The Forsaken Wilderness, page 14
‘You see, what we have out here is a cross-section of a land that was once innocent,’ Swaami Atal-Anivaarya pointed out into the distance. ‘Villagers flocked the banks of the river. Pitcher on head, sickle in hand and home-grown vegetables for dinner. You know it used to take one village woman a five-kilometre walk to get one pitcher of water from the river, yet they were happy. It was their land. Now the government’s moved in. And then, all of a sudden there’s no electricity! We’re back in the old days again,’ Swaami Atal-Anivaarya continued, almost as if he was telling some tale of a distant far off legend.
‘How is the resort managing with this?’ I asked in humbled stupor.
‘And it’s all because of the underground,’ Swaami Ji carried on, crawling along the shores of the river like a boundary squirrel.
‘Hmmm…’ he bent down and touched the ground like he was touching a lover. ‘It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Everything that is under the ground! It’s like another hemisphere. A realm of the Earth that is most unexplored. Another world down there. You know there was once a prisoner. He was in for assault and larceny. The judge gave him seven years, but he got out in four, couldn’t take it!’
‘How?’ I trembled.
‘He dug his way out through the underground. For two consecutive years, the man dug and dug and dug. I wonder how it must have been for him. He crawled out of that jail cell like a rat. And kept going through with it, until he hit the cemetery.’
There was a ruffled silence. The only sound to be heard was the whistling of the wind, the rustling of the leaves and the croaking of some distant crickets. Almost as though nature itself had responded to the Swaami ji’s story.
‘Ohh…the horrors the man must have faced! The horrors!’
We walked on through the marsh where tall wild grass was growing irregularly all about the place in haphazard postures and varying states of impenetrability. A small pond or a puddle of sorts had formed somewhere on the bank. Buffaloes bathed in the keechad as birds and amphibians inhabited its mucky recesses. The wires overhead sloped and disappeared over this area, lapsing into a peripheral scramble of cables that lay in the distance ahead of the indefinite grass.
I was stomping through the weeds when somewhere in the marsh and muck and dirt, Swaami Atal-Anivaarya noticed an anomaly in one of the leftward channels of the water pump. A curious amount of water was being discharged from what appeared to be some sort of sabotage in one of the openings of the tubes of the pipes. Water was flowing violently out of it at an alarming rate which seemed to be swelling up the marsh on the bank and accelerating the velocity of the natural flow of the current.
I threw a stone into the water to see it spin off and to count the number of times it would bounce off the water. The result of my attempt stupefied me. The pebble seemed to hit the water at the speed with which it was thrown, then however it bounced off on its own accord at an enhanced rate, and then proceeded to skim off the water, a record seven times, before vanishing into the depths of the leaning current.
In all my years of throwing stones and pebbles into the river I had never known it to bounce seven times before it landed. A sure record considering my vast years of experience. We wondered long and hard as to whether the inherent trajectory of the current in the river was responsible for the damage of the pump and was precipitating this occurrence. We walked up to a rock formation that overhung the river and standing above we could now perceive the minutest details of the current with acute accuracy. We looked on into the river, trying almost to penetrate its surface and configure the route these waters took in their course to the great lakes and reservoirs. We both stood simultaneously stunned a moment, gazing deep into the river to decipher what menace to mankind seemed to be lurking beneath the water.
We shortly walked back up to the pump to take a more thorough look at its configuration. The damaged pipe was partially submerged in the water as its upper channel rose into the chamber connected to the mainline. The apparatus was assembled in perhaps not altogether competent terms, but it did still have the stability to withstand any sort of leak or crack in the metallic pipework. Upon inspecting the damage which had been inflicted upon the cylindrical tube, it was apparent to us that the flow of water within the pump had drastically increased. There seemed to be an external source from which water was being drawn out and then drained back into the river.
Our initial response was to suppose it had something to do with the lowering of the aqueducts and reservoir canals of the dam. Swaami Atal-Anivaarya had been informed of a northward shift of the waters due to the influx, but what we were here witnessing still seemed to exceed any possibility on that count.
‘Are the glaciers melting?’ I asked.
‘The source of this influx,’ he scratched his chin. ‘Could either be attributed to the bore-well we had dug sometime back when the river had dried up, or even to a third possible additional source that has escaped my notice.’
‘Such as?’ I wondered.
‘An irrigation channel from Rajaji National Park that might have been intercepted, or even as you suggested—the rising of the water level due to the melting of the icecaps. It is summer after all.’
I bent down to taste the water, and as per my worst apprehensions—it was saline, beyond a noticeable doubt. We were now both silent. There was no explanation to be given of this, either by way of assumption or even speculation. Both of us failed to say a word to the other and we both strolled around just a bit longer before Swaami Atal-Anivaarya spun about on his heel and thought out aloud—‘That dam was built by the State Energy Division.’
‘Hmmm…’ I pondered on it, recollecting the signage plastered all around the mountain-ways and uphill roads of Northern Garhwal.
‘They’ve cut off our electricity,’ he continued. ‘And now as you say—sealed off Ranibaug in search of an indefinable power source.’
‘The containing fluid,’ I thought to myself before blurting out, ‘It seems to generate energy and preserve all organic life. Its own self-sustainable lifeforce. It’s saline. Just like the zinc solution to a rudimentary electric circuit. What if they were transporting this very liquid down the mountain in order to utilise it for the generation of renewable power? What if they were saving up all the natural resources there discovered for their very own selves? For all you know, if privatised, some infrastructure development firm or mining corporation might stake a claim and decide to purchase it.’
‘What if one were to reach there before they did?’ Swaami Atal-Anivaarya murmured.
‘It’s no good. The place will be swarming with surveyors, government personnel and armed officials. The gold rush is just beginning.’ Just then the thought occurred to me. ‘What if you were to accompany me up there Swaami Ji?’
‘No good,’ he shook his head stubbornly. ‘I can’t make it.’
‘With your endowments and special knowledge, there’s no telling what we could discover up there,’ I offered, in a tone of swiftly mustered sycophancy.
‘Hmmm…’ His lower lip crinkled up. ‘I could send one of my men along with you.’
‘That would be no good. I need you Swaami Ji, you, with your extra-sensory abilities and special powers.’
‘What special powers?’ he laughed. ‘We are all but human here, after all!’
‘Not you Swaami Ji…’ I lowered my voice in resolution, still insisting on his divinity. ‘It would be a gift beyond measure if you were to come along with me…’
‘I cannot grant you that my child.’ He clasped a rudraksh from the string around his neck. ‘Not I, nor our creator. You will have to make this journey alone, or accompanied by someone of my choice. Just as you had earlier. Only this time, make sure you don’t return alone.’
He left the thought dangling from his teeth, and splashed his hands mildly about in the water to reconfirm its salinity. ‘Hmmm…’ he filled his palms up. ‘What’s the closest sea from here?’
‘The Bay of Bengal,’ I said. ‘Oh no…’ I corrected myself. ‘The Arabian Sea. They’re equidistant, except some of the inland channels branching in from around the Sunderbans. Some of them might be saline. The closest from here would be…’ I guessed.
‘The Gulf of Khambat,’ he concluded. ‘Or Kutch,’ he spat out a spray of water and gaped on into the distance, deciding shortly thereafter that we proceed to the resort for some rest and refreshments.
chapter five
We were now both considerably tired and it was almost four o’clock in the afternoon. Swaami Ji lay down on a cot, the smell of a variety of waterlilies and raath ki raanis swarmed about me as I turned to look on into the garden. The sight of it rather relieved me of all my worries. Just to think that this could as well be a form of endeavour to embrace for the rest of one’s life: living amongst nature. Maybe that’s what had kept old Swaami Ji so up and about at so tender an age. I had always wanted to be a farmer or a botanist like the Professor, and tend to the leaves. What nobler pursuit, what greater cause? I suppose it gives a person a whole lot of joy to plant a sapling in the ground and watch it blossom.
But I had known of the lesser tranquil aspects of agriculture; the ups and downs, the dependence on forces of nature that lay beyond ordinary human comprehension. The toil, the blood, sweat and tears and the sun—the sun that burnt off all that couldn’t withstand it. Be it a flower, a dried-up leaf or an insect; any animate or inanimate object bowed down to that sun. Sometimes it would be a blessing, like the light of day that dawns on the blind man stranded on the street, squeezed out dry. Sometimes it cheered me up to bask in its warmth, and feel its rays soothing my spirit. Sometimes it would be good for the newly planted saplings, sometimes it caused more photosynthesis than the plants required, sometimes it could wither a whole crop before sundown. And the rains! The rains that kept us all a prisoner. In the old days, we used to look forward to the rains as a time of change, when you could wash away all your sins and take comfort in mother nature.
Now the monsoons just came and went like the scent of a sunflower on a dry August noon. I looked around. The petunia petals had wilted before they had a chance to flourish, the soft smell of a row of dried up shrubs passed over the dreary resonance of crickets and other insects beckoning to be heard. The trees bore little fruit this year, and amid the deep recesses of foliage, a Lychee Orchard could be seen somewhere in the distance upon a grove, its bushy dark-green trees swinging wildly left and right. The chirping of the birds too had by now grown painfully restless.
Amid a vast array of Magnolias and rose bushes, there descended a cobbled path that had been carved through a row of Elephant Apple trees on either side, that led directly down to a well to which I soon proceeded. The diameter of the mouth of the well was about eight feet in all. I circled it numerous times, leaning over to catch my reflection flickering at me from down below. The depth however was not a matter that could be accurately gauged from the point at which I stood. Certain rumblings detectable from the circle of still water staring back at me, convinced me it could well have been more than thirty feet in length. Dropping a rock to watch it recede into its depths, I was struck at once by the near absence of a ripple or even a minute disturbance in the shimmering translucent surface. My mind swooped in to plumb the full extent of the bottom of the well, wading past visions similar to ones encountered at Ranibaug, to imagine a bottomless basin; a steep cylindrical passageway down stairs of soil, dropping into a layer of eternal luminescence.
I walked off from the stone rim of the well before my thoughts could lapse any further into its growing underwater opacity. A frog leaped out from a mossy crevice in the stone slabs. I was told to be cautious of snakes in and around the property, and warned not to wander off too far from sight of the bungalow. Dog howls sprung out from between the folds of the ascending shrubbery. A column of Bougainvillea separated this portion from the rest of the property. An ancient banyan overhung the adjacent tract whose topographical features seemed most appropriate for terrace farming. Cultivation of all sorts of cash crops took place. Anything that could be transported to the market in due time. Rice, wheat, jowar, bajra, lentils, pulses, vegetables, fruits seasonal and non-seasonal, tulsi and mint, herbs of all sorts, some of medicinal value, some experiments, saplings collected from all corners of the country tested in these geographical conditions. Some were efforts in vain, some proved fruitful, some were botanical oddities, some were extraordinary outgrowths, some lived on to be many years old and many feet tall, some were inhabited by birds, some provided useful timber, some were just for ornamental and decorative purposes. Some died…but death itself seemed inevitable in this radiance of decay that far and wide encumbered the surface. It stretched out its blessed arms like a blanket, gently beguiling the weak and feeble willed into the dreary depths of oblivion.
Death came as no surprise here, and was to be expected, and tallied along the general head count and nomenclature of each individual plant that was a ritual in Swaami Atal-Anivaarya’s everyday existence at the Resort. The plants were his pride and joy. On his weekends here, he would study each plant meticulously according to its exact specifications of soil and climatic type and try to provide sufficient conditions.
The vast and varied assemblage of flora that was a permanent feature of each and every square inch of the landscape were a bit unusual at first, but then they soon began to have a soothing effect on the soul. Almost as though one were in the midst of some verdant maze that man had never trodden upon.
Of late, Swaami Atal-Anivaarya’s devotion to his plants had reached obsessive proportions. He did not let any outsiders or trespassers even touch a petal or a branch. Each fraction of his land was guarded by a series of diligent but ferocious watch dogs of the Doberman kind. There were a team of four farmers who worked for Swaami Ji, out of them three were ex-convicts who had been arrested prior to their newfound employment for having tried to break in and perform a burglary in his house in Haridwar. I never understood it, but there was one thing I knew for sure: they worked hard and honestly for Swaami ji and had not once dared to cross him. He took good care of his men and their families and provided adequate means for their livelihood. They in turn respected him and were loyal.
I stayed many days with Swaami Atal-Anivaarya, helping out in the various chores requisite for running an establishment of this size. I recognised some of the camouflage gear and camping equipment as belonging to the HRA supply store. I contributed to the cleaning and cooking, attended prayer, and went on the Safaris with some of the guests that invariably materialised.
It was only on the fourth day of my stay—when I was out in the jeep on my own for, what was supposed to have been, a routine patrol of the woods—that I managed to catch sight of what I had all this while been hoping to encounter. Amid a huddle of bushes that spanned the circumference of a waterhole, I noticed from afar a singular looking creature stooped on all fours to wet his snout, or at least what appeared to be a snout. It was, however, beyond all doubt, a beak. There was no tail. The scaly outline suggested an absence of fur and a reptilian disposition, but the scuttling motions and rigid bearing hinted at a near-simian possibility. It resembled from one end the anatomy of an anteater, yet from another angle assumed the aspect of a mule, and yet from another when upright appeared not to different from a Kangaroo. Its hawkish beak and deformed wings gave it at once a remote kinship to the penguin. There wasn’t even a trace of any specie as yet discovered in its entire manner. It was as something entirely novel and inconceivable to the conservationist and paleontologist alike. I immediately produced my camera and began to click away furiously, capturing blurry fragments of what it was actually like. I saw it with my own two eyes and will never forget the hideous glow that emanated from its eyes. The unthinkable anatomy, an outré amalgam of all things natural and mineral.
When I showed these photographs to Swaami Atal-Anivaarya, he shuddered at their existence.
‘Destroy them at once!’ he commanded me.
‘Why?’ I demanded.
He flicked hold of the Nikon camera from my hands and immediately ejected the memory card with the smooth adeptness of the technologically literate.
‘I will be keeping this.’ He held up the slim chip in his thumb and forefinger and placed it into the chest pocket of the white kurta he had worn.
‘What was that Swaami Ji?’ I gasped. ‘What on earth was that thing?’
‘It wasn’t a thing.’ He glared at me sternly, his upper torso wiggling as he placed the memory card inside. ‘It’s an experiment. Just forget you ever saw it.’
‘How can I!’ I protested. ‘I’m not ever likely to forget what I just saw. You can destroy my camera, but I always have my memory to rely on. It’s gotten me this far.’
‘My boy, why don’t you understand!’ he tightened his lips, finally a bit exasperated. ‘If you really want to know what you went all the way up there to find out, you are not going to find the answers here I can assure you, son!’
‘At least tell me what that was. I’m entitled to that much. I saw it with my own two eyes, didn’t I? It was in my destiny. To chance upon it. Had I never seen it, I wouldn’t be asking you about it, would I now?’
‘Look, Barkat!’ Swaami Ji put his arm around my shoulder. ‘What you saw out there was neither human nor animal. It was, how shall I put it…a kind of…eh…’ he reached for a word, but his tongue recoiled from it in disgust. ‘Ahh…’
‘I’m still waiting for an answer, Swaami Ji. And I’m not going to leave without it. I’ve come a long way from Mathura, as you can see.’
‘Very well…’ he resolved, taking me aside to one of the verandahs. ‘You see, when I had gone up to Ranibaug and injured myself,’ he settled into a rattan armchair, ‘one of my co-expeditioners had managed to make the trip up all by himself while I convalesced at the campsite above Harki Dun—the ghost-camp you spoke of. He didn’t of course manage to make it all the way up there. When he returned, no doubt visibly haggard, he had brought along with him in a gunny sack, a peculiar breed of rodent he had come upon on the route. We had settled at the campsite which contained the belongings of the topographical survey of ’71, and were in the process of studying what we found. We had rehabilitated its remains with our own tents and supplies, but the moment the creature was unleashed out of the gunny sack, it began to multiply in numerous forms which ambushed us in all directions, making us flee in the most extreme weather conditions imaginable. We managed to capture one of them, carried it back to Uttarkashi along with us, and at my urging decided to deposit it in my forest resort to observe its activities, and see it propagate. In a matter of few weeks it began to grow prodigiously till it reached the size of a Saint Bernard. When its wings sprouted we had to operate upon them so as to prevent it from flying away…’
