Flip

Bison once thundered across North America in the millions, their herds shaping the prairies and nourishing ecosystems. By the 1880s, overhunting and habitat loss left only a few hundred in Yellowstone, teetering on the edge of extinction.

Through strict protection and conservation efforts, their numbers have grown back into the thousands. Today, Yellowstone’s bison are a living testament to resilience and the impact of the human stewardship.

Before the boats, before the bells, there is the chai stall. Raju lights his stove at a quarter past five on the steps above Assi Ghat, and by the time the sky turns pink he has already poured a hundred cups.

He serves it in kulhads, small unglazed clay cups that give the tea a faint earthy taste. You drink, and then you throw the cup down where it breaks and returns to the mud it came from. Nobody washes anything.

The recipe is not a secret

Milk, water, a lot of sugar, black tea, crushed ginger and one cardamom pod split with a thumbnail. Boiled hard, twice. Raju shrugs when I ask about the recipe. The secret, he says, is doing it ten thousand times.

Tourists take photos of the river. Everyone else comes here first.

Pilgrims, boatmen, students and a few tired priests stand around the stall in a loose circle. For ten minutes, before the city gets loud, they are all just people holding warm cups in the cold.

Tal Chhapar is a small sanctuary, barely seven square kilometres of grass. On a map it looks like nothing. On the ground it holds more than two thousand blackbuck.

The males are the colour of strong coffee, with spiral horns. They hold small territories and spend the mornings pretending not to look at each other.

Every evening at about a quarter to six, the old city stops being three-dimensional. The domes go flat, the minarets go thin, and for twenty minutes Lucknow looks like something cut from paper and held up to a lamp.

I have been climbing the same terrace for a month. The owner, a retired schoolteacher, charges nothing and asks only that I bring him a print of the best one. I have not found the best one yet.

Indian grey wolves do not announce themselves. In the grasslands west of Jodhpur, you learn to read the land instead: a herd of blackbuck suddenly alert, a shepherd's dogs barking at nothing, a line of fresh tracks across a dirt road that was smooth at sunset.

For eleven mornings I sat in the same spot before dawn, the camera wrapped in an old shawl against the dust. On six of them I saw nothing at all. On three I saw a wolf so far away it was a grey comma on the horizon.

The tenth morning

On the tenth morning a female came out of a ravine with two half-grown pups behind her. She trotted along the ridge, stopped, and turned her head to look straight down the valley toward me. I have no idea whether she saw me. I took four frames and then I simply watched.

At ten the shutters come down on the cloth shops and the smoke goes up from the kebab stalls. The lane changes owners every night.

Galouti, soft as butter, cooked on a tawa wide as a cartwheel. The man who makes them has been doing it for forty years and has never once eaten one standing up.

The first thing you notice in the lanes behind Chowk is how quiet the work is. There are no machines here, only the soft pull of thread through muslin and the occasional radio playing old film songs from a doorway.

Chikankari begins long before the needle. A printer presses carved wooden blocks into a washable blue dye, laying out vines, paisleys and tiny flowers across the cloth. Those marks are a map. Once the stitching is done, the cloth goes to the washermen and the blue disappears, leaving only white thread on white fabric.

Thirty stitches, one hand

Rukhsana has been stitching for twenty-six years. She names the stitches as she works, as if introducing old friends: tepchi for the long running lines, bakhia for the shadow work that glows from behind the fabric, phanda and murri for the knots that sit like grains of rice on the surface.

It is a ridiculous bird and a magnificent one, tall as a child, with a walk like a retired general. It cannot see power lines well, and power lines are what is killing it.

The door was painted blue in 1971, the year her husband came home from the war. Nobody has repainted it since; they only oil the hinges.

Inside, the courtyard holds a neem tree older than the house. She tells me the house was built around the tree, not the other way round, and I believe her.

She does not want her name used. ‘The house is the story,’ she says. ‘I just live in it.’

In 1784, during a terrible famine, Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula began building the Bara Imambara. The story every guide tells is that labourers built by day and nobles, too proud to be seen working, were quietly paid to pull parts of it down by night, so that the work and the wages would last.

Whether that is true or not, you understand why people want to believe it when you stand in the central hall. It is enormous, and there is not a single beam or pillar holding up the roof. The vault simply stands, held by its own shape.

Lost on purpose

Above the hall is the Bhool Bhulaiya, a maze of narrow passages and identical doorways. Children run ahead and call out, and their voices come back from the wrong direction. A guide strikes a match against one wall and you hear it clearly from the far side of the gallery.

Malaiyyo is milk boiled, left out overnight under the winter sky, then whipped by hand until it is mostly air. It tastes of saffron and very little else, which is the point.

By nine the sun has made it impossible. So you eat it at seven, in a clay cup, standing in an alley that has not changed since your grandfather ate it here.

Day one is easy and everyone lies about how easy it is. Day two is pine forest and snow that squeaks. Day three is the camp below the summit, where nobody sleeps.

We left for the top at three in the morning. By the time the sun came up, the ridges behind us had turned the colour of the inside of a shell, one layer paler than the next, all the way to Tibet.