Dear Reader,

What was supposed to be a weekly affair has turned into rare correspondence. This shall unfortunately continue to be the case in the near future. Malnutrition, illness, and lungs full of regolith have forced me to retreat to familiar haunts for some time. I might hammer out a couple posts more on this battered laptop while I rest and recover; after that it could be a while before we hear from each other again. Threat of theft and the elements prevents me from carrying this laptop along on my travels, and typing out these notebook entries on a mobile phone is too bothersome and nerdspirited and humiliating to attempt; I hope you understand.

Hulloes and apologies,

Raunsil.

PS. You can read the first instalment here.

April 17, Midnight, Delhi Airport

Before his pyromania got out of hand and he set his sister’s braids alight, No-No Kid and I would jump off knee-pulverizing heights that’d make the flat of my feet ring out like overpumped basketballs bouncing off concrete. I was eight then. Half an hour back someone called out to me on the escalator, and I didn’t dare crane my neck back and respond until I was off it, safe on the upper floor.

When did this happen. In the airport’s faint din and sanitizing bright lights I may have begun seeing the consequences of this decision clearly.

I am writing at the food court. There isn’t much else to do. Tough decisions had to be made while stuffing my rucksack; I have left behind the copy of Rimbaud’s poetry I had wanted to bring along. I had even inscribed it beforehand: Immortal companion on our grand Himalayan adventure. All I have now to amuse myself is a ball-pen and this little notebook. I have to spend four more hours here.

I’m fighting off sleep and the smooth murmur all around is like a glass of warm milk before bedtime. I would’ve slept on the bus from Haldwani to Delhi if the seats weren’t upright and so curved they’d only fit the small of a fairy’s back. I had to watch the beautiful sunset over the Haldwani countryside against my will, had to watch the clouds turn from spun gold to cooling embers to streaks of stubborn graphite no god could scrub off that moonlit cobalt sky. Just this once I want someone obnoxious to walk by and strike up a slow painful conversation that incenses my soul, keeps me awake, distracts me from myself. The din is a vacuum, intent on drawing out all loud anxious babble within. Were I not so spent I’d have walked to someone’s table and struck up that conversation myself.

I like the view beyond the glass; giant fireflies landing, taking off, taxiing on that dark infinite tarmac. All of it is supposed to be repulsive and maddening—the ugly winged barrel that will soon fly me to Assam; the glare bouncing off the squeaky shiny floors; this vast building, glass hide stretched over steel bones, more botched taxidermy than sterile architecture—yet I welcome it all: it is respite from six hours of dry heat and mosquitoes and morose vistas of crumbling kiln chimneys sprouting out of great bare stretches of dark blue fields.

Three and a half hours more and the sky will lighten again.

April 17, Guwahati, Assam. Morning.

The operator at Zainab Travels has chosen this day to take all filler phrases literally. “Seat number”, he asks. “Give me two minutes,” I respond. “Okay,” he says and the call disconnects. I dial back and ask why he hanged up on me midway. “You said you needed a minute…”. “Seat number”, he asks again. “Hang on a minute,” I say and instantly realize my folly. “Again?” he exclaims in a thick Assamese accent, and hangs up once more.

I’m a bat in a cool cave. The lights are off and the curtains are drawn; the AC leaks and barely works but the roaring ceiling fan helps things along beautifully. I’ll sleep through the day; eight hours of uninterrupted sleep at last in this shady love hotel in the middle of nowhere. The nervous suspicious receptionist was offended I didn’t have a woman by my side.

I have no will to explore the city. The walk to the hotel was long and hot and blinding. The sky was clouded but white as burning quicklime; the landscape was bleached of all color except green. Trees, bushes, hills and vines glowed lime and jade and mint and emerald, as lush and lurid and riotous as poisonous rainforests. My drooping, sleep-starved eyes could barely take in that vulgar exuberance; set against that quicklime sky the colors began melting my brains.

The roads had none of that verdant freshness. They were dry and draped in a chalky haze. The city vanished after I crossed the highway—just a few scattered houses, some huts and a dirt track remained; the hotel was still far away. People were few on this stretch and I saw no smiling faces; the muggy heat had sapped all souls. The woman in the blood-red saree had looked on listless at the giant mutt barking at my crotch. Her eyes bore no malice, no contempt, no curiosity, no alarm, no concern, no hesitation. Perhaps it wasn’t even apathy. Sweating and sitting on her haunches outside her hut she quietly witnessed it all unfold. I stood still, umbrella in hand, thinking I’d at least try breaking the dog’s snout before it tore me apart. When after fifteen minutes it got tired the mutt slid back into its house through the little gap in the wall and resumed barking at me through the locked gate.

I walked past the dog, past the woman. She now stared at the pawprints on that empty stretch of dirt track.

April 17, Guwahati Interstate Bus Terminus, 08:30 p.m.

I’d never had prawns before. I can now confirm they have a crunch to them, I just wish I could taste them too. All my tongue got was the honey-chilli sauce they were drenched in, culprit behind all those tired appetizers rolled out in every wedding, jubilee, birthday—honey-chilli potatoes, honey-chilli mushrooms, honey-chilli paneer, honey-chilli chicken, and now, here in the north-east, honey-chilli prawns.

My lips burn. I ate more out of boredom than anything else. It is humid, the mosquitoes are feasting on my neck and forearms, and unlike the airport there’s no faint murmur here that’ll put me to sleep. Scooters, hatchbacks, tuktuks and e-rickshaws outside honk, honk, honk incessantly, keeping up the illusion of a busy lane in the heart of a dense city when there’s nothing three hundred meters beyond the flyover.

The operator had said the bus will leave by quarter past nine. People are beginning to cluster at the platform where it will arrive. I think I can identify my co-passengers now: three nuns, one Christian, the others Buddhist; a couple monks, Buddhist again; four families, one Arunachali, two from the south, one north Indian, father’s probably in the military; a few more soldiers and backpackers.

One of the backpackers is either too anxious or a bit too enthusiastic. I was buying a bottle of water when the bus arrived; from the corner of my eye I saw him bolting for the door and flying into the bus. After some commotion he alighted and walked back to the platform, embarrassed, now patiently watching the bus reverse and come to a halt.

March 30, Somewhere in the Kumaon Himalaya.

Bloodied a toad with my sickle. It is an accident I regret; I had been clearing bushes and weeds off some abandoned fields. He has a wide purple gash on his back where my blade found him. He looks like a clump of cancer tumors dyed in black bile and brought to life. He is crawling towards the shade of the rotten banana tree to breathe his last. I take a ten-minute break from work and head to the bench by the terrace-field’s edge.

The wind is cool and strong and tearing through the slopes it makes the pines rattle and sound like a thousand furious waterfalls. The patch of shin-high grass beside me is dry and hollow and waving in the wind it lets out a sonorous hum. Not a blade of grass dared move on that patch five years ago, I remember, lying flattened for hours after the leopard had left that spot.

Seeing the leopard again would be a good omen. A glimpse of vigor, strength, poise and decisiveness, a memory to savor and turn over in your head again and again in idle moments. I’m desperate to take a good omen along for the travels ahead. I remember our encounter five years ago (at least I like to think of it that way). There’s never been any tree stump near that patch, I had thought when I first laid eyes on him. He was at the edge far away, and from the little house and through the trunks and boughs of lemon and oak I could barely make out his eyes. He was looking in my direction, not anxious, not furious, unmoving, a spotted stone. This wasn’t a stray that’d be spooked by the wave of a stick. That affront he would punish.

I lay down where he had lain half a decade ago and look up at the cloudless sky for a while. Then I get up and get on my knees and look at the little house. I try to be as still as him, as quiet as him, but my ankles and toes are having a hard time propping me up, and I sneeze. I give up and sit back on the bench; the grass has rebelled already, waving and singing its songs in the wind again.

There are rumors of a leopard staking out a few houses with dogs in the village below. I can go there, I will go there after work. I’m lying to myself.

For now the baby deodar would do as my good omen. He’s a miracle, the only tree like himself for miles at this elevation. He has become strong enough and tall enough that no bear or mad boar can tear him down anymore; he is set to grow into a grand old sage.

My ten minutes are up. I wipe the blood off the sickle and get back to work.

April 15, Nainital.

Lately I have a terror of the shins.

I wasn’t an athletic kid ever. The dregs of fitness I do have is an accident of geography—steep long walks: to the market, school, fairs, bus station. I was proud of those feats, and I therefore find it unbelievable I’ve been looking up Medial Tibial Stress Syndrome on the internet lately. Earlier my knees had been giving trouble. Over the past year the nerdspiritedness inherent in athleticism has been a revelation, a deeply disappointing one. An obsessive recording of time and distance, of knowing what and where one’s anterior cruciate ligament and anterior tibialis is. It can be a distasteful affair.

I’m in a foul mood. Some travel-vlogging oaf gets in my face and asks me some crass question and I want to run a grater down his windpipe. I wanted to be in town before I leave, but not in these circumstances. Family of a friend wants me to talk to him. He has run away from his home up in the hills and now rents a matchbox in the bowels of the town, hidden away from all beauty and charm. I owe him one; I’d probably still be a shut-in had he not forced me out of my recent intense period of total reclusion.

It is a small room by the large monsoon drain. The stale pink paint looks like sunburnt skin sloughing off walls. I notice the bottle of rum in the corner and sigh.

“They’re fixing me up with a whale.” He passes me the to-be’s photograph. I look at it and pass him his phone back. We sit in silence. I can smell the rum on him. I want to break the bottle on his head.

This has gone on for too long. Diplomat from Sober-World negotiates with the drunk, the unhappy, the suicidal. Last year at a wedding I had swiped a drunk uncle’s keys right under his nose, pocketed them, and then helped him look for them outside the venue all night. Had I not done so he’d either have backed his car into the highway and gotten squashed by some speeding truck, or he would’ve stumbled back into the wedding and ruined it with all his shouting and swearing and a thousand other festering resentments.

What am I doing. I take a deep breath. He is my friend.

“We’ll walk for a bit.”

No cars are allowed in Thandi Sadak. It is a stretch of tranquil road by the lake. I remember all the drunks I have handled here: lies, flattery, insincere advice, anything to get them home safe. With B______ I am honest: “You’ll have to leave home, start something of your own. There’s no other way. You’ll just be delaying the inevitable otherwise and there’s only so much time.” He is the only heir to a modest business. If he takes my advice his parents will never want to see me again. I have known them since childhood. By renting the room by the drain you have taken your first step towards freedom, I tell him.

We walk on in silence and we reminisce about nothing. At length he asks:

“You leave tomorrow?”

“Yes. By bus to Delhi. From there I’ll fly to Assam, Guwahati. Then onwards to Arunachal.”

“You’ll be back when?”

“Not soon. Brother will join me in Arunachal once I’m done. We plan on travelling together for a while after that.”

“I wish I could just leave all this nonsense and go with you.”

“Decide wisely, B_______”

He hugs me and pats my back. His eyes are watery and his breath stinks of rum. He’s not drunk out of his mind however. He’ll remember everything.

“I’ll walk you back.”

“Nah, I’ll find my way.”

I trust him and do not push it. It is quarter past four. I can still sneak uphill, steal a glimpse of my childhood home and hurry down in time for the 05:00 pm bus back to Haldwani.

Haldwani, July 2025

I hate the new butcher. He’s sickly, resentful, and ashamed of his trade. He badmouths his customers when they aren’t around. “This one,” he points to the balding fat man waddling over to his scooter with his black bag of meat, “he buys two kilos every day. He is, you know…” He brings an invisible bottle to his lips. I pretend to not get him. He leans forward and whispers, “booze”.

He disapproves of me visiting him daily. He has warned me of the dangers of bodybuilding and too-much-protein in a million veiled ways. He’ll lighten the scale by 50 grams if I don’t have my eyes on it. I hate his friends too. Like him they’re bony and jealous. They smoke all shifty-eyed like teenagers. Sometimes from afar I see them put out their cigarettes and scurry into the shop when our eyes meet. They’re all my age.

I had asked after the other guy when I returned to the town after a couple months. He hadn’t really answered my question. From his forehead and eyes I know they’re kin. The other butcher was married and had a kid. He had let himself go, but you could see those early years of bodybuilding on his shoulders and chest. Cleaver in hand he looked the part. He’d tell me stories from when he was a bouncer in Delhi nightclubs and the frames I was to look for in the couple films he was an extra in. A lot of his friends were his protégés. “This one,” he once announced with pride as he patted this bearded lug’s back, “he’s preparing for Sheru Classic despite his shoulder injury.”

I regret never asking him his name.

Almora, July 2023.

The ‘hotel’ is someone’s house on a cliff by the road and our ‘room’ is a spare kitchen with a couple beds thrown in. I got what I paid for, and the host is warm, the room is clean, and there’s free Wi-Fi; I have no complaints. My brother and I want to get some shuteye but there’s some guest in the living room and the walls are thin.

“The boy’s always had a streak of the devil in him, Kamla. Forty years and all he has given me is pain. He used to be such a sweet boy. Then him borrowing your daughter’s frocks, his glowering rage and theft of cattle and that monstrous appetite, eating food meant for twenty-five and all the paint off our walls…took him turning diabetic and losing a toe to calm down. Painting the house yellow helped; give my regards to the old lady. I’ll bring her a basket of fruits the next time I walk by the temple. Now he’s back. God knows what he’ll do now.”

I see him as we return from the literature festival: the jowly overgrown boy in spectacles on the roof of the yellow house beside our hotel, his fat chest spilling over the balcony, sweeping the road with his eyes. We see each other and he does not look away.

Nainital, November 2024.

The woodworker pulls out a small pine slab from a shelf and points to its xylem rings. “There’s more to these than just getting to a tree’s age, see.” His hovering finger halts over a ring thicker than the rest. Tapping it he says, “It must have snowed heavily this year. The tree grew thicker skin to protect itself.”

Outside there’s a chill in the air. Against that cloudless expanse of delirious blue, Naina Peak’s rugged face appears to be magnifying every passing second, lit up like a hill of gold while I look up at it from Ayarpatta’s cedar-scented shadows, tinged with the cool blue sheen of that boundless psychedelic sky.

This place feels familiar. The woodworker says his grandma used to run a kindergarten on the property. A neighbor taught here, I remember. All slides and swings and seesaws have vanished from the backyard. You can’t miss the workshop’s entrance: a huge circle with half-moon double doors. “I got that from Lord of the Rings.”

The world resides in his workshop. All shelves are crammed with wood from distant continents: there are blocks of wenge, zebrawood, and ebony from Africa, cabinets of Indonesian padauk and Chilean purpleheart, slabs of Alpine spruce, American cherry and Australian gumwood, stumps and beams of local haldu, oak, shisham, sal, toon, and many more. Japanese azebiki saws and kanna handplanes hang from a tool wall among chisels and spokeshaves and whittling knives. A giant lathe rests in a corner with a warning in bold stenciled across—CAUTION! THIS MACHINE HAS NO BRAIN USE YOUR OWN.

The woodworker is tall and bald and heavy-set. His enthusiasm is infectious. “Trees are honest, ruthless memoirists.” He shows me scars from leopard claws and fungal diseases and eras of feasts and famines forever inscribed within those layers of xylem. He crafts everything from cabinets inspired by Barcelona’s Casa Mila to lathe chisels and shave horses. Sometimes he teaches shop in one of the old colonial schools, in a century-old tunnel he turned into a maker-space himself. “They stored coal there for the students’ baths well into the eighties. When we reopened it in the pandemic we found some interesting stuff: old bells and lamps and a couple vinyl records from the Woodstock Festival, belonging to one Nina Buck. She’s alive, turns out. I mailed the records to her home in America.”

A lonely homecoming.

I’m looking out from the balcony as I scrawl into my notebook.

Far, far away, past the silhouettes of plantains and cinnamon, past the sloping pines and the gurgling ravine and the blue evening mist, I see old Nainital twinkle. She is the only hill glittering on that darkening range. Not far from the town, atop Manora Peak, her dark, gloomy twin, the distant dome of the ARIES observatory gleams like a lilac pearl against the dying light.

Nainital is myth realized. To glimpse her is to glimpse El Dorado and Shangri La. From afar, she hides from the world the lake of legend that gives her her name—whose emerald waters, so the Skanda Purāṇa tells us, were siphoned from Tibet’s Mansarovar by the sages Atri, Pulastya, and Pulaha to quench their thirst. Sacred to the hillmen of her shores and mythic to the rest of the world, this lake eluded her seekers until an English sugar trader1 came looking for her one winter in 1841. Today, Nainital is a packed hill-station, full of lovers on the promenade and newly-weds in swan-boats, the favorite weekend haunt of all nearby plainsmen.

Sometimes, little flashes in the corner of my eye distract me from my notebook—the blinking headlights of a car heading to the lake town; a fellow man driving towards civilization, unaware that another far removed from it sees him from many miles away, and draws great succor from his twinkling presence.

It has grown darker. The pearly dome has lost its sheen; the stars have come to view. And while that tiara of city-lights glitters brighter than ever, none of its evening bustle reaches my ears: not the honking of cars nor the nagging of hawkers, just the din of cicadas in the foliage around me and the calls of the muntjac breaking up their hypnic drone. Hidden in the dark, sometimes a nightjar hums her sweet song, and for a moment, turns my deepening loneliness into blissful solitude.

I hadn’t intended to be the sole inhabitant of the farm. Only a few hours earlier, I was lugging up gifts and rations for the steward couple, Vanja and Nalin: a few books, a couple sweaters, lighters, tea, sugar, milk powder, potatoes, onions, namkeen, five kilos of flour. As I hopped up the last stone steps past the big yellow board, panting, shouting their names, I was greeted only with the shrieking of thrushes and crickets.

Nalin and Vanja weren’t out in the fields—all doors were padlocked. In the kitchen shed outdoors—a shelter of tin sheets nailed to wooden pillars, black with soot from the mud stove’s smoke—all jars and utensils were missing from the shelves. Even the large black kettle was gone, whose brew of bay-leaves, lemon-grass, nettle and honey would warm eternally on the stove’s glowing embers.

I foolishly waited for them a while, entranced by the glowing sky on the horizon, that wide scarlet stain from a riotous sunset that daubed everything in view red: the trees, the hillslopes, the house. My trance broke when I saw the canopies grow thicker and darker, and the huge padlock hanging on the hall door—where will I sleep?

I dialed Vanja, then Nalin, and dialed them again and again, and when they didn’t pick up, anxious, watching the darkening sky feeding on the scarlet stain, I dialed T___, my friend and owner of the farm.

T___ was furious and horrified I was up there all alone. After chewing me out for my nasty habit of springing surprises at people, he rattled out a list of angry instructions: find the keys hidden beneath the earthen stove, unlock the bedroom, find the lantern, go to the little room beside the house, clip the wires on to the battery to get the lights running, then unlock the common hall, open the huge tin trunk right beside the door and look for a little gas stove and some noodle packets. If I was lucky, the dregs of butane in that empty cylinder would tide me over for the night.

Heartbreak, yearning, restlessness.

Vanja had left the farm a month ago, heartbroken. The forest fires had destroyed her precious oak saplings and nearly killed her husband, and a leopard had mauled her dog.

At the height of the summer, flames from a cluster of burning pines uphill had glided down to the farm. While Nalin and Bhuni struggled to put them out, waiting for help to arrive, another fire raging below sneaked up on them. Sandwiched between the fires, Nalin froze, and it was Bhuni who risked his life and hauled him to safety.

The rangers caught hold of the fire a safe distance from the buildings, but not before it had engulfed all of Vanja’s saplings. She had painstakingly planted them all along the farm’s border over the years. These beloved martyrs were Vanja’s foot soldiers in her fight to rout all pines from the hillslopes—those tall, magnificent, sweet-smelling bastards; vain, selfish, short-tempered, flaring and burning down entire forests if god forbid the sun shined too bright for their liking, shedding their needles and cones and burying all sprouts and shrubs under their heavy flammable carpet, never allowing a tender shoot to thrive in their shade, their reign unchallenged except for a brief coup in the monsoons when the ferns took over and humiliated them by sprouting out of their very limbs and hearts.

Then two months after nearly losing Nalin, Vanja lost Tiku. The leopard couldn’t drag away the hefty mountain dog, but ripped a whole chunk off his neck trying to. After twelve days and nights of injections, bandages, and fervent kisses, brave Tiku succumbed.

With no one to talk to in her mother tongue, having labored alone with her thoughts for nine years on this remote Himalayan farm, Vanja must have yearned for a glimpse of home and family in faraway Croatia. Now buried under this sudden heap of losses and scares, she snapped.

‘The energies in this place, they haf changed,’ Vanja told T___, who spotted Nalin putting padlocks on the doors as he walked up the stone steps and swung open the wooden gate, confused seeing their rucksacks and suitcases on the verandah. Furious there was no notice, deeply hurt they would’ve left forever without even saying goodbye, a decade of togetherness unraveled as they shouted at one another, negotiated, apologized and begged; and all rifts healed and passions calmed as they broke down into sobs and hugs, bidding each other a difficult, teary farewell.

When T___ told me this over the phone I was surprised, but this was exactly what Vanja would do. Nine years in one place was unlike her. Eccentric and restless, she had fled home to travel the world as a stewardess on board cruise-ships; she had shown me pictures. The most striking of them were from her time on an Arctic liner navigating the Northwest Passage—her claustrophobic, window-less sleeping quarters at the bottom of the ship; the red icebreakers in front of the hull; icebergs, polar bears, and frigid vistas of white and blue. One day, after one hasty swipe too many, she unwittingly showed me her home in Croatia: a snug little white-and-brown cottage with a view of the sparkling Adriatic.

Bhuni.

Bhuni came next morning. T___ had requested him to check on me, so he had walked up to the farm a couple miles from his village.

He had brought his sickle, some okra stew and fresh rotis. The mountain sun has aged him by a decade and a half. He’s almost fifty, but his eyes are starting to vanish behind his thick wrinkled skin. Humble, lean, and muscular, he possesses a courage honed by pragmatism and the accident of being born a hillman: sharp and swift, peppered with bursts of surgical daring. It was he who had hauled Nalin up his shoulder and ran to safety as the leaping flames closed in on them.

I made us tea. The burner only began to flicker as it came to a boil. The gas stove had worked splendidly yesterday evening; it was a joy to eat warm noodles at the balcony in the nippy September air.

Taking a long draught from his cup, Bhuni said: ‘T___ told me to clear the weeds now.’

He downed more tea in a breathless gulp when I looked into his eyes. Nalin and Vanja leaving had made a dent in his earnings too: every month he had some assured work at the farm: tilling, tending to tubers, collecting mulch, hauling up supplies, plastering the huts. He probably travels to the next town for work now.

In the front yard, Bhuni sharpened his sickle while I got an axe from the godown, intending to split some wood while he cleared the weeds.

‘This place could’ve been neater, you know,’ Bhuni said as he glided his sickle through fistfuls of grass. ‘Vanja never let me.’ That was true. Practitioner of a strange faith that was a stew of Hindu observances, a hippie-obsession with stones, personal spiritual hunches and the faith of her land, Christianity, Vanja had forbidden rooting out weeds and invasive plant species in the name of compassion, to Bhuni’s utter bewilderment. Vanja also never let him sneak off the farm before five if she had engaged his services for the day. Bhuni must’ve been half-glad when she left the farm. He was there to help them with the baggage when T___ and Vanja fought, the only time he didn’t charge for his services.

They had a difficult relationship. Vanja acting like a perennially frustrated elder sister really set him on edge. Once, early on, when Vanja thought he was skimping on the work by plastering the hall’s walls thin, she shouted at him to lay on more mud and to ‘do proper work’, and Bhuni got so pissed and hurt he began doing exactly what was asked of him. I was there. With a furious, controlled rage, he plastered all outer walls of the hall as thickly as he could, and stormed off. The walls held fine till they were damp, but as the clay dried, great clods of earth began falling everywhere, leaving the walls a cratered mess.

‘You remember how she called out to her husband? NAALUUU…’ He had perfected her thin Slavic shriek. Hearing her voice escape from his mouth I couldn’t help but guffaw. It set us into a cheery rhythm, slice-slice-split, slice-slice-split, until we had both amassed sizeable heaps of grass and wood.

The stove flared up like a blacksmith’s forge; the wood crackled like dry twigs in peak summer. I couldn’t thank Nalin enough. After every storm he’d walk the jungles, looking for trees uprooted by the gale or struck down by lightning. These he’d hack and haul down to the farm, and stack them neatly in the dry nook beneath the verandah. He had stored enough logs in there to last the rains.

I made us coffee that looked like mugfuls of puddle water, and warmed Bhuni’s rotis and okra stew. As we ate, we discussed what we’d do next. Bhuni said we should keep up with clearing weeds, and be done with as much of the fields as we could cover today.

Our souls sank when we got our first glimpse of the terrace fields: they had vanished. The jungle had been frighteningly quick in reclaiming the farm: the old plantains, mulberries, lemon trees poked out of the waist-high foliage in a few places. When Bhuni suggested we could come to the brambles later, and that it made more sense to cut all the parasitic trees around the house and the hall and hack them into firewood for use after Nalin’s stock runs out, I agreed.

So we at last felled those fibrous, jaundiced trees that should have been uprooted as fledglings, but thrived under Vanja’s compassionate patronage. We swapped our tools from time to time. Bhuni said he needed the axe to ‘open his body’, by which he meant he needed to stretch a bit. So with the sickle I whittled off all branches and twigs from the boughs and trunks he felled. Our palms itched and the mosquitoes feasted on our feet, but Bhuni had stories.

‘There’s a man-eater prowling around Bhujiyaghat, you know?’

‘Spots or stripes?’2

‘Stripes. He feasted on this plainsman two weeks ago, some tub of lard from Haryana. We tell these sorts to not seek adventure in the dark, to not step out of their vehicles while driving through the jungles, but they think us hillmen are blockheads. Serves them right.’

We continued to fell and whittle in silence. Then Bhuni said, softly:

‘I’ve seen him, you know?’

‘Stripes?’

‘Yes. When I was returning to the village from the motor road. He’d hunted a deer—the neck was limp between his jaws—and he saw me, and dropped his kill. Man-eater, mind you. I had my sickle, so I wasn’t too worried. He roared, twice, picked up the deer in his jaws again, slithered up an oak tree, and with a clean jump, disappeared into the nearby bushes.’

‘Tigers aren’t very good climbers, Bhuni.’

‘Oh, this one was.’ When I looked at him, he flicked down his eyes and began felling the trunk with a singular focus and renewed vigor.

I hadn’t heard of any man-eaters in the area—if there was one around, it’d be in the papers and the forest rangers would’ve been taking out patrols, lugging cages and tranquilizers. But Bhuni’s yarn was half-believable. Sometimes, there are man-eaters. Corbett famously hunted them in this terrain after all, walking alone in these jungles of Kumaon, sometimes in the pitch-dark, sometimes under the moonlight, keeping vigils atop machans and following the beasts’ pugmarks for days and nights across jungles, glades and waterholes before taking them out.

Slurping noodles in mortal fear.

Bhuni had stayed past an hour of his ‘agreement’ with T___. He had many more stories: of leopards, tigers, gods and ghosts, and he told them with such relish, and I listened with such awe, we didn’t even realize when the sun set.

After I paid him, he said he should go. But it had been five hours since we had eaten anything, and I felt bad sending him back hungry after he had helped all day.

‘You should stay for some tea and noodles at least, Bhuni da.’

‘I should go, Raunsil. It’ll be dark soon.’

‘Please stay a while, I insist. Literally takes minutes.’

I began looking for firewood to put in the stove, lit up some splinters of pine. The resin bubbled to the surface as the flame fed on it, and certain it’ll burn steady, I put it in the stove’s mouth and watched the flame slowly grow as it engulfed the twigs around it. But as soon as I put in the firewood, the flame put out.

‘Let me see.’ Bhuni took the lighter from my hand and repeated what I did, but a few seconds after he put in the firewood, the flame put out again.

He tried a few more times, but the flame just wouldn’t take. As the light waned, it became harder to look around. I had insisted Bhuni stay for tea, and now the stove wouldn’t light up, and it grew darker by the minute outside, and he had to cross the jungle to get home. I just stood beside Bhuni, quiet and embarrassed.

A few minutes later, he started laughing. ‘We’re using the yellow wood from the afternoon. It’s still green and damp.’ He smacked his forehead. ‘We’re so soaked in sweat and exhausted we aren’t thinking straight.’ He was right. I had bundled all the fresh felled wood over the old oak ones and had forgotten all about it.

With Bhuni’s deft hands, the stove lit up like a furnace again. I put the noodles to boil; nearby, a barking deer called. When his calls became desperate, half in jest, half wanting him to shut up, Bhuni mimicked his call back into the void. As I was pouring the noodles onto a plate, we heard a loud grunt and the deer’s calls suddenly broke into a bloodcurdling bleat. Bhuni rushed into the hall; I and the plate of noodles followed.

After bolting the door we rushed to the windows overlooking the house. We saw nothing except for its tin-roof silhouette. The struggling sounds came from beyond the house—it was all taking place in the front yard. Far from a hunt, the whole thing had turned into a conversation, as if an Aesop’s fable unfolded in the dark: the deer would bark, the other animal would grunt. It seemed like he had fumbled his hunt and was furious.

kh-kh-kh-kha, kh-kh-kh-kha…

The sounds grew nearer. Bhuni switched on the light, found a spatula, and began howling and banging the large aluminum containers. I followed suit. The grunts receded eventually, but certainly not because of the noise.

While I looked out at the house’s silhouette, tense, Bhuni was rifling through the utensil trunk. We had nothing to defend ourselves: the staffs, sickles, axes, and noise guns we’d all left behind in panic. I could see nothing with the lights’ glare on the window pane, so I asked Bhuni to put them out, which after a while, he did.

After a few minutes of listening in, eyes peeled and ears straining, Bhuni quietly whispered: ‘Raunsil?’

‘What, Bhuni da?’ I whispered back.

‘Eat the noodles. They’ll go cold.’

‘I will Bhuni da, just a moment.’

‘Okay.’

When the grunts grew louder again, and seemed to circle towards the hall door, we began howling and banging utensils a second time. At this point, we were making noise only to delude ourselves into thinking we were safe than scaring off this invisible predator.

kh-kh-kh-kha, kh-kh-kh-kha…

I was visibly tense, and silently panicked whenever the grunts grew closer; Bhuni was alert, but unworried. He whispered again:

‘Raunsil?’

‘Yes.’

‘You should eat the noodles.’

‘Uh-huh.’

I felt the plate in my hand tip to one side, and in the silence, amid the grunts and barks, I heard a long, watery slurp: Bhuni was hungry. He had been ransacking the utensil trunk for a fork. In my panic I had lost all manners; I should have asked him to eat even if I wasn’t feeling like it. I dug in too, and slurping and chomping and staring in the darkness, we waited.

A half-hour later, all noise subsided. Just as Bhuni switched on the lights, the window we were looking through groaned open; a breeze from the abyss caressed my forehead and sent a shiver down my spine.

Both of us stared at the open window. Then slowly stretching out his hand, Bhuni pushed the panes together and bolted them down. The tension broke. We laughed uproariously.

Crèches and morgues.

Bhuni spent the night at the house. In the morning, after tea, he said he wanted to show me something, deep in the woods.

‘A treasure, Raunsil.’

With axes and spools of rope slung over our shoulders, we walked uphill towards the old concrete tank at the ridge, which had an unusually thick wall because three drunk workmen had plastered the fourth’s corpse into it to get his share of the wages—so the local lore goes. ‘He still wanders here. My boy says he saw him, but Nalin da and I have only heard his voice. He once called out for a cigarette as we were returning from the temple one night.’

We trudged past the ferns and the pines, past the ruins of the village the farm was once part of; Bhuni pointed to the heap of stones and shale that used to be his ancestral house. A century ago the entire village had moved downhill, nearer to the buggy route, which today is the motor road. ‘My grandfather said they moved after a child died.’

We talked about the hunt. ‘That was a leopard.’ Bhuni was convinced. In the darkness and panic I had thought so too. But when around six I heard the grunts again, far away—kh-kh-kh-kha, kh-kh-kh-kha—the morning light seemed to have removed all terror and menace from them. I inspected the front yard a half-hour later. There were a lot of hoof-prints, but no pugmarks.

We walked on, our footsteps padded by the soft black soil. ‘Be careful of the leeches, Raunsil. Sons of whores sneak up unawares.’

At the ridge, Bhuni pointed over to the slope. Down below was a morgue of mutilated pines—a cluster of fallen trees resting on a bed of ferns, splintered, charred, bleeding sap. The lightning had cleaved one open clean through the middle, and its rich red heart gleamed like a solid pillar of ruby from afar.

Bhuni, surefooted in his crumbling slippers, ran down the mossy path with the spring and grace of a mountain goat. Swaying, slipping, tumbling down with all the dignity of a ragdoll, I followed. The sap’s scent grew stronger the closer we got.

‘See! Hearts of pine, drenched in sap. Soak these fuckers in water and they’ll still glower aflame with just a spark. We haul just ten arm-length chunks each, and its splinters will last you three months.’

We got to work, a couple grave-robbers looting an arboreal tomb. Bhuni bundled the wood together and fashioned a couple slings out of the rope, and hauling the syrupy red chunks upon our backs, we began the long walk home.

At the farm, Bhuni split all of that wood into a crate full of finger-length splinters, and for all this hacking and hauling and splintering, he strangely did not take even a rupee. After a meal of coffee and oats, he said goodbye.

While the scent of pine in my nostrils was wonderful as I hauled those red, gleaming slabs to the farm, all its bleeding sap rubbed onto my clothes and dried on the fabric. I tried to rid my shirt of the stains, but no amount of detergent would make it come off. After a tough battle lasting half an afternoon, I gave up, rinsed my brown, blotchy shirt, and put it to dry.

Bored, sitting at the verandah alone, looking at distant, cloud-wrapped Nainital, I thought of Tiku and Nalin. In the late afternoons they would sometimes head to the little glade surrounded by oak trees, not too far from the farm. Nalin would smoke a cigarette there and sit in contemplation, and Tiku would run around half mad with joy, sometimes dashing into the woods, sometimes dropping branches at Nalin’s feet to get him to play fetch. But his favorite activity was climbing up the rock overlooking the glade and surveying his lands, that grand black dog cutting an Akela-like figure from The Jungle Book.

It was three in the afternoon; I decided to visit the glade. On the way there’s a narrow turn, walking along which one has to be careful, lest one dashes one’s head into the rocks below—as I once nearly did when I was hauling back a crate of oak with Nalin, and Tiku thundered past me on that turn and threw me off balance, and my life flashed before my eyes.

It pained me when I realized that the glade’s true inhabitants would never return. Tiku would never sit perched on the rock again, cocking his stupid adorable head around; Nalin was, by now, perhaps a continent away. Soon, the glade itself would vanish; a nursery of tall baby oaks had sprouted there. Vanja would’ve liked that though.

I clambered onto Tiku’s spot on the rock and sat still and thinking. Evening mists found their way to the glade and flooded the baby trees; a lone twinkling firefly, a season miracle that had outlived all its brethren, played peekaboo with them. The jungle had come together to nurse its younglings.

Something rolled off my foot: a fat leech had had its fill of blood. Bhuni was right, bastards do sneak up unawares. The fat, slimy glutton was a victim of its own excess, barely able to drag itself straight, rolling over every now and then like a drunkard. I punctured it with a sharp stone; thick, wine-red blood oozed out. Relieved of his load, thinner, the leech dragged on, looking for its next host.

Decay.

While writing in the hall this balmy afternoon, a wrinkled, hairless baby rat plopped down on my desk.

I watched the tiny, panting blob of flesh for a while. Not knowing what to do with him, and my concentration broken, I decided to head out and make some coffee, stretch my legs.

Hidden in the ceilings, the rats are building a city for themselves. You can hear their explorers and pioneers at work night and day: their surveyors mapping uncharted territories with their tap-tapping tiny feet; their tunnellers nibbling unseen through the rafters to expand their domain. Their traffic often loosens the dried mud clods on the beams, remnants of a previous plastering; their falling down breaks my sleep a couple times at night.

When I first arrived, I thought they were carrying jackfruit seeds in their mouths. They’d emerge from a bramble, scurry up the mulberry trunk, hop onto the kitchen ceiling and deposit the baby in some unseen nook. Then they’d scurry down and repeat this circuit over and over again. This they did over days.

The signs of decay are everywhere: the rats aren’t just confined to the ceilings. In her hurry Vanja had left a little trunk in the hall open; the rats had torn through the sugar bag within and shat in it, and a spice jar’s inner walls were covered with mold. In the house, the bedroom’s ceiling leaks, apparent only during a great torrent of rain. Little heaps of powdered wood crowd around the pillars propping up the kitchen tin sheets; termites have been hollowing them for some time now. They have been hollowing Nalin’s firewood too, white, bulbous vermin worming about in the split wood. The foliage is closing in on the farm; the animals have gotten too comfortable being around the house: I see fresh hoof-prints in the yard every morning. The weakened battery can only support a charging phone, which is why I’m writing in a notebook, a habit I have come to like and might continue.

The baby had vanished when I returned to the table. Mama rat had sniffed an opportunity to rescue her child, and she took it.

Cocking the Gandhi Gun; or, The Malay-Monkey Theatre Troupe.

The langurs swung by soon to add to the problems.

When I had pointed out the eroding mud walls to Bhuni, he said the langurs did it. “They like the rocks’ salty taste. They’re scraping away the mud to lick the stone.”

For all their mischief, langurs are at heart gentle beings. Me storming out to the yard with a stick lifted over my head was enough to make them pounce off to the highest branches and watch me intently, wondering if I’ll stay put or make good on my threat and hound them out further. It was all theater—I pretended to hurt them, they pretended to get spooked by my antics—a very gentlemanly arrangement all around.

And while this arrangement worked well, and both sides honored their end of the bargain, it began wearing me out. I couldn’t leave the food on the stove to run out and keep them off the walls; a more permanent peace was needed. I remembered the Gandhi Gun hanging by the window at the verandah.

For the uninitiated, a Gandhi Gun is half a gun: there’s a chamber and hammer but no bullet and muzzle. It is forged from iron and built like tongs, except there’s an iron cup welded to one arm’s end and a hammer welded to another’s. You sprinkle equal parts sulphur and potash into this iron cup, tamp all of it down with a piece of paper, then lock the hammer over it. Strike the cup-and-hammer onto the ground, and the explosion scatters every bird and beast in the vicinity.

I began looking for the sulphur and potash. I knew Vanja and Nalin kept decent amounts of both on the farm. I’d run out of the house shouting to keep the langurs at bay, then with the time that bought me I’d search all rooms, shelves, trunks. To my surprise they were in a box in the shrine the couple had carved out of the little battery room, like an offering of gunpowder to the god of war.

The gun wasn’t welded right. The hammer and the cup didn’t fit together well, and the moment I tried to bang it on the ground, it would come apart from the momentum and I’d have to start again. The langurs were spooked a couple times from the swinging motion, but then I attracted quite an audience: many grey limbs of fur descended to the lower boughs to watch me strike the Gandhi Gun again and again and again, their curious black faces watching over me as amused old sages watch over their fumbling protégés.

As if this humiliation wasn’t enough, a thrush hidden in some tree nearby began mocking me with her shrill, sarcastic laugh: HA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAA. Make a fool of yourself before your enemy for once, dear reader, but never, ever, ever let yourself be mocked by a laughing thrush. I pray you never suffer such soul-destroying ignominy.

I struggled on, locking and swinging and banging over and over again, and when the gun went off it took me by surprise: the birds and beasts scattered at once, but a little burnt flint flew into my eye and my ears rang for a solid minute.

Rose quartz, greeting cards, suction cups.

A week has passed, and too bored to read and write and work and walk today, I decided to take stock of the farm’s inventory, hopeful I’d come across something quaint to distract me for a while.

The two larger trunks in the hall were full of blankets, pillows, and mattresses; the smaller one by the door had a military knife and camping gear: fabrics, tentpoles, sleeping bags. The white-board at the back was still scrawled with Vanja’s plans and instructions: collect mulch, conduct permaculture workshop, new book for library, ethos coaching, Tuesdays and Thursdays for washing fabricks. The little piece of paper stuck behind it was a hand-made greeting card, made by some girl who had attended one of her workshops, thanking Vanja for a lovely time at the farm.

The ‘library’ was a line of short, glass-fronted iron shelves below the windows looking over to the house. All books were donations by people who had lived at the farm over the years. A nice bit of literary collection had emerged: Conrad, Camus, Marquez, Melville, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Rushdie, Naipaul, Mistry, Vikram Seth. Then there was the pop exotica, courtesy the hippies: Shantaram, Eat Pray Love, The Alchemist. I wouldn’t dignify the self-help books by naming them, but they occupied an entire separate shelf. In the religion section, there were, among other books, the Vedas, the Gita, the Quran, a few Baha’i pamphlets and a pocket edition of the Bible, possibly Vanja’s. The shelf next to it was crammed with primers on Hindi, Spanish, German, and French, fat Lonely Planets and other slimmer travel guides, and a travelogue here and there: Dalrymple’s City of Djinns and Nine Lives, Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar.

It is tragic that only half the books on the last shelf stand intact: books on flora, fauna, agronomy, pedology, and permaculture all nibbled through by rats that had slinked in through the chipped glass at the shelf’s corner. T___ had started the farm to grow some organic produce, and the books had been an important part of the journey. Now, the ‘energies’ Vanja dreaded had come for the sacred knowledge of agriculture itself, having burned her saplings and destroyed the terrace fields.

Nowhere was Vanja’s dejection and heartbreak more apparent than in the things she left behind.

It had been a hasty exit. She had forsaken even family heirlooms. Vanja’s crucifixes still hang in the shrine, beside pictures and figurines of Hindu deities and holy men, an iron trident, and crystals of rose quartz. An orb of rose quartz sits on the bedroom windowsill too, and in the trunk beneath it, there are pictures of Tiku, his shampoo and lice comb, a couple speakers, a projector, a gimbal, lipsticks, a nail-clipper and a cupping therapy kit: the naked loin-less body on the box is covered with suction cups and labeled in Chinese all over, their horribly misspelt English translations accompanying them in brackets.

I had seen her crucifixes before, but I had seldom seen a visible Christian in Vanja. The woman was a hippie almost—she just didn’t dress like one. She bragged about talking to animals, energies, spirits and trees, and with a stick stirred all pails of water clockwise (or was it anti-clockwise?) before pouring them over the crops so they got the ‘right blend of positive energies’. The villagers were terrified of her deranged beliefs. It was only during sacred vigils that the gods entered their bodies and spoke to them; Vanja seemed to be possessed round the clock.

But even though Vanja chanted the Gāyatrī Mantra every morning and was consumed by a militant compassion rivaled only by Jainism, East and West battled in her being. The Christian in her seemed deeply uncomfortable with the existence of the local deities, especially the goddess whose temple adorned the hilltop, rumored to be guarded by leopards at night.

‘She’s not goddess, she is spirit,’ she would say to the villagers, to their great consternation. ‘I talk to her.’

Phantoms.

In the bedroom, Tiku’s leash still hangs by the door. He has also left a faint pugmark on the plastered verandah.

It is two in the morning, and I cannot sleep. Some animal is walking on the roof, back and forth, back and forth; I’m hoping it’s an insomniac langur. The roof creaks under his weight, and the rats, hidden between the tin and ply, nibble and squeak and scurry about in distress. Banging the staff on the ceiling doesn’t help; the noises always return.

My senses have sharpened here. Away from the city’s chatter and din, shrouded in silence and foliage, I hear every rustling leaf, every snapping twig. There are deer nibbling on the leaves outside; I hear the soft trample of their hooves on grass. Hoping to get a glimpse, I unbolt the window—in the starshine, a faint, four-legged shadow crosses the yard. A few nights ago, at the creak of the window pane, I heard the click of hoof on stone and a couple hefty gallops crashing into a distant bush. A muntjac had mustered the gall to climb up the verandah and munch a few leaves off the vine coiling down the drain-pipe.

I look at Tiku’s leash and wonder how quiet Vanja’s days must have gotten after he passed. What did her Croatian inner voice say to her when she was silent and alone? Apart from her family, she only ever talked in her mother tongue with the cat. She could talk to her (him?) for hours as she would dig up potatoes and wash the sheets and put the blankets out in the sun, the cat listening to her ramblings attentively. I forget what she called her, some adorable Slavic nickname that escapes me now. That was until two years ago, when a leopard took her away. A few months after that, the leopard killed Jamuna too, her feisty snow-white pup. While Nalin talked to Tiku in Hindi, Vanja only talked to him in her broken English. Alone in the alien Himalaya, the cat had been her closest confidant.

The mud walls are bare except for some paint adorning the niches and the hippie slogan above the door: you are LOVE. I lie down again and stare at the ceiling. It’s been a while since I’ve heard a fellow man’s voice. Crickets, thrushes, nightjars, owls, and the calls of the muntjac are all I know. Sometimes, in the dead silence, the lengthy squeal of a braking truck travels up the soft night breeze, and muffled by the ferns and mists and pines, sounds like the wailing of a mourning jungle spirit.

Invoking Agni in the Late Triassic.

It has been raining for seven hours now.

The torrent was expected. The weather alert on my phone warned of heavy rain for the next forty-eight hours. In the morning, when the sky was clear, I thought I could ignore the alert and head down to catch a bus to the plains, but the downpour was so sudden and constant that the ravine on the way down must’ve turned into a furious mountain river within minutes, ready to sweep away whoever dared cross her.

The umbrella broke clean off the handle as I walked from the house to the kitchen shed. I couldn’t put the handle and shaft back together again, but I could whittle another, larger handle from a branch, which I could then fit higher up the shaft to make up for the length that had snapped off. So after making myself some coffee and oats, I grabbed a couple branches from the firewood heap and Nalin’s military knife from the hall, and rushed back to the house.

Whittling is good meditation. It teaches you patience. After nicking yourself a few times, you slow down on your own. The knife was too big to be whittling with, but I got the hang of it soon. The rains helped me focus: the tin clattered so loud I could no longer hear myself speak and think; the present was all there was. Cut by little cut, I set upon realizing the form hidden in the wood.

The jungle has grown quiet. The poor thrush, loud and brave and mischievous otherwise, is nowhere to be found. The air is cool and fragrant, with faint notes of lemon, cinnamon, and pine. A thin mist floats over the lush, leafy hills, the cold scented exhale of a million green alveoli.

*

The rains were pounding the roof with the same sustained vigor when I woke up next morning. Outside the window, nothing had changed: the same charcoal sky hung over the same shades of undulating green. Mists, mossy trees, and endless rain; I may as well have been witnessing the million-year rain of the Carnian Pluvial, when dinosaurs were only beginning to roam the Earth.

Coffee didn’t help with the drowsiness. I dragged myself through my morning exercises, read and wrote a little, whittled a knife out of a spare branch and messed up its wooden blade, read some more, did some more push-ups, and then went to the balcony again, as if condemned by the gods to witness the entirety of the Carnian Pluvial. I sat there for a while, a silent, unseen witness of Time.

I dozed off in between; when I woke up, it felt like a hundred thousand years had passed. The sky had darkened a little, and it was colder, but the rain had lost none of its vigor. As supper-time neared, I dreaded the idea of cooking up some tasteless concoction again from the scarce ingredients Vanja had left behind in the ration trunk.

I checked myself wallowing in this haze of drowsiness and despair, and decided that my last evening on the farm—if the sky cleared by tomorrow afternoon, that is—should be an obscene, decadent celebration of the human spirit. Man will light a fire and announce his birth in the Late Triassic itself, dinosaurs be damned.

I marched to the hall, determined to fix myself a royal meal from Vanja’s scraps. In the ration trunk I found some gramflour and a packet of cumin seeds. I also shoveled out a big bowlful of pasta from the steel container in the corner. From the little garden patch in front of the kitchen I plucked fistfuls of mint leaves. I had fortunately brought some onions, gingers and potatoes along with me, which would help a lot.

I decided to make pakoras. I diced the onions and potatoes by the dying light and dipped them in the gramflour batter along with some cumin. These I fried in mustard oil till they were crusty and brown. The pasta had softened by then in the other utensil. There were no ingredients I could make the sauce with, so I sautéed it with some golden-brown onions and mild spices and two small bulbs of garlic—sliced paper-thin, like in Goodfellas—and hoped for the best.

I made mint chutney next. I mixed and ground together two large pinches of roasted cumin, two cloves of garlic, all of my plucked mint leaves, water, half a squeezed lemon, and salt. The result was a watery green mush that tasted sweet, rich, and tangy.

What about dessert? No longer would I eat sugar or jaggery like a peasant; destiny must have something in store for me. I ransacked the ration trunk again. Hidden behind the pasta container was a small unopened can of condensed milk. I could dine like a king now.

Sheltering all the goods under the umbrella, making multiple trips, I arranged the food at the verandah table. I unwrapped the plastic bag I had brought the firewood in, emptied it into the sooty brazier, and made a nice fire. And thus, having made myself comfortable, I dined.

I’m tooting my own horn here, but I had whipped up a mean feast: the pakoras were crunchy and went perfectly with the mint chutney, and so did—to my surprise—the pasta. The strong garlic had tamed the chutney’s sweet tang. In the middle of my dinner, the fog thinned, and then dissolved, and far away, Nainital glittered again. The rain weakened; the roof finally went quiet. I felt like a mendicant from the Vedic realm; it was as if Agni, pleased I had invoked fire to fight the darkness and cold, went to Indra and pleaded him to halt his wrath for my sake alone, his most ardent devotee.

A travelling headlight twinkled again on that dark black range; I wished my fellow man a safe journey.

A lonely farewell.

It is a clear blue morning. All dust has settled; every slope and ridge and tree on the range stands distinct. The world all around me is bathed in sunshine and blue shadows.

The shelves and stove are bare again; I’ve locked away all jars and utensils in the hall. Only the langurs have come to bid me farewell. They sit hunched on the higher branches, waiting calmly, keeping watch. Soon I’ll leave and no one will come between them and the farm’s tasty walls. I appreciate their patience and decency.

After locking up the house, I called T___. He said I was probably the last guest on the farm. ‘I cannot be there all the time, and the place is going to shit. I think I’ll repair it after the rains and sell it.’

I bid goodbye to the farm the Vanja way. ‘Thank you, house!’ I say, aloud. Thank you cinnamon tree, thank you oaks and pines, thank you thrushes, thank you muntjacs, thank you langurs. I look back at the farm one last time, and begin my downhill trudge back to civilization. Behind me, I hear the langurs’ patience break: a great rustle and thump ensues as they jump down the trees and leap towards the house, eager to savor their rock cuisine uninterrupted.

Header photograph from the Imperial War Museum.

I.

The old Gorkha gentleman sat at his little desk at the Windlass Shopping Complex, Rajpur Road, Dehra Dun. He wore a black top hat and a black suit, both dull and worn, but clean. His clothes had shrunken over time, but oddly complemented his short, stocky fit. I’d see him whenever I accompanied my father to the bank on the first floor. He reminded me of the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, but without the nerves. He looked like he ran the place: commander of an army of one. The vigor in his body and eyes would only leave him when he’d die.

He carried a baton. Perhaps he carried a pocket watch too, hidden away in his waistcoat. He might have reminded the adults of a pimp: all his fingers were full of colorful rings.

He took great pride in his appearance. Clean white socks and shining black boots. Was he a veteran? There may or may not have been medals on his chest. His desk was crowded with long, pink reams of paper. I never asked him what he did. Perhaps he handed out parking tokens.

II.

The ancient Afghan sat cross-legged in the cancer ward of a Delhi hospital. He looked like the subject of an 1800s Atkinson sketch. He wore a flowing salmon-pink salwar-kameez; a beige turban and silver beard framed his pale, shrunken face. The grey shawl his daughter had draped over his shoulders also cloaked his folded knees. He had no phone in his hands, no watch on his wrists. Nothing on him could point to him belonging to the twenty-first century. His clouded eyes rested softly on some object in front of him. He was either absent, praying, numb, or terrified.

A nurse came out of the doctor’s office; she and the daughter exchanged glances. The old Afghan sighed, uncrossed his legs, planted his feet on the floor, and slowly lifted himself off the bench. He walked unassisted into the doctor’s cabin, slow and uncertain. His daughter followed him, rolling in an empty wheelchair.

III.

The handsy transvestite beggar accosted me outside Nizamuddin Railway Station, Delhi. I had rushed past her dull, repetitive bleating for money; she sniffed my panic and latched on to me. ‘You should loosen your pockets sometimes, my hero.’ I felt her hand caressing my neck. I quickly got away, dodged her handsy advances a couple more times, and realized that I didn’t have to play this silly game of tag. I was about to shout at her when I noticed the clean white dupatta she had draped over her ironed shirt, her neatly done hair, her rouge-heavy cheeks, the lack of an Adam’s apple.

Curious, I gave her a twenty-rupee note. As soon as money exchanged hands, dignity returned to her. She blessed me.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

‘Siliguri’. She sounded more womanly, but still preserved the off-key masculine tone somewhere in her register. ‘I’ve lived in Delhi for eighteen years. I completed my education here.’

She swayed on her feet, wondering whether she should share more about her life. She stifled the temptation, took one step back, then another, and disappeared into the railway crowd.

***

‘Or we could walk down to the ravine in the evening, as we always do,’ I said. ‘Clear our heads, beat the heat there. Also, the cops have an eye out for people travelling to the hills from other states. You have a DL number-plate. Not worth the hassle.’

‘Pfft. My ID says I’m an Uttarakhand resident. Just bought the bike in Delhi. Also, what do you have to worry about? You’ll soon be lawyer or advocate or some shit like that.’

‘The law means nothing to a cop if you aren’t armed with a bar certificate, trust me. They’re booking people left and right under 270 as it is: “malignant attempt to spread infectious diseases dangerous to life”. Gets you a fine, and if you’re unlucky, up to two years in jail.’

‘Pussy. We’ll just bring along some of grandma’s X-rays and a medical folder, cook up some bullshit disease in front of the cops and tell them we’re travelling to give her her file. They never take a closer look anyway.’

Pathak stared at my face and waited for an answer. Then he sighed and went back to gazing at the stars. It was an unusually clear September night. It had rained in the evening and a strong cool wind was blowing down the Himalayan foothills. We’d brought a rug each to the terrace to escape the humid indoors. The wind and the croaking frogs far away made for an excellent lullaby, but the majesty of the stars twinkling above kept us awake. The village was beautiful, but its languor could also sap the life out of you. I was lucky to escape to it when the pandemic began racking up numbers, but it had been five months now, the infections and fatalities had come down, and panic had given way to boredom.

I could understand Pathak’s restlessness. It had been only four days since he had come home from Delhi. I had been in the countryside for five months. Outside of my law school reading, I had read a fair bit of Naipaul and all of Chatwin, and over the months had grown sick of reading and writing. The internet was terrible, there were frequent power-cuts, and my only escape had been long walks in the surrounding jungles, but the rains had turned the trails to slush and the mosquitoes in the humidity devoured you whole. It had taken me a while to get bored; Pathak, on the other hand, with no intellectual interests, no hobbies, no craving for solitude, no eye for beauty, folded instantly. He couldn’t keep himself entertained swiping up Reels and giggling to himself, so he burned through all the movies on his laptop in the first couple days and on the third asked if I had any on me. I had an old atrocious print of The Motorcycle Diaries, a 2004 movie on Che Guevara’s travels across Latin America. He liked it, and had since been pestering me to go on a ride with him.

‘It’ll be like the Spanish movie. Me and you. Alberto and Fuser. On our very own La Poderosa.’

‘La Poderosa was a battered, leaky piece of work, true, but it’s quite brave you think your busted 97 cc Splendor measures up to a 500 cc Norton. The damper on that thing would break all bones in an old man.’

‘You’re an old man alright. Who goes on walks in his early twenties? You’re like fucking Ruskin Bond without the wrinkles and bloat. You hate it here. I see it in your eyes when you talk to Ghanshyam Tiwari.’

‘You know what Ghanshyam’s like. At least I talk to him—you just pull out your phone, stand behind me and scroll around apps. He annoys everyone, he’s a leech and a miserable drunk!’ But an interesting one. He once overpowered a roadside mule and rode it outside my house for hours, mistaking it for the house of a woman he fancied, who lived about a kilometer further down the road. Next day, I met him at the bazaar where he was walking around in pain, with his legs spread apart. Riding a mule bareback for hours would do that to you. But more on him sometime later.

‘It’s not just Ghanshyam. You hate everybody here. Even our uncles. Especially our uncles.’

I do not hate our village uncles, but talking to them is definitely a chore. Nothing fazes them, and that’s not another way of saying they’re cheerful against all odds. Their eyes imbibe nothing of what’s being said to them. Deep down, they’re either cold, unfeeling sadists or the ultimate stoics, I’ll never know. It’s like water running off plastic: news of a newborn or a death in the village, their faces barely twitch.

Pathak made sense there. I wouldn’t be so bored if I could talk to different people from time to time.

‘Seeing some fresh faces wouldn’t be so bad, I guess.’

Pathak’s eyes lit up. ‘We’ll leave before sunrise. Pack an X-ray since you’re so worried.’

***

The cat woke us up before five. She was trying to make a bed out of my belly and her claws hurt. I’d shoo her often when she visited me in the beginning, but she stuck around and I began putting out some milk for her every morning and evening. She even hunted down a snake for me once.

Pathak started when she jumped on him. He rubbed his eyes, looked at the cat, looked at me, remembered what the day was about, and pointed to a hilltop nearby: ‘we’ll go there first.’

He was pointing to our ancestral home. Around the time the notorious Sultana Daku roamed the Gangetic plains terrorizing the Raj, my great-grandfather and his brothers descended from Roshila to Gaulapar, one of Sultana’s many hiding places, and settled about a mile and a half from the peepal tree beneath which he’d bury his loot. I’d pass that tree on my walk every evening.

What must have taken them a day back then took us a half-hour. The previous day’s rain had settled all dust, and from the little meadow up top we saw the last of the Himalayan foothills slope down to the boundless Gangetic plains. A little blue train slowly pulled up to the little Lego station at the foot of the hill; far away, at the edge of the world, a barrage faintly glimmered. We saw our village. The wide, swollen Gaula separated those vast brown-and-emerald stripes of farmland from the faded concrete town. My forefathers left the meadow for that fertile land a century ago. I pictured them slowly descending on a string of mules against that promising vista, bringing with them whatever they had: utensils, clothes, shrines, yokes and horoscopes, anxious and eager to begin their new lives as plainsmen.

Pathak and I visited the obstinate few that stayed back.

Of our old house, only a wall remains. Its wood and shale was likely used to build the newer house beside it, a hybrid of the old and new styles: half sloping shale, half ugly concrete, all of it daubed a glowing milky blue.

‘We should go meet Sharda ji,’ Pathak whispered.

‘Pathak, it’s half-past-six in the morning.’

‘So? It’s not like we’re in the city or something. Everyone wakes up early in Gaulapar too. We drink tea around this time back home.’

‘Yes, and not with our neighbors. What’s wrong with you?’

As we bickered at the highest register whispering would allow, Sharda emerged from the house with tea. It was awkward. Did she hear us?

‘Sharda ji, you really shouldn’t have bothered. We were just passing by.’

‘Oh no, you didn’t trouble me. I make some tea for myself around this time, creature of habit, haha.’ Pathak looked at me with a satisfied smug. ‘Thank you Sharda ji,’ he said, and took the tray from her hands.

‘I saw you from the kitchen window. A little outing?’

‘Yes, we were getting bored.’

And then we ran out of things to say. We sat on the verandah and sipped our tea in silence. History, prophecy and folklore had collided when we’d first met; how enthused were we! Like those that left cherished the migration as a sacred event almost, those that remained had preserved the memory of an even older exodus, when seven tribes were exiled from the middle Himalaya and doomed to spread and wander until they came across two fighting snakes, as was prophesied; and when they did, the head of the wandering band threw a trident at them, and the trident struck land and spouted water, and so they consecrated that place by building a little stone well there, and around it their shale houses and temples and granaries and cattle-pens, and they ceased their wandering for good and took up trades, and called Roshila home for a long, long time.

That surreal evening we had also untangled our complicated family tree, figured out who was cousin, uncle and aunt to whom, but we jumbled them again the moment we said our goodbyes, and now no one dared to bring up relations, addressing each other with the neutral, respectful ji instead. Once the twain met, all folklore, prophecy, history lost its charm. Everybody moved on heartbreakingly quickly, and those that left and those that stuck around remained civil and polite only because history had once shown them to be of one blood long, long, ago.

‘Thank you for your hospitality, Sharda ji,’ I said. ‘Pretty rude of us to turn up at your house this early.’

Sharda nodded awkwardly. ‘Stay here. I’ll pack you boys something for the road.’

***

We scraped our shins and elbows raw near a landslip site. Pathak had grazed his chin and injured his back too: I had fallen on him when the bike slipped over the gravel and rocks. We hauled our bike up and rested it against the retaining wall, then dragged ourselves up to a parapet and washed our wounds. For a while we quietly sat there, in the middle of nowhere, looking out at the vista, soaking in the grand setting of our misery: the green hills fading back to a blue impossible to tell apart from the sky, the little villages that dotted them, the white valley below and the trickle of water it carried, like blue veins spread over a bed of marble.

Pathak asked for band-aids. I said I didn’t have any, and we bickered again. I reminded him how confident he was that we could make this trip with just our toothbrushes and a change of clothes, and how he mocked me for even entertaining the idea of packing anything else; he retorted that were I paranoid for the right reasons we could’ve been using antiseptic and bandages instead of carrying around a useless X-ray that no cop had bothered with so far.

After a few minutes of sitting in silence and trying to temper our great rage and pure bile for one another, Pathak said:

‘But it’s like the film, see? Like Alberto and Fuser. On our very own La Poderosa.’

I looked at our battered motorcycle resting against the retaining wall. If that thing had a mother, she’d be cradling its headlight in her trembling arms and kissing it incessantly and weeping and beseeching the Gods to rain down their cruelest curses on us. If La Poderosa was an ailing horse, our Splendor was the paralytic, malnourished mule Ghanshyam Tiwari overpowered and rode for hours. If our Splendor could speak, its bloodcurdling bellows would force the Gods to put it out of its misery. No, it wasn’t like The Motorcycle Diaries. There was no Chichina awaiting my fond letters in a faraway leafy estancia; our paths weren’t dotted with learned doctors and academics inviting us to lunch and asking curious questions about our travels; we weren’t crossing countries and being feted in the local papers wherever we went. We were just two idiots on a janky bike weathering the consequences of our stupid decisions.

‘I won’t lie to myself any more.’

An eatery owner in the valley below welcomed us into his leafy yard. He plucked some leaves off a medicinal plant, washed them, crushed them, and told us to wipe our wounds with it. I forget the plant’s name. A pharmacist was awoken from his afternoon siesta and sold us some antiseptic and bandages. We asked for nearby towns we could reach before dusk, and he suggested we should head to P___. It was the only village around with a hotel. When we asked for directions, the villagers said that they only knew the traditional route, which was recently destroyed by the landslide. We thanked the village-folk and headed back up to find another way to P___.

***

Reaching P___ revived our frayed spirits. The evening mist cloaking it carried the scent of cedars and pines. It embodied the inherent vitality and optimism of the mountain man. Men and women here were cheery, fit, and full of vigor; all faces and eyes were alive and alert. As we entered the village, a file of young men sprinted out, smiling, upbeat army hopefuls out for a tough evening workout.

Having tortured our Splendor for hours, we walked around P___ like Ghanshyam Tiwari did the day after riding that unlucky mule: in pain and with our legs splayed, as if we had shat ourselves. The horrid damper had made sticking our seats to the motorcycle a feat of grit, more so because the other weathered road to P___, in addition to being full of gravel and loosened rocks, was also narrower and without guardrails, with a steep drop to the left always inches away from our tires, keeping us terrified and alert.

We needed to check the hotel for ourselves; we had heard bad things. P___ had sounded familiar to Pathak when the pharmacist brought it up, so he called his friend who put him through to Mr. Bisht, a public works engineer, who confirmed that there was indeed a guest house there for visiting engineers, and he permitted us to stay there because he had seen the hotel and it was cramped and overpriced and infested with rats.

We saw a rat scamper across the lobby as soon as we entered the hotel. Then we glimpsed the stained ancient mattresses peeking out from the moth-eaten bed-sheets, and we promptly got out. We walked around the village for a while, asking for directions to the guest house, taking it all in: the silence; the oak and the pines; the grey parapets disappearing in the mist; the signboards, barely readable in the half-light; a child, far away, yelling to his heart’s content; the cold sitting on the tip of our red noses.

When we reached the gates of the guest house, Blue Foot didn’t let us in.

***

Blue Foot was the caretaker of P___ Guest House. He was the only unhealthy man in the village, a piss drunk diabetic with bloated blue feet and a stale stench of cigarette smoke. He’d been watching cricket in his little house up a small flight of stone steps, which is where I first found him, and he really hadn’t liked me disturbing him.

‘No.’

‘We’ve talked to Mr. Bisht, sir. He says we can stay the night.’

‘I don’t care about any Bisht, I don’t answer to any Bisht. This place for engineers and officers only.’

‘M___ ji, Mr. Bisht is a public works engineer. Please try to understand. We were injured on the way, and we have nowhere else to go, and he allowed us to spend the night here.’ I pointed to my elbows and Pathak’s bandaged chin.

‘Go to the hotel.’

‘We don’t have enough money.’

‘Not my problem.’

‘At least talk to Mr. Bisht once.’

‘No Bisht no nothing. Get lost. You aren’t Kumaonis anyway.’

We sighed and slipped into Kumaoni to appease our drunk Himalayan ethno-nationalist.

That stumped him. He didn’t speak for a minute. Then he looked at our bike.

‘Naaah. Someone taught you. You don’t speak it well enough. You’re from Delhi.’ He pointed to Pathak’s DL number plate. I let out an impatient sigh.

‘Perhaps we can help out with your situation here,’ Pathak pulled out his wallet and signaled me to loosen mine. Turns out having less money wasn’t an excuse: we only had four hundred rupees between the two of us; the hotel room cost ₹ 800. We truly had nowhere to go if Blue Foot denied us a room.

‘You’re from Delhi,’ Blue Foot repeated in his drunken stupor, looking straight through the notes in Pathak’s hand, as if it were phantom money. Then he turned around, and step by uncertain step, climbed up and barred himself into his house, abandoning us in the fog and dusk.

We were thirsty and hungry and angry and tired; we headed back to P___ market. We spotted an eatery across the road, a traditional shale building painted a hideous fluorescent green, and spent seventy rupees on scrambled eggs, a couple rotis each, and a bottle of water. Then we visited the dispensary and got ourselves a couple tetanus shots.

Hoping against hope, we went up to the guest house again. We sat beneath the electric lamp, mulling whether we should seek out Blue Foot again or go around knocking doors and pleading people to let us stay the night. They probably would, but we only wanted to inconvenience people as a last resort.

‘Call Mr. Bisht. Maybe he knows someone other than M___ who could help us out.’

‘What do you think I was doing down at the eatery? Zero reception. Only BSNL works here.’

We heard someone skipping down the steps and stood up. It was a little boy. Pathak saw him, coolly pulled out the X-ray, lifted it to the light and acted miffed and important. That got the boy’s attention. Slowly and shyly, he approached us. Never looking at him, Pathak continued:

‘Look over here, Dr. Negi. The infection in her lungs is severe, she’s coughing blood. We need to be nearby if we get a midnight call, and my phone battery is about to die! How will the family call us now if there’s an emergency? Where do we go? The engineer said he’d have the guest house opened by now! This supervisor should be fired!’

‘My grandpa takes care of the guest house,’ the boy said with a hint of panic in his voice, ‘I’ll go wake him up,’ and he started for the steps.

‘Oh, I didn’t know he was a grandpa…’ Pathak pretended to let go of his anger, evoking pity in his voice. ‘Kid, wait. No one’s firing your grandpa, don’t worry. We’re just tired from tending to this case all day. Your grandpa must be tired too, don’t wake him up. We just have to sleep in for a few hours and charge our phones, we’ll likely be gone in the morning. Do you know where he keeps the keys?’

‘I do.’

‘Can you get them for us without waking grandpa up?’

‘I can.’

‘Alright then. Off you go.’

The kid scampered up the steps.

Pathak slid the X-ray back into the bag and turned to me. ‘Alberto and Fuser, traveling doctors of repute, hahahaha.’

‘What if he wakes up?’

‘You saw how drunk he was a half-hour back? Must’ve been knocked out cold by now.’

I couldn’t indulge in the hypocrisy of feeling disgusted with him after what had happened; I had very seriously stared at the X-ray when Pathak told me to. It was marvelous what he had pulled off, so brilliantly instinctual: like a bushman ensnaring a baboon in the outback.

The kid returned with the keys. Pathak reached for his wallet, pulled out a fifty rupee note, and gave it to the boy.

‘Here, treat yourself to something tomorrow. Don’t tell your grandfather we were talking about firing him, that was just…talk. We didn’t know the situation here, you know. Come, Dr. Negi, we’ll rest for a bit. And kid, collect the keys from our room tomorrow morning. We’d likely have left by then. Thank you!’

The kid, joyous he’d saved a life and his grandfather’s job, nodded, ran up the steps, and disappeared.

***

When we switched on the lights in our spacious room, we realized the toll Blue Foot’s drunken daze had taken over the guest house. There was no staff around, the room hadn’t been swept in a while, the bed was covered with cob-webs and dust, and the cupboards were empty and crawling with spiders. There was no water in the washroom, no blankets on the bed. We realized we would’ve been so much better off spending the night in the hotel had we the kind of money to book a room there.

‘Fuck it,’ Pathak said. We flipped the sheet and hit the bed, shivering and sore, counting on our fatigue to knock us out and deliver us from our nightmares.

Hailed as one of the pioneers of the tabloid genre, the Journal was very much the nasty sensationalist paper tabloids are today. Its artists had that annoying quality of modern paparazzi, painting and etching gore to depict crime scenes for the front page of its weekly illustrated supplement. Crime drove up circulations; Le Petit Journal and the like were always on the lookout, even if they had to get their fix from across the strait: the French penny-papers took a keen, lurid interest in Jack the Ripper’s doings in London. They fattened themselves feeding on the basest instincts of man; facts mattered little. In 1870, the Third Republic came to be and the tax on political papers was removed. Free to talk politics, the Journal sided with the public’s inflamed sentiments during the Dreyfus Affair and launched an antisemitic tirade against Captain Alfred Dreyfus—a soldier wrongfully accused of selling military secrets to Germany—taking out full-page artworks portraying Dreyfus’ disgrace.

These paintings and engravings showed ‘Le Traitre’ Dreyfus’ sword being snapped into two; his court martial; him languishing in jail on Devil’s Island; the police outside Rennes prison, where he was held for his retrial, and the writer Emile Zola arriving at the Palais de Justice, summoned on the charge of defamation for alleging that the government had forged evidence to convict Dreyfus.

Dreyfus was eventually found innocent. The man who had framed him slit his own throat in prison.  

These colorful spreads of suspended drama were not just limited to spicing up domestic affairs: they also captured the horror and awe of a swiftly changing world. The modern era was beaking out of the medieval: while one issue depicts an Afghan man tied to a cannon, about to be blown to bits for conspiring against the Emir, a French crowd in another looks up in wonder as a huge contraption of timber and fabric, Santos-Dumont’s flying machine, takes to the sky in its first public flight. 

Paintings of faraway wars in faraway places were popular too: in the late 1890s and early 1900s, the Journal came out with many illustrated editions on the Boer War. Jubilation, misery, compassion, death, defeat, capture, scenes and emotions of every shade made it to its front pages. The frozen-action style unique to these penny papers rivaled Tintin comics in serving up adventure and fantasy to millions that would never get to step out of their country.

This was, dare I say, their only achievement, but it was a significant one.

What was tragic for journalism was heartening for storytelling. Choosing paintings and engravings over photographs made historical events timeless and mythical: those coups and wars and scandals and assassinations could be happening then or centuries before. Events could be choreographed at will; man, spirit, landscape and destiny arranged to please the eye. Angels could swoop down and revive a fatigued army on its last legs, or phantoms silently watch doomed men march to their death. Large pennants could flutter perfectly on enemy lands, inspiring men to quit their trenches and forge on ahead, or ominous skeletons quietly stand by the bedside of dying regents. Somewhere in the mess of reality, exaggeration, symbolism and mythmaking, possibilities of a breathtaking epic emerged. Napoleon, revered often as Caesar and Alexander are, died half a decade before the first surviving photographs. Would he appear as wrapped in mystique and splendor were he photographed in albumin print, exposed as a mortal?

But photographs are necessary, journalism is necessary. For every battalion-worth of adventure-hungry lads signing up to die for their king, moved by the papers’ storytelling and mythmaking, a sobering shot of butchered men could snap a young man out of his fantastical reverie, save him from the horrors of war. Photographs came, and then moving pictures, and people found out that they could be crafted to awe and deceive too, but never could they evoke the drama and scale of the human imagination as vigorously as those engravings did.

***     

What journalism lost, endured in travel writing. There were no dog-headed people in modern travelogues; the world had become smaller, too familiar, but a dose of good yarn helped keep landscapes and people wrapped in mystique, dyed them again in legend and myth, crafted narratives of immense beauty and awe.

Bruce Chatwin wove such yarns. He turned his childhood memories into quests spanning continents; people, history, landscapes, myths and prehistoric creatures all converged as he plodded through remote terrains for his answers. His passages were hypnotic, ‘voyages of the mind’, as his friend Werner Herzog put it, and his prose was a rare marriage of brevity and warmth: incisive but seldom clinical. He’d paint entire vistas in a brief paragraph, sum up a man’s appearance and soul in a few lines.1 Bruce opens The Songlines by describing a Russian man he met in Alice Springs:

Nothing in Arkady’s temperament predisposed him to live in the hugger-mugger of Anglo-Saxon suburbia or take a conventional job. He had a flattish face and a gentle smile, and he moved through the bright Australian spaces with the ease of his footloose forebears...only when you came up close did you realize how big his bones were.

Arkady is a major presence in the book. He accompanies Chatwin in his pursuit of the Aboriginal songlines, is a second protagonist almost, the youngest son of an immigrant Russian father who escaped Nazi custody by jumping off a cattle-car bound for a German factory:

One night, somewhere in the Ukraine, he jumped from the cattle-car into a field of sunflowers. Soldiers in grey uniforms hunted him up and down the long lines of sunflowers, but he gave them the slip. Somewhere else, lost between murdering armies, he met a girl from Kiev and married her. Together they drifted to a forgetful Adelaide suburb, where he rigged up a vodka still and fathered three sturdy sons.

But this sturdy Russian explorer, Chatwin’s guide to the Outback, never existed. He wasn’t an outright concoction either. Arkady was modeled after Toly Sawenko, child of an immigrant Pole, who’d been mapping Aboriginal sacred sites when Chatwin first met him. His father did escape the Nazis, only the circumstances were less graceful. There was no train he jumped off of, no field of sunflowers he vanished into. His commander had deserted his troops, and the Nazis captured him and others as they attempted to flee the German tanks. “Allowed into a cornfield to shit, he and two others escaped”, writes Nicholas Shakespeare, Chatwin’s biographer. “At midnight, his companions judged it safe to stand up and were shot: all day the Germans had been waiting. He waited in the corn until they had left and with a bribe of honey vodka bought himself new papers.”

The truth here is as intriguing as the lie. But by making the prisoner jump off a doom-bound train and find salvation in a field of sunflowers, by letting him fall in love while he roamed “lost between murdering armies”, Chatwin elevated the event to poetry. The knowledge that one’s reading fiction numbs one to its wonders. The tiny voice within refuses to be tricked; the immersion is never complete. To achieve total immersion one has to confuse the mind, muddy the line between reality and fiction. Whether or not the immersion will break depends on how subtle a yarn the writer can sneak into reality, and how far he can push it. Chatwin was a master of such yarns.

There were other improvisations too which were not well received by the people Bruce documented. His cousins in Patagonia were miffed at his portraits of their parents:

One of the things that drove me out of my mind was that he called my father ‘Charley’. He was never called that. He was ‘Charles’ or ‘Captain Milward’. He described my father as tall, having startling blue eyes and black mutton chops, with sailor’s hat at a rakish angle. He was short and red-headed and bald by the time he was 30, and always wore a black tie. And he was not this sickly old man. He died very suddenly of a heart attack.2

Chatwin’s embellishments and lies weren’t confined to his books either. In his final years, he hid news of his Aids diagnosis by giving his ill-health fantastical origins: depending on who you’d ask, they’d tell you that he got his disease by eating either the raw meat of a Cantonese whale or a thousand year-old rotten Chinese egg. For Chatwin, even his death needed to be kindled by some obscure, curious, wondrous event, like the explorers of yore.

***

For all the criticisms Chatwin attracted for his embellishments, he was clear about his motives from the beginning. That his book was being called a ‘travel book’ when it first came out didn’t sit right with him. Here’s what he writes after reading the first reviews of In Patagonia:

the FORM of the book seems to have puzzled them (as I suspect it did the publisher). There’s a lot of talk of ‘unclassifiable prose’, ‘a mosaic’, ‘a tapestry’, ‘a jigsaw’, a ‘collage’ etc. but no one has seen that it is a modern WONDER VOYAGE…

‘Wonder Voyage’ sums it aptly. It echoes the timeless spirit of those penny paper illustrations showcasing faraway lands. There’s great (?) journalism out there, from op-eds and features to minute-by-minute bulletins keeping us abreast of the truth. I would argue we have space for some wonder voyages too: shorn of their nasty origins, aspiring to literature, now dedicated solely to satisfy mankind’s sense of adventure and awe.

What stood out to me about Balmukund was the little black dent on his bony left knee. He knew it was a problem. ‘My left leg’s been thinning and shrinking,’ he told me when we first met, ‘it has shrunk about a half-inch in two decades. It’s this damn black spot, I’m sure. It’s as if it were feeding on my marrow ever since it appeared.’

‘You didn’t show it to a doctor?’

‘Realized too late it’s been harming me. What it does to me doesn’t matter anymore. I’m old now. Too old.’

Balmukund was too old indeed. He looked like a typical Himalayan village elder: eyes barely visible behind folds and folds of wrinkled hide, wearing thick broken glasses mended at the bridge with copious amounts of thread, a toothless gummy mouth that sucked in his dry, cracked lips and a deep furrowed brow, slow, short, hunched and irascible, so ill and in pain it felt cruel to wish him a long life. Death had ignored him for two decades now, but Balmukund did his part: he smoked as many bidis as he could, day after day, religiously. He ran out of them during our last meeting, and he turned sad and sour when he realized I didn’t carry any on me.

So I did this time. I purchased a bundle on my way to his house. He lived in the first hill village beyond the Sukhi river, which, true to her name, was a dry stony bed for most of the year. The river separated the bhabhar from the hills—humble beginnings of the great Himalaya—and here you could see them rise from their roots. In this little stretch beyond my village, as far as the eye could see, there was no sign of civilization. This was Earth untouched, pristine, prehistoric. Far away to the west stood blue, fading hills, turning greener and leafier the closer they got to the river bank; the sky and sun were at their brightest blue and gold, as they are right before evening; a sweet, gentle breeze blew. The trees and bushes sprouting from the other bank hid the path to the village. I stopped there, looked at the edge of the river bed cutting at the root of the hill, touched the corner where the two met, and marveled at this union of the mightiest of mountains and the most fertile of plains.

I kept on the winding track of packed dirt, onwards and upwards, in the cool blue shade of the tree branches rustling above. Soon, I began seeing people. Curious faces. The village wasn’t used to visitors. There were questions, always. Where I lived, what I did, whom I’d meet. In villages, one cannot take offence to such questions. One cannot tell people that the road is a public place, and that it is no one’s business to know how long one chooses to lounge there. Villages, especially those still unconnected by concrete roads, have a very strong sense of shared ownership. In the villages, everybody is somebody, and the stranger has to be mindful to not sound dismissive; he has to recognize them that way and talk to them as such.

When they cannot work up the courage to ask you directly, they follow you—like they did on my previous visit. Had they asked me questions then, I wouldn’t have known how to answer. I had headed out of my village one evening on a whim, and decided to explore the dark hills beyond the Sukhi. In the eyes of the villagers, you only travel while on business: the rest is either loafing or tourism. There is no such thing as exploration; aimlessness is shady. Nervous, I plodded on ahead, and suspicious, the villagers followed. Then I saw Balmukund sitting on a bamboo chair outside his traditional house, a small, whitewashed, slope-roofed structure, full of sparrows flying in and out of the little gaps between the walls and the roof, the last bastion of beauty in a village almost entirely taken over by gaudy flat-roofed concrete nightmares. I decided to say hello, asked after his health, and to my relief, he was interested enough to offer me the bamboo chair beside him. I readily obliged. The villagers lingered for a bit, then satisfied, went away.

Balmukund lived alone. ‘I have a son, but that ungrateful git shat in my mouth. Ran off with this Punjabi woman to Ludhiana. We haven’t seen each other since.’

Out of curiosity, but also duty, villagers would drop by every fifteen minutes to ask after him. Did he need tea? Does he have his stick with him? Someone arrived with a bundle of his laundered clothes. Balmukund’s reaction to them all wasn’t a smile or a bow of gratefulness, but the stern nod of the village patriarch. The charade of duty let the villagers help the man without wounding his sense of self.

Not as many people came up to him when we met again. A few had remembered my face from earlier; their gossip alone quenched the curiosity of the rest. They didn’t need an excuse to come see me anymore.

Balmukund was happy when I handed him the bundle. ‘Good man,’ he said, pulling out a bidi and lighting it, ‘I thought you had forgotten me.’

It was evening when I reached the village. The sun was a low yolk of orange bleeding all its vitality and color into the fading sky, tingeing everything lilac: the hazy strip of town far away, the train tracks drawn across the patchwork of farms, the ugly stadium, the river bed and the forests sloping down to it, Balmukund’s beautiful house.

He caught me looking down at his black dent.

‘Seems it will swallow my leg whole before Fate wills I’m done.’

‘Your son knew about it?’

‘He left me while I was still working. I’ve no idea where he is now. This world is no longer grateful, there’s no sense of duty. There was a time…’ The old man sighed. The sky gleamed pink in his bulbous glasses, his mouth was slightly ajar. Far away, in the faint distance, a crow cawed.

Two women came, set down the tray of tea and the jar of biscuits they were carrying, looked at me a while, and left.

‘There was a time when even ghosts had the good sense to help someone in trouble.’

Unsure how to respond, I nodded and gave a polite laugh. He didn’t like that.

‘Oh, you think I’ve lost my mind too, haven’t you!’ he snapped. ‘Listen fellow—bidi is my only vice. And a cigarette when I can get one. But I don’t drink, and I don’t smoke hash and do all of that other nonsense. Don’t let the hunch and stoop fool you—I’m still as sharp as I ever was!’

‘My intention wasn’t to mock you, sir. I’m sorry.’ His thick glasses may have cloaked his rage, but the heavy breathing gave it away. He calmed down only after muttering and grumbling for a while. The sun had dissolved into the sky completely.

‘I was a peon with the sub-divisional magistrate at Pithoragarh,’ he started afresh. ‘He was a new officer, young hot blood, and my, the arrogance! He didn’t think much of our traditions and beliefs. He was one of those loud, English-speaking ones from Delhi, you see. Props to him, however, he managed affairs well, and his arrogance was limited to chiding his staff, and never the people.

‘He wanted me to deliver a stack of files to a block officer in some obscure village, I forget the name. One had to pass through a stretch of jungle to get to it. The jungle’s still there. It’ll always be there. Cut one tree and see if the fairies there won’t harvest their souls.’

‘Fairies?’

‘I’m coming. To that.’ He had enunciated every word, and his voice quivered. He was making a great effort to restrain himself from shouting at me.

‘The village was three days away. The journey was up and down a mountain, through the jungle in the valley, and then about a quarter-way up another mountain slope. I had to time my journey right so I could reach the mouth of the jungle in the early morning, and cross it before evening fell. This was important. I had to keep a certain pace throughout the journey to achieve this. It was tiring, especially walking through the second night, but I was at the jungle’s entrance by six.

‘It’s incredible how fear pushes a man. I feared the magistrate, and I feared the fairies. The magistrate would sack me if the block officer didn’t have his files by next morning; the fairies would kill me if I even glimpsed at the glade where they danced and frolicked, evening through night.’

Balmukund looked at my hesitant face, and smiled.

‘Himalayan fairies are no benevolent godmothers, son. They are beautiful, so they say, but also vain, shrill, rough, loud, angry and childlike—nothing like those pleasant winged angels schoolboys read about these days. Many would drop down dead near the glade. They would cross the jungle in the evening, and the shrieks of the fairies would make it near impossible not to risk a glance at the glade. That would be their undoing.

‘It was an unspoken rule among the people there that business could wait a day or two if the jungle was to be crossed on the way. No way would people enter it after three. I had tried to tell that to the magistrate, but he rubbished my pleas, told me not to be superstitious. I had seen that crackpot suspending people for as little as uttering ‘but’ when in a bad mood; I had no choice—I had to also feed that disappointment back home, you know. He was a beautiful boy.’

Balmukund sighed again. But for the faint glare of his glasses, his face had disappeared. The sky was a viscous mass of inky blue. Far away, at the horizon, a yellow glow hung above the twinkling town. The sonorous echo of a distant temple bell and the chirping of crickets mingled into a faint mellow din, soft to the ears in the coolness of dusk.

‘I was tired, about to collapse. I knew I’d cross the jungle before evening comfortably, so I decided to risk an hour’s nap. I was barely in my senses, having walked an entire day and night at a constant pace in fear of the magistrate and the fairies. Now a third fear arose: half asleep, I’d drift off, lose my way in the jungle and never reach the village.

‘I settled for a nap, certain that my anxiety would make for light, cautious sleep and wake me up before time. I’d be groggy still, but saner. Instead, I woke up refreshed and terrified to a white hot afternoon, staring into the darkness of the jungle I was about to enter. For a moment I thought of risking the magistrate’s wrath and stalling the journey, and planned to start for the jungle the next morning. But the horrid thought of being unable to feed my boy made me realize I was better off resisting the temptation to look at a glade than losing the only job I knew how to do.

‘For that ungrateful bastard, I entered the jungle. It was a lot cooler in the shade, I remember. There was a soft breeze, just like today. And the bells, how could I forget the bells! They sailed on the breeze and reached me in waves, their faint, gentle echoes. I decided to cling to everything pleasant I could find: the breeze caressing my cheeks, the music of the bells, the jungle’s shade. As I pushed deeper into the jungle, I thought, maybe dying here wouldn’t be so bad. One just died instantly the moment one looked at the fairies, was it not? That’s not a painful death! And I might never get to die so comfortably again. I had almost started looking forward to the glade, as a weary man looks forward to a good night’s rest. Only the thought of my boy would pull me out of that sweet hypnotic lull.

‘I began to fear the jungle too. Had the jungle and the fairies struck a pact? It seemed so. One would lure in visitors for the other to kill them. I grew wary of the breeze and shade. The sound of the bells was my only succour. They weren’t temple bells—they sounded more like the hollow tinkling of those little cylindrical bells they tie around the necks of cattle. Perhaps a clueless goatherd had strayed into the jungle too. I had passed the densest core of the jungle, the sun had set, and I was on my way out. The glade would appear soon. I did not have the luxury to wait for the goatherd. After crossing the jungle—if at all I did—I had to walk five more hours to get to the village. But the tinkling grew louder, seemed closer, and I knew I’d be meeting the goatherd and his flock soon.

‘I could sense the glade from the corner of my left eye: a vast absence of foliage begging to be seen, a void tugging at my eyes like a vortex pulls at boats. There were no shrieks, no giggling, no sounds of merrymaking or frolic. I fought hard to look straight ahead, but it was dark, and the glade, without canopy, was full of evening light. Desperate to make sense of where I was headed, my eye flicked to the glade and back on the path ahead. My heart gave a jolt, realizing what I did, and I thought I died.  

‘What I felt next wasn’t relief, but anger. I stopped and looked at the glade. It was empty, dimly lit by the dusk, surrounded by darkness. It sounded there quite like how it sounds here right now: bells and crickets. I stomped off in anger, only realizing then that my feet had blisters on them.

‘By the time I emerged from the jungle, it was pitch dark. Not far away, a tea seller was boarding up his shack, done for the day. When he heard my footsteps, he lifted his lantern up to me to have a good look at the madman who emerged from the jungle at that hour. I still remember the wild glint of disbelief in his eyes.

‘“Have you gone mad, my friend?” he asked, “Or is it that you don’t have the will to live anymore? You look like a hillman to me, you know what goes around in these places. Why do you tempt fate like some moronic plains dweller?”

‘“There are no fairi—”

‘“You DON’T take their name. Lucky day for you. I rarely ever not hear them.”

‘“They’re not there. And I’m not the only one passing through. A goatherd and his flock will come out of the jungle anytime.”

‘“You heard the little bells?”

‘I nodded.

‘“God’s favorite child, you. That’s no goatherd, my friend! He’s a ghost! A good ghost. He probably sensed that you were terrified, so he decided to walk along and chased away the fairies for you.”’   

Balmukund slowly got up from his bamboo chair. I handed him his walking stick. He hobbled to the yard and looked up at the starry sky.

Pointing to a house across a kitchen garden, he said: ‘Go there and tell Sarla to give you a mattress and a blanket. Stay here for the night. I hear a leopard’s been lurking around these days—he made off with two of Lalit’s goats just a week ago.’

Raju Bandar became a celebrity in Nainital in the late 2000s.

The monkey smoked, drank and chewed gum atop a Maruti 800 parked outside the Coronation Hotel. He would have swore too if he could, his vices cheered on by the idlers and curious passers-by swarming him.

‘Bandar’ was a misnomer, of course: for locals, a ‘bandar’ (or monkey) meant the red-faced macaque. Raju was a langur—a larger, grey-fur monkey with a black face and a long tail. ‘Raju Bandar’ just had a nice ring to it, so the name stuck. All townsfolk had opinions on him. Raju was the bravest of beasts, a neighbor would say. ‘Langurs are shy creatures, proper gentlemen compared to those red-faced devils. The little courage they can muster is spent stealing a fruit or two from people’s gardens. They keep to themselves otherwise, never bother people unless they bother them. Then this guy emerges out of nowhere and not only does he dare to befriend people, he also drinks and smokes with them! It’s incredible, all of it.’

Others thought he was a cautionary tale in the making: ‘Wait till he gets drunk and rips out a guy’s hair, or worse, a child’s face. Terrible parents, letting their kids wander near him. They’re waiting for some poor child to become his victim before he’s chased out of town,’ my fifth-grade teacher would lament.

‘He’s probably been trained to smuggle drugs up his you-know-what. A mule, you see. No wonder why he’s so comfortable around people,’ thought Sharad, a senior in tenth-grade who sat with us in the school van.

I had never seen Raju. Kids living at the lake’s upper shore saw him all the time, and they talked about him all the time. I didn’t get to go down to the shore regularly enough for me to glimpse him. Nainital looks like a leafy bowl: a ring of tall hills cup the lake below. My school was on the rim of this bowl; my home, halfway down another hilltop, not far away. On most days my life was spent shuttling between these two places. One only went downhill to the markets when something was absolutely needed: textbooks, notebooks, grocery, rations.

My classmates made Raju seem very grand, but also very human—a man almost, as if he was a traveler from a far away land, amused as he sampled the vices of this quaint, unknown town, surrounded by admirers. Coming from children, the descriptions were exaggerated, of course, but I’d taken to imagining him lounging in a chair, a charming man but for his grey fur and long tail, taking a deep drag from a cigarette some idler handed him, drinking from another man’s whisky glass, laughing at a joke someone cracked, shaking hands all around.

So when I saw him for the first time, I was underwhelmed. He was a lanky grey animal, all face and limbs with a vacant expression on his face, pulling a bit of his bubblegum out like string cheese before slurping it up and chomping on it again. My grand imaginings had disappointed me. Or perhaps it was my desire to see him smoke or drink, which I never did. Or did I? I’m unsure. I do remember seeing him one more time, in a cloud of smoke with a cigarette in his hand, but whether the sight was a true memory or a vividly imagined scene that stuck with me, I don’t know.

***

For years after, I’d think of Raju Bandar during idle moments: him along with Sunglasses, who thought that he had died long ago, and the figure veiled from head to toe in a black burqa, with the gait of a tank—a man deeply ashamed of his vitiligo, and the local ‘Yeti’, a poor, mentally unsound man with hypertrichosis, rumored to break rocks on his forehead and munch on nettles near the jungles of Naina Peak, the town’s highest point. Raju Bandar was one of these many strange beings that populated the town then, a quaint memory you’d smile at sometimes when you remembered your childhood.

Largely forgotten thus, he became the topic of a lively discussion in a small hotel room in Nainital about a decade later. I was in town on Christmas for a reunion with Pavan and some old friends, having started the practice only in 2020, when after years, fate brought me back to a place near my hometown.

I asked one of Pavan’s lawyer friends, Sohum, if he remembered Raju.

‘Oh, haven’t thought of him for years. Fun guy, wasn’t he? Haha. Giri da was heartbroken, of course. He thought of Raju like his son.’

‘Who’s Giri da?’

‘Lived only a short distance from here, down the steps. He’s no more. Loved animals. Even got into trouble with some forest rangers once because he found some tortoise lying belly-up on the road and took him home, and it turned out to be an endangered species. He could’ve been jailed for that, but it was an honest mistake, and the neighbors created too much of a ruckus and even called a journalist, so they backed off.’

‘How did Raju and Giri meet?’

‘Giri found Raju as an injured little cub crying beside a forest trail. Either some leopard had made a meal of his mother or an elder from a rival group had injured him. Giri da took him home, cleaned and bandaged his wounds, and then left him in a different part of the jungle again. Next morning, Raju was back at his doorstep.

‘He tried getting him to leave his house three times, and when he showed up the fourth time, Giri da gave up. He treated him like his grandson. All of us remember playing with him,’ people in the room nodded.

‘He even got his wife to weave sweaters for the guy, grew to be really fond of him. But then, teenage came. Raju grew rebellious. He wouldn’t even come home to eat his meals, and started hanging out with the loafers down the huge grilled drain. That was when the stunts started. They’d give him a shot of Old Monk for the laughs. Then they gave him whiskey, made him smoke. They didn’t force him or anything. The trick to make him do something was to do that thing but pretend to be secretive about it, as if you were excluding him from all the fun, and he took it up in an instant.

‘But the clowns overdid it one day, and Raju got home drunk. Giri da was incensed. Next day he followed Raju to the drain, and when he spotted the idlers, he chewed them out. “Raju wouldn’t go out from now on,” Giri da thundered, “shame on you for corrupting my boy!”

‘But Giri da, in his love, had forgotten that Raju was no boy. He kept shrieking to be let out day and night for a couple of days, and Giri da knew that Raju had to go when he struck a dinner plate off his wife’s hands and lunged at her. Giri da then caught him by the scruff of his neck and cast him out. Broke his heart to do that.

‘Raju would hang out with the idlers all day, and then return to Giri da’s house at night. Giri da threw his utensils at him, shooed him away. He had to do that half a dozen times more before Raju realized he wasn’t welcome anymore. That’s when he joined the idlers full time, and at night, when they went back to their homes, he took to bunking with the porters at the Mall Road. It worked for him splendidly: the porters always had some cheap alcohol they gave him every night.

‘Giri da died a few years back, heartbroken. His time with Raju was short, but it left a mark on him. He had no son of his own, and he had come to lavish all his affections on Raju alone. It feels very insensitive saying this, but it was entirely Giri da’s fault. What would a langur know about responsibility and love?’

I wanted to ask more about Raju, but then more of our friends began shuffling into the room. The conversation shifted to other interesting things, and everyone forgot about him.

I wonder what became of Raju. Perhaps he ran away one day. But hearing that his will hinged on alcohol, that seems unlikely. Short of an accident, only the most tragic end seems the most probable: Raju died a drunk, that miserable, twice-orphaned local spectacle, his tragedy unknown to the tens of thousands that had flocked to see him in his lifetime, unknown, perhaps, to even him.

‘We were the first croose to go through Northwest passage, you know? Iceberg everywhere. Like Tit-aanic.’

Vanja was flipping pancakes on the little earthen stove in the corner of the tin shelter. It was dusk. Far away, the jagged Shivalik hills stood like a tall black wall against the indigo sky, and the tourist town of Nainital glittered like a jewel-encrusted mountain. Miles away from that dazzle and shine, enveloped in foliage, we were sitting in the glow of the stove and a single dim lantern, preparing for a rare pancake-and-burger party: Vanja had some old mayonnaise she wanted to use before it went bad, so earlier that day my brother and I got some buns and ketchup from the little cluster of shops downhill.

‘Icebergs sound scary.’

‘No. Nooooo,’ Vanja said, in her thick Eastern-European accent. There was everything on croose, you know? Helicopter, life-boat. Ice-breaker too: red ships, streaming ahead us. I also saw polar bear.’

Slowly, pancakes began stacking up beside the stove. They looked disappointing. I had never had pancakes before, and I was expecting them to look like something out of a Hollywood breakfast scene: stacks of fluffy brown discs topped with a small cube of butter drowning in its own melt. Vanja’s pancakes, on the other hand, looked like slightly leavened chapatis—bland, colorless, uninspiring.

‘It was beautiful. Everything white and blue: blue sky, blue iceberg, white clouds and white sheet of ice on blue ocean, as far as eye can see. Too beautiful to remain on croose to experience all that, you know. I had to throw tantrum to captain to let me out.’

My brother, who’d been slicing onions for the burgers, stopped, wiped his tears, and asked: ‘Let you out where?’

‘We were near island. They were flying out passengers for a while, and they wanted to fly some staff to island too. Chefs, two officers. They never even thought of cleaners and caretakers. I go to captain office, eleventh storey. I told him, “I don’t even haf single strike on me. I am good worker. I talk to crazies without losing cool, change bedsheets full of shit. I spend my night in window-less bunk at the bottom of ship. I deserve fresh air!” He let me go.’

‘He could have fired you.’

‘You shouldn’t be rude. But sometimes you haf to take risk and be a beetch to get what you deserve. I was good worker. He knew that.’

We heard some loud grunts and stopped talking, and when the grunts faded away, Vanja said, ‘Barking deer, no worries.’ She had flipped and stacked her last pancake and signaled me to hand over my plate of potatoes. I was almost done peeling them. She never bothered with peeling the remaining, mashing them all up for the patties.

‘You mentioned talking to crazies.’

‘Yes, all kind of crazy people on croose ship. They vomit and shit on bedsheet, clog toilet, and you have to still be polite. But such people are usually drunk. It is sober ones you have to…dread. Like English lady with red sock puppet.’

‘Yes, what about that?’ my brother asked, amused and curious.

‘If I talk directly to her, she say talk to puppet first. So I talk to puppet first, then puppet talk to her, then she talk to puppet, then puppet talk to me. Crazy beetch.’

The sound of patties frizzling in oil made my stomach growl. It had been a long day: collecting and hauling sacks upon sacks of dried leaves and pine needles from the forest; hauling crates upon crates of dried, dead oak that Nalin, Vanja’s husband, had been chopping all morning; washing the pillow cases, blankets and bedsheets, working the bean patch, then walking the long trail down to the motor road to get the ketchup and buns and then hiking all the way back up again.

I needed to stretch my legs. I stepped out of the lantern’s dim halo and into the darkness. I stretched my arms and looked above. The sky was crammed with stars. Deep in the forest, an owl hooted, invisible but for its eyes, two fierce beads of light penetrating the thick foliage, keeping watch.

I turned back to look at Vanja’s kitchen: a tin roof propped up by four thin pillars of wood. Her face was lit up by the stove’s fitful fire, which threw huge shadows of her head on the retaining wall, to which Nalin had screwed a spice-rack. That, the stove, a small table and a few wooden stools was all that was beneath that tin roof. Along the ridge above, I saw a couple flashes of torchlight. Nalin spent some time up there before dinner, smoking in peace beneath the stars as he took in the quiet, glimmering Nainital and the surrounding hills.

I saw Vanja walk around and arrange the food on the table: pancakes, mayonnaise, ketchup, a plate of onions, another plate of patties and the packets of buns. She put a huge sooty kettle on the empty stove and then stepped out of the kitchen, vanishing in the darkness until her smartphone glowed: she was calling her husband down for dinner. Up along the ridge, Nalin’s torchlight began flashing among the pines again. Then her dog began barking from their mud hut a few paces away and she walked back into the lantern’s dim light and out again, her footsteps fading into silence for a moment before I heard her faint voice again, yelling at Tiku to shut up and that there was no one around and that he was a good boy. She walked into the light again and I realized what an odd sight all of this was: this middle-aged Slav woman, who, after her years of sailing around the world, did not return to the comfort of her family and hometown, deciding instead to make the alien, faraway, leopard-infested wilderness of the lower Himalayas her home.

She had shown me some photographs earlier—photographs of her adventures around the world: her on the cruise, turned out like a 50s American housewife—short-haired, aproned, smiling; her lounging in a seaside hammock somewhere in South-East Asia; standing beneath a statue of Eva Peron in Buenos Aires; holding a spotless orange on a street in Spain; wetting her feet at a beach in South Africa, and looking out at the wide frigid vistas of the Arctic, of course. Hers was a novel method of guerilla tourism: once the ship docked at a port city, she spent all her wages on taxi fares: zooming from monument to monument, clicking as many pictures as she could in a couple of days before the ship sailed on again. She did not purchase souvenirs.

Hailing from a remote town in erstwhile Yugoslavia, she had no taste for storytelling or slow travel. All those unusual encounters along the way held no meaning for her. It was I who was the richer for travelling through her memories, asking her questions on every leg of her journey, making her relive moments which for her were nothing more than instances of discomfort she had overcome and forgotten about.

‘Malay, boorgers are ready!’ she yelled out, as Nalin walked into the light and sat on a wooden stool. I started walking towards the kitchen, curious what my first pancake would taste like.

Every year on 11th March, I travel back in time and play ghost.

It’s not difficult. I just have to take the 06:00 am bus to Nainital, a little town in the Himalayan foothills. It takes an hour and a half to get there, and the long scenic climb from the plains to this lake-town ensures that the vistas never get boring.

It’s still early when I reach Nainital station. I alight and know the sights that await me: the viewing deck, the lake, and the scores and scores of black fish swimming in its emerald waters; the boats to my right, fastened to the huge pink steps leading down to the waters; the library a little further, which, panelled and slope-roofed, looks like a giant houseboat moored to the shore; the lake’s upper shore on the opposite end, far away, and beyond it, the tiny houses stacked on the foot of Naina Peak, the town’s tallest hill, so tall it outgrows both civilization and vegetation, its bald, rugged peak overlooking the entire town. Climbing it is a part of my birthday ritual. I’d be on top of that hill by noon.

The town looked the same thirteen years ago, when I left. It must’ve looked the same before I was born. As a child I would see bleached old white-and-blue photographs of this bus station scenery glued to the walls of restaurants and travel agencies, and it hasn’t changed one bit.

I sit at the viewing deck for a while, absorb the landscape. A cloud floats in from behind Naina Peak and veils its bald top. It’s still half past seven in the morning. There are no hawkers pushing wares on you, no boatmen pestering you for a ride. It’s the best time to see the town undisturbed. I start walking.

I walk past the black Gandhi statue and the toll booth to get to the lower Mall Road, which runs along the lake and links the lower shore to the upper shore. There’s no point walking on the upper road just yet — all the shops are shuttered down. The only people on the streets are joggers and morning walkers.

I recognize some of them: familiar strangers. I watched them pass me by many times as a kid, and I’m sure they’d have recognized me too were I not all grown now. They’ve all aged a bit, of course. Some of them have just greyed; others have wrinkled too. The most heartening sight is of a couple in their mid-thirties jogging together on the upper Mall Road. I used to spot them often at a roadside café during evening walks with my father. They were younger, chirpier and more animated then. I’m glad they stuck together.

Only the library is open at this hour, and I walk in. There’s a girl reading by the window. She’s beautiful — not dizzyingly radiant, but warm and kind, the sort any man with half a brain won’t pass over. There’s no one else here. I browse the bookshelves, sit at a desk, pull out my diary, and write about my day so far.

I look out of the window. There’s a lone swan-boat in the middle of the lake. The cloud over Naina Peak has vanished.

The library used to be crowded in the evenings. It used to be a gathering of men, young and old, my father included, flipping newspapers in silence. I don’t know if that’s still the case. Among the paper-flippers was the most absurd man I’ve ever seen. I called him Sunglasses. He’d sit with cotton stuffed up his nostrils and ears, the way a corpse’s is during Hindu funeral rites. Once when my father got curious and asked around, the paper-flippers said that Sunglasses was convinced he had died long ago.

He was old then; I wonder if he’s still alive.

I put my diary back into my bag and head out. The girl didn’t even notice she had company.

I cross over to the upper Mall and amble on. I pass two churches and Narain’s bookstore. My father used to buy me little encyclopedias from there, and some Amar Chitra Kathas. I remind myself to pop in after I hike down from Naina Peak.

The upper shore is empty too, but the salesmen are slowly arriving at the promenade, one by one. They spread their mats on the sidewalk, open their tin trunks and begin arranging their wares — small plastic necklaces, forged colonial coins, handicrafts of varnished deodar and pinecones.

I walk past them and arrive at the little religious square: there’s the gurudwara and the temple on the left, the restaurants on the right, and a huge signboard with the photo of a young Dalai Lama in front of me, proclaiming the Tibetan people’s resolve to keep fighting for a free Tibet. I turn left, go down the stairs, and enter the temple.

I have loved spending time at the Naina Devi Temple since childhood. The cool marble floor beneath my naked feet, the smell of incense sticks, the water quietly lapping up the marble ghats, the lingering echo of the bronze bells, the coolness of the chandan-tilak radiating all over my forehead, striped sailboats slowly drifting off in the distance, all of these sensations have informed my idea of peace and calm.

I hear a string of Sanskrit chants; I recognize the voice. Mr. Joshi was a neighbor. He was a clerk at a lawyer’s chamber at the High Court, and would supplement his income with donations he received from his duties as a priest: conducting naming ceremonies, weddings, funeral rites, and everything in between. I look at him a while, hoping he’d turn and notice. He does. He sees someone familiar, recognizes me from somewhere, but not really. I look away, and he continues with his chants.

This is how I plan to go through the day. Meeting, chatting, transacting with people who once patted my back and ruffled my hair and called me by my name nearly everyday, but who’ve now, after so many years, forgotten me. But not entirely. I see a flicker of recognition in some eyes, a rekindling of memory that is heartening, but ultimately futile. I’m a ghost to them all, invisible yet known.

***

By the time I get back to the square, business is already booming. I see tourists roaming around, some of them clueless, perfect targets for boatmen and touts. A fair few are sitting in the restaurants in front of me. Paunchy men with heavy wives and bratty kids. They’re in a hurry. They have their hotel rooms booked, their itineraries set. Their travels aren’t travels, they’re blitz campaigns. They’ll rush from place to place, click pictures where their bodies eclipse the sights behind them, then pack into taxies to get to their businesses and homes in the plains. There’s nothing slow, absorbing, deliberative about their journeys. All they want to do is plant flags in as many places as possible. They were there.

I sit facing one such family. The boy is screaming for waffles and chocolate syrup and I want to punt him across the square. The girl is quietly drawing a sunrise on the table’s smooth white surface with a sharpie — there are huge, dirty smudges. Their mother just cannot be bothered. She’s eating her thukpa. It’s spicy and she’s tearing up but she does not pause. The man has called out to the waiter three times in five minutes, wondering where his chowmein is.

I order a thukpa too, and it is served by another familiar stranger. All the time I’m eating I hope the owner throws the lot out. He’s clearly incensed. But food for four in the morning is good business. He sends a waiter to their table with a damp cloth.

I finish my chicken thukpa, pay the owner and head out.

I walk through the Tibetan market to get to the foot of Naina Peak. I have a long way to go, and the market is only a small part of it. Patches of tarp overhead cover the entire street for some reason, and the sunlight filtering through them turns everyone blue.

I like the Tibetans. They keep to themselves but aren’t insular. There were a lot more older folks managing the shops back when I was a kid. They had settled in Nainital after fleeing Tibet when the Chinese invaded in 1950, and some of them spoke only Tibetan. They were helped out by their kids and grandkids.

Now those kids and grandkids run the shops. They sell tents, toys, clothes, umbrellas, windcheaters. One famous shop, Sonam, sells momos, and the long lines there often clog the market’s exit. It’s clear right now, mercifully. I exit the market, take the left by the mosque and begin the slow, tiring climb to the Nainital High Court. The path to the court isn’t steep — it is instead a very slight incline drawn out over a great distance, which makes walking up much more tiring.

It’s the same as it was all those years ago: the old fire-station; the sooty, greasy mechanic shops; the mongrels sifting through trash in the huge green bins; the ruins of the haunted Hotel Metropole, its windows patched up with old signboards of products and companies that no longer exist: Hutch, Bytes, Escotel.

I want to buy some chocolate. Thukpa isn’t proper breakfast. Neither is chocolate, but getting some sugar in at intervals during the hike would feel good. I buy two small Cadburys from the bald gentleman’s shop near the court. We don’t talk. He looks at me and I see the flicker.

My father would often stop by his shop in the evenings, and I remember him having a long conversation with my father about his ear infection. He had a huge wad of cotton and antiseptic taped to his ear then. His ear is good as new now. Time has wiped off all blotches and scars.

I walk onwards and reach the High Court. This is where the real climb begins: past the court, past the judges’ quarters, run huge concrete steps one has to climb to get to the motor road that cuts through the middle of the hill. You have to cross the road to get to the narrow trail to the top.

I pass by schools and neighborhoods. No familiar faces here. I never came to this part of town as a child. The first time I trekked to Naina Peak was almost three years back, when I first returned to Nainital, and when this ritual began.

I get to the motor road. I let the few tourist cars pass, cross the road, and begin walking up the narrow trail cut into the hill.

***

It’s a good day. It’s spring and the rhododendrons are in flower. They gleam red in the brown, dry foliage. The sky is blue and there are no clouds. Far away the Himalayas stand guard, bluish in the distance, towering over the entire terrain.

It is quiet and I’m alone. I like this bit of the trail. It flattens out for some distance before the final climb. I chomp on some Cadbury.

I see snow as I go higher. It’s on the trail and on the slopes, leftovers from the winters. It is hard and crystalline and it makes the trail slippery.

I feel cold, but it’s not the harsh sort. Himalayan cold is kinder than the dry cold of the plains, which makes your bones hurt; Himalayan cold revives you. Few ruthless terrains have the heart to soothe the sufferings of creatures trying to survive them. The Himalayas do. They make the sufferings of its inhabitants worthwhile, make their adversities sweeter. As I walk further up on this trek, and at moments begin to regret it, I feel the cold breeze on my face and I’m filled with gratitude to have been born in this beautiful, dangerous, generous terrain.

***

From here, I see the entire town spread out before me: the mango-shaped lake with the ring of hills around it, civilization sprinkled over them like salt and pepper. I see the temple and the cinema hall, the Tibetan market, the Mall Road, the bus station, my school. There are a lot more boats on the lake now. They look like bugs sailing on glitter.

I look to my left and see the Himalayas presiding over the endless folds of green and blue mountains. To my right are the plains, the city of Haldwani, to which I’ll return before sunset.

Time lies frozen beneath me. I feel immortal.

***

It’s an hour past noon. The chocolate’s long gone, but its bittersweet coat still lingers in my mouth. I need a mint and some water.

I go to Paras' store near Allahabad Bank. He used to drive us boys to school and back. He was young and easy-going and he never talked down to kids. I liked him. I sometimes met him in the market in the evenings. That’s how I knew his shop.

His face has bloated now and he keeps a moustache. He still smiles. I ask him for a pack of mint and a bottle of water. He says I look like an outsider and asks me if it’s my first time in Nainital. That hurts, but I play along.

‘Yes, never been here before.’

‘You should visit the Eco Cave Park. Lots of caves to explore there. And be sure to visit Raj Bhavan. They keep a collection of Sultana Daku’s swords.’

‘Ah. Sounds interesting. I’ll check it out.’

He shakes my hand after I pay for the water and mints, and I head back to Mall Road.

***

The road, benches, shops, hotels and restaurants are packed. The entire crowd looks like clones of that morning family. I make my way through the crowd to Narain’s bookstore.

It’s closed. I’m a bit disappointed, but I carry on. On the wall to my left are friezes of Kumaoni and Rung women in local finery looking out of intricately carved windows, a common art theme throughout Kumaon.

I walk by Chandni Chowk Restaurant, a hideous red façade mimicking Delhi’s Red Fort. There are mannequins on the doorways and bastions — soulless cooks manning tandoors and grinding spices. This monstrosity was built after I left the town, and its gaudy, pompous presence never fails to annoy me.

This building is the only change I’ve noticed in the town, but I walk a few more paces to see a new Subway where once my favorite video game arcade stood. I stop and mourn its loss.

I reach the station; the bus to Haldwani will leave soon. I’m still reeling from the arcade’s loss. I look out of the window, heartbroken. There’s an old man out there with long, grey hair, sunglasses and a colorful jacket crossing the road. He stops to look at the lake, then walks past the Gandhi statue and disappears into the Mall Road.

Sunglasses is alive. And he isn’t stuffing cotton up his nostrils and ears anymore.