the new era.
A world that might still live through screens and satellite images, but one we will no longer touch or smell. A world that now belongs to legend, with creatures no less mythical than the dragons said to sleep beneath the mountains.
And the developer exclaims, with an enthusiastic grimace, his sacred blueprint in hand: “Look at the progress.”
