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lifeline of the road. The government never built it. The people of Chapursan did, with their own labour, funded by these donations from travellers. The money pays for stones, cement, and the sheer back-breaking work of hauling away rockfall each spring.
I stopped at one box where a boy was collecting. He couldn’ t have been more than twelve, his hands black with dust. He explained that his father and uncles had helped blast open the road thirty years ago, and even now the family takes turns maintaining it.
“ If we don’ t do it,” he shrugged,“ no one will.”
Above him, a shrine clung to a cliff ledge, dedicated to Baba Ghundi, the same saint Bashir had mentioned back on the KKH. The boy told me
Baba Ghundi came from Central Asia, a wandering mystic who tamed the valley’ s spirits. Local legend claims he once struck the ground with his staff, and from that spot a spring still flows, never freezing even in the deepest winter. Each year, villagers hold a festival at his shrine, slaughtering yaks, and goats in his honour.
As we rode deeper into Chapursan, the occasional donation boxes began to feel like milestones in a spiritual economy: faith and labour stitched together into a road. Not always prominent, the donation boxes were there, ever present, when you knew what to look for. My motorcycle bounced over boulders and waded streams, but each box reminded me that I wasn’ t alone. I was riding on a collective act of stubbornness and
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