The Forsaken Wilderness, page 16
‘It has been said that with the assistance of some equipment in his laboratory, he is able to communicate with any living creature,’ she continued in a bewildered and also slightly frightened tone. ‘He can grasp any frequency not normally perceptible to the spectrum of the five senses, and can hear and understand what they are trying to say, and indeed in some cases, can talk back to them.’
chapter three
Any further attempt to disentangle the wealth of incident that had transpired within the course of the preceding years, found me plunged neck-deep into the ruins of state survey records, ancient files and documents stacked away in the cabinets and drawers of some government office, the police station in Uttarkashi where the missing person’s report had been originally filed back in ’71 of the topographical survey team that had failed to return from their expedition to Ranibaug, the endless drama of unbelieving friends, relatives and acquaintances with their morbid hypotheses.
There was only one course left to be taken. For the last and, what was supposed to have been, final time, I ventured back up to Taluka in my white Gypsy this time accompanied by Pratyusha Negi. The first two days passed steadily, up until we reached Osla, beyond which our mental state began to rapidly deteriorate. Once we crossed Harki Dun and had made it tirelessly up to that gargantuan tree, neither of us could trust our eyes. We had carried along a surplus of provisions in the event of such unaccountable fatigue—twelve sachets of Electral, a box of Glucon-D, an assortment of chewable and non-chewable vitamin and calcium tablets, energy bars, dry fruits, apricots, and so on—but found ourselves unable to consume even a bite, and forced to return to Taluka, dazed and confounded, this time swearing to make a vivid spectacle of the photographs taken by us of the monstrous tree that had cut off all routes in the ascent to Ranibaug.
Pratyusha had already made arrangements to sell the photographs to National Geographic, a plan of which I strictly disapproved, but nevertheless felt impelled to comply with. When we did finally manage to locate representatives from the magazine, they had a litany of questions for us to answer regarding the photographs before they could proceed with their publication. Some thought it manmade, a product of some bizarre cult intent on blocking access to Ranibaug (a site which had eluded even some of their most adventurous photographers) and thereby consolidating its exclusivity. Others proclaimed it to be a geological abnormality, an archaeological find: not a tree but instead some accumulation of aberrant earth that defied explanation, akin almost to the adobe formations unearthed at the ancient city of Petra.
Once disclosed to the readership of the magazine, the photographs had the desired effect. A team of geologists from the Wadia Institute immediately detailed an expedition. An elaborate boring device was constructed to stir its unshakeable constitution which blended into the very base of the cliff itself. It seemed to them to have sprung directly out of the rock face, like some solidified geyser of wooden flesh.
Several excursions were made to the land where that enormous tree stood. Some by routine survey personnel, some by scientists, some by mining expeditions, some by logging and timber enterprises. But no one succeeded in getting it to budge an inch. Each party warned their successors of the evil that lay within the Tree. Some said it was haunted, and planted there by some deranged sadhu, and that each person who attempted to destroy it was in turn destroyed. Some said it was an evolutionary experiment forged by some quasi-simian civilization that predated even the early Cenozoic age, and that it was waiting to emerge in its full form from subterranean caverns near the Earth’s core, where it had been stored for centuries. Some said that its glandular secretion consisted of a series of complex multicellular organisms comprised of compounds whose elements could not be identified and were possibly of alien origin. They assumed varying chemical properties in the gaseous, or liquid form.
No one could really come to terms with the mystery of this Tree. The more scientists studied it, the more they were perplexed by its properties, and the less they could account for what they witnessed. One thing was for certain—it was growing at a phenomenal rate.
chapter four
Our next stop several months later was Swaami Atal-Anivaarya’s Forest Guest House, where we found ourselves inadvertently snooping around for a few days, stumbling out into the adjacent forest for the supposed purpose of collecting sturdy samples for the rock-climbing wall to be constructed at HRA as per Swaami Ji’s instructions.
Swaami Ji was not in attendance when we made our visit—it being a weekday after all—and so, with the exception of the four caretakers immersed busily in their chores, there was only a single sadhu present, an aged fakir of sorts, with approachable eyes, and a friendliness of bearing that shone in sharp contrast to Swaami Atal-Anivaarya’s marked air of authority. His name was Somdev, and he claimed to have survived solely on tea and water for the last couple of years. He had arrived only the night before last and was eagerly awaiting the Swaami Ji’s presence. When we learned shortly after making his acquaintance that he came from Ranibaug, we took him into confidence, and spoke of our previous visit, even shared with him photographs of the Tree that had stirred the public’s imagination.
On one of our excursions, we took him along in my Gypsy to scan the neighbouring premises for any trace of the indefinable creature we were in search of. He even offered to guide us back up to Ranibaug through an alternate route if we so desired. He, however, failed to answer any of our questions pertaining to the more troubling matters at hand, feigning ignorance or perhaps practicing a caution neither of us were aware of. He did know of the Tree though, and spoke of it with musing regularity, in a stillness and wonder most befitting its incommunicable features. Of the temple, he had not the remotest desire to converse about. The plight of his fellow exiles he would not touch upon. It was perhaps too severe a subject for casual discourse.
‘I happen to have seen those blasted things!’ I reminded him, steering clear of a ditch as he wobbled about in the backseat clutching on to the hand rest for dear life.
‘So you have…’ he bounced up, and then remained almost upright in his seat as if standing over it.
‘Are you comfortable at the back?’ Pratyusha inquired, leaning her shoulder over.
‘N-n-not exactly…’ the sadhu stuttered, then changed his mind—‘I’m fine! Nothing to worry about.’
We halted beside the water hole where I had previously sighted it. Pratyusha quickly assembled the tripod for her camera on the bonnet of the jeep, and peered into the shrubbery through a pair of binoculars. The sadhu sat silently in the back seat, keeping a sound lookout, and resting his flute sulkily on the lowered window. I insisted he abstain from playing it. He cupped the palms of his hands around his mouth and made a variety of sounds which I suppose were intended to draw or attract whatever it was that we were after. Pratyusha sat cross-legged on the bonnet, camera in hand, attention still peeled on anything that could be possibly skulking around in the foliage. I stepped out of the jeep, slamming the door shut.
‘Shhh…’ Pratyusha squawked. ‘Be silent, will you!’
She hunched down low to peep through the viewfinder and fastened her index finger around the flat, trigger-like button, aiming the muzzle of the lens into the waterhole. She tried to hold the contraption steady but her forelimbs trembled, and just as she adjusted the footing of the tripod, I heard something move in the foliage circling the waterhole. She looked at the sadhu, who nodded in response. It was apparent that something had caught his attention. She handed over her binoculars to him and whispered an instruction into his ear, on account of which his expression turned frightfully pale and alarmingly uncertain. In a matter of seconds, the creature emerged from the undisturbed surface of the waterhole, and swerved across the bushes to pounce into the underlying shrubbery. Pratyusha swung the camera around and clicked twice. The sadhu, gathering his wooden flute, jumped out of the backseat and tiptoed over to the undergrowth it was hiding in. He prodded the flute at the vegetation four times with his upper torso turned away before he managed to startle it from its refuge.
It bounced out in an instant, and staring at us dumbfounded with open-mouthed terror and harrowed eyes, stumbled about on its hind legs before crouching on all fours to scurry across into the surrounding forest. The ‘WHIR’—‘ZOOM’—‘BING’ of the assembled Nikon photo camera whizzed away within a fraction of a second. Pratyusha kept readjusting the focal length and clicked furiously on until it had vanished off into the all-encompassing tangle of green.
The sadhu and myself huddled around the camera to inspect the photographs Pratyusha had captured. There was one in sharp focus where one could gather in resolute detail, the incongruous features that spanned its shambling form. It looked more or less the same since when I had last seen it, only its head had grown a considerable amount in the intervening years, almost disproportionate to the dimensions of the rest of the anatomy. As if the bulky head of a bear had been planted atop the timid neck of a cow. The tips of its limbs were neither paws nor hoofed nor webbed, they resembled neither a claw nor a hand, but were outstretched with a plumage of innumerable ingrown nails and protruding scales sprouting a mess of fur and feathers. Its skull was determinedly ovoid in shape compared with the rest of the rectangular body, bereft of a tail yet humped with an irregular bulge weighing upon its back.
‘Hmmmm…’ the sadhu purred, as we stumbled back along the rocky pathways up to the Guest House.
Pratyusha turned her upper torso around over the backrest on registering the sounds that escaped him. ‘Hmm?’ she crumpled her brow.
‘Hmm…’ the sadhu nodded, his head poking out of the open window like a puppy bracing the air.
‘If you’ve got a sound that belongs to the Hindustani language, then spit it out!’ Pratyusha ordered. ‘What are you saving it for, Dusshera?’
‘Hah!’ the sadhu cackled, his mouth wide open and his jagged teeth looming like white glacial mountains over his blackened tongue. ‘I have nothing to say about what we just saw, my child!’ he looked her dead in the eyes, then proceeded to stare out of the window. ‘I have not seen it before, and I don’t think I wish to see it ever again, even in the pictorial form.’
‘Well, you don’t have to see it again,’ Pratyusha wobbled about in her seat. ‘No one’s asking you to examine it. But now that you have seen it, what do you have to say about it?’
‘I don’t have anything to say about it,’ he said.
‘You saw it up close even, with the pair of binoculars I gave you.’
‘I scarcely even know how to work these.’ He held up the strap and handed it back to her over the partition that split up the jeep.
‘But you did see it with the naked eye?’ she persisted.
‘I did…’ he swung his head up and down, slightly flustered. ‘As did you.’
‘And?’ she opened only half her mouth.
One of my tires spun over a crater in the kachha-raastha, lobbing us leftward as the car curved along towards the front gate of the Guest House.
‘I have only one thing to say about it…’ the sadhu crankily decided. ‘And it shall be said not here, in these unholy grounds, but amidst the hallowed graces of Ranibaug.’
chapter five
There being no internet at the Guest House, and certainly no perennially available electricity, we had to wait out a torturous night before we could transfer the collected data over to our point of contact in National Geographic Magazine and depart smoothly without suspicion being aroused in the hearts of our unpredictable caretakers.
Dinner was served at eight as per scheduled. The sadhu of course abstained from any kind of solids, opting instead for a glass of water boiled in mint and cinnamon to ease his throat. The four caretakers, clad in sleeveless khaki camouflage jacket and army cap, were silent as ever. Not a word occurred to them, or ever a point of common interest broached.
‘When is Swaami Ji expected?’ I asked, breaking the morose silence.
‘On the weekend.’ One of them answered without eye contact, the voice came as if from a disembodied spoon shovelling a pit of daal amid a heap of rice.
‘I see…’ I took a bite of the carefully prepared cauliflower which had been soaked in nothing more than mustard oil as per my knowledge, and thereafter fried in mustard seed, exerting an inordinate influence on the sinuses.
‘I hope you have prepared the bill for tomorrow morning,’ Pratyusha spoke with her mouth half-full. ‘As we intend to depart at the crack of dawn.’
The four caretakers all turned from their bowls in a collective glower which caused her to cough out loud—‘You see, we intend to miss the early morning traffic on the highway.’
‘And you too Babaji?’ one of them asked of the sage.
‘Oh no…’ he took a sip of the lukewarm liquid he had been nursing. ‘Not in the least. I intend to stay here until the Swaami Ji’s return.’
Holding his flute up like a sceptre, he arose from the long wooden dining table and hobbled over on one leg to the defunct fireplace. Pratyusha wrapped one arm around her camera case, watching his every move carefully with dead-eyed precision.
‘Is that a Sony Ma’am?’ one of the men addressed her without looking up from his plate.
‘No,’ she exhaled. ‘It’s a Nikon.’
‘Ah…’ the man munched away. ‘I see…’ he cleared aside another spoonful from the mess of rice and daal on his plate. ‘Rakesh, could you pass the salt!’ he asked one of his co-workers.
On being handed the salt shaker, he dug out a patch of plain rice from his plate and catapulted it off into the verandah for the Dobermans to feast on. ‘We have a lot of wildlife photographers coming out here,’ he said, without looking at either of us, his gaze still hovering about the squalling dogs fighting over a speck of rice in the verandah. ‘Some from Sanctuary Magazine,’ he continued. ‘Some from WWF, Project Tiger, trappers, nature clubs, students, zoologists, especially ornithologists. Bird watchers, we had a party of four ladies just the other day, in fact. Bird Watching Society from Dehra Dun. Golden Wings, I think they were called.’
‘Gilded Wings!’ another one correctively grunted.
‘Gilded Wings! My name’s Sankalp by the way.’ The talkative fellow finally introduced himself. ‘This is Anshuman.’ He pointed at the man who corrected him. ‘And that’s Rakesh and Parshuram.’
The two that remained saluted with their spoons, tipping their caps faintly at the Madam.
‘What do you do?’ Sankalp abruptly turned towards me.
‘I’m sorry?’ I gulped.
‘What’s your line of work?’ he leaned forward and raised his voice ever so slightly.
‘Oh…’ I took another bite. ‘Engineer,’ I said.
‘And you Madam?’ he turned back to Pratyusha.
‘Teacher,’ she spoke without opening her mouth.
‘At the institute?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I see…’ Sankalp smiled. ‘Then I take it that photography is merely a hobby for you people? Not exactly a pressing vocation, is it?’
‘Oh no…’ I said. ‘As I said….’ I took a long pause over which I chewed my food. ‘…we went out to collect rock samples. We barely took any photos even.’
‘Really?’ his eyes lit up. Pratyusha’s wilted.
‘It wasn’t working properly,’ I bluffed.
‘What?’
‘The camera.’ I lifted another spoonful from my plate and dallied around with it before sinking my teeth in.
Pratyusha caught Sankalp’s gaze swishing over to the camera case in an instant. ‘Really?’ he flattened his eyebrows. ‘Maybe we could fix it for you?’
‘No need,’ Pratyusha promptly answered before he had even finished framing the proposition.
‘As I said,’ he laughed, showing his teeth. ‘We have a lot of wildlife photographers come up here, Ma’am.’
‘I heard that.’ Now that the eye contact was being belatedly returned, she spoke without deigning to look at him.
‘We happen to know a little about electronic repair work. It’s part of the job. A sort of necessity. How to repair a torch, a watch, a radio, a walky-talky, an invertor, a boiler, a telephone, even a camera or television set.
‘No thanks,’ Pratyusha affirmed. ‘It’s not working because there isn’t a plug point to put its charger in…’ she took a pause, then thought up a reason. ‘The electricity being gone and all.’
‘Ahh…but that’s where you’re wrong, Ma’am!’ he got up from the table with his plate significantly emptied. ‘You should have told one of us. We would have gladly provided you with such a plug point, or power source. You see, the electricity may be gone.’ This he addressed to me. ‘But we do have provisions for what to do in the event of an emergency. There had been a bit of an electricity crisis a couple of years back.’ Here he looked to the sadhu. ‘Ever since, the electricity has been a bit…uh…what’s the word… erratic. Comes and goes! Which is why we had to install an invertor which also happens to have conked out at present. But you see there is a small cabin in the property where we have a small generator…’
‘Generator?’ I chewed.
‘Runs on fuel. If we keep the motor running you can leave your camera to charge there for the night, and by the morning have it equipped to capture any souvenir that might catch your fancy on the way out.’
Pratyusha and I quietly finished our dinners, ignoring the young man’s malicious design to the best of our abilities. He kept insisting though as if it were his duty as our hospitable host and caretaker. The other three scarcely paid his persistence much mind, but it was apparent from their mildly indifferent manner that they were not altogether uninterested in the plight of our batteries.
‘This is, after all, Swaami Shree Shree Gurudev.’ He joined his hands together in abrupt solemnity. ‘Atal-Anivaarya Natija’s Forest Guest House and Bird Sanctuary. Where people come to learn about the animal kingdom, to observe them, to click pictures of them! In that regard, it’s a sort of goldmine, with prospectors flocking here with camera case and belt pouch, ever ready to snap a sight fleetingly witnessed by them in the never-ending wait. It’s like being a chowkidaar!’ He laughed.
