The Forsaken Wilderness, page 9
‘It is not solely I!’ his eyes loomed across the seated figures. ‘We would not want to be provoked enough to enforce those rules.’ Not a figure stirred from the ground, a silent menace enveloped all in their stillness. ‘Rules are meant merely for observing, not necessarily always for obeying. Once they are instigated into effect, startled into action, then there’s no turning back from the long arm of the enforcer. And especially if the jurisdiction that arm exercises does not have merely to entail proceedings within the limits of its operation. It exposes itself to all conduct inside or outside the realm of its approach, and hence endangers itself to entities it should have never come in contact with in the first place. And therein lies the anatomy of crime!’ he pointed out with his right index finger only slightly bent. ‘There’s a place for it, hidden deep down far away in the jungle, lest any human eye take notice of it, or any ear be wary of its shrill cry.’
He placed his other foot down on the ground, and staggered forth a few steps in an indistinct direction. ‘Which is why I concern myself with order.’ He carried on towards the waterbody in some idle reverie. ‘Does not tax the mind. Soothes it, this prospect of endless harmony. Law.’ He spoke with the frivolous and guarded grace of the well-educated. There was the spell of old Allahabad in his pronunciation, in his whole idiom—even though shudh (pure) Hindi in adornment, it carried a distinct touch of the vernacular emphasis that could place him as belonging not to some nomadic wandering tribe of sadhus but as a man of the world arrived lately to such an ascetic station in life. ‘My mind is at rest young man.’ He raised his index finger high up in a pose of acute emphasis. ‘Which is why I prefer to restrict my expertise to the apprehending and cleansing of ills as opposed to the diagnosing of them, which I take it has been your preoccupation of late with regard to your fellow companions.’
‘Nothing could be further from the truth,’ I said.
‘Then why have you arrived here?’ he questioned me.
‘Because I was asked to accompany the Professor.’
‘By whom?’
‘By the man himself, and also his spiritual advisor.’
‘You mean his soul?’
‘I mean his astrologer, who gazes into the stars and foresees the future in the form of the irrational.’
‘What if I were to inform you that the astrologer you speak of is sitting in our midst.’
Here I scrutinised the surroundings in search of what could have looked like Swaami Atal-Anivaarya Natija, a phantom image stirring in my mind incredible memories of tantrics and pandits. None of the long bearded derelicts fit the bill in even the remotest sense. They all appeared to have about them an air of ascetic displacement unbecoming of the more nominal pieties specific to those in the clergy—the perpendicular ponytail protruding from the back of a bald scalp, a string tied diagonally across the upper torso, a stern physiognomy and stubbornness of will alerting the more reckless faculties to the iron clasp of obedience. I conjured a consideration that perhaps they were indeed the remnants of that fateful expedition that had never been heard from since the year 1971, whose possessions we had witnessed not so long ago. They seemed past all material considerations and could well have slipped into a semi-conscious state of ‘sanyasa’. What if the Professor himself had concocted the astrologer in deceit, and was himself who he claimed was his advisor?
The Professor had by now dried up from the glowing warmth of the hearth. He wiped the moist vegetation off his head and body and took a bow, settling back into his lotus posture without releasing a word. He barely acknowledged my presence, although I could assume that my predicament might have crossed his mind after my abrupt abandonment. Shera’s eyes stayed stubbornly closed.
‘Do you dwell in the realm of the irrational?’ the old sage asked.
I could minutely sense myself reaching for my forehead and chest with my right forefinger to ward off the discomposure whose approach I could feel in the innermost corners of my consciousness. He could well have been asking this question of the cavernous formations and frescoes on the stone walls that wound on into a receding chamber that the eye could not penetrate. Wondering what lay ahead, I approached the lake with a trepidatious tip-toe, turning back to learn that my two guides into this labyrinthine network of caves and tunnels had entirely deserted me. The faint moan of the shankh could be heard from afar, stifled and considerably diminished by the many strata and layers of rock it crossed to reach my ears.
‘The irrational?’ I pondered, conducting my subtle exhortations in silent solemnity. He witnessed me kissing my finger and wagging it numerous times between my brow and mouth in prayer.
When I was a child I would pray for tranquility, good fortune to shun adversity of any kind: ‘Please protect our whole family, everyone related to us and everyone close to us and please give us all a very long, peaceful and happy life.’
My early adolescence yielded certain irreconcilable desires; good marks in my exams, a place in the hockey team, the reciprocation of care from a person for whom I felt immense affection. Later, as I approached youth in all its indeterminate glory, I prayed for an admission in the Indian Institute of Engineering (IIT), a lucrative placement and rewarding starting salary for all my labours behind the desk. Then as adulthood dawned I craved marriage, a child, the fellowship of my peers; contentment, such as one anticipates: serenity of being—peace of body and mind, of soul and spirit. The happiness of all mankind, the eradication of pain and suffering. ‘How can one be happy?’ I thought. ‘When one’s fellow human being is not.’
My desires turned to goals, my goals to effort, my effort to expectance, and my expectance dwindled in the ever-passing air of disappointment; the inevitable malaise set in, enchanting me by its unpredictability, fascinating me endlessly as to the nature of fate. Whether one’s prayers controlled one’s own destiny and that of others? I prayed even more furiously than ever before. I subscribed to no particular faith or religion, but instead appealed to a monolithic God—a grey bearded face in the sky and when he would not fulfil my wishes, aimed to appease him with my righteousness of heart. I made certain sacrifices in my day-to-day life. Abstained from pleasure of any kind in hope of inspiring in him a sympathy, practiced penance of every sort; set ablaze a new set of rituals and acts of obedience to his indomitable will. All until it reached a point of neurosis, of what kind I will not as yet specify.
‘Logic is the only God I know of,’ the old man declared. ‘And to believe in the forces of the irrational is to amount to, in my books, nothing less than heresy.’
‘Heresy?’ I said out loud, surprising even myself. My thoughts had begun to swim into material pronouncements, and even as the memory of my ritualistic motions struck me, I could not be entirely certain that I had not uttered them out aloud for everyone in the space to hear and take imminent notice of. They all glared at me now from around the red-flame, including Shera.
‘If one believes that one can make material what one desires with the aid of prayer, that is tantamount to a belief in telekinesis; witchcraft! That one can with the power of their mind alone and its innate concentration make manifest what it requests of this existence. Are you endowed with the super-natural gift? Are any of us?’ he spread his palm around the gathering. ‘Is our creator? Is he but a holy ghost that is able to mould objects and instances to his will.’ The old man slumped beside the fire. ‘If I were to pray.’ He closed his eyes and joined his hands together as if in mockery of my actions. ‘With all my might, that I could extinguish this fire. What that make it happen?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘As that is not a worthy cause for prayer.’
‘Ahh…’ he smiled. ‘But then what is? For an ant that might be its prime consideration. The shifting of a stone. The blowing out of a fire that enflamed its only home. It might pray day and night for a clearing of its way. Can it accomplish that by simply believing that it can? Or will it actually attempt in the physical way to make that happen?’
‘Both, I suppose.’
‘You prayed day and night for your desires, and worked relentlessly at them too I suppose.’
‘Indeed.’
‘And when you were granted what you wanted, to what and whom did you attribute that? To what you did, or to how you prayed?’
I had no immediate answer.
‘Consider for a moment, the ratio of your disappointments to that of your fulfilments.’
‘What about you?’ I challenged his assertions. ‘What ails you?’
He took a deep pause before answering in a hushed cry of uncertainty—‘Death!’
‘Death?’ I asked.
‘Merely the thought of death.’
‘Merely the thought or the actual act of death?’
‘You mean murder?’
‘I mean a decease,’ I corrected him. ‘By natural means. About as natural as circumstances here would permit.’
‘I have invited the three of you here,’ he announced. ‘To witness my death.’
At this revelation I was noticeably alarmed.
‘As per my findings, the day of my deliverance is at hand. I am to die at exactly the hour past sundown.’
chapter two
From out of the shadows of the inner-most recesses of the cave—that concealed the chamber that lay ahead and beyond a deceptively uncertain dead-end—there emerged a geriatric lady whose age could have been no less than a hundred years; her nose hooked, her back bent-double, her wobbly legs crooked and bow-legged beyond repair, yet her eyes alert to even the minutest motions within the enclosure. Everyone stood up at her entry.
As I later came to know, she was the renowned mountaineer Karma Bodh from Haridwar that had led the expedition up to Ranibaug almost fifty years ago. She had singlehandedly manned a reconnaissance attempt to the Everest Basecamp in the fall of ’52, in a premature rescue operation for the famed British Expedition. It was said that a lover of hers at the time was on the team and so enflamed was she by the prospect of his loss, that she ventured out on her own in what was deemed by some of the Sherpas at the time, a fit of unholy madness.
She wore her hair in a frail white head-scarf and still sported the by now faded red wind-cheater she had probably worn on that fateful voyage of ’71.
‘Welcome!’ she said. ‘To the abode of the queen.’
She removed from her jacket pocket, what unmistakably looked like a coalminer’s head-torch from the sparse illumination I was granted; at least that was the most fitting association I could sum up. The flame on the hearth had ceased, and the chorus of bearded men were back at their enchantments. As I came to hold what she handed me, I recognised them to be a pair of suction-cupped, broad-eyed scuba diving goggles, more akin to a snorkeling mask that encompassed even the nose. I tried them on, the strap was loose from the ages and presumably from frequent use.
She now asked me to step in the water. I hesitated expectedly, as the temperature—even inside the cave—was not by any means conducive to a swim, even the lightest immersion. Yet, that mortal pang of discovery compelled me further in, each unknowing step recoiling once at a time, in, into the grey-green haze of malign water.
Once I entered in, all thought and apparent awareness ceased, deep into the darkling dust that muddied all visibility. The water was not quite as cold as one might have expected. It was merely murky with slime and the green twistings of waving underwater vegetation clawing at the pebbled ground I soon touched to feel sure I was at a standing height of no more than five-and-a-half feet. I gradually waded completely in past the drop at the mud fall, that perhaps could account for the Professor’s abrupt submergence. My feet were floating through a ground far removed from their grasp. The entwining weeds and tendrils writhed in distressing patterns promising a pathway into murkier recesses…
chapter three
What formed the spectacle of my underwater voyage will be reserved for a chapter devoted entirely to those purposes. At the time being, the mere flicker of their memory invokes in me a motor instability that might render the pages that follow unintelligible. Once reasonably gathered, I shall endeavour to share my stimuli with the keen reader, although caution is advised when approaching its pages, for the nature of the material there sighted could be liable to inspire a certain unsteadiness of sensation.
Once emerged from the water, in my noticeably unnerved state, I was guided down the further windings of the cave complex by the old lady as if to remedy my distress, only to find that buried into the mountain whose habitation at present we employed, lay a deep mine, the extraction of which could not have been possibly accomplished without the sort of machinery near incapable of being transported up to a height of five thousand feet. Beyond the passageway she had earlier emerged from, crowded with stalactite of every height and shape, I found myself atop the elevated shelf of a vertical mine-shaft from which I could faintly behold down below, a glowing orb etched circularly into the deepest burrows of the mountain; unreachable save for the dead that attempted its dismal plummet. I at once realised why it might be that these people, whoever they were, had summoned Prof. Charan Prakash Chaturvedi.
The expeditioners might certainly have been adept at such matters as concern mountaineering, but rock-climbing and rappelling down a potentially life threatening cavity in the mountain that yawned an infinitude of bottomless descent was an altogether rarified proposition.
And then, just as expected—Professor Charan Prakash Chaturvedi presented himself into this decrepit mine-shaft from the warmth of the hearth. He was alone. Waist bound with the rope, he began to lower himself into the limitless pit…
‘PROFESSOR!’ I screamed out to him.
Halting his manoeuvers down the edge of the cliff, he waved out to me cheerily, and widened a grin from behind a pair of the darkest sunglasses I had ever seen.
‘I’ll be sure and wire you my report. Give word to Pratyusha!’ With that, he hooked on a helmet of some sort to climb further down the mine-face and just as he did so and proceeded but a few feet on—out sprang a hideous cry from the very depths of the subterranean hole: a swooning torrent of unearthly voices, a magnetic vortex sucking everything into the ringing orbit of its glowing shrine.
It is only now in consideration of the doom which awaited the Professor and which caused him never to return from his sojourn down the limitless pit, that I can summon the sensations which occurred in my brief but unshakeable swim.
chapter four
It had often been my practice over the course of my job to prospect the possibilities in every murky expanse of water I happened to encounter; to dream up projects that would probe the immutable mystery of the great waterways of our nation.
No waterbody was unfit for exploration, at least in an imaginative capacity; I could not help but picture the very depths of the most desolate patch of still water, the most sordid tributaries, the most turbulent dams, the most lifeless lake and infernal swamp—the mutant sea, and the river too diseased to even touch. Nothing, however, not even the most grotesque fancies could prepare me for what I was to here witness, not in the sanctity of the imagination but in the certainty of the flesh.
Swaying reeds twisted and writhed into the opaque depths, hurling me into an underwater vista where a mire of slime decomposed before my very eyes to relieve what lay beneath it. There stood some thirty or forty feet beneath the water, a coralline formation of petroglyphs enshrined into a wide oblong slab some sixty feet in length and breadth, lodged firmly at the basin of the water body. It emitted a sound not unlike the one I had encountered at the temple. A rumbling, whirring churning of the water that bespoke maelstroms incomprehensible to any but outer space astronauts, defying all terrestrial phenomena, and abandoning the simplest resemblance to anything hitherto discovered underwater. I was reminded at once of the Yonaguni monument off the coast of Japan that persists to baffle both oceanographers and archaeologists alike.
Just as I attempted to touch it, there emerged from its crevices and caverns a seemingly innocuous marine creature, yet once I was granted some proximity to it—the wholly uncanny nature of its aspect baffled and somewhat startled my fascination. It appeared neither amphibian nor reptilian, closer to the shape of a prehistoric bird, a sort of aquatic pterodactyl that shrieked at my ambling underwater form and flapped its tail violently in my direction. Its eyes surpassed every conception of hideousness, its sinuous wings writhed into myriad claws, each with nails and limbs outstretched from its webbed symmetry. The head and beak were so elongated in their appointments as to resemble nearly the mythic intent of an ancient Greek mask. The skull was round and humanoid, almost in the shape of that of the ostrich. There was yet in its morbidly startled eyes, and beckoning open-mouthed desperation, a sort of pathetic quality that belied any superior intelligence. It nearly caused me to faint in mortal terror at its appearance, and had I indeed done so, I hesitate to mention that this document might never have existed.
chapter five
What may have seemed a mirage, or merely some abject hallucination wrought by deprivation now acquired an air of the undisputable, of the inarguable even, the tangible and concretely measurable. I wished at that very moment that I had at my disposal an instrument by which I may have recorded in the pictorial form the images that swept by my every sensation. If I were an artist, I might have drawn what I glimpsed but briefly. Were I photographer of some skill and technique, I may have captured fragments of the unthinkable sights that acquired a firm foothold in my memory, dispelling any skepticism as to the uniqueness of this godforsaken mountain and its inconceivable insides.
Transfixed by the all-encompassing glow of the depths of the mineshaft, I proceed to inform Ms Karma Bodh of what I had seen, of the sounds that I had heard, of the imagery the inhabitation of that temple had incited. And when expressing some fears as to the plight of the departed Professor, was plainly reprimanded for my concerns.
