By Sunil Kumar
The tree roots coiled around the ruins like time trying to remember a story it had once told — half of it lost to moss, the rest etched in stone.
I sat cross-legged in Ta Prohm, the temple Angelina Jolie once ducked and rushed through in Tomb Raider, and let the ancient air wash over me. The breath moved differently here: aesthetics, crushed leaves, the passing scent of rain and history.
A teenage version of me — skinny, bespectacled, a first rank-holder obsessed with history and maps — would have zipped through this site like a mission. But now I paused.
I let the ruins breathe me in. My body, heavier now and softened by age and indulgence, became a grounded vessel: for memory, for myth, for something unnamed.
There is a femininity to ruins. Beauty, infinity and divinity. These crumbling halls do not resist time. They receive it. Like Apsaras frozen mid-dance, their chipped smiles still radiant, they speak in gestures beyond language.
In them, I saw Shakti — not a calendar icon, but the raw pulse of change itself: the tremble before the form dissolves. The infinite cycles of Indic cosmology.
Sunrise at Angkor Wat is a ritual now commodified- sold to millions of tourists and tour groups, yet no less profound. The tour group stood with cameras drawn like priests bearing offerings.
Even so, when the first light hit the towers, something ancient stirred.
Everybody gasped, and for a moment, we were initiates. I thought of the endless beginnings and endings that must have passed through this place. Lives lived and lost. Lovers, wars, kings, dancers, ghosts. Aspirations and dreams.
Later, over lunch, we laughed. Our group was lively — Americans, Brits, Vietnamese, Germans, Lithuanians, Australians, Spanish girls with full-sleeve tattoos, and a Cambodian-American couple tracing their ancestry. I experienced solitude in a crowd like I mostly do, but a tad gently. There was warmth. There was a shared reverence for this strange threshold between past and present.
Watching The White Lotus (Thailand season) on my iPad earlier had been absurd, intriguing and oddly prescient. Its surreal tone, its haunted luxury and cold satire, echoed something I couldn’t quite name in Southeast Asia’s real-life paradises.
The show mocked the privileged gaze that lives and consumes suffering as aesthetics. And yet, here we all were, enacting it. Maybe I shouldn’t have thought of fictional cynicism and real life with real people.
Taking selfies among ruins. Eating mango sticky rice in boutique roadside cafes. I wanted to laugh and cry at once.
The Beach, that Alex Garland feverish novel, a dream of hedonism and escape, also felt close. Paradise is a projection. A hunger. And often, a trap. Karma and Maya.
In the Kulen Mountains, the river ran over a thousand Shivalingas carved into stone. Their shapes blurred beneath the shallow water, shimmering like memory. I stood above them and wondered: what if even gods grow tired of formlessness and long, for a time, to become something tangible?
Nirguna, Saguna, Brahman, Akal Purakh, Fanaa. Is that not what all of us are doing? Flowing into form, forgetting, returning?
And yet, form is where pain lives. A woman weeps, her husband shot in cold blood. A child watches in terror. Tourists. Soldiers die on holiday.
Gar firdaus, ruhe zamin ast, hamin asto, hamin asto, hamin ast.
Far away in Kashmir, as I travelled, a macabre dance of destruction unfurled. People slaughtered on their honeymoons. A vision of joy turned into a bloodstain. The news came like a stone into still water.
Shiva and the mystic Lal Ded lived in that beautiful valley once upon a time. Now it promises the icy chill of a nuclear winter.
I thought of my parents, ageing, worrying. I thought of home. I thought of borders, and how fragile every sanctuary is.
There’s a sorrow to travel, especially when it’s joyful. Because you know it ends. Because it reminds you how temporary everything is. But that’s also the saving grace. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing should.
Theravada Buddhism, which permeates Cambodia, whispers impermanence with every bell chime. Vajrayana, its Himalayan cousin, dances with it more flamboyantly — wrathful deities, skull cups, a theatre of transcendence. Conjoined twins.
But both agree: clinging causes suffering.
So I try not to cling, just try. Not even to this moment, writing this. Not even to my story.
Because the truth is, I have relapsed. I am back in my city. After shedding a little, my weight has returned. My temper flares at traffic. The mysticism dulls under fluorescent light. The inbox grows monstrous. But some small thing has shifted.
Maybe that’s what breathwork is really about. The Pranayama, the Satipatthana, the insights of Vipassana. Not breath as performance or protocol, but remembrance. That you are here. That this moment, like the breath, will pass. But you can be with it fully.
I remember laughing in a tuktuk strangely called ‘Batmobile’, music blaring, the driver doing a wheelie just to make us scream.
I remember sitting in silence by the ruins, letting the wind carry my thoughts like ash. Sunset at Phnom Bakheng.
I remember the dancing Apsaras. I remember being alone and not lonely. Like Tagore and his teardrops on the cheek of eternity. Endless love, Anant Prem. Shesher Kabita. Or like the timeless Christopher Reeve flick, somewhere in time.
The poet in me hopes you, the reader, know this too. That even your pain has a place in this mosaic. That your joy is not naive. That your memories are temples. That your breath is a song older than your name.
Somewhere in Angkor, a woman’s hands press together in stone, mid-dance. And she says, without words: we’ve been here before, you and I.
