It was in a dream that he saw the path being cleared through the woods, so when he woke up he packed himself a bottle of water, some fruits, picked up half a loaf of bread with some butter and set out, walking back a few steps to pick up a cap because the sun could turn turn harsh if the woods would have really lost some of its cover.
The first few minutes took him down the goat-track till he reached the road freshly laid with coal tar that spun like a ribbon picked up by the wind and dropped here among the hills, and forgotten. He crossed it without looking left or right and walked over to the other side where the hill continued to drop after this brief interlude. Another few minutes of walk brought him to the narrow stream that skipped over the glazed pebbles and stones and glittered under the sunlight. And just beyond, lay the first line of trees standing like a row of guards protecting the woods behind them. Somewhere along these lines there must be the path that he had dreamt of. Running narrow, crowded in by the trees, letting in the sun in fits and spurts, and flowing straight like an arrow to someplace that had always been a source of mystery and theories to the children of Bibbal. There had been stories of a village of giants on the other side, of people having been lost forever once they went past the first few rows of trees, of leopards and snakes and bats that had a wingspan from one edge of the woods to the other, of caves that led to tunnels underground that led to the old fort on the other hill. There had been as many stories as there had been mouths. Only to be forgotten when these children grew up to become adults and moving away to towns and cities, or to start farming on their terraced fields or run their family businesses of growing and selling lukaat, the local fruit that found more favour in the cities far away than they did here in their place of birth. But these adults would make room for the next wave of children in the schools, on the playground, on the swings, and on the windward side of Bibbal that looked down on this stream, the woods beyond and in their hushed tones the stories would live, grow, and change shape.
Furhaan was one boy who never really grew up. His father had no shop or business or a piece of land to give him, and he had no desire of leaving Bibbal. Having always been a less-than-average student, he had no prospect of becoming a teacher in the local school, or a librarian of the room that had a few cupboards full of books and tables that gave space to the newspapers from one day earlier, because that’s how long it took for the city to send them the news that most often was — like the city — too far to have touched them anyway. So Furhaan stuck to the room that his brother and he had shared in their early years, and with the older boy now working in the city, he took over the entire room, and lived off the money his brother sent to his parents, never grudging him for taking a part of it, for Furhaan didn’t really need much. And also because the brother staying away felt at ease knowing that his old parents were not alone.
That left Furhaan with a lot of time at hand. A large part of which he used to lie in the bed and dream, not always with his eyes closed. Being of an age where his parents thought that something could yet become of him, he spent his waking hours hidden from the questioning eyes and encouraging words of the well-meaning people Bibbal. So when he dreamt of the path that had been cleared through the woods, he saw a great chance to narrow down all those stories to one, besides being away from the village for the entire day.
Now, standing far from the cot he had dreamt the dream he was following, he saw that the tree line looked uninterrupted, unbroken, and inviting. That was one thing most stories had in common. The woods seemed to pull people in, unlike the awning of a circus tent that gave a hint of what lay beyond, this exerted a force in people by not holding out any promise, by closely guarding its secrets. Like an old trunk locking up the mysteries within so completely, that even an honest person would be tempted to break open the lock.
Furhaan looked up at the clear blue sky, the very, very light sound of the water nudging the pebbles in its path, the distant cry of a bird that could be warning him against taking another step, or warning whatever lay hidden beyond of a possible intrusion. But these slight sounds only made him realise the stillness and the quietness of his surroundings. Like the sound of his father’s deep sighs to stir some guilt in him. Or those of footsteps approaching him as his sat under the banyan tree before asking him if he was thinking of doing something with his life. Or of the whirring of the aata chakki that kept up with its bhurrm-bhurrm-bhurrm not far from his own house that filled in the spaces left vacant when the other voices and sounds dropped off to rest awhile. The grass below his feet were the shade that the late spring months colour them with, generous in their departure. He felt like sitting down for a bit, and he did. Taking out a chunk of the half loaf, and a big dollop of the home-whipped butter that he had helped his mother whisk out only yesterday, he chewed on them slowly. Nothing was rushing him, no one was questioning him, and he thought of making this his place, his sanctuary. But then he remembered his mission, his reason for being at that point on that hour, and realised that the path once found could lead to something that he would end up desiring even more, or maybe scare him away from anything on this side of the stream. He turned to look up at the village and saw the sunlight bouncing off the silver paint of the wire mesh that was erected on this side of the school to stop footballs and children from hopping down at will. Maybe some of the children were looking down at this very moment, not seeing him but looking at the woods beyond and telling each other of the things that were known to have happened, of the disappearances and of the sounds and the sights that many felt sure were heard and seen by those they knew, but never by any of them.
He stood up with a smile, strung his bag over his shoulder, and his cap over his head, and started walking parallel to the line of the trees, keeping some distance, because with a mind that hadn’t been occupied by things that others of his generation had to deal with, he still retained most of the stories in their full detail and richness, and started looking for the clearing he remembered from his dream of last night.
He had walked for around an hour or so, having skipped over the stream at its narrowest point, and now with it to his left and the woods to his right, he realised that there must have been the slightest of curve in the margins to either side of him, for when he looked back and over at the hill where Bibbal should have been, he saw that it was no longer visible. Instead, a strange hill stood looking down at him. For a while he felt a shiver go down his spine, with the thrill of having found a place that shielded him from the sight of the village too. But soon the shiver continued in form but changed to a strange fear even at this bright hour for having come to a point where at least one of the stories started looking like a possibility.
He must have been 10, or around that age, when a girl in their class had told them about the dog and his master on a day when the teacher had not turned up and they were all sitting in their class looking out the window from where they could see the hills rolling down, but not the woods where they ended. The story spoke of how the dog had dropped a stick it the stream and had started chasing it. The man — from a neighbouring village — had started chasing his dog with whom he had come down to pick up a sack of provisions for his shop. The bus from the city had been delayed and they were both waiting, when the dog had found the stick and dropped in the stream where the two had gone for a drink. She said the two ran for a while and soon lost their way, which was contested by one of the children, saying you only had to retrace your steps along the stream to return home, and his reasoning found a lot of support, but also made the children disappointed at this very dull ending to the story. But the girl puffed up her face, looked up and said they were most welcome to laugh it away and if only they had seen the abandoned shop in that village they would know if was true. So after the boy was made to apologise, she continued and said that the strange thing was that they did manage to pick up the stick finally, and started walking back along the stream when they came to a point where it branched out in two directions, something they clearly remembered not seeing when they were headed in the other direction. The man decided that the one that was curving towards the wood must be the one they had walked alongside, as they had always been between the trees and the stream. But the dog stood its ground, tilting its head this way and that and then barked at the man who kept walking, convinced that the faithful animal would follow. He turned once, perhaps many more times but no one would ever know, and saw the dog had jumped over the narrow stream and had started walking along the other branch, stopping to look at the man. It too may have thought that the faithful human would eventually turn back and follow. What happened to the man, no one could say. But the bus-driver found the dog standing alone by the curve when it stopped to let a few passengers get off, and to drop the sack. Which he finally had to entrust in the hands of one of the villagers who had stepped off. That evening, the villager and the dog waited for as long as they could, but the man didn’t turn up. Next day, a few men got together and followed the dog up the stream for as long as they could, and then turned back. And they too came across the fork on the stream, they just stood at the confluence wondering why they hadn’t seen it before, but though they felt they should walk along the tributary towards the wood, they all felt safer following the dog who hadn’t lost its way the day before. But the man they had set out to look for was never found. The dog, it was said, ran down to the stream every single day and turned towards the woods and barked and barked and barked. But no one had the heart to follow the direction of its sound and see what it was trying to point out, or say.
Furhaan wondered if he had passed that point, and he looked towards the woods, that even under broad daylight looked dark and mysterious. If he were to turn back now, would he find the point where the stream forked into two? At least he knew which branch to take, and which to leave. But then he shook his head, and laughed. Many said he hadn’t left his childhood behind. He was certainly carrying the stories from them. But he was a grown up. He knew it. Would he have dared to come this far all alone, if he wasn’t? He stopped to catch the sounds that he had heard earlier, anything that tied him to the village he had left. Everything seemed still, even the birds had stopped following him, the stream wasn’t gurgling either. He looked around, and everything was so peaceful, that he wondered if people who reached here deliberately lost themselves. He moved a little towards the stream and started walking closer to it, happy for the company of the flowing water. At some point he reached into his bag and brought out a bunch of lukkat and munched on the juicy flesh, dropping the seeds into the water and seeing how they rolled and stumbled for a while and then settled down for a long, long rest. Like this is where they always wanted to be.
It was when he had dropped the last seed in and had bent to wash his hands that he noticed something bright and red glimmering under the sun. He bent closer, already knowing that it was a broken glass bangle and hoping that it wasn’t. He reached into the cool, clear water and picked it up and saw the little specs of yellow glasses that must have been part of the design, but not the whole bangle, here looking like the work of an artist who had dropped her creation abruptly and walked away. A shadow leaned over him, and he snapped his head back, expecting to see the bangle seller standing over him, demanding that he return what was hers. He let out a sigh, that had started as a half scream, to see that he was alone, and the shadow was of a large, silent, lone crow who was skimming over the warm air currents in big circles. He dropped the shard of glass that had once been an ornament and tried to push away the story of the bangle seller pounding on his head to be let out, demanding that he do what the story said a man must do if he were to return safely. But the stories had always been told by children, and if he were to do what they said a man had to do, would he be counted as a child for believing it? But if he didn’t, and something did happen to him, would he become someone who only existed in the stories of the children?
He stood up straight, looked at the woods, and keeping his eyes trained on the trees ahead, no longer looking for the path that he had set out to seek but now keeping an eye out for a woman to emerge, he stepped back, slowly, feeling the soft ground give way to hard stones and the cold of the water rushing around his slippers and his toes, and he kept walking backwards till he was back on the ground, the stream standing between him and woods. They always said she never crossed the stream.
She was first seen in the village many, many years back. To the children, anything that’s before their birth is history. Their parents’ birthdates and the times when kings and queens rode chariots and the goddesses let their tresses down to create rivers and the demons opened their mouths to form caves, were all dates on a single calendar. Somewhere in between all those years, it was said that the bangle seller walked into the village carrying a trunk on her head, with sides made of glass so people could look at the rows upon rows of bangles. Colourful, beaded, lined, strung, dotted, there was no one in the village who hadn’t stopped her to ask about the bangles. Even the priest of the temple had called her out and asked that she donate a pair for the local deity. Because no one could buy even a single bangle, for they came at a cost that few could afford, and the seller was a rude, obnoxious woman who wouldn’t budge an inch when people asked her for a discount. So after being stopped by everyone but not making a single sale, she turned back to face the village as she stood on the edge of the clearing from where the hill rolled down, and cursed the village. No daughters will be born to the village, no bride will survive. The women who refused to buy her bangles for the price she had put on them, will be the last the village will ever see, she screamed out loud and started walking away. A few people chased her, afraid of her curse, and begged and pleaded with her to come back again and they would save enough to buy a few of her bangles. It was said that she finally relented when she saw a young, pregnant woman among those who had gathered around her, and agreed to return the next month.
But the month came and went and then another month came and went and everybody soon forgot all about her, till the pregnant woman gave birth to a stillborn girl.
The people all gathered under the banyan tree and decided to go and look for her. Some went to the surrounding villages while some went as far down as the closest town which was anything but close, especially in those days when there were no roads and buses to take them there. But there were no signs of her. But when no daughters were born in the village for over a year, and people refused to marry their daughters to the men of this village for fear of the curse, they all got together and decided to go looking for her again.
This time they were more determined to not return without finding her, and making her take the curse away. They must have tried very hard for them to get this close to the woods despite hearing so much about it, and when they found her box lying beside the stream, so far from any of the villages, with the bangles all strewn outside, mostly broken, mostly submerged in the stream, and looking like they had all been abandoned many months back, they knew that something had befallen the woman. They were still talking when a young woman among them let out a shrill scream. The rest turned to look and saw a bright red chunni fluttering among the trees. Some remembered it as the very same garment that the woman had covered her head with, to cushion the weight of the box. Others were too far gone in their terror to remember anything. But none moved closer to the trees, instead they started walking back as fast as they could, wanting to put as much distance between the scene of the strewn bangles and the trees and the fluttering red chunni that looked much faded now. Somehow, that young woman who had first seen it, had stayed rooted to the point, unable to move, or even take her eyes off the woods. And though no scream escaped her lips this time, but when she finally caught up with them at the point where the goat-track held out its first ledge to take them up to their village, she said that the woman had emerged from the woods, and had almost floated to where she had stood, and held out a bangle. She couldn’t do anything but take it, and then the bangle seller had held out her empty hand, and not knowing if it meant anything different, the young woman had dropped a few coins in it, the coins she had been carrying like the rest to buy a few bangles from her once they found her, and ask her to take the curse away. Few believed her, mostly because they did not want to believe her. But a year later, when the first girl child was born in the village, they all went down to where the broken box and the bangles lay, and picked up one each — some a full bangle, some a piece — and dropped a coin in its place. They all looked up, and saw the chunni was still there, faded a bit more, but under a cloudy sky and strong winds, it seemed to have regained its life and was bellowing up, so that they all bowed down to thank the woman they now knew was taken into the woods by an unknown force. Only to return to sell what she had set out to. Ever since, it was said, that if you ever found a bangle or a shard in the stream, you must pick it up and drop a coin, or the bangle seller would return her curse.
Furhaan looked deep into the woods, and found some relief in the fact that the chunni was no longer there. But after all these years, what belonged to this world would certainly go away. But what of those that belonged to the world of the spirits? He picked up the piece again, and dropped a coin into the stream. And started walking slowly, wondering if he should start heading back now. Wondering if he would take that path he saw in his dream, even if it really did exist.
But after a few steps, he felt a little at ease. The sun was now brighter than ever, and he heard a bus in the distance, not visible, but a sign that he was not alone. He picked up pace and started walking a little more confidently.
Furhaan had walked a good distance when he finally owned up that the path in his dream may have just been a dream. He was tired, and though he never thought he could be that, lonely. At some point he sat down, only because he found a rock jutting out of the earth next to the stream. The sun was directly overhead, so he dipped his feet in the cool water and started eating out of his bag. This time he didn’t have to ration his supplies, because he knew was heading back now. And it would take him all of the remaining afternoon and some of the evening to get home. A prospect he was looking forward to, to a cup of hot tea, to putting his feet on his bed and letting his head and shoulders and back rest on the old pillows that knew exactly how to engulf him. He was hoping his mother would have fried a few of the pumpkin flowers plucked from the creeper behind their house, after dipping them in gram flour. He could almost smell the sharp smell of the burnt mustard oil, the sweet smell of the tea with a thick layer of cream on top. He sipped the water from his bottle, looked inside his bag to see if had missed anything. But other than some crumbs of bread, he found nothing. Getting up, he looked at the grass stretching ahead, and wondered what it would take to walk the entire length, wondered what lay at the end of it, and wondered if someday he could come back and resume his journey. And that gave him an idea.
He reached into his bag and looked for the small knife he had dropped in to cut the bread, though he didn’t use it. He took it out, snapped it open, and started to etch out a sign on the rock. A sign that he was here, that this was where he had to return, and start afresh. The rock was hard and refused to let him leave his mark initially. But he persisted, and soon a line started appearing, and then another, and then another. Till he had carved out an F that was more or less visible.
It had taken him almost an hour, and he knew it might even get dark before he reached home. He wasn’t worried about reaching home that late, only if he could reach the road by the time the daylight left. He stepped back, saw that the letter was certainly marked out clearly, and turned to walk back. His bag was light now, though his feet were a little heavy with the morning walk. But he had no issues with that, having been born and brought up in these parts, where people had to walk to every place. This time he had a goal, he had a cut off time, and a little bit of that fear that he may yet get waylaid like the man with the dog. And together, it was all the motivation he needed to walk as fast as he could, retracing his steps and keeping his eye out for a dog, a woman, or a man. Hoping he would come across neither.
The clouds first appeared as a whisp of cotton candy that barely made a mark on the blue sky, and did not even catch Furhaan’s attention. He may have looked up, but only to see if birds had started appearing, signalling that he was getting closer to civilisation, where the wheat and rice left out on sun roofs to dry would attract them. But as the layers of the thin clouds started joining ranks, and the sun was subdued a little, he looked up and knew from experience that this could go either way. The clouds may drift away, choosing another piece of the endless sky to bond over, or they may decide that this was where they wanted to be today.
At first, he felt a little relieved when the clouds dimmed the sun a little. He had been walking for hours and mostly under the strong sunlight of the valley, deliberately keeping away from the shelter of the trees. The flow of the water helped a little, as he would occasionally scoop up some water and drink it, or splash it on his face. He knew it would rapidly get cooler as the sun bent over the curve of the sky but he still had some distance to cover and would rather brave the heat than the darkness, at least before he reached the road.
But then it began to rain, at first in thick heavy drops that made a sound as they fell on the stream and that was the first thing he noticed about it. Looking up, he saw it was one big, thick, dark cloud that seemed eager to shed its weight, while far away the sun’s rays slanted upwards and over the hills above. Knowing his house was there somewhere, and that they too would be under this bright spot, he suddenly started missing it. That, or the fact that the rain was falling in faster, continuous threads, he started running. His slippers were now gripping onto the ground that was getting wetter by the minute, making him pull harder to coax them to keep up with him. The ground seemed to be holding it back, pulling at it to thwart escape. On one such pull the strap of one of his slippers came out of its front hole, and his foot shot in the front, the slipper reluctant to follow. He stopped, stooped to pick it up, but decided he was better off without an accomplice who was only slowing him down. Dropping his other slipper too, he started running bare feet and soon found out that it was anyway a better option. His legs were strong, and he would often walk bare feet like most of the people in these parts. The ground was still squelching and gripping but his feet were a part of him, of his urgency, and behaved the way they should.
He looked ahead with barely opened eyes, held close as much as he could to keep off the rain, and saw the place around him was looking darker. Where just an hour or so back he was in a vast open valley carpeted with green grass, lit up by sunshine and despite all the stories, looking like a place he would have liked to come to often, it had now turned into a dark and brooding place where the stream seemed to flow faster, marked with bubbles and flowing grey and wider; and the woods to one side of him seemed to be looming over the landscape, the trees appearing larger, thicker, and ominous, a single dark wall blocking escape, and inviting the lone traveller with false promises of shelter and safety.
And then the first lightning struck, crackled and lit up the valley once more, very briefly and not in the same way that the sun had done. But quite the opposite. Furhaan stood still. He couldn’t move. For to the left of him, where the trees had stood unbroken, steadfast, a gap had suddenly opened up.
The lightning had struck down two trees and left a smouldering hollow, revealing a path behind. Not the long, straight, paved path of his dream, but a short clearing, at the end of which stood a structure that he couldn’t quite make out in the pouring rain, the darkening sky, the fear. But he could certainly make out some forms, that were clearly a man and a woman and then, also a dog. And they seemed to be calling out to him, the dog barking over the din that was erupting around and inside him. He ran. Not stopping to look, not stopping to ask, not caring if he was heading in the right direction or not. He just ran till he reached the road, and the path that led up to his village, and slipped and slid over the path that was now full of slush with the rain having reached up to his village and the water now pouring back into the valley below. He found holes and small protruding rocks and stones and gripped the extended branches and exposed roots of the trees around him and stopped only when his worried mother opened the door for him.
And far below, in the valley, the couple and their dog who lived in a cottage behind the single row of trees, were now back inside, wondering why that young man wouldn’t take shelter when he had just seen what a bolt of lightning could do, and instead chose to run home somewhere in the hills above, a place they always spoke of exploring every time they came to live in their summer home, but somehow never quite found the time to.