I
am sitting on the balcony in one of my regular places of stay in a place called
D. It is a couple of kilometers above town M. It serves as my base camp, this
town, a place where I can be on my own, alone. Temperature is significantly
lower than where I live and so I sit and sip Vodka. The zephyr is comfortably
cool. The multicolored light shades are throwing varied hues of dim light. My
headphones are throwing soft psychedelic Icelandic music into my ears I don’t
understand and don’t care to. The purpose of music is to keep a part of my
brain occupied with background mellifluous but non-interfering sound.
Just
as I had planned, I finished my work in the department, canned my shit and
reached here. My kitchen knives are with me but the owner of the place who
knows me well has provided me with a stout stick, just the kind I left at home
which I had stolen from one of the shops when I had come here last time. The
owner is thinking of coming with me tomorrow morning. He figures his tummy has
begun to protrude a bit too much. He looks up at the silhouette of mountains
against the dark gray clouded skies, stares for some time and then asks “Are we
not going to follow the trail?” I say no. For how long are we going to walk? He
asks. Till one of us is too tired to walk any more, the tired one can turn back
and the other person will have a choice to carry on, I tell him. Let me think,
He says. Shall we just barge into the jungle? He asks after a few minutes of
mulling. Yes, I say.
It
is ironic. Call it a travesty, if you will. The owner is local. I am not. He is
scared. I am not. It doesn’t make me brave though. He is afraid because he knows
the shit one can get into. I know that too but I am too much of a coward to get
into a real fucked up situation which in a perverse way makes me a person with
guts.
Usually
I carry the camera with me. This time it is a camcorder. The purpose is to
document real me shit scared. The first time I covered myself in this manner,
my overwhelming concern was that I will not or will not be able to reflect the
reality or maybe I will try to make it look much harder than it really is
because at the back of my mind there is a potential audience later whom I may
want to impress with my bravado. But you can’t really fake hyperventilation and
fear tinged voice at least not for long. When the real panic hits, the truth
comes out.
It
did come out during last two times and that is the reason I have deleted all
the footage. It was embarrassing. There is an expression ‘scared shitless’.
Well I am personally acquainted with scared shitfull. Climbing a foggy mountain
with chest high grass and thick forest, tales of bears and leopards plying
repeatedly like a broken record, I have felt like emptying my bowels and I have
done so at least twice. It worsens the situation and exacerbates the panic. I
squat and then I can’t see anything except the grass right in front of me. I
feel the urge to stand up and make sure that no bear is ready to pounce on
defecating cowardly brave man that I am but to stand with a dangling turd is a
tough maneuver.
People
in these parts talk about bad weather, cloud burst, slippery slopes, getting
stuck after getting injured, getting lost and so on. And I say that I am not at
all concerned about these. My friend is the gravity. Just crawl down the slope,
cursing, yelping, without a shred of dignity till you find a trail and then
wait there like a good doggy till someone comes along to help you.
The
owner decides to come along or let me put it more precisely, lead on. The man,
for more than three decades has been, more or less confined to this area. I
guess with age, marriage, kids and business, his guts, once appreciable as an
adolescent or young adult but now in a dormant state have awakened. He knows
the mountain intimately. We climb and climb. I sweat profusely, pant and drink
water copiously. We are surrounded by thick fog. I like the fog. He hates it.
He says” I understand when you say that you don’t like to see humans while
trekking but I can’t understand your liking for fog. You can’t even see the
scenery’. I let it pass. The only reason he is with me is my fear, real or
imagined, of bears and leopards. We climb for three hours and come to a shelter
under an overhanging rock. There is an old man, 61 years old and diabetic, as
it later turns out, minding his mules, cows and sheep that are grazing placidly
in the drizzle. They regard the new arrivals with mild curiously. The old man,
initially reticent, opens up after some time which is not surprising since he
knows my companion very well and vice versa. The old man stays there of his own
volition for a couple of months every year and claims that he doesn’t miss
fellow humans at all. He makes us tea on the log fire under the rock shelter.
It begins to rain. We start our descent. It takes us another three hours negotiation
knee high grass, rocks and thick patches of trees. We get drenched even with
umbrellas.
It
is worth it.
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