ABSTRACT
Nasir and I walked down a small street, with the address we had gotten from a Hoshiarpuri trader in Leh. Neither of us had ever been to Hoshiarpur before and we were slightly lost in what seemed like a large town. A cycle rickshaw wallah had taken us to this section of the town, near an old library building surrounded by pleasant gardens and large colonial-style banks shaded by tall green trees. But now we were wandering, going back and forth across a series of streets with tall white walls and imposing wrought iron gates. This upper-middle class Indian neighborhood seemed far from, and perhaps unconnected to, Ladakh. Children played in the streets in front of the neat white concrete houses and a small girl jumping rope in one street said something which caught our ears. “Did she just say something in Ladakhi?”
