The Forsaken Wilderness, page 20
Were we not all as one? A mass of cells and molecules moulded by our creator into what we are now? Good and evil, absolute! Within and without lie all potential for kindness and humanity, for cruelty and contempt, the divided soul and self that wanders at will through our unforeseen existence. I gaped on at all the infinite flaws of a humanity mutated, of an existence distorted, and a reality propelled into unreality…
‘Gaze not at what you see!’ the vision commanded. ‘Nor at all that you hear, or feel or touch…every sensation is as but a mere satellite to the senses devout, the feelings withheld, the goodness foresworn, the evil unrepentant. Being is what one would want it to be, even without…if mere being could determine what the onward mass of time made measurable into actuality.’
I had heard of instances wherein the roots of a plant could communicate with that of another, where the cells of a non-existent human being lasted in one of its offsprings as the spirit everlasting. Was it the Professor that was in communication with what I was undergoing? Did he know? Could he see? Was he too falling endlessly?
The Goddess of all the Himalayas beckoned, the mountain itself stirred, the ocean from which it was spawned seemed still and higher than us now. The focal point of all this energy, this magnetic velocity which sucked me down at a furious speed, grew more distant to the eye the closer it seemed to the other senses. I floated serenely on into this bottomless chasm, crossing rivers and streams that seemed stuck to the wall, flowing against gravity. Settlements which appeared to exist on a vertical plane, vast expanses of meticulously cultivated landscape defying all laws of physics, motion that appeared inert, vegetation that grew sideways—an entire wilderness frozen in space. An infinity of the same winged creatures inhabited its intricate topography.
A few of them flew past me, swooping and flapping pointlessly in circles till a flock of them formed a bed of wings under my flat and floating body that carried me along in the fashion of a magic carpet back up against the tearing gravity. The violent alteration of air pressure nearly made my head explode as I was swept back up over the bewildering expanse I had flown freely past; the dark patch of perennial night, the suspended lake, the glowing magnetic force field of intolerable brightness, the yellow, blue, and purple profusions of sparkling shapes and patterns all blending in to the receding twilight. The creaky primeval whirring or whistling sound emitted by the creatures I was rested on encompassed all sensation. It grew louder and shriller as we gained altitude, and in a matter of mere minutes I was thrown back ashore onto the stalactite covered edge of the mine, which I could from a distance behold Pratyusha attempting to climb with the aid of the string of rope anchored at its entranceway. She nearly lost her grip on the rope when she caught sight of my pterodactyl-like avian accompaniment. She clambered up the last few rocks in a hurry and with both hands placed on the edge, drew her entire body weight up with the preternatural strength of a gymnast—undoing the knot around the entranceway, and walking tentatively up to me, with palms cast outward as in caution.
I was covered from head to foot in a strange sooty material, which left a greenish residue all across my person. As I later came to know, the rucksack which had fallen into the pit was mine; a stroke of providence I had not in the least suspected. Thankfully, the one belonging to Pratyusha was in our possession and had been securely recovered from the ledge some fifty feet below us. It contained the vintage camera we had found at the campsite, and was also amply provisioned to see us through two days of trekking back downwards, which we would have to accomplish in this instance without Baba Somdev’s invaluable assistance.
I showed Pratyusha the water body in which I had dived with a snorkelling mask provided to me by her late paternal grandmother, the hearth around which the ceremony had taken place, the winding labyrinthine tunnels which proceeded in all directions through the cave complex, one of which we employed on our path back out to the stepladder that hung outside the entrance to this grotto. No one was to be spotted in any of the caverns on our way out, not even Baba Somdev, he had vanished into the ghostly shadows of the mineshaft, perhaps to join his fellow-exiles in the bottomless descent, perhaps to leave us to our folly, perhaps to join the congregation of mountainfolk at the temple. Who knows?
All I know is that when we reached the temple they were gone. Nowhere to be found. Only an ooze of insects inhabited the insides of the temple, an interlocking mess of recumbent earthworms twice their natural size, scorpion-shaped tails and flowering gnats and beetles exceeding their wildest everyday proportions. This had probably driven away the rest of the company, as there was no rifle within reach as there had been earlier assisted by the marksmanship of Karma Bodh. No one to save the people from the incomprehensible spillage from the basements concealed just below the temple. I took her by the hand and rushed out of the temple! Her rucksack nearly fell off her shoulders, I tripped once or twice over the irregular rock formations strewn all about the sloping tracts of terrace. The downhill stride propelled us into a sprint, our feet were operating now out of our command. The tumultuous drop at the edge of the approaching cliffside stared at us from some twenty metres on. There was nothing we could do to deaccelerate our tumble, we were in rapid motion and as I caught from the corner of my eye the bending stairway of rocks creeping down the base of the terraced-steps, I saw that there was only one choice.
I pulled her arm with both hands and leaped towards the turn as we neared the drop. We somersaulted into a quarry of rocks, and rolled downhill some seven metres before falling back at the top of the abandoned campsite.
chapter two
We plundered every article from that wreckage of campsite that could be of some remote use to us in the arduous descent. Mufflers, monkey-caps, some of Swaami Ji’s shawls, also certain books and magazines of the time that might hold the mind on a leash, along with a musty .32 Long Barrel Revolver. I searched all the jacket and trouser pockets for a round of ammunition, came upon a few stray bullets in one of the outer compartments of a rucksack, hidden away in a matchbox.
‘I think you’d better give it here!’ Pratyusha placed an outstretched palm before me.
‘I found it!’ I told her.
‘Still…’ she insisted.
‘No!’ I refused outright. ‘You were the one that made me find the camera so you are entitled to keep it, same rules apply for the firearm.’
‘Barkat! I don’t think you are well-equipped to handle a gun right now! I think you’d better let me have it.’ She rolled her fingers up into her palm.
I handed her the gun, but held on to the bullets. ‘If you insist!’
We were making our way towards the bottom of the same rockface through that frightening path charted by the sadhus along the narrow parapet, bypassing the tree and arriving at the patch of flat land where I had once dug our rations—when I noticed from the top of the slope, trudging up along the harsh hillside from below—a pair of policemen, or at least uniformed officials. One of them was a policeman, and the other donned some kind of a black-green commando attire, unrecognisable to either of us, especially to Pratyusha who was from a defense background, which was all the more disconcerting.
‘Yes?’ The policeman asked, in a tone of casual insolence—his right hand making motions and shapes in the air. ‘What are you two doing here?’
‘My mother works for the State Electric Division,’ Pratyusha frowningly answered, a bit dismayed. ‘Her name is Damini Jain Negi. You can check. Ask anyone!’ her tone degenerated into an affront within one syllable.
‘Your mother?’ the policeman’s frown curved even lower than hers.
‘That’s right!’
‘What did you say your name was young lady?’ the other gentleman inquired.
‘Pratyusha Negi!’ she snapped. ‘I’m with the HRA.’
‘The HR what?’ the policeman whined.
‘Could I see some identification please.’
‘Look…please…’ I intervened. ‘We work with the government.’ I fetched up a bald-faced lie.
‘So do we,’ was the policeman’s gnarly retort.
‘We work for the government,’ the commando stipulated. ‘You work with them…’ his mouth crinkled up in thought. ‘That makes you our seniors!’ he decided.
‘Them?’ the policeman gasped, in forced incredulity
‘That’s right,’ the commando smiled, taking off his pair of dark glasses. His face was shaped like a cement slab, his hollow eyes acting as handprints. ‘And if they happen to be our seniors,’ he carried on, in mischievous pursuit. ‘They certainly would be aware that there happen to be some rules implemented and in place regarding the area from which they have, it seems, just returned. And well…’ he rambled on. ‘If that just so happens to be the case, then what we have out here are a pair of deliberate rule-breakers who possibly harbour some ulterior motive for being out here in the first place. But then, if we were to give them the benefit of the doubt, we might also suppose that they could possibly be one of the select few that are permitted to visit the peak. But if that were the case, they certainly would not be in the condition in which they now appear.’
‘Who else is allowed to go on top?’ I asked.
‘We are not privileged to lend out that information to you, sir. Our job is to keep all passes up to the peak sealed, at all costs! In the interest of public health. Now, if I may ask, what exactly is your job sir?’
chapter three
We were escorted back down by the two grumbling officials whose custody proved to be an unintended deliverance of sorts. Were it not for their firm hand, and adept navigational manoeuvers I doubt we would have made it back to Taluka in one piece.
We were, however, arrested and did have to spend a couple of nights in an Uttarkashi jail-cell until Pratyusha’s mother was able to travel up from Dehradun to pay our bail. The vintage camera was handed back to us wrapped in the depths of the rucksack as its presence had not been revealed in our modified official account of the incidents. We were subjected instead to a thorough questioning by the two personnel from Army Intelligence who seemed more interested in what the mother had to say for her daughter than what her daughter had to say about all that we had discovered. We, of course, claimed to have been lost in the wilderness on a routine trek to Harkidun, and guided up there by a pair of malicious sadhus.
‘You better be careful of those sadhus,’ Lt Commander K.P. Barnwal politely smiled.
We were seated in the DIG’s secluded cabin.
‘Aghoris, tantrics, you don’t know what kind of stuff they’ve got up their sleeve!’ he now grew serious, imparting a measured assessment of what might have possibly led the supposed sadhus to take us up to Ranibaug. ‘You can’t stop them!’ he complained. ‘Even if you block all access, they can still come up with a route. Through the bushes and rocks, they’re like goddamn termites. They can walk through wood! By the way…’ a more serious thought fleetingly passed his memory. ‘Weren’t you the one?’ he looked at Damini Jain Negi just to be sure. ‘That got those photographs of the Tree across to the National Geographic.’
‘That’s right,’ Pratyusha answered before her mother could.
‘Mmmm…interesting.’ Lt Commander Barnwal looked at the tiles that spread out across the floor. ‘All on a routine trip to Harki Dun heh?’ he got up.
‘I keep going up there,’ Pratyusha said. ‘It’s a kind of a place of…’ a word occurred to her which she refrained from using. ‘Pilgrimage,’ she chose instead. ‘For me, at least!’
‘Worship?’ Lt Commander Barnwal’s eyes lit up.
‘Oh no!’ Damini Jain Negi shook her head agitatedly. ‘She comes with me to the temple every once in a while. There’s nothing wrong with her like that!’ she assured him.
‘And…’ he settled back down into his chair. ‘What intrigued you about this tree?’
‘I’d never seen anything like it.’ She explained without any expression whatsoever. ‘I don’t know,’ she finally snapped out of her stupor. ‘What intrigues you about it?’
‘We’ve tried to chop it down!’ he blankly stated. ‘Applied mechanical buzz saws, a wrecking ball even. Nothing seems to work to get it to budge an inch.’
‘Perhaps that’s the way it was intended,’ Pratyusha said.
‘By whom?’ all eyes in the room suddenly spun around at her.
‘Whoever it belongs to?’ she shrugged her shoulders.
‘What?’
‘The Tree.’
Lt Commander Barnwal exchanged an indiscreet look with one of his sub-ordinates. The three of them sat still in their chairs, waiting for another word to be spoken. I decided to take up the rest of the questioning with concocted anecdotes; incidents which seemed plausible enough yet which tested the patience of their collective credulity. We were soon ushered out, while they had a final word with Pratyusha’s mother in our absence.
The two of us stood outside the gate of Uttarkashi Police Thaana, taking in the petrol air, the soothing sounds of earthly chaos and commotion taking on an ethereal quality. It seemed real! Undisputed.
‘What are you going to do with the negatives?’ I asked, after a long and still silence.
‘I don’t know,’ she looked on into the distance, her eyes roaming celestial freeways and distant ruins of outer space, then falling back upon the world around her and stumbling into sense. ‘I suppose…’ it occurred to her. ‘It might be one way of meeting my grandmother. If not in the flesh, then at least through the eyes!’
‘Hmmm…’ I nodded my head along with her thoughts and meditations. ‘Perhaps you might get to see that Tree.’ I suggested. ‘Fifty years ago! What it looked like. What it might look like.’ I thought to myself before thinking out aloud. ‘Fifty years from now. Why fifty, maybe a hundred-two hundred. Entire centuries beyond! Centuries, and millennia and ages ago and ahead. It stood there. And Pratyusha you were the first to bring it to light before the world.’
She smiled hesitantly, or at least it was the closest one could expect of a smile from her. ‘That animal too!’ she looked beyond into the future. ‘And if what I find in this camera is of any value, who knows?’ her eyes flitted across to mine. ‘A name to be made. A place in the history books. An entirely new profession from rock-climbing.’
I smiled at the prospect and wished her luck as her mother collected her from the driveway of the Police thaana. The two state-issued government ambassadors crawled out with the officials behind Damini Jain Negi’s Ford Endeavour. I bid them all farewell and got into my Gypsy parked outside the gate. It had lain without attendance for a number of days now, and had to be wiped clean of all the bird droppings and mud and dust that coated it.
While washing up the mudguards, and polishing the windscreen, I had to borrow a cloth and spray from the back of the jeep where the jack and wrench lay—and while doing so came across the issue of National Geographic from the week before with the vivid portrait of that deformed tree gracing its cover.
A seated sadhu by the crumbling wall of the police station, noticed me from the roadside. He shone at me from his haggard posture, a toothless smile brimming with an intangible camaraderie. I returned his warmth with a wink, which he just nodded at, and rested his head against the wall—gazing up at the mesh of wires wrestling overhead—then slowly shifting his head in my direction, as if in indecision, he nodded again at me and slowly winked back—the same smile lighting up his landscape of a face.
I threw the magazine back inside the trunk, and slammed the door shut, waving him goodbye—to start up the ignition and warm up the engine before I could be on my way back to Mathura.
It was a long drive, proceeding through lush acres of green, smoky highways and peripheral forests, past many Mofussil towns, and truck-stops, hotels, petrol-pumps, food courts, providing regularly for all the daily amenities of everyday life. The Tree constantly danced before my mind as I cruised through another wilderness at top speed. It was a discovery! By all possible means, a real find. And it would forever determine my onward path, now that I have explicated the details of my account.
The photographs of the animal are to arrive on the 23rd of June in their Summer issue. What Pratyusha might find in way of evidence of that archaic expedition still unsolved, only time will tell. In the meantime, I would urge the keen reader to pursue any means possible of trying to help better the understanding of that unexplainable botanical lifeform.
It has been something of an object of obsession for me of late, as I had once prayed to it, feared it even, and bargained with it to alter the outcome of the doom that lay waiting in my destiny. And it had provided! In the form of that sadhu who was my only saving grace, my only guardian from death and starvation. Was it real? Had it exerted the divine influence?
This question has been plaguing me recently, and causing in me a wild array of psychological maladies and morbid afflictions. I request, at once, the urgent assistance of anyone that might be aware of how to dispel the situation I am undergoing.
chapter four
The Tree has begun to occupy my every thought. I pray to it twice a day, once in the mornings and another time at night before going to bed.
My condition has only grown worse. I am given to spells of manic-depressive tendencies, I sometimes even talk to myself, falling asleep between sentences. My family members feel I have grown more reclusive since my last expedition, often wishing to be left alone and not disturbed. I loathe the company of people. The only thing I take comfort in is plants. It has even become mandatory for every visitor that comes to our house to arrive accompanied by a sapling of some sort. In ordinary circumstances, my family would never have allowed it, but once convinced they agreed to make an exception in this case, and accommodate the plants provided they did not grow too large for my room.
