Slideshow
One evening I sat at my desk in Mumbai and felt something I couldn’t name. Not sadness. More like repetition. The same road home. The same morning alarm. The same version of tomorrow. A life running on a loop cassette that nobody asked me if I wanted to press play on.
That night I decided to leave. Not next week. The next morning.
I called Kritika at night. I said come with me. She asked where. I said I don’t know. Somewhere in the mountains. Somewhere far from all of this.
She said yes immediately. That’s the thing about Kritika. She says yes to the things that matter.
I checked trains. One general compartment ticket to Delhi leaving in an hour. I packed a bag in twenty minutes and left.
THE TRAIN
The compartment was packed. No seat. Nowhere to stand without being pressed against five other people. I had also left too fast to eat and I was hungry.
And then a group of travellers made space for me beside them.
I didn’t know them. They didn’t know me. But somewhere between Mumbai and Delhi they fed me from their own food because I had nothing and they sang, and they laughed, and they told me things about their lives with a generosity that I did not expect and could not explain.
By the time Delhi arrived I understood something I would spend months trying to put into words: the most open-hearted people are often the ones the world has been hardest on.
That train journey was the first story of Cristical. I just didn’t know it yet
THE MOUNTAINS
Delhi to Dharamshala by overnight bus. When I woke up the fog was everywhere and the sun was rising from behind the mountains and I a boy from Mumbai who had never seen snow, never seen mountains like this, never seen anything like this pressed my face to the glass and could not look away.
Green so deep it felt impossible. Light so clean it felt like the first morning the world ever had.
We reached McLeod Ganj and found our room in Dharamkot exactly what I had asked for without really believing I’d find it. Nature on all sides. Silence. Trees. A room owner who by the second morning felt like family.
THE WATERFALL NOBODY WARNED US ABOUT
A local told us about Gallu Waterfall. Few people go, he said. You’ll love it.
The path started wide and became narrow and then became something that didn’t feel like a path at all. A wrong step and you fall and falling there meant something final. People turned back in front of us. A couple. A group of trekkers. Everyone looked at the path and made the sensible choice.
We almost did too.
But I thought about something. The moth the one that flies toward fire knowing exactly what will happen. Not because it is stupid. Because what it wants is on the other side of the fear, and no amount of knowing the cost changes the wanting.
We kept going.
The waterfall was fed by glacier ice. The water was so cold that when I put my legs in I lost all feeling within seconds. My body became someone else’s body. And then I looked at the water and I thought I did not climb that path to stand at the edge.
I took a long breath and jumped.
I cannot describe what happened. Everything went numb. I couldn’t stand. I fell sideways into the water and came back out somehow, laughing in a way that had nothing to do with anything being funny. It was the laugh of having done something you weren’t sure you could do.
We ate siddu and drank coffee at the waterfall as the sun began to fall. Then we realised it was getting dark and we were in a jungle with wild animals and no phone signal and a two hour walk back.
We walked back by phone torch through the dark. It took two and a half hours. We were terrified and grateful and completely alive.
THE MONKS
The next morning we walked into the Tibetan monastery a place of learning unlike any classroom I had ever sat in.
Monks debated not to win but to find truth. Students learned not for degrees but for understanding. I watched a room full of young monks work through a problem together, each one contributing, none of them trying to be the smartest person there. I thought about every school I had ever been in and felt the difference like cold water.
Later in the market an older monk spoke to us about stones. How the Tibetan people have worn them for centuries not for beauty but for intention. Amethyst for protection and calm. Clear quartz for clarity the master healer, frozen light. Citrine for abundance and joy. Each stone chosen for what it carries, not what it looks like.
I picked up a piece of amethyst from a market stall and held it and something shifted. Not dramatically. Just quietly. Like a question getting answered.
We bought stones from that same market. The same place the monks buy them. Because where a stone comes from is part of what it carries.
HOLI. SNOW. THE TREK.
Holi morning in Dharamkot. Speakers in the valley. Colours everywhere. The room owner came to our door at breakfast with colour in his hands and said bura na mano, Holi hai and laughed. In two days he had become someone we didn’t want to say goodbye to.
We ate paratha, packed some for the road, and started the Triund trek. Our first ever.
We had no idea what we were doing. We carried too much. We sweated and stopped and sweated again. At a midpoint tea stall a dog adopted us for twenty minutes, ate half our paratha, gave us his full attention and unconditional affection, and then went back to being a mountain dog with better things to do.
Hours later, as afternoon became evening and the cold started coming down from above, we saw the snow.
I ran.
I picked up real snow for the first time in my life and held it in my hands and it was nothing like the ice in a freezer. It was alive somehow. It was the mountain in your hands.
And then I stopped.
The tents were ahead. The ice mountains were ahead. And the sun was setting behind us falling on the peaks and turning them gold.
Not a bright gold. Not loud or sharp. A warm, quiet, settling gold. The kind that makes everything go still. The kind that makes you sit down without deciding to.
Kritika and I sat on that mountain and didn’t speak for a long time.
That light became our first collection.
The colourful gemstones carry the energy of those Tibetan stones chosen with meaning, worn with intention, brought back from the same market where the monks buy them. The gold carries that evening light. The two things we couldn’t stop seeing when we closed our eyes on the bus home.
THE RETURN
We came back to Mumbai different. Not dramatically. Just quietly. Like something had been answered that we hadn’t known we were asking.
We sat in the studio with the stones from the market and the sketches from the bus and we made the first pieces. We made mistakes. We changed things. We started again. Every piece went through trial after trial until the story, the design, and the quality were all present at once.
Nine necklaces. Nine moments from one trip. Each one carrying a place, a feeling, a person we met, a light we saw.
This is how Cristical works.
We go. We feel. We listen. We come back and we make something you can carry.
Every piece has a story. Every story is now yours.
Slideshow
— Hritik & Kritika
... Mumbai, 2025