In layers of Himalayan sediment lie the knowledge of communities

When I was a child, I would chase the sun around my village in western Sikkim to bask in it before it went behind the mountains. I would then plunge my hot feet into the cool stream near my house, watching the tadpoles and fish swim around them.

One day, I came across a uniquely shaped stone in the water – it was round and flat, and had a large indented hole in the middle, and I thought it looked like a “gadung,” which we used for pounding grains. With great effort, I lifted the stone from the river and dragged it home to show my parents. They asked where it had come from, and then my father pronounced it was a “tendrel,” or auspicious connection, that had led me to find it, as it was indeed a “gadung,” and may well have been used by his late brother-in-law, my uncle, who used to pound his grains while sitting on the river bank.

My child’s eyes and imagination had found the “gadung” among many other pebbles and stones that had been worn down over thousands of years of water flow that connected the mountains above us to the mighty rivers below, and...

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