Sunday, April 21, 2002		Books

The last wilderness
by Nirmal Verma Published by Indigo Pages: 296. Price: Rs 295

I SEE HIM in the distance. Alone, or is that someone with him? It’s impossible to tell. He is in a dip of the slope where, if he had a companion, he or she would be invisible to me. I’ve given up wondering. He is now in the last grove of trees, under that green ceiling, shot with gold by the setting sun. Above it is the conclave of the birds and above that sky, stars, air .... and then nothingness.

From here, I can see into the distance. He has now emerged from the tree-line onto the last stretch of the footpath, which will take him to the back door of his cottage. He has a walking stick in one hand: in the other, a torch. If he had a hand to spare, he would probably have put it on his own shoulder, to help himself along. No one would dare offer him help. He takes the help of none — certainly not in everyday, pedestrian matters. He reminds me of the closed door of a hotel room with the white card hanging from the knol. Please do not disturb! Only he who knows that his supplicants sit outside, awaiting his attention, can make this statement. He who is truly alone can never put up that card on his door. If such a man did put up a sign, it would perforce read: Come one! Come all!

Why has he stopped? Why doesn’t be open the door and go in? His torch extinguished, he stands on the threshold. Does he hear something that I don’t? Is this right, to stand like a thief at your own door, eavesdropping on your own home? Does age make you so suspicious that you begin to doubt the very walls of your home?

But the next second I think ... how unfair of me! He wasn’t eavesdropping, merely looking. He had taken a step back to look at his home, rather like me step back to admire a painting. Framed by two mountain peaks, his cottage glowed with light. Only one spot lay in shadow, and there he stood, his back stooped, his walking stick swinging from his hand, his torch unlit... it wasn’t he but I who was suspicious I, watching him like a thief.

Sometimes I think what we call our lives, our past our history, brings us peace — no matter how painful it may have been to live. No matter how forbidding its terrain may have been, it is familiar country. All our experiences are strung on an exceedingly fine thread. A thread that binds our entire treasury. Sunder it and you shall find no order, no consequence. All turns to dust. Like a photograph album where one frame may well follow another, but the empty spaces between them can never be filled. The ‘I’ which was supposed to have filled them is long dead. They are the negatives of our present tense .... ghosts made of white light whom we can take out of the closed cupboards of memory and see at will. We don’t even have to take them out — one image draws forth the next in the chain, though the relation between them is long dead.

Like that evening when I saw him standing outside his cottage... I remembered another scene. A silent, peaceful landscape. Two peaks in the backdrop, a coffin being lowered, his wife lying in it. She is descending into the earth, and he stoopes to look into the dark maw of the open grave. His daughter stands behind him, her handkerchief covering her eyes. Is she weeping I can’t tell. I can see neither her eyes nor her face. From where I stand, I can see, only her upraised hand, and the corner of the kerchief before her face.

Suddenly I hear her laughter... from behind shining, white teeth, warbling like the wash of a mountain stream... the laughter of the one being buried. She had always laughed that way, like children hiding behind a corner in a game of peekaboo do when the pursuer spies them but moves on. I stepped forward and put my hand on his shoulder — come, I said, now she is hidden for ever.

When I first came here, I was routinely amazed. He used only one room, but the lights would be on all over the house. Once, while dictating to me, he stopped in mid-sentence. He’s trying to recall something, I thought. I waited, my pen poised. Suddenly he lifted his walking stick and pulled at the rope hanging by the wall. It was a bell-pull, leading to the bell in Murlidhar’s quarters. You couldn’t hear it in the room, so when Mrulidhar arrived, it was as though he had been physically reeled in by the bell-pull.

He would never come in, but stand at the threshold and peep in like a pupper whose head moved, but the rest of the body was shrouded in darkness. "You haven’t switched on the light in the room at the back?" he asked. He stared at him in silence. "Had you forgotten" No — he shook his head. "The bulb has blown out. I’ll change it tomorrow."

He said no more. If he didn’t like something, he would lapse into silence. After a long spell, he turned to me and asked: "Where was I?" And instead of reading out his incomplete sentence from my notebook, I laughed: "You were right here, where the lights are all on. Why do you get upset if the other rooms are dark?"

A strange hopelessness spread over his countenance. House, home, rooms... He was someplace far away and he did not want to return to me, to the here and now. This was not merely the distance that age brings along. It was a distance of a different nature, and I always had to cross it to get to him. He liked it that way. He did not want anyone to be with him all the time. They could be around him, not with him. He applied this rule to everyone — his daughter, his guest, his manservant, he made no distinction.

Perhaps that was why this seemed to be a great, rambling cottage, though it was really quite small... like a mountain fortress. Neither seen clearly by the enemy, nor discovered easily by a friend. There were pines on either side and the green roof of the cottage merged with the foliage. You could not see the cottage from the road on the hillside — just Murlidhar’s quarters on the grassy slope. A footpath climbed up the hill, and up above was the shed in the alley which had probably been a sentry-post before it was built up into a little room.

I lived here. It was enough for my needs. A room, a kitchen, a washroom and an alley. It was the alley which had attracted me to this tumbledown home. Sitting there, I could see both the valley below and the forest above me. At night, there were the gleaming lights of the town below and overhead, the stars. It was difficult to tell precisely where lamplight flowed and merged with a real star.

I would sit there until I saw a third light. One that was neither above nor below, but climbing towards me up the side of the hill. Murlidhar’s lantern. He would come up from his quarters, climbing the slope in long strides. Kali barked at his heels, and his son Bansidhar brought up the rear. The two would halt before they reached my alley, but Murlidhar would advance one more step and stop on hte wooden stairs. He would say nothing, but hold up the flickering eye of his lantern. And I would know that the moment which I had been postponing for so long had come to claim me.

"Shall we go?" I would ask.

"Ji", he would nod. I suspected he was smiling under the cover of darkness.

"Is everything all right?" I would ask.

"Ji", all is in order. We’re waiting for you."

As though he had just set up the stage for me, and it only remained for me to step out of the wings.

I put my spectacles and fountain pen in my bag and wrapped my muffler about my neck. I took the bottle of brandy out of the sideboard and took a long pull, straight from the neck, to gather the courage to face him. Then I slipped on my tennis shoes and walked out.

We would go down the footpath in a pathetic little procession — Murlidhar swinging his lantern ahead, then I, followed by Kali, Bansidhar at the rear and trailing us all, the half moon which kept step with us and would stop with us when we halted at the door, perhaps to see what we would do next.Murlidhar would not open the door, but stand with his ear to it, as if he awaited an unknown signal from within. He looked quite the hillman in his seventiered turban, with its serpent tail trailing down, his hand over his mouth as though he were not merely listening but whispering something as well. Some secret communication that only Kali could smell out, for she would circle him, barking madly.

The door opened so suddenly that Murlidhar almost fell in. He stood there on the threshold, looking at us. At Murlidhar at the foot of the stairs, his face turned away, at Kali, wagging her tail, at Bansidhar, who was trying to merge further into the darkness, and at me, who stood before him without hope of cover and whose breath smelled of brandy.

He shut the door firmly.