I’m not going back

Strong winds accompany us on our quest, sweeping off layers of fog and unease. Stars, dotted throughout the night sky, forming stories in constellations and galaxies, watch over us as we make our way. The tumultuous river flowing alongside us on the left shimmers with a bright film over it, posing a motile mirror to the starry sky.

The trees here seem bigger with thick layering of bark over trunks. I brush my fingers over the broad cracks populated on the barks, the cold helping its roughness abrade my skin.

“We need to hurry,” the guide says. “We need to get to the cottage before midnight,”

It is around half an hour till midnight, and the cottage is nowhere in sight.

The cottage, as it seems, gets farther from the road, into the woods, in the dark, as much to even agitate the guide.

Kriti proposed, though, at around the third anxious ‘we need to hurry’ from the guide that he might just be playing around with us, getting us to a point of panic, for we had denied a guide in our package in the morning. Manish added he might be doing so in order to establish the importance of a guide in these huge mountains, and ultimately get a huge tip from us.

Kriti walks right behind the guide, sometimes getting her tiny shoulders ahead of him as if she knows the way better than he does, her long coat flapping behind her. Manish and I follow the two, his earphones buried deep in his ear canals, while I let my gaze fall on the bends in the river as it topples around big round rocks.

“We should have left an hour early,” the guide grunts. “I told you, I told you,”

“It’ll be okay,” Kriti glances at us with her eyebrows raised. “We get in dangerous situations, and always make it out alive,”

Manish joins her in resounding laughs that overwhelm the crackling noise of the river.

“Spirits are nothing to laugh about,” the guide says, shaking his head.

“We are not laughing at them,” Kriti says. “We are laughing with them. Isn’t that right, spirits?” She tries hard to contain another laugh that eventually seeps out.

The guide frowns before climbing up on a sharp rock.

The winds have calmed down a bit. I look up to see, find the heads of the tall trees to no avail as if they have submerged into the sky. There are pine trees and deodar, and a few apple trees with red, plush apples hanging from their branches, waiting to be plucked.

It could be the tall, rich trees, or the serene yet uncanny silence of the mountain, or the uproar of the river, but there is something about this place that renders everything outside of it inconsequential. It does not matter how the four of us, including the guide who appeared in our lives only today, met, how long we have known each other, what circumstances led us to buying a package for a cottage in the woods on this mountain; we are all here, walking, thinking, being.

Here, I do not expect to find any answers, the ones I have been looking for since the curse of consciousness dawned on me, the ones that have no questions to begin with, but feel I will stumble upon something more profound like a story with no end or beginning, which just is. A place where sages come to dissolve their ego back to nothingness, where artists seek the coveted contentment, where voyagers look for that one intriguing mystery. A place you have to go through, that reminds you the world ravels and unravels without your intervention, and you can be a part of it, witness it from the inside.

The guide takes out his greyish-black stick once again, shoves it in his right nostril, and inhales deeply before shaking his head with sheer vehemence. He has been doing that act of oddity since we started walking up the mountain. Manish asked him what it was to which the guide replied with an odd smile.

“Hey,” Kriti steps up beside him. “Can I have one… uh, what is it, one shot of it?”

“Have you ever had it before?” The guide asks her, putting the stick back in the pocket of his pants.

“No,”

“Then, no,” he says, scratches the tip of his nose and walks ahead.

Kriti shrugs her shoulders.

The guide was the youngest of all the guides lined up at the entry gate of the station, and the only one in fur jacket and fur pants, while the rest were either draped in embroidered, regional shawls or sporting multipurpose, linen jackets. I wonder whether other guides would have let their conscience take a hit of intoxication every five minutes while a group of three lost travelers followed them.

“You want a chocolate?” I ask Kriti.

“Yes,” “Yes!” Kriti and Manish say in unison. I do not get how Manish manages to listen to everything when his expensive earphones blurt the beats out into the setting.

I get the last packet of white chocolate out from my pocket, and both of them snatch it out of my hands. They pull it with as much force as they could exert on the pitiful pack. Kriti, even with her tiny hands, secures the bigger half of the torn pack. Manish grunts, looking at his leftover share.

“Come on!” The guide calls, who has gotten to the other side of a small dissection on the paved way between a line of pine trees.

We move with hurried steps, Kriti and Manish nibbling on their blocks of chocolate. I was hoping at least one of them would share a block with me. They don’t.

As we step outward the dissection, a vibrant hue in the endless stretch of dark and green and grey catches my eyes. I step ahead, tilt my head, and my body stiffens, and a cold breath gets stuck inside.

It is a melange of red and yellow and silver and brown on thin fabric elegantly draped over the swirling bodies of girls hanging from a tree.

“What the fuck!” Kriti steps back, clutches on my arm.

Manish removes the earphones, covers his mouth.

“What the fuck is that?” Kriti asks the guide, or whoever has any idea about it.

The girls, around half a dozen, are hung by a red cummerbund tied to thick branches of the thickest tree we have yet encountered. They are waving their arms, shaking their legs in an uncanny synchronization.

“Don’t be scared,” the guide laughs. “They are just some local girls performing the twelfth night ritual to keep the spirits away from their families.”

“What? What?” Kriti keeps on shaking her head, squeezing my arm.

“Seriously, don’t be scared,” he continues walking.

“What kind of stupid fuckery is this!?” Kriti looks at me with broadened eyes, seeking some semblance of explanation.

It is after we move ahead do I see a couple of men sitting behind the big tree on a cut wooden trunk, smoking on long, curved chillums. They must be the ones officiating this horrific ritual in the middle of the night, sitting comfortably, high out of their minds.

The girls have their hair tied in braided ponytails, their feet exposed, skirts swaying along the wind. I cannot take my eyes off the girls, seemingly of my age, or younger, hung from a tree, lost in an act of magic, of superstition led by innocence and credulity.

I wish I could just sit beside those old men and watch the entire performance. Kriti would want to inform them of their delusion, would hassle to get them down from the tree. But, who is to say whether their blind-belief is not as real as ours over anything, who is to say the stories that culminate in the dark in these hills are not as real as the ones that are told in concrete buildings in the cities.

Kriti, after all, lets go of my arm and takes her position beside the leading guide. Now, however, with each step, she would take a glance sideways. She shoves her hands in the pockets of her overcoat, twisting and turning them in hiding, possibly searching for something to direct her wandering mind towards.

I am out of chocolates, and in no mood of opening my backpack here, so of no help.

Kriti had denied the whole idea the first time we had proposed on our weekend call. She informed us she had been having a tough time with her boyfriend and at her work, and hence a break of two weeks for a trip out of state was inconsiderable. She was persistent for an entire month, dropping the conversation altogether if we brought it up somehow. Then, out of the blue, one night, she called us and agreed, agreeing on a remark by Manish about how this could be an event of a lifetime.

Manish and I, on the other hand, had been longing for a break from repetitions for months. When we had first decided to go on a trip without Kriti if she didn’t join, Manish told me how hard it had been for him to sleep for past few days, and comforted me saying he finally understood what I meant; he had been aware of my struggles with getting my head to shut down and get a decent amount of sleep every night. From that day on, we exchanged threads we read on the internet about developing insomnia, about anxiety and alleged ways to deal with such, sent each other audiobook, podcast and porn recommendations. And, it went on like that till the day for our departure for the trip arrived.

The cottage, this mountain by the river, is the last stop of our trip, and I am not certain if I have acquired enough contentment, tranquility required for another bout of repetitions back in the city. I have not lessened to the thoughts of incompetency, of expectational self-worth, of insecurities throughout the trip. I have not teleported to some other place, some other dream playing before my eyes. The people with me, and the scenic landscapes before me have been adequate in constraining me to the ongoing. And, so, it has been a break alright, but I am not certain if I have broken the chain.

“This is just stupid,” Kriti says. “Why are those girls forced to do that?”

“No one has forced them,” the guide says.

“Yeah, right!” She searches the depths of the pockets of her overcoat once again. “We have booked the return tickets, right?”

“Yeah,” Manish says.

“Okay,” she nods. “Do you know the way or are you just as lost as us?” She asks the guide.

The guide pulls out his magic stick, shoves it in his nostril, inhales deeply before grunting like an animal. “If you walked like normal people, we would be there in no time,” he says.

Kriti throws a look of disbelief at us, throwing her arms in the air.

The pines and long deodars, with occasional trees having inviting apples dangling from fragile branches, look similar to the ones that were lined when we had begun climbing up the mountain. The water thrashes and glides on the curved rocks the same. We could be going round and round, and wouldn’t know the difference. To be lost in the extents of a mountain is to find within it paths to the unknown, the unreal.

Perhaps the guide has a secret, community allotted, duty to fill the travelers with a sense of disillusionment from the world outside, to push them closer to the mystery of here, that could be found if looked with intent anywhere. And, ultimately lead us to an enchanted place where we could see girls dancing, meditating, leaving reality, where we could dance.

I look back to see the colors of the skirts, the smoke of chillums, but we have left them far behind. Now, I am not certain if what I saw was in fact on sight, or just a fleeting flash of fantastic that vanished out of existence once I rubbed my eyes.

“What is that man doing?” Kriti taps on my shoulder.

I follow the direction of her tiny red finger.

A middle aged man in tight sweaters and loose pants has submerged his feet in the flowing river. He stands on the other side of the river from us. He takes a step ahead into the river, into the vigorous flow.

“What the fuck is he doing!?” Kriti says, going towards the bank of the river.

“He is offering himself to the spirit world,” the guide says, matter-of-factly. “It is going to bring prosperity to his offsprings. He is probably very poor,”

“What!? What!?” Kriti shakes her head. “Hey!” She yells at the man who seems to be in a trance, far away from us, even from the river he is stepping into.

Manish removes his earphones, puts them into his backpack, not letting his eyes fall off the man and his trance.

“The river devours everything that falls into it,” the guide says, scratching the base of his nose. “From the smallest thing to the largest, it eats up everything. Once, not long ago, a bus fell into the river with around fifty something passengers. Not one body was ever recovered, not a single part of the bus,”

The man takes another step, trembles against the current.

“What is wrong with all of you!?” Kriti shouts. “Can’t you fucking see those water bottles and those wrappers by those rocks!?” She cocks her head to look at the expressionless face of the guide. “If it eats up everything, how are those water bottles floating!?”

I wait for the guide to respond. He does not.

The man lunges into the river, his head slowly submerging into the current, vanishing into it, becoming it.

“Hey!” She yells on the top of her lungs.

“What just happened!?” Manish rests his trembling hands on my shoulders.

“What… we should… we should call someone!!”

I take out my phone. There are no signals. Kriti and Manish do the same.

“What do we do!?”

“You cannot do anything,” the guide says. “He chose his own fate, and the fate of his family. There’s nothing you can do now,”

I run through all the probable options that can be brought about in the middle of the night, middle of the woods. We could run back, following the river, and inform the authorities. We could find the dancing girls and the old men, and tell them what just happened. Or we could get to the cottage first, get signals on our phones and then decide. But, judging by the speed by which the river is flowing, the crackling sound it is bursting into the entire setting, there are no chances of saving the man. He is gone to the other side, into the river, to the spirit world.

Manish hugs Kriti. “We can’t do anything now,” he whispers. “He’s right. We can’t,”

She pushes him away. “Lets’s just… let’s just get to our cottage. All of this is stupid. This is… let’s just go…”

The guide takes the cue, starts moving. We follow.

“There it is,” the guide announces.

The three of us, stacked against each other in the cold, look up as a manmade wooden structure, almost indistinguishable from the hay of natural wooden structures around it, reveals itself. I sigh in relief.

We charge towards it, jumping over fallen branches, turned rocks, and finally over a two feet tall curb. The curb encompasses a two floored building. A small porch waits patiently ahead the ground floor. A spiral staircase extends from the porch ending on the balcony of the first floor.

“Yes!” The guide says. “We made it. And, it is still a minute till midnight,”

I cannot grasp how the effect of said spirits would nullify by a perimeter of wooden curb that is not even tall enough to hold off wild dogs.

“I will rest here for the night,” the guide points at the closed door on the ground floor. “You all have the first floor. It has been cleaned,”

“What about running water?” Kriti asks. “And, heater. We’d need heater,”

“Everything’s been looked after for you. You’ll find it in the rooms,” he says and leaves for his room. “And, if you need anything, you can wake me up,”

We climb the stairs, select our rooms. Kriti readily jumps on the bed in the room on the far left. Manish gets his earphones out, gets in his bed.

I cannot sleep yet. There are still some unattended thoughts roaming around in my head. I stand by the railing of the balcony, take out a cigarette and lighter. The balcony faces a cluster of pine trees that screen the river. That man who had offered himself to the spirit world must have flown away to the hills in the southern part of the state, maybe to the other state. Would he have told his children after dinner what he was about to do, or his wife?

I put the cigarette between my lips, open the top lid of the lighter, and the clink resonates beneath the whoosh of the cold wind. The flame does not ignite. I close the lid and open it again. I cover the lighter with the shield of my palm, try once again. Nothing.

I look up ahead, and the wind stops, the cigarette falls, the sounds die out in an instant, and a gasp leaves my body.

There is a girl ahead of me, between two trees. There is a girl in red and grey, embroidered, long skirt, wearing striking red lipstick, glowing through glaring white cheeks. There is a girl ahead of me, her feet above the ground, levitating, in the air.

The white in her eyes contrast the pitch black of the eyeballs as she stares back at me, looks at me with serenity.

She levitates toward me slowly, piercing through the wind, her hair flailing all over. I grab the railing, take a deep breath. She stops a few inches away, not blinking, looking into me, through me.

I reach out, and she holds my hand.