A song of ice and fire

In cold, cold Leh, one young woman is holding down two unusual jobs. Noor Jahan is both an art restorer and goalie on India's women's ice hockey tea

- Riddhi Doshi

Inside a 200-year-old building in Leh, at the region's first art conservation lab, Noor Jahan, 33, gently scrapes oil and soot off a decades-old thangka painting, using a long cotton bud. The work comes from Keylong village, 350 km away in Himachal Pradesh. And under the bright, white light of her studio and her careful cleaning, vivid reds and yellows of Buddhist deities slowly emerge.

Jahan's hands are used to such delicate work. But that's not all they can do. Jahan is also the goalie of the Indian women's national ice hockey team. She saved 190 goals of 230 attempted shots at the 2016 IIHF Women's Challenge Cup of Asia, her first international competition. "We didn't even know that the number of goals attempted and saved are counted in international tournaments," she says.

Jahan won the best goalie trophy at the event.

Ice hockey is very much part of Ladakhi culture, says Jahan. She spent much of her childhood playing on frozen lakes. "The girls would split into teams, sometimes competing in district-level tournaments," she says. "It was all for fun, but I loved every bit of it." So, when most of her friends moved out of Leh after Class 10, Jahan persuaded her businessman father and farmer mother to move her to a government-run school, so she could stay back, cheaply. "I was happy to play ice hockey for two more winters," says Jahan.