losing the war

No one who has not taken in hand the cultivation of a thousand miles of live hedge... can form any conception of the Herculean labour this involves... The hedge is nowhere less than eight feet high and four to five feet thick; but in places it is as much as twelve feet high and fourteen feet thick at the bottom.
Allan Octavian Hume, Commissioner of Indian Customs, British India

It was 1962 and India was losing a war, losing bits of itself that it has never regained. The Chinese had advanced through these northernmost valleys, all the way to the pass where we now sat huddled. Locals say that the army had retreated, all except for one soldier who, despite orders, had stayed and halted an entire battalion. Through a combination of superior altitude and raw courage, he had kept them at bay for 72 days before being overpowered and butchered. Bits and pieces of him were found later when the Indians fought these slopes back; and when Sela, his lover, discovered them she threw herself off the peaks, cementing the legend and lending her name to a spot already heavy with tragedy.

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