If you’re sitting by a window on a flight from the UK to Pakistan, you may catch a glimpse of the Alps on a clear day—an unforgettable sight before the long stretch eastward. Mummy pointed them out to me in January 1973, as we were returning home after a year in England. My sisters and I bundled together on our journey back home.

I was seven. What I remember just as vividly as the flight is the memory of a story set in the Alps, Heidi, with her grandfather, her goats in the high, clean mountain air. 

The Alps, Half a Century Later

Now, decades later, I’m not flying over but threading through the Alps by train. We left our Zurich hotel at 4:15 a.m., jet lag  making the early hour easy. We boarded a train to Chur, beginning our journey on the Bernina Express, bound for Tirano.

The Angel of Zurich

Before this Alpine journey began, I took photographs of the walk. By the time we arrived at the station, the Zurich Hauptbahnhof, I looked up and found L’Ange Protecteur, the Guardian Angel. Created by French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle. She has floated above Zurich’s station since 1997—golden-winged, radiant, joyful. A figure from the artist’s “Nana” series, designed to offer protection and warmth to travelers. She holds two silver pitchers connected by red-lit wires—lifelines, the artist suggests—echoing the balance and patience of the Temperance Tarot card. In that busy hall, her presence was mythic and maternal.

Her joy, her curves, were familiar—not just as sculpture, but as presence. In a place built for transience, she hovers—grace in motion. I stood beneath her, remembering another protector: my mother’s hand, guiding us on our journey home. Maybe it was memory. Maybe Heidi, whispering her welcome again through the folds of story and time at the airport.

Pastures and Perception

As the train curved through the mountains, we passed lush pastures with grazing cows, clusters of barns, and wooden farmhouses nestled in lush hills—postcard-perfect. The cows stood motionless in the morning dew.

But behind this tranquility, I sensed another truth. From memory, from reading, I know that farm life often conceals loneliness and hardship. The women who live in these valleys carry burdens—of labor, silence, and isolation—that rarely make it into storybooks.

Breakfast in Chur and a Taste of the Past

In Chur, we wandered around in search of coffee and breakfast. A small café offered, spinach quiche, and rhubarb tart—its sharp sweetness took me back to Mortlake Church of England Elementary School. Rhubarb crumble with thick yellow custard: memory turned edible.

Memory, Movement, and Contrast

As the train snaked through the Alps, I searched for contemporary Swiss writers online, and I came across Noëlle Revaz. Her work does not provide comforting images. In her novel With the Animals, Revaz dismantles the myth of rural innocence. In her portrayal, farm life is characterized not by harmony but by brutality. The narrator scornfully remarks, “She was useful for warming the bed and bearing children,” reducing women to mere utility and denying their humanity.

Where Heidi’s grandfather offers care, Revaz’s narrator controls. The novel is a about dominance and dehumanization, a raw rural patriarchy. Reading it reminded me of my own writing: in Wild Boar in the Cane Field, I wrote of Tara’s world—one in which silence was the only rebellion left to women like Saffiya and Tara.

Both Revaz’s Switzerland and my South Asia reveal what lies beneath pastoral illusions: pain, power, and the endurance of women. Behind the bells and barns is a truth we must not ignore—beauty and brutality often share the same landscape.

Monumento all’Emigrante

In Tirano, at the end of the Bernina Express line, I came upon Monumento all’Emigrante—the Monument to the Emigrant. At first, I thought it honored immigrants, but it’s for those who left—those who departed in search of work, of safety, or something more. A tribute not to arrival, but to departure. To loss. To the ache of what we leave behind.

It made me think of my own crossings. Of how journeys shape us. Of how stories, like people, migrate—and how memory itself is a form of return.

“Welcome to Switzerland,” the Angel seemed to say.

“You’ve come full circle.”