The Forsaken Wilderness, page 11
At length, Ms Karma Bodh came tottering down from the strip of mountain that jutted out into the horizon, and settled down on one of the steps to the temple.
‘Where have they all gone?’ I gasped, striding all about in rabid disarray.
‘Underwater,’ she closed her eyes. ‘They are at present, right below where we are seated. In the vicinity of the temple.’
‘How do you communicate using the containing fluid?’ I asked.
‘You see…’ she began. ‘All this predates even paganism. The worship of truth, of reality, of thought and reason. It was what caused us to ascend from our primordial forefathers in the first place. The capability for abstract thought.’
‘Even artificial thought?’
‘I know not what you mean.’
‘You see, Ms Bodh, I also imagined that if any other planet’s visitants did indeed voyage down here, they certainly would not be organic examples of their civilization. Owing to the sheer length of the travel, they would have to be beings which could last one, maybe two or three human lifespans.’
‘Come again?’
‘They would not be natural beings, Ma’am!’ I shouted.
‘You mean they would be electronic?’ she frowned.
‘Precisely. Engineered, automated. In short, artificial intelligence. A life that could live out all those millions of years that you claim, or self-propagate, and perpetuate for eternities in an alien environment, such as the inside of a mountain—shielded by their own technologies. You claim they were infants but for all you know, those winged creatures could be nothing more than helicopters or a mosquito squadron with no consciousness beyond the tasks assigned to them, such as disposing of the dead and protecting their satellites both underwater and the under the ground. One of those creatures tried to attack me when I neared the vessel in that containing fluid.’
‘Our friends and brothers are in that vessel right now,’ she said. ‘As we speak.’
‘How so?’
‘It is possible to breathe in there. I have been. The pressure is regulated by some electrical mechanism that seals it into a vacuum. And from an opening under its base, there lies another route, through countless caves and tunnels, down to the illuminating subterranean abyss that you beheld from the mineshaft. As per our estimations, the nerve centre of all that energy being emitted from down there lies some twenty thousand feet below. We have only very rudimentary meteorological and seismological equipment at our disposal up here, dating back to the early seventies. Same goes for the other mechanical appliances and surgical instruments. Professor Charan Prakash Chaturvedi’s expertise on medicinal botany was counted as another asset by Swaami Shree Shree Gurudev to endear him into our confidences. Which is why, as you noticed, he was conducting the ritual that preceded the death.’
‘But I thought you have attained mastery over death,’ I said.
‘What makes you think that I am not really…dead?’ her cheeks creased apart. ‘What makes you think these eyes are mine? These ears and entrails, and bones and flesh? What if all this while you had been speaking with a person who was no longer alive. Someone whose years betrayed not the slightest sign or indication of their true unfathomability. I myself know not how old I am, young man. In my day, you were lucky to be given a birthdate, let alone a birthday. Death up here though is merely a process the body goes through. Same with birth, and injury of any kind or worldly woe. The true communion is with the infinite.’
chapter six
The wreath-robed procession of haggard, long-haired men soon emerged from the edge of the cliffside. They marched on down from the summit to join us at the temple. By now, even the two sadhus had come out from the innards of the temple which seemed to nurse some sort of trapdoor that led to a nether chamber.
Shera hurried up to me, vaguely revived from whatever form of hypnosis he was under.
‘What the hell is going on!’ I shook him vigorously by the shoulders. ‘Did you see what happened to the Professor?’
‘W-what happened to him?’ he mumbled.
‘He went down into the mountain. He’s gone.’ I tried with all my might to arouse his alarm, or even his concern.
He batted his hand in the air in reply, and turned his shoulder aside, clearing it from my grasp. ‘The Professor has gone down to do what he came here to do,’ he grimaced.
‘And what is that, may I ask?’
‘I told you, didn’t I? Absolution. He’s cleansing his sins.’
‘Nonsense!’ I screamed. The gathered company paid me no more than a passing shrug. ‘What are you talking about Shera? You’re sounding crazier than that old lady…’
‘Don’t say anything about Ms Bodh!’ he warned me.
‘So you know her from before?’
‘I’ve only heard of her. She’s a legend in some circles.’
‘Why did the Professor bring the both of us up here with him, Shera? To accomplish what? Was this all some sort of an elaborate hoax? All these fire-worshippers,’ I scorned our surroundings. ‘And deformed carnivorous birds, that peculiar water body and mine-shaft stolen deep away in some remote corner of the interior of Ranibaug. This demoniacal temple. WHAT is the meaning of this, Shera? This is not what I signed up for.’
‘You didn’t sign up for anything,’ he corrected me. ‘This isn’t some voluntary mission or construction job you’ve undertaken. You have no contractual obligation. You can leave here anytime you like…’
‘What’s the matter with you now, Shera!’ I glared at him in reproof. ‘You’re sounding just like them.’
‘We’ve come to find something here. And we’re doing everything we can to reach there.’
‘Even if it means conquering death?’ An illusion I still found difficult to fathom. ‘And feigning telepathy with a simple background check. Accusing me of witchcraft, of heresy, of telekinesis.’
‘You saw the Professor that day at the temple before Sahastradhara, didn’t you?’
‘I did. But what does that have anything to do with this?’
‘It was a full moon night; he was having one of his spells…’
‘You are sounding increasingly like a crackpot now, Shera!’
‘Hysteria! What doctors cannot diagnose and sermons cannot cure. It is a terminal condition. And the Professor is at present engaged in doing whatever he can to restore his mental faculties.’
‘In some underground laboratory or hospital?’
His lips broadened into a faint laugh. ‘It isn’t like that! It takes months, years sometimes to be redistributed into the environment. Take for instance that tree we encountered on our way up. What makes you think that tree wasn’t endowed with human capabilities?’
‘Plenty! Common sense for one.’
‘When I disappeared into its recesses, where did you think I wound up?’
‘In an underground ant colony I suppose?’
‘With the Professor. Inside its tunnels, in the vacuum of a fossil. The intricate network of roots led us through a thick liquid to finally emerge about five hundred metres west of here.’ Here he pointed down in the direction of the terrace-stepped landscape that sloped below us. ‘If you ask me, this whole thing perplexes me just as much as it scares you. I’m not afraid of anything, even death…all I want to know is what lies down there…’ He touched the earth before the temple. ‘What breathes and foams below this sacred ground. What malign force will emerge from its bowels?’
‘What did you see in the underwater vessel down there?’ I asked him in a flash.
‘Nothing,’ he answered in swift certainty. ‘At least not anything worth remembering…’ his eyes stayed on the ground, attached by means—as if—of some magnetic force. ‘I don’t know,’ he quaked. ‘We went to deposit the body.’
‘Look,’ I guided him to a corner of one of the pillars, away from the others who were by now congregating around the entrance. ‘Why didn’t either of you tell me anything about this? What was the purpose of bringing me along to witness this ceremony?’
‘The Professor thought that it might do you some good…’ he admitted. ‘But as we approached closer, he changed his mind, and actually asked me to do you in with the rifle.’
‘Preposterous! You wouldn’t expect me to believe that!’
‘I can swear on it!’ he clipped his fingertips around the skin of his Adam’s apple. ‘He thought death would do you better than what you were to behold at Ranibaug. He was convinced that he’d made a grave mistake! You see, Ranibaug is said to have a strange effect on the psyche. In other words, the higher one climbs the more one tends lose what in ordinary terms is thought of as their sanity. That’s all there was to it. He thought he’d rather see you dead than an insane person. I had to convince him otherwise. Handed the rifle over to the Baba.’ He swung one of his elbows in the direction of the entrance where one of the two wise men was posing fitfully by the stone steps, nodding at everyone’s entrance. ‘They maintain law and order out here. There’s more you know,’ he assured me. ‘Legions of men and women and children, and goats, and dogs, and khachars.’
‘You mean to tell me you actually knew that aghori Baba that chanced upon our campsite that night?’
‘I knew his superior. The one who plays the horn. Met him at Hrishikesh. One drunken night he told me all about this place. I took an oath that I would never tell a soul until I myself made the effort to climb it and see for myself what was up there.’ He now pretended for a moment as if we were back in Uttarkashi, taking in the night’s McDowell’s at a rooftop restaurant in some seedy hotel. ‘You can go if you like.’ He then proceeded to say. ‘But as for me, I’m staying up here. I have renounced all those bright shiny lights that glitter at us in dark solitude on the mountain tops, as if sneering and ridiculing our distance from them. I am one with the mountains.’ His eyes closed, and his fingertips touched his thumbs raising them into a wavelike haphazard motion that only grew more indistinct as his sight abstained from taking anything in view. ‘One with the trees, one with the waters, one with the worms and the caterpillar and the dragonfly!’
chapter seven
Often enough, there comes a time when the very fibre of one’s psyche is put to demands so anomalous and outside the bounds of common experience, that the very nature of reality is itself a matter of some contestation. At such instances, mankind is wont to retreat from such a spiral and appeal to some higher power, where beliefs are hatched pertaining to the outcome consequent of each mortal action. That the black cat crossing the road could pose a threat is no more valid an inference than an elephant dropping from the sky—yet the thought, a brief glimpse of doom, however momentary, occurs, and with it follow a million suspicions and indecisions, yielded by nothing but a timid association implanted in the reception of reality.
It would be safe to say that both the Professor and Shera were as fixed in their intentions as might be the village grandma who pauses in her chores to defer to the marching echo of a funeral procession.
I spent the night at Ranibaug, blanketed by a sheepskin shawl, in one of the burrows beneath the temple, sleeping beside Shera in one of a row of countless cubicles hewn out of the rock and mud—hovering between consciousness and a psychogenic fugue state. No insects outside of the ordinary made their appearance as yet. In the morning, there was an assembly at sunrise at the altar of the temple where an ever-larger contingent of mountainfolk had grouped outside the entrance, and wore woolly garments and leathery apparel, furs of a certain sort, patches of mule-haired mufflers, even the odd nylon wind-cheater was to be sighted here and there amongst the shabbily clad children. The women were cloaked with layers of shawl, some of the men even donned oval mountain caps, closer in fashion to those worn along the North-West Frontier Province than to the famous Manali topi, or the multi-coloured Garhwali flat-top. I remember reading of the pagans of Kafiristan (present-day Nuristan), a land untouched by Islam till the turn of the previous century. Or of certain regions in upper Himachal Pradesh that were said to be populated by faiths other than Hinduism and Buddhism until just recently. The people could not be placed geographically, they were merged as one sole-throbbing spirit that breathed and whispered among themselves of their new visitors—the shy laughter and gaiety reminiscent of a small-town square in earnest anticipation of a long-awaited arrival. No chorus was to be sung, nor any lamps or dias lighted. They had merely come to peep in and stare with the same sense of wonder that had dawned on our acquaintance with Ranibaug. They spoke a similar tongue to the one I heard the first sadhu utter. Shera tried his hand at it, but failed in a sentence or two, provoking in them a gaggle of laughter in quick response. The children shrugged away from his embraces, hiding behind the legs of their parents. The two sadhus were now partially disrobed and conducting service with hums and murmurs which circled the partial enclosure. A drawing of the deceased old sage was engraved along one of the walls above the altar. Ms Karma Bodh stood alongside the other mourners, and clapped her hands every now and then to dispel any frivolity that might displace what was to be a solemn occasion. In a matter of moments, all men, women and children were seen to scatter as the murmurs grew into chants and the chants into a horn. The sound was too much for them to take. The shaggy long-haired regiment of Ms Karma Bodh’s seemed the only occupants to be able to withstand it. A pallor clouded Shera’s face, a bloodless dust-coloured complexion beset with exhaustion, exhilaration, and vacancy all in the same hue. His head started to rattle with the trembling motion of the vibrations. Once the rumblings became all-encompassing, and interrupted even the fixture of the slabs that held together the temple, from out of the deepest recesses of the Spartan bunkhouse down below, there crept a multitude of verminous insects, all in different shapes and sizes, some with two heads splitting and intermingling into the other, others with retractable tentacles, and bobbing antennae the size of a hand grenade. It seemed evident they were no doubt some obscure species of overgrown pest, yet their movements alarmed even the sadhus conducting the ceremony. They grew in numbers and exploded out of a mound in the burrow where they were teeming in terrifying profusion, and heading rapidly in all directions, sideways up the wall, diagonally, in straight lines, in circular patterns, in V formations like migrating birds. They trampled over all over our sleeping arrangement and in a matter of seconds quickly demolished all the carefully constructed cubicles.
Karma Bodh reached immediately for our rifle that lay hidden beneath a shawl near the altar. Before the insects could scuttle about entirely and besiege us, she pumped in the cartridge and blasted four holes into the temple floor with successive manual re-loadings, all her geriatric limbs rising steadfastly to the occasion. One of the crawling creatures was beheaded in an instant but persisted to writhe about on the botched floor. Another clump of tentacles splattered about the altar, unleashing a slimy liquid indistinguishable from the lather which had formed from the plant matter. A dispossessed claw flew across my forehead and landed smack on one of the displaced tiles, bleeding out a ribbon of the same ghastly fluid which foamed and burnt into the temple walls. It only became apparent to me now that perhaps the weathered marks and torn features of the temple were not the time-worn stains of age, but simply the results of similar disturbances in the seismic structure, and the many attempts there expended to exterminate what it unleashed.
The tentacles and tails, and gnats and beetles retreated into their caverns without a trace. Ms Bodh lay down the rifle in its allotted resting place and asked the long-bearded company to step outside while she had a word with the two new entrants.
chapter eight
‘If and when you do choose to go back down to the so-called “real” world,’ she began, ‘the movement of your lips will be closely monitored! Each syllable, utterance and breath will reverberate to our communicative facilities.’
I looked at Shera dumbfounded, my mouth open with the sheer imbecility of that claim. He seemed to be convinced, and met her murmurs with hums, and nods at each of her assertions.
‘There are those that can hear,’ she went on, poking at her ears with eyes aghast, showing for the first time in her demeanour a trace of senility. What if she was now all of a sudden playing old for Shera’s benefit, and had assumed within the blink of an eye, the mantle of wise old grandma from the almost robotically cunning mountain-climber I had heard speak at the mineshaft.
‘They’ll catch up with you,’ I assured her. ‘All of you…’ this I now directed to Shera with my arms maniacally apart. ‘There’s no way you can prevent this from breaking loose down below. They have to know about this. They’ll find you!’
‘They already have,’ she demurred. ‘Or at least they’ve tried. Swaami Shree Shree Gurudev Atal-Anivaarya is a part of that “they”. And it is indeed they that have sent you here in the first place, so let’s not get all high and mighty, my child. Don’t get ahead of yourself. You are a part of that “they” you so proudly assign to lesser mortals. You’re no better or worse than the lot of them!’
‘I’ll go straight to them when I descend this mountain. I’ll inform my colleagues, my employers, the police! The army. I have contacts in the Cantonment in Dehra Dun!’
‘If that is a threat my child…’ she snorted. ‘You will have to do better than that. You can send in the Air Force! That isn’t going to get us to budge an inch. What we have unearthed here shall remain, and all those who wish to view it will have to make the effort to trek up here, and earn that right. That is the only thing that hasn’t stopped me from blowing your brains out all over these temple walls like the rest of those insects!’
