Balachandran V's poem is about an office worker who longs for the Himalayas but spends his days indoors, under air conditioning, dealing with customers. He keeps the mountains alive in small, secondhand ways: a desktop picture of Everest, passwords named after rivers and sacred places, trekking books read on the sly. Even a sip from his water bottle becomes, in his imagination, a drink from a mountain stream.
The speaker feels a quiet, restless yearning, mixed with a little guilt, since the reading is done "surreptitiously." The ending shifts the tone. He says escape is "really so easy": he only has to leave his seat, walk to the window, and look up at the sky. The ellipsis at the close leaves that thought hanging. It could be read as gentle irony, since a window and a patch of sky are a thin substitute for the real thing, or as a hint that he may never actually go. The mood is wistful, slightly wry, and tinged with frustration.