What stood out to me about Balmukund was the little black dent on his bony left knee. He knew it was a problem. ‘My left leg’s been thinning and shrinking,’ he told me when we first met, ‘it has shrunk about a half-inch in two decades. It’s this damn black spot, I’m sure. It’s as if it were feeding on my marrow ever since it appeared.’
‘You didn’t show it to a doctor?’
‘Realized too late it’s been harming me. What it does to me doesn’t matter anymore. I’m old now. Too old.’
Balmukund was too old indeed. He looked like a typical Himalayan village elder: eyes barely visible behind folds and folds of wrinkled hide, wearing thick broken glasses mended at the bridge with copious amounts of thread, a toothless gummy mouth that sucked in his dry, cracked lips and a deep furrowed brow, slow, short, hunched and irascible, so ill and in pain it felt cruel to wish him a long life. Death had ignored him for two decades now, but Balmukund did his part: he smoked as many bidis as he could, day after day, religiously. He ran out of them during our last meeting, and he turned sad and sour when he realized I didn’t carry any on me.
So I did this time. I purchased a bundle on my way to his house. He lived in the first hill village beyond the Sukhi river, which, true to her name, was a dry stony bed for most of the year. The river separated the bhabhar from the hills—humble beginnings of the great Himalaya—and here you could see them rise from their roots. In this little stretch beyond my village, as far as the eye could see, there was no sign of civilization. This was Earth untouched, pristine, prehistoric. Far away to the west stood blue, fading hills, turning greener and leafier the closer they got to the river bank; the sky and sun were at their brightest blue and gold, as they are right before evening; a sweet, gentle breeze blew. The trees and bushes sprouting from the other bank hid the path to the village. I stopped there, looked at the edge of the river bed cutting at the root of the hill, touched the corner where the two met, and marveled at this union of the mightiest of mountains and the most fertile of plains.
I kept on the winding track of packed dirt, onwards and upwards, in the cool blue shade of the tree branches rustling above. Soon, I began seeing people. Curious faces. The village wasn’t used to visitors. There were questions, always. Where I lived, what I did, whom I’d meet. In villages, one cannot take offence to such questions. One cannot tell people that the road is a public place, and that it is no one’s business to know how long one chooses to lounge there. Villages, especially those still unconnected by concrete roads, have a very strong sense of shared ownership. In the villages, everybody is somebody, and the stranger has to be mindful to not sound dismissive; he has to recognize them that way and talk to them as such.
When they cannot work up the courage to ask you directly, they follow you—like they did on my previous visit. Had they asked me questions then, I wouldn’t have known how to answer. I had headed out of my village one evening on a whim, and decided to explore the dark hills beyond the Sukhi. In the eyes of the villagers, you only travel while on business: the rest is either loafing or tourism. There is no such thing as exploration; aimlessness is shady. Nervous, I plodded on ahead, and suspicious, the villagers followed. Then I saw Balmukund sitting on a bamboo chair outside his traditional house, a small, whitewashed, slope-roofed structure, full of sparrows flying in and out of the little gaps between the walls and the roof, the last bastion of beauty in a village almost entirely taken over by gaudy flat-roofed concrete nightmares. I decided to say hello, asked after his health, and to my relief, he was interested enough to offer me the bamboo chair beside him. I readily obliged. The villagers lingered for a bit, then satisfied, went away.
Balmukund lived alone. ‘I have a son, but that ungrateful git shat in my mouth. Ran off with this Punjabi woman to Ludhiana. We haven’t seen each other since.’
Out of curiosity, but also duty, villagers would drop by every fifteen minutes to ask after him. Did he need tea? Does he have his stick with him? Someone arrived with a bundle of his laundered clothes. Balmukund’s reaction to them all wasn’t a smile or a bow of gratefulness, but the stern nod of the village patriarch. The charade of duty let the villagers help the man without wounding his sense of self.
Not as many people came up to him when we met again. A few had remembered my face from earlier; their gossip alone quenched the curiosity of the rest. They didn’t need an excuse to come see me anymore.
Balmukund was happy when I handed him the bundle. ‘Good man,’ he said, pulling out a bidi and lighting it, ‘I thought you had forgotten me.’
It was evening when I reached the village. The sun was a low yolk of orange bleeding all its vitality and color into the fading sky, tingeing everything lilac: the hazy strip of town far away, the train tracks drawn across the patchwork of farms, the ugly stadium, the river bed and the forests sloping down to it, Balmukund’s beautiful house.
He caught me looking down at his black dent.
‘Seems it will swallow my leg whole before Fate wills I’m done.’
‘Your son knew about it?’
‘He left me while I was still working. I’ve no idea where he is now. This world is no longer grateful, there’s no sense of duty. There was a time…’ The old man sighed. The sky gleamed pink in his bulbous glasses, his mouth was slightly ajar. Far away, in the faint distance, a crow cawed.
Two women came, set down the tray of tea and the jar of biscuits they were carrying, looked at me a while, and left.
‘There was a time when even ghosts had the good sense to help someone in trouble.’
Unsure how to respond, I nodded and gave a polite laugh. He didn’t like that.
‘Oh, you think I’ve lost my mind too, haven’t you!’ he snapped. ‘Listen fellow—bidi is my only vice. And a cigarette when I can get one. But I don’t drink, and I don’t smoke hash and do all of that other nonsense. Don’t let the hunch and stoop fool you—I’m still as sharp as I ever was!’
‘My intention wasn’t to mock you, sir. I’m sorry.’ His thick glasses may have cloaked his rage, but the heavy breathing gave it away. He calmed down only after muttering and grumbling for a while. The sun had dissolved into the sky completely.
‘I was a peon with the sub-divisional magistrate at Pithoragarh,’ he started afresh. ‘He was a new officer, young hot blood, and my, the arrogance! He didn’t think much of our traditions and beliefs. He was one of those loud, English-speaking ones from Delhi, you see. Props to him, however, he managed affairs well, and his arrogance was limited to chiding his staff, and never the people.
‘He wanted me to deliver a stack of files to a block officer in some obscure village, I forget the name. One had to pass through a stretch of jungle to get to it. The jungle’s still there. It’ll always be there. Cut one tree and see if the fairies there won’t harvest their souls.’
‘Fairies?’
‘I’m coming. To that.’ He had enunciated every word, and his voice quivered. He was making a great effort to restrain himself from shouting at me.
‘The village was three days away. The journey was up and down a mountain, through the jungle in the valley, and then about a quarter-way up another mountain slope. I had to time my journey right so I could reach the mouth of the jungle in the early morning, and cross it before evening fell. This was important. I had to keep a certain pace throughout the journey to achieve this. It was tiring, especially walking through the second night, but I was at the jungle’s entrance by six.
‘It’s incredible how fear pushes a man. I feared the magistrate, and I feared the fairies. The magistrate would sack me if the block officer didn’t have his files by next morning; the fairies would kill me if I even glimpsed at the glade where they danced and frolicked, evening through night.’
Balmukund looked at my hesitant face, and smiled.
‘Himalayan fairies are no benevolent godmothers, son. They are beautiful, so they say, but also vain, shrill, childlike, rough, loud, and angry—nothing like those pleasant winged angels schoolboys read about these days. Many would drop down dead near the glade. They would cross the jungle in the evening, and the shrieks of the fairies would make it near impossible not to risk a glance at the glade. That would be their undoing.
‘It was an unspoken rule among the people there that business could wait a day or two if the jungle was to be crossed on the way. No way would people enter it after three. I had tried to tell that to the magistrate, but he rubbished my pleas, told me not to be superstitious. I had seen that crackpot suspending people for as little as uttering ‘but’ when in a bad mood; I had no choice—I had to also feed that disappointment back home, you know. He was a beautiful boy.’
Balmukund sighed again. But for the faint glare of his glasses, his face had disappeared. The sky was a viscous mass of inky blue. Far away, at the horizon, a yellow glow hung above the twinkling town. The sonorous echo of a distant temple bell and the chirping of crickets mingled into a faint mellow din, soft to the ears in the coolness of dusk.
‘I was tired, about to collapse. I knew I’d cross the jungle before evening comfortably, so I decided to risk an hour’s nap. I was barely in my senses, having walked an entire day and night at a constant pace in fear of the magistrate and the fairies. Now a third fear arose: half asleep, I’d drift off, lose my way in the jungle and never reach the village.
‘I settled for a nap, certain that my anxiety would make for light, cautious sleep and wake me up before time. I’d be groggy still, but saner. Instead, I woke up refreshed and terrified to a white hot afternoon, staring into the darkness of the jungle I was about to enter. For a moment I thought of risking the magistrate’s wrath and stalling the journey, and planned to start for the jungle the next morning. But the horrid thought of being unable to feed my boy made me realize I was better off resisting the temptation to look at a glade than losing the only job I knew how to do.
‘For that ungrateful bastard, I entered the jungle. It was a lot cooler in the shade, I remember. There was a soft breeze, just like today. And the bells, how could I forget the bells! They sailed on the breeze and reached me in waves, their faint, gentle echoes. I decided to cling to everything pleasant I could find: the breeze caressing my cheeks, the music of the bells, the jungle’s shade. As I pushed deeper into the jungle, I thought, maybe dying here wouldn’t be so bad. One just died instantly the moment one looked at the fairies, was it not? That’s not a painful death! And I might never get to die so comfortably again. I had almost started looking forward to the glade, as a weary man looks forward to a good night’s rest. Only the thought of my boy would pull me out of that sweet hypnotic lull.
‘I began to fear the jungle too. Had the jungle and the fairies struck a pact? It seemed so. One would lure in visitors for the other to kill them. I grew wary of the breeze and shade. The sound of the bells was my only succour. They weren’t temple bells—they sounded more like the hollow tinkling of those little cylindrical bells they tie around the necks of cattle. Perhaps a clueless goatherd had strayed into the jungle too. I had passed the densest core of the jungle, the sun had set, and I was on my way out. The glade would appear soon. I did not have the luxury to wait for the goatherd. After crossing the jungle—if at all I did—I had to walk five more hours to get to the village. But the tinkling grew louder, seemed closer, and I knew I’d be meeting the goatherd and his flock soon.
‘I could sense the glade from the corner of my left eye: a vast absence of foliage begging to be seen, a void tugging at my eyes like a vortex pulls at boats. There were no shrieks, no giggling, no sounds of merrymaking or frolic. I fought hard to look straight ahead, but it was dark, and the glade, without canopy, was full of evening light. Desperate to make sense of where I was headed, my eye flicked to the glade and back on the path ahead. My heart gave a jolt, realizing what I did, and I thought I died.
‘What I felt next wasn’t relief, but anger. I stopped and looked at the glade. It was empty, dimly lit by the dusk, surrounded by darkness. It sounded there quite like how it sounds here right now: bells and crickets. I stomped off in anger, only realizing then that my feet had blisters on them.
‘By the time I emerged from the jungle, it was pitch dark. Not far away, a tea seller was boarding up his shack, done for the day. When he heard my footsteps, he lifted his lantern up to me to have a good look at the madman who emerged from the jungle at that hour. I still remember the wild glint of disbelief in his eyes.
‘“Have you gone mad, my friend?” he asked, “Or is it that you don’t have the will to live anymore? You look like a hillman to me, you know what goes around in these places. Why do you tempt fate like some moronic plains dweller?”
‘“There are no fairi—”
‘“You DON’T take their name. Lucky day for you. I rarely ever not hear them.”
‘“They’re not there. And I’m not the only one passing through. A goatherd and his flock will come out of the jungle anytime.”
‘“You heard the little bells?”
‘I nodded.
‘“God’s favorite child, you. That’s no goatherd, my friend! He’s a ghost! A good ghost. He probably sensed that you were terrified, so he decided to walk along and chased away the fairies for you.”’
Balmukund slowly got up from his bamboo chair. I handed him his walking stick. He hobbled to the yard and looked up at the starry sky.
Pointing to a house across a kitchen garden, he said: ‘Go there and tell Sarla to give you a mattress and a blanket. Stay here for the night. I hear a leopard’s been lurking around these days—he made off with two of Lalit’s goats just a week ago.’
There is something quintessentially Indian about this: the folklore, the fairies, the good ghosts. Amazing work :)